That was how Wesley Branch Rickey began at Ohio Wesleyan University—an institution that would remain special to him through all the days of his life.
“I never did go to high school, and never saw the inside of one until after I went to Delaware,” he would write. “I was a preparatory student with two years of so-called prep work to do in order to become a freshman. I carried as many as twenty-one hours in one term and never did catch up with my class until the spring term of 1904. . . . I did the preparatory work and the four years of college work in three and a third years. . ..
“No boy could have had fewer clothes than I had in my first year in school. And no boy could have had less money than I had either. There was one month during which I did not have a single penny at any time. . . . Hormell [a professor] got a job for me waiting tables, and Walker [another professor] saw to it that I got the furnace job that gave me one-half interest in an attic room. Walker paid me eighteen dollars for copying some papers for him, which mystified me at the time because my penmanship was not too legible. During my first term at Delaware I had only one pair of pants, and nobody saw me wear anything else. I cleaned them myself and pressed them myself, and not infrequently. And they saw me through.”
These penurious circumstances notwithstanding, Rickey threw himself wholeheartedly into campus life. “There was an old gymnasium that was too small for basketball. There were a couple of showers where the water was usually cold. One coach handled all athletics. There was not much game equipment. . . . One day we were playing baseball and a long foul landed near the railroad track, behind the catcher. A boy watching the game grabbed the ball. We chased him half a mile, even wading through the Olentangy River to get that ball back so we could continue the game.
“In the old days, we had padded sweaters, shin guards, and tight-fitting vests and pants for football. We usually bought our own shoes and had cleats nailed on by the shoemaker. Before the football season, we let our hair grow so our heads would have protection without head guards in the old center rushes. Five yards in three downs meant mass plays, and everyone piled up.
“Social life was pretty quiet. We went to the YMCA on Wednesday night and to church on Sunday. Monday, we signed slips in chapel to say that we had, or had not, been to church the day before. We might walk home to Monnett Hall with the girls after class and see them until nine o’clock on Friday or Saturday evenings. If we went walking, we confined our strolls to the halls and front porch of the dormitory. There were no dances, no picture shows, no college shows. We had a good lecture course, and it was a big event when a musical performance was given. The fellows wore dress suits, if they had them, and the girls wore formal dresses.”
Poor, without a high school diploma, a product of country-schoolhouse education and largely self-taught, Rickey was ill prepared for some of the academic challenges of Ohio Wesleyan. He was at a particular disadvantage in classical studies. His knowledge of Latin, prior to his university days, had come from rote study of one Latin book. He knew the meanings of most words, but admitted that “what Cicero or someone had meant when he put those words together was a mystery to me.”
Called to recite one day in Prof. Johnny Grove’s class, Rickey stammered through a passage, embarrassed in front of the other students, most of whom were from big-city high schools and knew much more than he. When Rickey had completed his self-conscious recitation, the old professor peered at him over his glasses. “Whose Latin grammar did you study, Mr. Rickey?”
“Grove’s Latin Grammar,” said Rickey, sheepishly.
The class erupted. Rickey immediately realized that the little black Latin book that he had studied so diligently back home had been written . by the professor standing before him. One pudgy student was laughing so hard he nearly fell out of his seat. Rickey, crestfallen, stood in front of the room thinking, “When the next Hocking Valley train goes south, I’ll be on it.”
Professor Grove finally silenced the students and asked Rickey to remain after class. Alone in the classroom, Rickey and the professor sat at the desk in front of the room. “Mr. Rickey,” the professor asked, “what’s the difference between a gerundive and a verbal noun?” The question posed no problem for the eager student, and the answer satisfied Professor Grove.
“Mr. Rickey, you need some special work in translation. Come in to see me here tomorrow morning a half hour before class.”
Rickey attended Professor Grove’s special early-morning tutoring sessions until the professor said, “I think you are now prepared to recite. Get ready for tomorrow.”
