This was the 1940s in America, a time when Negroes were expected to be deferential, even in northern cities like Ashland. John Roseboro Sr. had arrived in 1928. He had played ball for the Homestead Grays in the Negro Leagues and with the Havana Giants in Cuba but abruptly given up baseball when his mother died—his father had already passed away when he was four years old. He felt shaken to be orphaned at 23. He went north to follow a lead on a chauffeur job for a man named Ezra Spreng, who had married into one of Ashland’s prominent families. “It was five months before I saw another colored man,” he said. After Mr. Spreng died, John Sr. found work driving Maurice Topping, owner of a Ford dealership. That’s when he discovered Geraldine Lowery, a pretty black girl whom he often saw sitting on her front porch when he drove by. He soon made her acquaintance, and they became friendly. Her parents objected, thinking their light-skinned daughter could do better than to court a dark-skinned chauffeur almost twice her age. When Geraldine got pregnant, she and John Sr. eloped to West Virginia to marry. John Jr. arrived less than four months later on May 13, 1933. His mother was 15.
John Sr. worked at Topping Bros. Ford and later at Hoover Chrysler Garage fixing and washing cars to support his family, which soon included another boy, Jim, born 18 months after John Jr. Geraldine washed and ironed other people’s clothes. “Nigger’s work in a white town, I guess,” Roseboro wrote in Glory Days, “but it never seemed like that because it wasn’t a bigoted town.” When Johnny reached high school, his mother took a job at J. C. Penney, becoming the first African American to work at one of Ashland’s downtown department stores. “She was a lovely lady,” said Betty Plank, another longtime white resident of Ashland. “There wouldn’t have been anyone in town having a problem with her waiting on them at J. C. Penney.”
John Sr.’s second home was the pool hall, where he went before work to eat breakfast, where he sometimes ate lunch, and where he hung out after having dinner at home. He didn’t drink there; he shot pool, which gave him an outlet for his competitive obsession. An excellent player, he hardly lost. When he did, he wasn’t happy. “If he got beat, he didn’t like it,” said Ted Jacobs, who grew up in Ashland and played baseball with John Jr. “He played to win, like the kid [Johnny]. That’s how the kid got it.”
The father also bought his son a baseball glove at a discount store and played catch with him in the backyard. Johnny and his younger brother played pickup ball on bumpy pastures with hardened cow chips for bases. The boys wrapped bats with black friction tape to make them last longer. Johnny used his $2.98 glove until it no longer fit on his hand. He and Jim also played softball at Brookside Park and in the schoolyard, with John trying every position and batting from both sides. He awed the other kids with some of his long home runs. But he didn’t dream about playing professional baseball. He wanted to be a police officer. Or an FBI agent. Law enforcement fascinated him. It wasn’t until high school that Johnny got serious about baseball.
Nice as the people of Ashland were in those days, they did not invite the Roseboro family to Sunday dinner or summer picnics. Sundays, the family often drove 16 miles to New London—which had a black community large enough for the town to segregate its churches and movie theaters—to attend church services and visit Geraldine’s relatives. Johnny wasn’t into church. He preferred going to movies at the Palace Theater on Ashland’s Main Street and eating 12-cent hamburgers from Peppy John’s across the street. He liked shooting pool, like his dad, and playing table tennis. He learned to play cards from his relatives in New London and applied that knowledge to win money off the guys back in Ashland. Cards continued to be a source of entertainment and income for him later as a professional ballplayer.
But girls posed a problem for a black teenager in Ashland. More than 15 years before Sidney Poitier announced himself for dinner, Johnny didn’t dare test the nice people’s tolerance for interracial dating. “Even if there really wasn’t any bigotry in that school, I was still a black cat in a world full of white girls, and I didn’t have the guts to go after any of them,” he wrote. When the phys ed class had a session of square dancing, Johnny begged the teacher to let him shoot baskets in the gym that period. “Looking back, I think of that as a turning point in my life,” Johnny wrote. “It may seem like a little thing, but I think if I’d gone and learned to dance and forced myself to socialize with those girls, I wouldn’t have become so withdrawn and shy and might have developed more personality and learned how to handle those situations. . . . I’m still haunted by the social failures of my youth.”
