Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  To Jack, time was of the essence. An injury could end his career at any time, but he was also becoming old for a professional athlete. “I’ve got to make it quick,” he declared, “because I’m 28, older than most people think.” At first he judged that he might play only two or three more years; then he revised his estimate: “I hope I’ve got six years of big-league ball ahead.” Despite his success, Jack’s interest in playing baseball at his age was limited once the Jim Crow barriers were truly broken. Thereafter, the game was mainly the means to an end, which was twofold: a solid financial foundation for himself and his family, and his long-term desire to help young people, especially the poor and black. He knew that now was the time to make money, while Jackie Robinson was a household name.

  To exploit his fame, Jack reached an agreement with a Manhattan agent, Jules Ziegler, of General Artists Corporation (GAC). Soon he, sometimes with Rachel and Jackie Junior, was endorsing various commercial products, notably Homogenized Bond bread (“I get a double play in Homogenized Bond. It tastes grand and packs plenty of energy!”) and Borden’s milk. More dubiously, he endorsed Old Gold cigarettes, which moved the sportswriter Sam Lacy to warn that Robinson “should do something about clearing up [the] impression that he smokes.” With advertisements that dwelt on Jack’s handsome, athletic looks and brilliant smile, more history was probably being made. These were perhaps the first commercial messages aimed at the mass market using a black man or a black family as their spokespersons.

  In October, the news broke that Robinson had been signed, with Rickey’s approval, to appear in Courage, a motion picture to be made by a group called Producers Releasing Corporation. Behind this venture was a producer, Jack Goldberg, who agreed to pay Robinson $14,500 to take part in what was to be an all-black production. To some observers, this seemed ill-advised. Since Jackie had broken the color line in baseball, one black journalist asked, “why would he have to take a step backward and appear in an all-Negro moving picture?” Another contract, signed through GAC on October 10, 1947, called for an autobiography to be written by Wendell Smith of the Courier and published by a small New York house, Greenberg. Curiously, the contract offered no advance and only standard royalties. But probably the most questionable venture promised Jack $10,000 for about four weeks of work in vaudeville. Jack would make guest appearances in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles as part of a show that featured comedians, singers, dancers, and an orchestra. Rachel had strong reservations about this latest gambit. It seemed risky, especially since “Jack couldn’t sing, and he was only a fair dancer. I couldn’t imagine what he was supposed to do.”

  But Jack liked the pay and accepted the challenge. On October 29, he made his debut, answering scripted questions about himself, at Frank Schiffman’s Apollo Theater on 125th Street in Harlem, a major showcase of black talent. The critical response to the show was caustic. The Apollo, one reviewer wrote, hit “a new low” in its sloppy, inane buildup to his appearance; “the entire show, save Jackie, stank.” Finally on stage, he seemed “disgusted and ashamed, looking completely out of place and character.… Everything Jackie had worked so hard to build, giving us an intelligent and capable ball player, was crumbled among those degrading surroundings.” Another newspaper praised Robinson on stage as “a picture of dapper modesty, quiet dignity and class” but also loathed the show: “The thought grows on you as you watch, ‘What the hell is Jackie Robinson doing in this?’ ” Clearly, “money” was the right answer, but “the idea persisted that there should be another way for him to earn the income he so richly deserves.”

  At the same time, Jack was ready to support charity. In Philadelphia, at the White Rock Baptist Church, he helped raise money for the church nursery. In October, Jack handed out silver medals to members of a boys’ baseball team playing in the Police Athletic League in Manhattan—and received a medal himself “for his interest in the youth of the 32nd precinct.” In California, where he lent support to the Beverly Hills Kiwanis Club, the comedian Red Skelton acknowledged Jack’s “gracious, down-right big-hearted manner.” Jack was also willing to make quiet visits to hospitals to comfort the sick, especially boys, as when he paid an unannounced visit to a badly burned youngster who seemed on the brink of giving up. In Malden, Massachusetts, outside Boston, he spent an hour visiting a sick Jesuit priest, a fan, who worked among blacks in Mississippi. When a ten-year-old Brooklyn boy, Milton Goldman, was gravely ill in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital and his doctors asked for a Dodger or two to visit him, Jack was the first volunteer. He arrived at the hospital bearing toys and a baseball autographed by his teammates. “Jackie took the boy’s emaciated hand in his,” one report went. “The boy tried to squeeze it. For several minutes Jackie sat talking to the boy, then out of a clear sky the lad muttered, ‘Gee, Jackie Robinson, and he came here just to see me.’ ”

