At the end of the day, as the white players returned to their hotel for dinner, Smith and Rowe took Robinson and Wright to the Brock home. As the group relaxed over drinks on the front porch, they waved at neighbors who wandered by, hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous visitor. Jackie felt the first day had gone well. “Everyone was swell to us, and we were expecting a cool reception,” he told his hosts. David Brock nodded as he sipped a rum and cola. “You’ll find good people every place you go,” he said optimistically. “Yes, sir, even here in Florida.”
But when the men returned to the Brock house for lunch the following day, they received a very different reception. Robinson and Wright had gone inside and Smith was sitting on the porch when a white man approached.
“You’re chaperoning Robinson?” the man asked.
“That’s right,” Wendell replied.
“We want you to get those niggers out of town,” the man said. He claimed that he had just come from a meeting of local businessmen at the town hall and that they wanted the two black ballplayers out of Sanford by nightfall.
Alarmed, Smith phoned Rickey, who was in Daytona Beach at the Dodgers camp. Rickey told Wendell to get Robinson and Wright away from Sanford as quickly as possible—but not to tell them what had happened until they were safely out of town. Both men had come to see how temperamental Jackie could be and they didn’t want him to blow up again. That evening, when the two players returned to the Brock home following afternoon practice, the usually jovial Courier reporters seemed “exceptionally quiet and sober,” Robinson recalled. Over dinner, they exchanged grave glances. Then Rowe stood up and announced that he was going to gas up his Pontiac.
“You guys leaving us?” Jackie asked.
“No,” Wendell replied. “We’re all going to Daytona . . . . Pack your duds, fellows. We’re blowing.”
Smith called Rickey to tell him they were on their way to Daytona. Overhearing the conversation, Robinson worried that the Royals might be letting him go. As he packed his bags, he cursed his decision to accept Rickey’s offer and contemplated taking Rachel back to California. The group piled into the Pontiac, Smith and Billy Rowe in the front seat and Jackie, Rachel, and Johnny Wright in the back. In the middle of town, they stopped at a red light. A group of white townspeople looked on from a street corner.
“How can people like that call themselves American?” Billy grumbled.
“They’re as rotten as they come,” Wendell muttered.
Jackie was confused. “They haven’t done anything to us,” he said. “They’re nice people as far as I’m concerned.”
Wendell turned around to face the backseat. “Sure, they liked you,” he seethed. “They were in love with you . . . . That’s why we’re leaving.”
“What do you mean?” Jackie asked.
“Look, we didn’t want to tell you guys because we didn’t want to upset you,” Wendell said. “But we’re leaving this town because we’ve been told to get out. They won’t stand for Negro ballplayers on the same field with whites.”
In Daytona Beach, Smith and Rowe took the Robinsons to the home of another black couple—Joe Harris, a pharmacist, and his wife, Duff—while Wright lodged with a black family nearby. At night, the five stayed in the Negro section of town while the white players trying out for the Montreal team headed for a hotel on the beach. At Kelly Field, the ballpark in the black neighborhood where Rickey had arranged for the Royals to train, scores of locals appeared to cheer on their new heroes. Eager to impress the black fans as much as his coaches, Robinson strained his arm firing from shortstop on his first day of practice. Forced to switch to second base and then to first base, able to take only a few swings of batting practice, he grew increasingly frustrated and anxious.
Wendell and Billy did their best to buoy Jackie’s spirits. They played cards with him at night and took him to a USO club with a Ping-Pong table and to the black movie theater in town. But Jackie remained in a funk until the Royals finally played the Brooklyn Dodgers in an exhibition game for the first time. Four thousand people showed up, a quarter of them black. When Robinson came to the plate, he heard a smattering of boos, but far more cheers. “Come on black boy, you can make the grade!” a white fan shouted. Jackie fouled out to the catcher and didn’t get a hit in the rest of the losing effort, but he left encouraged. That night, he recalled, he “went to sleep, the applause still ringing in my ears.”