Jim, two years behind him in school, was the extrovert to Johnny’s introvert. An excellent athlete who went on to play football at Ohio State on a scholarship, Jim ran for senior class president and won with 257 of the 260 votes. Jim was the guy joking around with classmates in the locker room while Johnny sat by himself in the YMCA lobby, feet propped on a chair, staring out the window. “I didn’t fit in the black community,” Johnny said. “I didn’t fit in the white community. So I decided to fit in my own little bailiwick and the hell with the rest of them.”
John Sr. sometimes drove his boys out to nearby Mansfield to watch the semipro Negro teams play baseball. Other times he took them to Cleveland, 70 miles north, or the boys went with youth groups to watch the Negro League’s Cleveland Buckeyes or the Indians at Municipal Stadium. The Indians of the late 1940s had strong teams with Bob Lemon, Bob Feller, Mike Garcia, and Early Wynn, but Johnny chose for his hero Larry Doby, who integrated the American League three months after Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers. Johnny also admired catcher Jim Hegan, whose smooth, effortless style he later tried to copy.
But football was Ohio’s state sport, so Johnny went out for the football team in high school and promptly broke his right leg when he tried to hurdle a pileup in an end run and came down wrong. The injury kept him out of basketball, but he did make the varsity baseball team in the spring and played football again the following fall. Blessed with natural speed, he became one of the best halfbacks in the school’s history, racking up touchdowns and admirers in two years those Friday nights. He was named the team’s Most Valuable Player his senior year when his nine touchdowns made him the A’s leading scorer. In the team’s yearbook photo, Johnny and Jim are the only two black faces—30 years had passed since the first black student, their uncle, had graduated from Ashland High—yet Johnny boosted his social stock among the white students with his athletic achievements. “Football for me was my first taste of being an all-star, a trophy winner, a hero, someone who stood out, and I really liked it,” Johnny wrote. “Who wouldn’t?”
His sophomore year, Johnny also had gone out for baseball. The coach, Bud Plank, a short, wiry man with a deep appreciation for the game’s essentials, molded Johnny into the player he would become. “When I got to high school, I really got into baseball,” Roseboro wrote. “Bud Plank liked me and helped me. He taught me more about fundamental baseball than anyone else did. He may have been a little old school, but I think he knew more about fundamental baseball than anyone I ran into in the big leagues until I coached for Ted Williams.”
Johnny liked playing the outfield. He was fast, so he could get to fly balls, and he had a strong arm. But he tried out for catcher because the varsity didn’t have one, and he figured he would get the chance to play at that position. He needed help from Coach Plank with the adjustment but didn’t flinch at balls thrown in the dirt or plays at the plate. And while Roseboro pitched some, too, he made his biggest contribution with his bat. His junior year, he hit .588. The next year, he batted .530 and was named the team’s MVP. He was perhaps best remembered for his speed on the base paths—and his reckless disregard for the fundamentalist coach’s signals. More than 60 years after Roseboro graduated, Plank’s widow enjoyed telling the story of Johnny missing Plank’s sign from the bench canceling the steal sign. Johnny stole second. Then he missed another sign and stole third before missing yet another sign and stealing home. “But Bud c
ouldn’t chastise him because he was safe each time,” Betty Plank said with a laugh. “That happened more than once—John stealing bases without the sign.”
At the time, baseball was a second-class sport in Ohio—Ashland had no organized summer league—so football seemed the natural sport for Johnny to pursue. He had the ability but not the grades to go Division I. He had considered school more a place for sports than studying, a place where he goofed off by surreptitiously pelting the printing class teacher with small pieces of type rather than applying himself. When he was about to graduate from Ashland High in 1951, his father asked him one day at the kitchen table, “What are you going to do?” All Johnny could answer was, “I don’t know.” Johnny’s only option for postsecondary athletics, er, academics, came from Central State College, a small black college in Wilberforce, Ohio, about 130 miles south of Ashland, that offered him a football scholarship at the last minute.