  In November, after several weeks without Jackie Junior, who had gone to Los Angeles with Rachel’s mother, Jack and Rachel drove home to California. The news that Jackie was close to taking his first steps turned the trip into a race against time. “We’d pull off the road,” Rachel said, “and Jack would tell me, ‘We’ll sleep a few hours.’ Then I’d feel the car moving. Of course, we didn’t make it. The day before we reached Los Angeles, the little guy decided to walk.” In Los Angeles, they moved in with Rachel’s older brother, Chuck Williams, and his wife, Brenda, at 1283 35th Street, the former home of Zellee’s mother. Aside from his vaudeville stint at the Million Dollar Theatre, where he opened on November 18, Jack mainly relaxed and played golf in the balmy weather or passed hours at the race track, which he loved. But again, he found himself a frequent guest of honor at dinners. In Oakland, at the yearly dinner of the Alameda County branch of the NAACP, Jack received its Annual Merit Award as “the first man in the history of your country to grip the handle of a baseball bat and knock prejudice clear out of a Big League Ball Park!”

  Just before Christmas, at Los Angeles General Hospital, under ether for about six hours, Jack underwent an operation for the removal of a bone spur in his right ankle. He left the hospital on crutches, discharged in time to enjoy a gala luncheon in his honor on December 31 at the Biltmore Hotel (where he and Rachel had their first date, seven years before), hosted by the Los Angeles Bruin and Varsity Clubs, booster groups for UCLA athletics. Wilbur Johns, Jack’s basketball coach and now the university’s athletic director, chaired the event; also attending were Babe Horrell, his former football coach at UCLA; John Thurman, his baseball coach at Pasadena Junior College; his illustrious backfield partner in 1939, Kenny Washington; and Jack’s former employers Bob and Blanche Campbell. After a moving eulogy, he was presented with a testimonial scroll and a sculpted bust of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Then a poised, confident Jackie Robinson, no longer the hungry, disgruntled young athlete from Pasadena, responded with “a short but impressive speech.”

  Early in the new year, 1948, Jack had one firm engagement: at Branch Rickey’s request, he was scheduled to fly east to take part, with Rickey, in a public rally in Virginia in January in support of a bond drive for a proposed World War II memorial stadium between the towns of Hampton and Newport News. However, pressed by Jack Goldberg, who insisted that production would start any day on their movie, he decided to stay in Los Angeles. Robinson then waited daily for the call from Goldberg, which never came; maddeningly, the movie project dissolved into nothing. Some time later, Robinson filed a suit against Goldberg for payment of the $14,500 promised him.

  Jack had not informed Rickey that he wasn’t coming; he simply failed to appear at the rally. “More than sixty thousand Negroes were disappointed,” Rickey’s assistant Arthur Mann wrote. So was Rickey, who was left to explain, as best he could, his black star’s absence. Jack, who took pride in honoring his commitments, had thought he had sent word to Rickey through Leo Durocher, who was living in Los Angeles (his wife was the movie actress Laraine Day) and had attended the UCLA luncheon in Jack’s honor; but Durocher, who was
near the end of his suspension as the Dodger manager, refused to be blamed. (In February, Robinson made up for the missed date with a visit to Virginia that included a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, a radio interview, and a speech at a rally for the new memorial stadium.)