Still, Robinson’s slump continued. Rachel began to worry that her husband wouldn’t make it past spring training. Finally, in a game against the St. Paul Saints, Jackie laid down a bunt along the third base line and beat it out for a single. Rickey was in the stands, and he gave Smith a vote of confidence to pass along to Courier readers. “He’ll hit, and he’ll be quite a ball player,” Rickey said. “I’m sure of that. The only question is his arm. I only hope it comes around.” Relieved, Rachel took over the kitchen of the Harris home and prepared a celebratory dinner of chicken and vegetables.
From that point on, Robinson’s hitting and fielding gradually improved, but his temper—and the patience of his Pittsburgh minders—continued to be tested. On a Sunday in late March, the Royals traveled to Jacksonville to play the Jersey City Giants, only to find the ballpark padlocked. The city’s Bureau of Recreation had called off the game at the last minute, leaving hundreds of fans stranded outside. When Montreal went to Deland, Florida, to play Indianapolis, Jackie scored a run in the first inning on a single, a stolen base, and a sacrifice fly. As he slid into home, a policeman walked onto the field and grabbed him by the collar. In a heavy drawl, the officer threatened to throw Robinson in jail if he didn’t leave the field immediately. “We told y’all to leave them Nigra players home,” he growled when Royals manager Clay Hopper protested.
In mid-April, as the Royals prepared to head north for the regular season, Smith added up the toll that racism had taken on their spring training. In addition to the incidents in Jacksonville and Deland, nine other Royals games had been called off. City officials in Savannah, Richmond, and Sanford had declared that they would allow play only if Robinson and Wright stayed away, and in each case Rickey had canceled the games rather than submit to the demands. For the first time, Wendell let Courier readers in on what had happened to Robinson and Wright in the days after their arrival in Florida. “Contrary to stories that were published from Sanford at the time, Robinson and Wright were definitely not wanted,” Smith wrote. He explained that he hadn’t reported the threats against them at the time for fear that “the power of suggestion” might encourage whites in other Florida towns to attempt similar intimidation.
As the Royals headed north by train for the regular season, Smith accompanied them, and Robinson confided to him how much he had felt the strain of expectation from black fans in Florida. “I could hear them shouting in the stands, and I wanted to produce so much that I was tense and over-anxious,” Jackie said. “I started swinging at bad balls and doing a lot of things I would not have done under ordinary circumstance. I wanted to get a hit for them because they were pulling for me so hard.”
In his next Courier column, Smith pleaded with “the Negro fan to help by taking some of the pressure off . . .” No celebrating before anything had happened, he cautioned. No disorderly conduct that might prove a distraction or an embarrassment. “The guy who is so stimulated by the appearance of Robinson and Wright in Montreal uniforms that he stands up in the stands and rants and raves, yells and screams before they have even so much as picked up a ball,” Wendell wrote, “is the guy who will be cheering them out of Organized Baseball, rather than in.”
Then, on opening day of the Royals’ season, before 25,000 fans and a bevy of chorus line girls that the Jersey City Giants had hired for the occasion, Robinson put on a performance that black fans couldn’t help but cheer. After a tense and unspectacular spring training, he suddenly displayed all the gifts that had led Wendell Smith and Branch Rickey to put so much faith in him. After grounding out to shortstop in the first inn
ing, Jackie came to bat in the third with two men on base. On the first pitch, he blasted a 335-foot home run over the left field fence. In the fifth, he dropped a bunt single down the third base line, stole second, advanced to third, and scored on a balk after unnerving the pitcher with a feint to home. In the seventh, he singled to center, stole second again, moved to third on a single, and scored on a triple. In the eighth, he beat out another bunt, made it all the way to third on the next hit, and then induced another balk. On defense, playing second base, he had five put-outs. He made only one error, a bad throw on a double play ball that cost the Royals the one run in a 14–1 rout.
In the stands, Wendell Smith and Joe Bostic, The People’s Voice reporter, savored the moment. “Our hearts beat just a little faster, and the thrill ran through us like champagne bubbles,” Wendell recalled. Meanwhile, the Courier’s editorial page writers delivered a self-help lecture reminiscent of Robert L. Vann. Robinson’s opening day triumph, they wrote, showed the importance for blacks to be ready to capitalize on the chances they demanded. “There is too much of a tendency for people nowadays to give more time to clamoring for opportunity than to preparing themselves for the opportunity when it arrives,” they wrote. “Agitation is very well, but execution is far more important.”