Rickey recalled the happy ending: “I don’t think I went to bed at all that night. I knew that lesson from beginning to end. And then horribile dictu! He forgot to call on me. Next day, he did call on me. I was prepared. . . . And the class applauded. It was almost more embarrassing than the first day. ‘Well,’ Professor Grove said to the class, ‘I think you will agree with me that Mr. Rickey has made considerable progress in his study of Latin.’”
Branch’s spare time was taken up by athletic endeavors aimed at earning money to meet his educational expenses. At that time, collegians were allowed to engage in professional sports. Rickey played semipro baseball in the summer and football in the fall.
As a member of the backfield of the Shelby, Ohio, football team, he earned up to $150 a game. But in 1902, a double fracture of his leg ended his football career, and he decided to concentrate exclusively on baseball.
He became the catcher for the Laramie, Wyoming, baseball team in 1903, was moved up to Dallas in July, and a month later was promoted to the Cincinnati Reds. As backup catcher to Heinie Peitz, Rickey was placed in charge of the catcher’s mask; Peitz looked after the chest protector. The Reds had just one of each for the team.
At the conclusion of a Saturday game, Rickey handed the catcher’s mask to Peitz. “Look after it, Heinie,” he said. “I won’t be here tomorrow. It’s a Sunday.”
The manger of the Reds was Joe Kelley, a tough former member of the Baltimore Orioles. “What’s that?” he shouted to Rickey. “What do you mean you won’t be here tomorrow?”
“Didn’t the Dallas team tell you when you bought me that I don’t play ball on Sunday?”
“This is a Sunday town,” snapped Kelley. “That’s when the money comes in. How come you won’t play Sunday ball?”
“It’s just the way I was brought up,” said Rickey. “It’s against my principles to play ball on Sunday.”
Kelley was livid. “You’re not gonna go too far in baseball not playing on Sunday. What do you think you are? You think you’re better than the other fellows?”
“That’s not it at all, Mr. Kelley.”
“Well, Rickey, whatever it is, we’re not going to make an exception for you. You will catch when I tell you to catch or you can get the hell out of here. Pick up your money and get out if you won’t play tomorrow.”
Released and returned to Dallas, Rickey learned an important lesson. From that point on, for the rest of his career in baseball, Rickey always insisted on a clause in his contract—as both a player and an executive—stating that he was under no obligation to be at a ballpark on Sunday.
In I904, Rickey was awarded a bachelor of literature degree from Ohio Wesleyan and enrolled at Allegheny College to study law and serve as athletic director and baseball coach.
Still a student, in 1905 Rickey became a member of the St. Louis Browns by way of Chicago. The White Sox had purchased his contract from Dallas and then traded him to the Browns for veteran catcher Frank Roth. He appeared in just one game for the Browns in 1905, but in 1906 batted a creditable .284 in sixty-four games. Perhaps his marriage to his childhood sweetheart Jane Moulton, a fellow student at Ohio Wesleyan, on June 1, 1906, had something to do with his playing performance. Rickey, who called his wife, a storekeeper’s daughter, “the only pebble on the beach,” claimed that he proposed to her more than a hundred times before she said yes.
It was an eventful year for Rickey. In addition to gett
ing married and playing major-league baseball, he also served as athletic director and football coach at Ohio Wesleyan, earned a second bachelor’s degree (this time in arts), and still found time to play checkers, a game he played avidly all his life.
In 1907, the Browns traded Rickey to the New York Highlanders. Years later he recalled the excitement of arriving as a country boy in the Big Apple that April, and riding uptown to 168th Street and Broadway, where the ballpark was located. Rickey may have been spreading himself too thin, though. He missed spring training because of OWU commitments, and that season he batted just .182—and was dead last in fielding percentage among all outfielders and catchers in the American League. In one eleven-game span, he committed nine errors. On June 28, 1907, he earned an ignominious niche in the record books. Catching against Washington, he allowed thirteen bases to be stolen on him—a record for a nine-inning game. The Highlanders released him after the season ended, and he went back to Ohio and his studies.
But it was not entirely a lost summer. Rickey had an opportunity to prevail, if not in baseball, then in another form of competition. In midtown Manhattan, there was a storefront where customers could play checkers against a large mechanical hand manipulated by someone behind a curtain. The hand played four or :five games at once, and never lost.
