Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  But this aspect of Robinson was lost on many sportswriters, with whom Jack’s relationship had now deteriorated badly. Among these was the powerful Dick Young of the New York Daily News. Once a Robinson supporter, Young now found much to criticize: Robinson was hypersensitive, too quick to see racism, too grand and independent. Kahn described a chilling scene between the two men, after Young had written an unflattering story about Robinson. In the Dodger clubhouse at Ebbets Field, Young was talking to someone when Robinson suddenly started shouting, “If you can’t write the truth, you shouldn’t write.” As Young continued to speak, unaware that he was a target, Robinson persisted: “Yeah, you, Young. You didn’t write the truth.” Other players, embarrassed, stared away as the two men shouted at one another. “Ever since you went to Washington,” Young screamed about Jack’s 1949 HUAC testimony, “your head has been too big!” “If the shoe fits,” Jack shot back, “wear it!” The shouting continued until, at last, it was time to play ball.

  JACK HAD NOT BECOME ARROGANT, but undoubtedly he had risen in the world. September 1954 found him and his family living no longer in middle-class St. Albans but in a grand house in Connecticut. This house was not Jack and Rachel’s, but had been lent to them; clearly, however, the once poor boy from Pasadena was now at home amid luxury. But Jack lived there with a clear conscience; if he was making good money, he had earned it.

  About a year before, Rachel had decided that it was time for the family to leave St. Albans for the home they would live in after baseball. “Jack would have been satisfied staying in St. Albans,” she said. “I wasn’t. The public schools were going downhill, and I wanted our three kids to go to public schools. I wanted more space, and a better social life for the children. I started thinking about Connecticut, about fresh air and ponds and lovely old stone walls. The whole notion of living in New England seemed good to me, a step up in upgrading our lives.”

  In moving to Connecticut, race was not an overwhelming factor. In St. Albans, the black presence, as the Robinsons experienced it, was still small. “Most of the black people near us,” Rachel said, “had no children, or none the age of Jackie, Sharon, and David. Most of the kids were white. We could have joined a black church, but Sunday baseball made that difficult. So we were not leaving a strongly black environment for a white one. It was not so simple.” To many blacks who could afford it, a belief in racial integration and social justice in the mid-1950s demanded precisely such a move. Integration meant living where one wished to live if one could afford to live there. The Robinsons knew they were taking a step that might profoundly alter their lives and those of their children, but were confident that the change would be all for the better.

  Accordingly, Rachel began to comb the real estate section of the New York Times. “I wanted a view of water,” she said. “I wanted beautiful trees. I wanted schools nearby, and good shopping, and a church. I had my dream place all clear in my mind.” With a broker, a bubbly white woman, she began to take trips north into Connecticut. Jack never went along; picking a house was Rachel’s business. But she soon realized that the task would be harder than she had imagined. A house in Port Chester, on the Connecticut border, seemed exactly right, even if some whites had stared coldly as she walked around the property. But when she boldly offered the asking price itself, the owner pulled the house off the market. In elite Greenwich, Connecticut, the owners of one house refused to show it to her. These snubs angered Rachel, and they riled her even more when she realized that her broker was probably colluding with the owners. The broker was also steering her away from one of the more desirable towns, Stamford, Connecticut. The broker herself lived there.

  Then a reporter for the Bridgeport Herald got in touch with Rachel. Preparing a series on Jim Crow in housing, the newspaper had been told that Jackie Robinson’s wife was meeting prejudice in her attempt to buy a house. “The Herald definitely did not hear about it from me,” Rachel said. “When I was turned down, I just quietly went away. Brokers told the Herald; they also told the Herald, apparently, that I wasn’t a serious buyer, that I was trying to start trouble—just like Jackie Robinson, I guess.” The newspaper decided to target the town of Stamford—“which was unfair,” she insisted, “because other towns had been just as tough to get into. But once Stamford was targeted, it had to respond, and it responded well.” A group of concerned ministers got together, circulated pledges of nondiscrimination among their parishioners, and called a small meeting, to which they invited Rachel. The meeting was held at the country home of Andrea Simon, the wife of the publisher Richard Simon of Simon & Schuster. Telephoning Rachel, she arranged to meet her at an exit on the Merritt Parkway near Stamford.

  Rachel liked Andrea Simon at once; Andrea, in turn, liked Rachel. Energetic, evidently strong-willed and yet sensitive, Simon promised to help Rachel with her house hunting. With four young children herself, she sympathized with Rachel’s desire for a better life for her own. Following her to the meeting, Rachel turned up a driveway in front of a beautiful white mansion that sat on over fifty acres of land, with a flourishing apple orchard in the front yard. The meeting with the ministers was pleasant. Murmuring their apologies, the men promised to try to stir their flocks to do their Christian duty.