A week later, Robinson was in Montreal for the Royals home opener and the beginning of a season-long love affair with the team’s fans. (After several bad outings, Johnny Wright was demoted to the class-C minor league, and the next year he returned to the Homestead Grays.) Jackie won the International League batting crown with a .349 average, stole 40 bases, scored 113 runs, and had the best fielding statistics of any second baseman in the minors. He led the Royals to 100 victories, the most in their history, and helped them come from behind to beat Louisville in the “Little World Series.”
After the Royals won their final game at home, thousands of fans rushed onto the field and demanded to see their hero. “We want Robinson!” they shouted, and in French, “Il a gagné ses épaulettes!” (He has earned his stripes!) When Jackie finally stepped out of the dugout, the crowd mobbed him, lifted him off the ground, and paraded him around the infield. As he showered in the locker room, fans jammed the hallway outside blocking his exit as he tried to leave. Handing his bags to a friend, Jackie crouched in his old UCLA running back stance and made a break for the street. Fans chased him for three blocks until he jumped into a waiting car.
Sam Maltin, a Canadian journalist who covered the game for the Courier, couldn’t help but note the irony of a white mob chasing a black man for something other than a lynching. When the Royals had played in Louisville earlier in the series, the crowd booed Robinson. Now, Maltin hoped, the scene in Montreal would teach them something. “To the large group of Louisville fans who came here for the first time, it may be a lesson of goodwill among men,” Maltin wrote. “They couldn’t fail to tell others down South of the ‘riots’—not because of hate but because of love.”
Wendell Smith stayed home in Pittsburgh, however, and was uncharacteristically subdued about Robinson’s minor league championship. His only contribution to the coverage was a short interview by phone in which Robinson thanked Montreal for “a great year” and his wife, Rachel, for getting him through periods when he had been “down in the dumps.” About the following season, Jackie said only: “I think I’m going to get a chance with the Dodgers; however, I haven’t heard from Mr. Rickey, so I can’t say.” Even when Robinson came to Pittsburgh the following week with an exhibition team, Smith steered clear of writing about him. After helping Jackie get so far, it was as though Wendell didn’t want to jinx his chances of taking the next step—or betray any concern that the welcome that awaited Robinson in cities across America might be less rapturous than the one he had received in Montreal.
• • •
IN JANUARY 1947, JOSH Gibson moved back in with his mother on Strauss Street on Pittsburgh’s North Side. In the decade since Gibson had rejoined the Homestead Grays, he had remained one of the biggest draws in black baseball and helped lead the Grays to eight Negro National League championships, seven of them in a row. But years of heavy drinking, drug abuse, and womanizing had taken a severe toll. Gibson’s once chiseled frame swelled with a mountainous beer belly, then withered as liver, kidney, and bronchial ailments spread. Dark bags framed his once boyish eyes. His erratic hitting had earned him a demotion to the back side of the Grays order, and his once awe-inspiring annual home run totals had dwindled into the teens.
Staying in Pittsburgh, Gibson skipped his usual winter swing through the Mexican and Caribbean leagues. On some days, he spent hours at the home of his late wife’s mother, where his son Josh Jr. lived, trying to reconnect with the sixteen-year-old. On other days, he lay in bed in the room where he had once slept as a strapping teenager starting out in the sandlot leagues. When he felt better, he headed across the river to the Crawford Grill, only to lapse into another bender and end up slumped over the bar or lying in a Wylie Avenue gutter. One night, his teammate Sammy Bankhead got a call alerting him that Gibson had crawled out on the ledge of a Hill District hotel and was threatening to jump. Leaning out the window, Bankhead talked his friend down by calling his bluff. “Go ahead and jump, then,” Bankhead said. “See if I care.”
On a Sunday afternoon, Gibson was drinking at the Crawford Grill when his head started to hurt. Wanting to get away from bright lights, he decided to spend the evening at the Garden Theater, a movie house on the North Side. When the feature was over, patrons found Gibson passed out in his seat. They searched his wallet and found his doctor’s name. When the physician arrived, he took Gibson back to Strauss Street and administered a sedative as Josh’s mother, Nancy, and younger siblings Jerry and Annie looked on. Whether Gibson later rose in bed and asked for all his trophies to be brought to him, as his Annie claimed, isn’t sure. What is certain is that by 1:30 in the morning on January 20, the man known as “the black Babe Ruth” was dead at the age of thirty-five.
