Rickey and Robinson

by Harvey Frommer

  He was the catcher on Muir’s baseball team and played on the Pomona Tournament All-Star squad in 1937. His teammates included outfielder Ted Williams of San Diego Hoover and third baseman Bob Ll;lmon of Long Beach Wilson.

  Robinson;s athletic career in college is the stuff of storybooks. He began inauspiciously as a freshman at Pasadena Junior College. In his first football practice, he broke an ankle. He missed the first four games. Pasadena lost every one of them. When he returned to action, the Bulldogs began a winning streak that did not end as long as Robinson was on the team.

  He was the piston that powered Pasadena to eleven straight triumphs in 1938 and the junior college football championship. Churning out over one thousand yards from scrimmage, he scored seventeen touchdowns and accounted for 131 of his team’s 369 points. He paced Pasadena’s 33-0 victory over San Francisco with a seventy-six-yard touchdown run on the second play from scrimmage; he scored three touchdowns in the game. Against San Bernardino, he ran for three touchdowns and passed for three more. He drew thirty-eight thousand fans to Pasadena’s game against Los Angeles. In a 31-19 victory over Santa Ana, he racked up an eighty-three-yard run, a field goal, and four conversions. More than forty thousand watched him in action against Compton Junior College. He scored two touchdowns and passed for another. In the stands that day was a Compton student named Edwin “Duke” Snider.

  “Jackie was the star,” recalls Snider. “He wiped us out in

  football, basketball, baseball. He could have been a pro in all three. I still remember that game he played against Compton when he ran back that kick. He must have reversed his field three times. I think everybody on the field took shots at him, but they couldn’t touch him.”

  At the Rose Bowl, where Robinson had chased rabbits as a kid, he brought thirty thousand fans to their feet in the season-ending game against Cal Tech as he dodged and scampered and powered his way for a 104-yard kickoff return.

  On May 8, 1938, his multiple talents presented a problem, but in legendary fashion, he overcame this too. He competed in two different events in two different cities in the same day, and excelled in both. In the morning in Claremont, he was given permission to take three early broad jumps. His third jump measured 25', 6½", breaking his brother Mack’s national junior college record. “I couldn’t get over it,” Jack said, “breaking Mack’s record. My big brother had always been my idol, making the Olympics and all that . . . running second to Jesse Owens in the two hundred meters at Berlin in 1936.”

  Then racing to a waiting car, like Clark Kent transforming himself into Superman in a telephone booth, Jack Robinson, track-and-field star, changed into Jack Robinson, baseball player. The car took him to Glendale. He arrived in the third inning, took over at shortstop, and helped lead his Pasadena team to a 5-3 victory for the southern California baseball championship. Named the Most Valuable Player in Southern California Junior College baseball, he batted .417 and stole twenty-five bases in twenty-four games.

  At Brookside Park, where Jack had once played baseball using a broomstick bat and a tennis ball, he played in an exhibition game against the Chicago White Sox. The date was March 14, 1938. The White Sox had agreed to the contest to help raise funds for Pasadena’s baseball program. Robinson slapped out two hits and made three exceptional fielding plays—on one of them going deep in the hole at short to turn a sure run-scoring hit by Luke Appling, the American League batting champ, into a double play.

  “Geez,” exclaimed White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes. “No one in the American League can make plays like that. If that kid was only white, l’d sign him right now.”

  Dykes’s statement did not surprise Robinson. “Growing up, I really gave no thought to becoming a baseball player,” he recalled. “There was no future in it for colored players. I did love softball. I played it better and played it before anything else. I was really shooting at becoming a football, basketball, or track star. But I didn’t think much of a chance existed for me in baseball.”

  California newspapers recounted his exploits. Robinson was referred to with hyperbolic nicknames—”Midnight Express,” “The Dusky Flash,” and “The Dark Demon.” He was termed “the greatest all-around athlete in California sports.”