The Central State team had better, older running backs, so Roseboro drifted among various positions until one day in practice he was slotted at defensive back. A wide receiver—who was interested in the same girl Johnny was—caught a pass, and Roseboro creamed him. Coach Country Lewis noticed. Johnny won a starting spot at linebacker. He learned how to crouch low and drive through opponents. Even though he weighed only 180 pounds, he hit much bigger players hard. “I wasn’t afraid to hit someone before he hit me,” Roseboro wrote. He drove his shoulder into the ball carrier, sometimes flipping him over his back. “It was something I was able to use years later as a catcher, blocking the plate.”
Roseboro lettered for the football team, but by spring his nonexistent study habits sabotaged his chances with the baseball team. Though his 1.7 GPA rendered him academically ineligible for games, the sympathetic coach still let Johnny practice. One day, Cliff Alexander, a scout who covered the Ohio territory for the Dodgers, showed up at the practice field and invited Roseboro, who was tossing batting practice, for a tryout in Cincinnati, where Brooklyn was playing a weekend series. Johnny was stunned. He had no idea how the scout had heard about him, but he happily accepted the invitation.
Johnny put on the only suit he owned, a baggy brown tweed, and drove to Cincinnati with Alexander, who introduced him to Roy Campanella and Joe Black, the only other black ballplayers on the Dodgers in 1952 besides Jackie Robinson. Campanella and Black invited Roseboro, who had never stayed in a hotel, to have dinner with them in their room at the Netherlands Plaza. Already in awe, he nearly fainted when a uniformed waiter delivered a cartful of food. Johnny, who loved to eat, had never seen sour cream on a baked potato, and here was this spread of shrimp cocktail, steak, vegetables, strawberry shortcake, and baked potatoes oozing sour cream. After they had feasted, Roseboro was surprised when Campy simply signed the tab. “You don’t have to pay for all this?” he asked.
“No, the club does.”
This is the life for me, Johnny thought.
He put on a Dodgers uniform the next day for his tryout on Crosley Field, afraid he might blow his big chance for free food. Manager Charlie Dressen watched him take some swings, lay down a couple of bunts, and catch infield practice. Coach Jake Pitler yelled at him, “Throw the ball. Let it go.” Roseboro did—over the second baseman’s head and into the outfield. Johnny felt awful afterward, certain he had blown his chance. But Dressen must have spotted potential because the Dodgers offered Roseboro a $150 monthly contract with a $5,000 bonus. Johnny signed before they could reconsider. “Hell, I’d have signed for nothing,” he wrote.
The Dodgers assigned the 19-year-old prospect to Sheboygan, their Class D club in the Wisconsin State League. Roseboro joined the team in June. He had left the shelter of Ashland still somewhat naive about the perils a black man faced in the world. Other than the Boy Scout camp, the worst discrimination he had suffered occurred in Cincinnati when he traveled there to play a semipro baseball game and was not allowed to eat with his white teammates in—of all places—a White Castle. His teammates had walked out with him. Before the civil rights movement gained momentum, he had not yet encountered the full force of racism as a young African American.
The Sheboygan Indians had several black players, but the town on Lake Michigan had only one black resident, a man who shined shoes. Roseboro wrote home asking his father to send a pair of clippers: “The peckers don’t know how to cut a nigger’s hair, so we’ll cut our own.” Johnny met a girl who lived around the corner from his boarding house, the first white girl he dated. They kissed on her porch swing, but he was scared to take her out in the town. Wisconsin proved a fairly tolerant place, though one day in Wausau a white fan behind home plate harassed Roseboro, calling him “chocolate drop” and “snowball.” When Johnny turned to glare at him, the man shouted, “I’ll come out and give it to you if you want, nigger!” Johnny decided to focus on the field.
In his first game behind the plate, a foul ball caught Roseboro on the index finger of his right hand and chipped a bone. A doctor fitted the finger with an aluminum splint. Joe Hauser, the Sheboygan manager, was a tough Milwaukee German who had been a minor league home run king. “What the hell is that?” he asked when he saw the splint.
“I busted my knuckle,” Roseboro said. “I can’t catch.”
“Then you can play the outfield,” Hauser said. “And take that goddamn cast off.”