The brief Associated Press story that marked Gibson’s passing in newspapers across the country cited the cause as a stroke. But in his obituary tribute in the Courier, Wendell Smith blamed a more insidious culprit. “Perhaps if Josh Gibson hadn’t been a victim of the vicious color line in the majors; if he had been given the chance to make the big league he so justly deserved; if he could have swung his bat against the type of competition for which he was born, he might be alive today,” Smith wrote. “For he was a big leaguer, and he knew it. He was a thoroughbred and he should have been with them. But they slammed the door in his face, his kindly black face, and left him standing on the outer fringes of the glistening world to which he belonged. That treatment, more than anything else, sent the ‘king’ to his grave . . . . It sent him to the ‘land of drink’ and into the pitfall of human errors. Finally his health went and he slipped away into eternal darkness . . . . I know the real reason Josh Gibson died. I don’t need a doctor’s report for confirmation, either. He was ‘murdered’ by Big League Baseball.”
In this case, however, Smith may have protested too much. He would later insist that he had tried to win Gibson a shot at the big leagues—by recommending him to Pirates owner William Benswanger in 1942, and by trying to bring him to the Red Sox tryout in 1945, before Grays owner Cum Posey vetoed the idea. But Smith’s writing at the time indicated otherwise. By the mid-1940s he had stopped singing Gibson’s praises, while insisting that white owners were looking for younger players. Just as Ches Washington and Bill Nunn had done in championing Joe Louis, Wendell calculated that comportment was as vital as ability in challenging white prejudice. Even if Gibson had the gifts to play in the big leagues, Smith knew, he lacked the maturity to handle the pressure and to avoid embarrassing himself off the field. So Smith never discussed Gibson with Branch Rickey, or included him in speculation about what players might follow Robinson to the majors. And that bitter knowledge—that he had been upstaged by younger players and replaced as the darling of his hometown newspap
er—may have contributed to Gibson’s decline every bit as much as the injustice of white baseball.
Ushering in 1947, Smith declared that Robinson had helped make “ ’46 the Greatest Year for Negro Athletes.” Yet as the new baseball season approached, Rickey still had not made his intentions clear, and Jackie was getting anxious. Once again, the Dodger president had chosen a spring training spot with Robinson in mind. Not wanting to repeat the previous year’s experience in Florida, Rickey had announced that the Dodgers and Royals would spend the preseason in Cuba. Beyond that, he had said only that “Robinson will go to Havana as a member of the Montreal squad.”
From Los Angeles, Robinson sent a worried letter to Pittsburgh, and in early February Smith wrote back to reassure him. “As I see it you are definitely going to get a chance,” Wendell predicted. “All you have to do is keep a cool head, play the kind of ball you are capable of playing and don’t worry about anything. As you know, Rickey is no dummy. He is a very methodical man and will see to it that you are treated right.”
Finally, as the Dodgers and Royals left Cuba to play a series of head-to-head exhibition games in Panama, Rickey began to show his cards. Safely away from the throng of reporters in Cuba, he invited Smith and Robinson to a meal at the Tivoli Hotel in Panama City. When the two guests arrived, a maître d’ informed them that they could enter the dining room but would not be allowed to eat—a Jim Crow practice imported by Americans who built the Panama Canal. Huffily, Jackie replied that he had already eaten. The two men waited in the lobby, passing the time writing postcards, until Rickey appeared and took them to meet in his hotel room.
The exhibition series against the Dodgers, Rickey told the two men, was Robinson’s chance to prove once and for all that he belonged in a Brooklyn uniform. He encouraged Jackie to be a “whirling demon” on offense. “I want you to hit that ball,” Rickey said. “I want you to get on base and run wild. Steal their pants off.” Just as important, Robinson needed to show that he could play first base—a position to which he had only just been assigned, to fill the team’s weakest infield link, but where by his own admission he felt “terrible.”
Smoketown Page 29