  As a forward on PJC’s basketball team, he averaged nineteen points a game and was named to the all-state team. He led Pasadena to the California Junior College championship. He started alongside four white players : Clem Tomerlin, Al Sauer, George E. McNutt, and Les O’Gara. During one game, a white opponent continually fouled Robinson and kept up a running stream of curses. “You’ve got no guts, Robinson,” the player shouted. “You’re afraid to fight.”

  Robinson answered calmly: “If you want to fight, we’ll do it after the game. I’m not going to get thrown out and hurt my team. We’ll fight later, and we’ll see who has more guts.”

  The reply infuriated the player, who slammed into Robinson, slugging away with both fists. Robinson did not strike back, realizing that the racial overtones of a physical confrontation might trigger a riot. Officials intervened, and the opposing player was ejected from the game.

  The athletic skills and winning ways he had displayed on championship teams in elementary school, junior high, high school, and junior college attracted scouts from many colleges. There were offers of athletic scholarships and parttime employment. “I chose UCLA,” he explained, “because I planned to get a job in Los Angeles after I finished school, and figured I’d have a better chance if I attended a local university. . . . In school I majored in phys. ed. . . . My mother wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer, but I never wanted to be anything but an athlete.”

  He became UCLA’s first four-letter man, starring in basketball, football, baseball, and track. Sportswriters began to refer to him as “the Jim Thorpe of his race.” He became college football’s top ground gainer in 1939, averaging a dozen yards each carry. He also returned punts for a twenty-one-yard average.

  Willa Mae recalls what it was like to have a brother who was a big football star: “I went to a football game and took along my oldest son, Ronnie, who was six. He started to scream, ‘C’mon, Uncle Jack! C’mon, Uncle Jack!’ And soon the whole stadium was calling out, ‘C’mon, Uncle Jack! C’mon, Uncle Jack!’ Jack didn’t like that kind of publicity, and I knew I was in for it. After the game he came home and I hid. He was calling out, ‘Willa Mae, who started that Uncle Jack?’ I said, ‘I couldn’t help it. What was my Ronnie gonna call you?’ And Jack laughed.”

  Jackie Robinson was not just Saturday’s hero. It seemed that every day of the week he performed heroics in some athletic event or other. He won the Pacific Coast League conference championship in the broad jump, and a month later captured the national collegiate broad-jump title. He starred on the UCLA basketball team and twice paced the Pacific Coast League’s southern division in scoring. Ironically, he only faltered in baseball, batting under .200.

  Sidney Heard recalls Jackie, the 1941 football AllAmerican: “Most people did not see him at his greatest like they saw Willie Mays, who came up when he was young. If Jack had gone up when he was twenty, there’d be records now they’d still be chasing. . . . I saw him run down to home plate and get within three feet and then go back to third base and be safe . . . that was his way. Whatever little flaws an individual or a team had, he took advantage of them.”

  Sidney’s wife, Eleanor Heard, who was sixteen years old when she played with Jackie Robinson in the Pacific Coast Tennis Tournament, recalls how he capitalized on the weaknesses of opponents and maximized his own strengths: “Jack played to win, I can tell you that. He urged me to play in the singles. I knew I would be matched in the competition against this woman who was about twenty-two or twenty-three years old. He urged me to play her first in an intermission contest, just for fun. She beat me. Jack watched the contest carefully. Afterward he took me aside, and he knew all the things that she did that I could overcome. I played her again, and I beat her.

  “Jack was a really fine tennis
player. He would outfinesse you. If you had a strong serve and a strong volley, he’d pit-pat the ball and use his speed. He could move from one part of the court to another so fast you wouldn’t even know he was moving. He had the ability to stop suddenly and get off a shot. He had a terrific cut that would make the ball hit the ground and just stay there. Nobody taught him these things. He just had to learn them himself. We won the Pacific Coast mixed doubles championship. But that was it. At that time, no matter how good blacks were, they were not allowed to compete in national tournaments.”