  With almost two months left before training camp, Jack then decided to take his stage act on the road. Organized by a West Coast agent, Jimmie Daniels, the tour took in seventeen cities in the South, including Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, and San Antonio. In one way, the tour was a serious mistake; his body ballooned. In the segregated South, most meals were taken in private homes, and were lavish. His metabolism surrendered as Jack drank milk by the quart, indulged in huge breakfasts of eggs, potatoes, and grits; lunches and dinners of fried chicken, pork, and biscuits; and desserts of ice cream, cake, and other sweets, which he always craved. His weight jumped to around 230 pounds. “We ate like pigs,” he confessed, “and for me it was disastrous.”

  On February 11, when Rickey and Robinson, accompanied by Rachel, finally met to settle his 1948 contract, an element of friction was present. The next day (the birthday of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, as one reporter noted snidely), the two men signed Jack’s contract. How much he would receive had been a subject of public speculation, especially after a poll of the Baseball Writers Association placed him fifth in the balloting for Most Valuable Player. “There’s no question about it,” Rickey had commented. “He deserves a substantial [raise] and will get it.” One report even asserted that a contract had been signed, for $22,500. But the new figure was only $12,500, which left both Jack and Rachel disappointed. “I respected and respect Branch Rickey,” Rachel said years later, “but the situation was pure plantation. There was no chance to negotiate, to discuss anything. It was no different for the white players, but I never thought it was right.” The meeting so affronted her that when at one point Jack asked her a question, she simply made no reply. She sat quietly as Jack, Rickey, and Harold Parrott tried to interpret her silence. Arthur Mann, who was present, later wrote of a display of “considerable vehemence on both sides … a wholehearted confession of merits and demerits in the sphere of supply and demand.” Before the press, however, Jack was loyal. “Mr. Rickey and I came to terms easily,” he said. “I left it all up to him and he came through with a good contract.”

  Later that month, Jack was about to leave Los Angeles for the Caribbean and training camp when he received the most devastating news of his life since the death of his brother Frank in 1939. In Austin, Texas, the Reverend Karl Downs, Jack’s most influential mentor in his late adolescence, was dead at the age of thirty-five. In September, Downs had come to Brooklyn for Jackie Robinson Day and stayed with the Robinsons. During his visit, he had taken ill with chronic stomach pain and gone with Rachel to a Brooklyn hospital. The Robinsons had urged him to stay there for further treatment, but Downs insisted on returning to Samuel Huston College in Austin, where he was still president. In Austin, on February 26, at the segregated Brackenridge Hospital, he had undergone an emergency operation at the hands of a white surgeon. “Complications set in,” according to Robinson in his autobiography, but “rather than returning his black patient to the operating room or to a recovery room to be closely watched, the doctor in charge let him go to the segregated ward where he died.” The death of the man who had brought Jack back to religion and given him a powerful sense of purpose tested Jack’s faith: “It was hard to believe that God had taken the life of a man with such a promising future.”

  A few days after Downs’s funeral on March 2, at Wesley Chapel Methodist Church in Austin, Jack reached Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. There, tired and troubled, he checked into his hotel and joined the rest of the Dodgers for a month of training before a two-week exhibition tour of the southwestern United States. His inner turmoil was eased only a little by the fact that, unlike in 1947, he now stayed with his white teammates, at the luxurious Hotel Jaragua by the sea; and at the park, as he wrote from Ciudad Trujillo, “I met all the gang, Hugh Casey, Eddie Stanky, Pee Wee Reese, Tommy Brown, Ralph Branca and all the others I played with last season. They all seemed glad to see me and I certainly was glad to see them again.” With him in the Dodgers camp was only one other black player, the pitcher Dan Bankhead. But some miles away, with the Montreal Royals, were Roy Campanella, on the brink of a call-up by the Dodgers, and Don Newcombe, who was still maturing as a pitcher.

  Controversy surfaced at once. Stanky, the second baseman, was holding out for more money; but with Robinson waiting in the wings to claim second base, the Dodgers dawdled in negotiating. In 1947, Rickey had said openly: “The best second baseman in the world is now playing first base.” Soon Stanky was traded to the Boston Braves. “I was sorry to see Eddie go,” Jack wrote. “He was a great guy and a swell ball player.” Second base was now open but he did not pounce. “Wherever they tell me to play, I’ll play,” he wrote, but “I like second base better than first … and hope I can do well enough to stay there all season.”