Rickey was an old hand at checkers, having played many games while sitting astride a cracker barrel in the country store back home, and he couldn’t resist the challenge. He played the hand and beat it. The man behind the curtain emerged to congratulate the victor. To the astonishment of both men, it turned out that the “book” system Rickey employed was invented by his hidden opponent. Rickey had mastered the technique, and the master had met his match.
Back in Ohio, Rickey took over the class of his onetime mentor, Professor Grove, who had died. At the same time he studied law at Ohio State University and coached football and baseball at his alma mater. He was known to be especially sympathetic to homesick young players. Recalling his own homesickness when he :first attended Wesleyan, he told them how he would go home for a day or two and return to school feeling much better.
Herman M. Shipps, a member of the class of ‘13 and later vice-president of Ohio Wesleyan, was a freshman when Rickey was the college’s football coach. He recalls another aspect of Rickey’s life:
“In those days there was a great deal of feeling in Ohio about Prohibition. In fact, you were either ‘wet’ or ‘dry.’ One evening Branch was walking up Sandusky Street after football practice with half the team gathered around him. At the corner of William Street and Sandusky a man standing on a baggage truck was making a speech to a considerable crowd. Branch said, ‘What’s that fellow doing?’ Someone said, ‘He’s making a “wet” speech.’ Branch said, ‘If you get a box over on this other corner, I’ll make a “dry” speech.’
“He got on a box and started to talk, and pretty soon he had the whole crowd come across the street to listen to him. It must have been a pretty good speech, because the AntiSaloon League heard about it and told him they would love him to make some ‘dry’ speeches in the small towns in Ohio, and they would pay him ten dollars and his expenses.
“The first place he went to was Chillicothe,” recalls Shipps. Rickey was told by three hotel managers that there were no vacancies. The hotels were dependent on their bars for much of their income. “Branch wasn’t quite sure what to do, so he started to walk down the street and met an old friend from Duck Run named Hunter. They stopped, shook hands, and Branch said, ‘What are you doing here?’
“‘I’m tending bar. What are you doing?’
“‘I came to make a “dry” speech,’ Branch said, ‘and I can’t find anyplace to stay. The hotels won’t let me in.’ “Hunter said, ‘That’s all right, come on down and stay with me.’
“So Branch stayed with the bartender and made a good ‘dry’ speech. After that experience he made quite a few such speeches in Ohio and became widely known as a public speaker.”
In the 1920s, Rickey was hired by the Reapath Lyceum Bureau in Columbus, Ohio, to speak in churches throughout the state. “Branch didn’t like to drive a car, so he and I made a deal,” Shipps recalled. “I would take him around to various small towns in Ohio where he was making speeches in the evening, and at dinnertime we would assemble the Ohio Wesleyan alumni who would come to have dinner together and to hear him talk about the university. Then we would all go to church and hear him talk about government. He was an ardent Republican, and at one time seriously considered running for senator in Missouri. I recall once we sat in front of my fire and talked for a couple of hours about whether he should stay in baseball or run. He finally decided, as it seemed he always did, in favor of baseball.”
But even baseball had to wait back in the spring of gog. Acute weight loss and a persistent cough were diagnosed as symptoms of tuberculosis. Rickey had to submit to a rest cure for six months at Saranac Lake, New York. The respite in the Adirondack Mountains worked. That fall, he enrolled in the University of Michigan Law School and served as baseball coach there. He completed the three-year course in two years, but the strain caused his health to break down again. Doctors suggested he go west, where the climate would be more beneficial. So the Rickeys headed out to Boise, Idaho, with two fraternity brothers and set up a law practice. It seemed as if he would spend his life as a western lawyer.
He had left with the understanding that if he wanted to return, he would be welcomed back. He wired the athletic director at the University of Michigan: “Am starving, will be back without delay.” He told his partners he was making a leave and headed back to Ann Arbor to coach Michigan’s baseball team. He doubled as baseball coach and part-time scout for the St. Louis Browns, sending in reports on players to the Browns owner, Col. Bob Hedges, who was so impressed with Rickey’s reports that he hired him as an assistant presidential secretary. He was also allowed to continue coaching at the University of Michigan.