  Jack played tennis with Eleanor Heard, but the girl he fell in love with was Rachel Isum. An honor student majoring in nursing at UCLA, she was introduced to Jackie one afternoon in 1940. Rachel had no interest in sports. She agreed to the meeting only to be polite to the twenty-one-year-old athlete. She was refined, serious, intelligent, and outspoken. At this point in her life, she saw no reason to become involved with a cocky, highly publicized football hero.

  “I could count on one hand the number of girls I went out with before Rachel,” Jackie observed. With the feel of the poverty of his childhood still clinging to him, he was shy and unco:m.fortable in the affluent world of UCLA. Only in the arena, where his athletic talents cut off any feelings of inferiority, was he at ease.

  He was defensive when he first met this pretty, obviously middle-class young woman who wore her long hair in the fashionable rolled-under style, and whose complexion was much lighter than his. But there was a certain melding of personalities, of opposites attracting, a mixture of the right moment with the appropriate person. “She never cared particularly about sports, but she took an interest in sports because of me. She became the most important and helpful and encouraging person I ever met in my whole life,” Jack said. “When I became bitter or discouraged, she was always there with the help I needed.”

  But despite the sweetness of romance and the recognition for his athletic achievements, Jackie was still a poor black man in a white man’s world. During his first year at UCLA, Robinson was in a car with a few friends. The car was bumped by a car driven by a white man. An argument ensued. When the police arrived, Robinson and his friends were taken to jail and booked on suspicion of robbery. A UCLA coach and some of Jack’s friends came down to police headquarters and argued that Jack and his friends were innocent of any wrongdoing. The robbery charge was dropped, but UCLA’s star athlete had to forfeit a $25 bond.

  Twenty-one years after Mallie Robinson had carried little Jackie in her arms on the dirty Jim Crow coach to California, Robinson withdrew from UCLA. He had a job with the National Youth Administration and wanted to make money to help out his mother, for the other Robinson children had financial family pressures of their own.

  Robinson’s job with the National Youth Administration did not work out. The wages were meager, and the athlete in him was restless. A young black man without a college degree, lacking any specific job skill, faced with the responsibility of helping out his mother and supporting himself, he turned to the athletic skills that had thus far sustained him.

  In the fall of 1941, he went to Hawaii to play professional football for the Honolulu Bears. There were many letters from him to Rachel, filled with thoughts of their life together in the future. Weekdays in Hawaii were spent working for a construction company near Pearl Harbor. On Sundays he played with the Honolulu Bears in an integrated league. The football season ended December 5.

  Two days later, aboard the Lurline, Robinson was headed back to California. He was playing poker when the crew members began painting the ship:s windows black. The captain informed the passengers that the United States was at war; the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Virtually all the passengers put on life jackets, but Robinson, obstinate and superstitious, refused. There was something about authority that brought out the iconoclast in him.

  The war would unleash great demographic and social change for millions. Perceptions would alter. Momentous technological innovations would usher in a world vastly different from what had been. Jackie Robinson would be shaped by and would help shape much of what was to come in those turbulent years. Yet, what had been for him was past forgetting.

  “When I saw him playing later for the Brooklyn Dodgers, it was part of the gang that had made it,” says one link to the past, Sidney Heard. “I feel good because we all contributed to his becoming what he became. Not that we were as good as he was. We were good, but not like him. Still, I know when he got a touchdown playing out on the lots and then when he got a touchdown playing in school or college, and when he hit those home runs and stole those bases for the Brooklyn Dodgers, it was easier because we made him know how to hustle.”

  Chapter Three

  Ohio: Pioneer Stock

  A raft bearing a young family, a cart, and a yoke of oxen drifted down the Ohio River one spring day in 1819, and came to rest at Sciotoville, close by Portsmouth, Ohio. The powerful man unloaded the raft and placed all his earthly goods on the cart. He hitched up the wagon, lifted his wife and child onto it, and moved out toward the thickly wooded land. He headed deeper and deeper into the virgin land until he found a large tract of meadow. This, he decided, would be where he would settle. The man’s name was David Brown. His wife, the former Hannah Hubbard, had been disowned by her family in Pennsylvania because her husband drank whiskey.