  A more serious controversy concerned Jack’s weight, now about 215 pounds. Durocher, back in charge after his one-year suspension, was eager to reassert his authority on a club that had won the pennant and almost the World Series without him; he was perhaps also smarting from Robinson’s charge that he had misled him about the Newport News engagement. Jack had taken the news of Durocher’s return calmly. “I’m just a player,” he declared, “I don’t pick the managers. I’ll give anybody the best I have.” But in Ciudad Trujillo, Durocher took one look at Robinson and exploded. “What in the world happened to you?” he screamed (as Jack reported). “You look like an old woman. Look at all that fat around your midsection.… Why, you can’t even bend over!” Feeling guilty but also humiliated, Jack offered Durocher excuses, “but he wouldn’t listen.… All the newspapermen gathered around and gave me an ‘army inspection.’ ” Durocher also offered another piece of criticism: Robinson hit too much to left field. “You’ve got to hit more to right this year,” he lectured. “If you learn how to do that you’ll hike your average by at least fifteen points.”

  “I think Durocher is right,” Jack told a reporter. “I hit too many balls to left.” As for his weight, Jack conceded that “my speed is a big asset—without that I would be lost.” He gave a solemn promise that “I’m not going to blow up like that again.… I’m going to find something to do; something that will keep me down around playing weight.” Durocher was not alone in criticizing him. In the Baltimore Afro-American, Sam Lacy bluntly challenged Robinson: “After an inexcusably ‘easy’ first week in training camp, Jack settled down to hard work.” Tested furiously under the tropic sun by Durocher, Jack began to lose weight quickly, though a few excess pounds resisted his efforts. But his throwing arm went sore, and he was timid on the base paths. Only near the end of training did Jack seem to be rounding into form, when he hit two home runs against the Royals and a local all-star team.

  He was buoyed, too, by his warm reception by people in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, where the Dodgers also played a few games that month. In Ciudad Trujillo, he wrote, most locals were “conscious of their color and the things they have in common with colored people of America.” Jack elicited the same reaction in Puerto Rico, where fans “pulled and tugged on his clothes, pleaded for autographs” and greeted his plate appearances “with spontaneous applause.” Still, he was lonely away from Rachel and Jackie, and Karl Downs’s untimely death overshadowed everything else. In the March 27 Courier, he devoted his entire column to Jackie Junior. “I miss him very much,” he confessed freely. The “best thing” about being a major-league player “is that it gives you an opportunity to make a decent living and prepare for the future.… He’s a grand little fellow and I want to be able to give him everything possible when he gets a bit older.… I want him to grow up in a good home, nice clothes, and some of the other things the average American kid enjoys.”

  The flight back to America from Ciudad Trujillo was a nightmare
, as the Dodgers’ DC-4 lost an engine and started misfiring on another. The pilot turned back. “Sure we were scared,” Jack told reporters. A later flight took them to Vero Beach, Florida, to an old military facility acquired by Rickey as a permanent training center that would be exempt from Jim Crow. By this time Jack was down to about 200 pounds. “I’m in good shape,” he declared gamely. “I’m ready for a big season. All I need is a little luck.” And initially he seemed to have it. In his first game at Vero Beach, before the largest crowd (about half black) to see a baseball game there, he led off for Brooklyn and hit a home run. He also did fairly well on the tour, which started in Fort Worth, Texas, and continued through Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Maryland, before ending in New York. Record crowds swollen by blacks, one reporter noted, made the turnstiles “click like a five and ten cent store cash register on bargain day.” Encouragingly, whites seemed eager to support the black players, although along the way Robinson and Campanella, who was now a Dodger (although only temporarily), heard a few loud boos. At a luncheon in Dallas, three hundred local whites welcomed the black Dodgers. When Durocher declared that Brooklyn would not have won the pennant in 1947 without Jack, “the jam-packed room of Texans gave Robby a rousing round of applause.”