Nearing the end of the third decade of his life, Wesley Branch Rickey had been a country schoolteacher, earned three college degrees, played and coached collegiate baseball and football, played professional baseball and football, lectured extensively on behalf of Prohibition, and been a college instructor, an athletic director, and a lawyer. He had come through two bouts with tuberculosis. An abstemious, Sabbath-observing Methodist whose vilest expletive was “Judas Priest,” he was primed to enter the rough-and-tumble world of major-league baseball. The sport would never be the same.
Chapter Four
St. Louis
In 1913, Ty Cobb of Detroit paced the American League in batting. Frank “Home Run” Baker of Philadelphia hit twelve homers to lead the league. Walter Johnson of Washington won thirty-six games and had an earned-run average of 1.09. The St. Louis Browns finished in last place, thirtynine games behind Connie Mack’s Athletics. Their three managers that season were George Stovall, Jimmy Austin, and Branch Rickey.
Col. Bob Hedges, the former Cincinnati carriage maker, prevailed upon his aide, Rickey, to take over the team for the final eleven games of the season. True to his old vow, Rickey would not enter the ballpark on Sunday; Burt Shotton, three years Rickey’s junior, from Bronhelm, Ohio, became the designated Sunday manager.
Rickey piloted the 1914 Browns to a fifth-place finish. On August 25 of that year, the thirty-three-year-old manager was coaxed into a final major-league at-bat. His Browns were losing, 7-0, in the first game of a doubleheader against Connie Mack’s Athletics in Shibe Park in Philadelphia. A nineteen-year-old southpaw named Ray Bressler was the Philadelphia pitcher. Veteran Ira Thomas, who had once been a teammate of Rickey’s on the New York Highlanders, was catching.
“Get up and hit, Rick. Get up and hit,” Thomas yelled. The other Athletics picked it up. Even the venerable Connie Mack joined in the chant. Rickey agreed to come to the plate if Bressler promised not to throw any curveballs.
“I was sure they’d curve me to death,” Rickey recalled. “So I wasn’t set for the first pit
ch, strike one, a fastball. Well, I thought, that was done to make me complacent. I just know they’d bend the next one over. The next pitch was a fastball and a strike. I was now ready for the curve and was utterly astonished to see a third fastball go by—strike three. My last turn at bat in the major leagues taught me that nothing is gained by distrusting your fellowman.”
One of Rickey’s early front-office coups was in signing George Sisler. He had starred as a member of Rickey’s University of Michigan baseball team before signing a contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates. As an attorney, Rickey realized that the signing was illegal, since Sisler was underage and therefore not able to sign a legal contract. Rickey journeyed to Sisler’s parents in Manchester, Ohio. After swapping some hunting and fishing stories, Sisler’s father signed with his fellow Ohioan, binding the future Hall of Farner to the St. Louis Browns, where he starred for a dozen seasons. The signing caused an uproar, but Rickey was upheld by the National Baseball Commission.
Even with Sisler, the 1915 Browns were a hapless collection of athletes. They won only sixty-three games and finished in sixth place. Yankee third baseman Fritzie Maisel, who stole fifty-one bases that year—many against the Browns—recalled trying to ride Rickey, who was coaching at third base. “I told him to get behind the plate and try to stop me from stealing since I was having such a good time against his catcher.
“‘Judas Priest, Fritzie,’ he shouted at me, ‘will you kindly shut your mouth. I am suffering enough.’” One contemporary claimed it was the players Rickey managed who suffered most. He droned on tirelessly about baseball theory, but his sermons on the game’s intricacies befuddled and bewildered some of the semiliterate types, who could only scratch their heads when the man they called the “Ohio Weezeleyant,” the exasperated professor of multiple college degrees, would declare: “I wonder why a man trained for the law devotes his life to something so cosmically unimportant as a game.”
Rickey and Robinson Page 5