  On the twelfth of March, 1874, Emily Brown, a granddaughter of David and Hannah, married Jacob Franklin Rickey. The young couple received a house, livestock, and two hundred acres as a wedding gift from the groom’s father, Ephraim Wanser Rickey, a farmer and landowner. Ephraim was the son of a Baptist fundamentalist preacher who had broken the soil in Madison Township and later acquired extensive landholdings throughout the southern Ohio countryside.

  Jacob inherited the religious fervor of his grandfather. Known as Uncle Frank, he was a pious, devout man. Emily, or Aunt Emma as she was called, was a Bible-reading, psalmsinging woman whose temperament melded perfectly with her husband’s.

  Emily and Frank had four children while they lived in Madison Township, but two died in infancy. With their two surviving children—Orla Edwin and Wesley Branch, born December 20, 1881—the Rickeys left Madison Township in 1883 and settled in Rush Township. A fifth child, Frank, was born in 1888.

  Uncle Frank became Sciotto County commissioner. He took much pleasure in planting fruit trees on his land, aided by his son Orla. Wesley Branch, named for the founder of Methodism, spent much of his time with his mother. She read aloud to him from the Bible through the long evenings and told him hundreds of homespun folk tales.

  During the 1890s, Branch, nicknamed “Week,” became caught up with baseball, like so many boys his age. An avid follower of the incinnati team, the strapping, broadshouldered youth competed actively in sports. He and Orla formed a baseball battery: Orla was a fastballing southpaw, and Branch was one of the few around who dared to catch the hard stuff Orla threw. Always the manager or the catcher, Branch was already studying strategy, noting what made for good and bad players and what won games.

  But Sundays were different. The Rickeys would eat a large breakfast and then hitch their horse, Old May, to a canopied surrey and ride off to church, filling the country air with the sounds of their hymns. It may have been on one of these Sunday rides that Emily extracted Branch Rickey’s famous vow that he would never engage in any form of sport on Sunday.

  When he had completed all the schooling available at the neighborhood school in Lucasville, a patchwork collection of courses that did not add up to a high school diploma, Week got a teaching position at Turkey Creek. The salary was $35 a month. He made the eighteen-mile trip to the Turkey Creek schoolhouse by bicycle in all types of weather. The teaching was an exercise in discipline. Some of the boys he taught were as big and as old as he was, and he learned to dodge their tobacco juice sprays.

  Rickey gave a portion of his monthly salary to his parents. Some he put away to save for a college education. With the rest, he bought books and taught hims
elf Latin, higher mathematics, and rhetoric. Language fascinated him

  His routine of teaching and reading went on for two years. Then, encouraged by educator Ed Appel of Wheelersburg, Ohio, and Jim Finney, the superintendent of schools in Portsmouth, who tutored him and provided him with books, he prepared himself for the entrance examination for Ohio Wesleyan University.

  “Two of my best friends had been at Ohio Wesleyan for a year,” Rickey later recalled, “and they kept writing to me about it.” He passed the exam for OWU and also for West Point. Rickey never intended to attend the military school, but took the examination for it, in his phrase, as a “brain test.”

  Admitted to Ohio Wesleyan even though he did not have a high school diploma, Rickey traveled on the Hocking Valley Railroad from Portsmouth to Delaware, Ohio, on a cool autumn day in 1900. A curious-looking figure dressed in an old suit, Rickey stepped off the train at West William Street. He carried his “other suit,” his baseball suit, in his bag. The new freshman, dressed as he was and walking with a pigeontoed gait, looked very different from the two well-dressed collegians who came to greet him. They were the two friends from Portsmouth who had written to him with so much enthusiasm about Ohio Wesleyan.

  As they walked down the street, one of the boys whispered to the newly arrived eighteen-year-old, “Branch, turn your toes out when you walk. You look funny walking that way.”

  “Aw, turn your own damn toes out,” was Rickey’s response. The two friends were taken aback. “I answered that way,” Rickey later admitted, “to show my independence right at the start in a new setting.”