His finger throbbed, but Johnny taught himself to throw with three fingers. He bunted more often, able to get on base with his speed. When the finger healed, he caught a few more games but played most of the season in the outfield. His .365 average ranked him second best among Wisconsin State League hitters. Hauser skippered the team to the pennant, which gave Johnny his first ring, a happy souvenir of his debut season in pro ball.
Johnny arrived for spring training at Dodgertown, a converted barracks in Vero Beach, Florida, in 1953 unprepared for the crash course in segregation and prejudice the town would teach him. Even though the Dodgers had progressively signed Jackie Robinson and generally treated the African Americans on their team well, they still held spring training in Dixie, a hostile environment. The train took Roseboro past the tourist section of town, which featured golf courses, beachfront hotels, fine restaurants, and tourist shops. His traveling companion, Maury Wills, a fellow black ballplayer who had made the trip before, told Johnny that they weren’t welcome in that area. At the train station the two players had to call the camp to ask for a lift because no taxi driver would give a black man a ride. When he wanted to see a Buck Jones western, Roseboro had to go to the impoverished town up the road because he wasn’t welcome in the Vero Beach movie theaters. He discovered that blacks weren’t welcome most places in Vero Beach, from the laundromat to the medical clinic. White guys picked fights with blacks they saw on the street. His awakening to racism in America was much like what Marichal and other Latin ballplayers experienced coming from an environment where they had not encountered that treatment. “All of a sudden the racial problem hit you right in the eye in Vero Beach,” Johnny said. “What a shock that was. I knew right away that this wasn’t a good place for me. I hated it.”
But if you were a young African-American ballplayer who wanted to make it to the big leagues, you swallowed hard and took it. Roseboro was fighting for a place in the organization, not a seat at the lunch counter. He made it up a rung on the minor league ladder to the Dodgers’ Class C team in Great Falls, Montana, as an outfielder. He lived with his black teammates in a boarding house in the town’s colored section and took long bus rides to the other towns in the Pioneer League. In the outfield he showed a strong but erratic arm—most of his 23 errors those first two seasons were wild throws. He hit eight home runs and batted .310 in 82 games before Uncle Sam snagged him in late July. Roseboro finished the season at Fort Knox.
The army shaved his head, gave him a uniform that didn’t fit, and treated him “like dirt.” “I hated it,” Roseboro wrote. “I was always worried I’d lose my temper and slug someone
and spend six months in the stockade.” He just wanted to serve his time and resume his baseball career. The United States was fighting a war in Korea, but Johnny drew the lucky straw with an assignment in Lapeim, Germany. His official duty was as a mortar man, but there was not much work. His schooling in the ways of the world continued. He lost his virginity in a Berlin brothel to a fräulein with a black mole on one of her enormous breasts. On the base he lost the money he made shooting pool in crooked card games. His most important duty was playing outfield for the division baseball team in games around Germany. Midway through his second season, his hitch ended, and the Dodgers sent him to play for the Pueblo (Colorado) Dodgers, their Class A team in the Western League.
The Dodgers wanted Roseboro to catch again. That frustrated him. He had returned from Europe thinking of himself as a star outfielder. Plus, the Dodgers had a future Hall of Fame catcher in Roy Campanella. When a team official told him that Campy, then 33, was slowing down, Johnny thought he was being conned. While Campanella hit .318 with the parent club, Roseboro’s worries behind the plate—learning to handle pitchers and block pitches—affected his production at the plate. His average dropped to .278, and his extra-base hits fell off. After 32 games the Dodgers demoted him to their Class B team in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The reassignment discouraged him. So did his reaction to an incident in Salt Lake.
After a game Roseboro and three of his black teammates went out to dinner. Knowing the white restaurants would not serve them, they tried a Chinese place. They sat at a table, but no one greeted them. Finally, a Chinese man approached and said, “We wouldn’t mind having you eat here, but our customers would.” Angered, Roseboro thought, What makes the Chinese think they’re better than blacks? Or the whites think that? He wanted to do something. Around the country, in Montgomery and Mississippi, African Americans were taking a stand. But he was at a loss. “I had the guts for a fistfight,” he wrote. “But I didn’t know what to do about the bigotry.”
The Fight of Their Lives Page 3