  At the end of the meeting, as Rachel rose to leave, Simon asked her to stay. Next, to Rachel’s surprise, a broker showed up, and the three women went off to look at houses. “I think Andrea herself thought that perhaps I was being difficult,” Rachel said; “I think she wanted to see what sort of places I was turning down.” They inspected five pieces of property. Each owner was willing to sell; but Rachel rejected them all. The broker then played her sixth card: a five-acre spread with the foundation of a small new house already in place. Here, the owner, Ben Gunnar, who was also a builder, was willing to sell. However, not long out of his native Russia and totally dependent on local credit, he feared he might be ruined, blackballed by every bank, if he sold to blacks. His fear seemed reasonable.

  The plot of land, on rural Cascade Road, had a rugged look, green but pitted with countless granite boulders and the raw gougings of bulldozers. The parcel for sale was but one portion of an undeveloped tract also owned by the builder. The foundations for the proposed house were dug atop a small hill. Behind the house, at the foot of a slope, lay a pond that could be opened to join another, larger pond that ran the length of the tract. Protecting one flank of all this land was a serene lake, securely fenced off—the town reservoir. “It was perfect,” Rachel said. “There and then, I said I wanted it.”

  A day or two later, Jack drove up with Rachel. “He took a good look at the property and he said, ‘Yes, it looks nice. Let’s do it.’ He had no misgivings about moving. He knew I had a financial plan all worked out already, if we could get a mortgage, and he had no ties to St. Albans. He had no close friendships, no clubs he would miss. Our home was his favorite place, the only place that mattered, and if I could recreate that home somewhere else, and upgrade it, Jack was all for it.” In the end, securing a mortgage was easy. “Two very nice brothers named Spelke—they were Jewish—owned State National Bank. ‘If you bring the Robinsons here,’ they assured Gunnar, ‘we’ll see to it that they get a mortgage.’ We never had to shop around or suffer the indignity of being turned down.”

  The road was now clear for Gunnar to build the Robinsons a home. He and Rachel quickly settled on the basic design, a split-level contemporary with room for not only Jack, Rachel, and the three children but also Rachel’s mother and Willette Bailey. From that point on, progress came slowly. Between Rachel’s soaring ideas about her dream house and Gunnar’s own desire to make the house both a labor of love and a showcase for his talents as a builder, delay piled on delay, and expense on expense. The features included walls eighteen inches thick made of cinder block faced by local stone cut individually by hand on the property; a massive stone fireplace with a large headstone dug from the Simons’ estate; paneling made of expensive African mahogany; a huge game room complete wi
th a restaurant-size soda fountain; a room with sliding, internally illuminated glass cases to hold Jack’s many trophies; and a “mother-in-law” apartment complete with its own kitchen.

  By the summer of 1954, Rachel knew that the house would not be ready in time for Jackie and Sharon to start the school year in Connecticut. Then Andrea Simon again stepped in. Her relationship with Rachel had begun to grow and deepen. “She kept in touch with me,” Rachel said. “She was fifteen years older but we made a connection across the years. She was instinctive, she felt things. She always wanted to know.” Simon offered the Robinsons the use of their summer home over the fall and winter, when her family would be in their main home, in Riverdale in New York City. “Jack and I talked about it,” Rachel said. “It seemed an odd way to start our new life. But we were very, very anxious to get the children into school by the start of their year. And Andrea was gracious about it. We accepted.” Late in August, just in time for Jackie Junior and Sharon to enroll in schools in Stamford, the Robinson family left 177th Street in St. Albans and moved to Connecticut.

  The house in St. Albans went on sale. As news spread of the family’s move, and of the luxurious house being built in suburban Stamford, not everyone was happy for the family. In the Pittsburgh Courier, a mischievous columnist told his readers that “Jackie denies that he is trying to escape his own race.”

  BY THIS TIME, the Dodgers had lost the 1954 pennant to the Giants. One reason behind Brooklyn’s fall was Roy Campanella; after an operation on his left hand, he had gradually lost all feeling in two of his fingers. He would end the season miserably, with a .207 batting average, 19 home runs, and 51 runs batted in, compared with .312, 41 homers, and 142 runs batted in the year before. The Giants cruised to victory by five games. Their new star, Willie Mays, prodigiously gifted but also the embodiment of boyish joy, hit .345 for the season and won the MVP award. Happy for Mays, Jack joined Durocher in hailing him, controversially, as the finest player now in baseball.

  But where Robinson now stood as a player was itself a matter of debate. In some way, his 1954 record was an improvement over 1953. Playing in 124 games, far more than expected, he had batted above .300 (he finished at .311) for his sixth consecutive year, a feat equaled or surpassed by only two other active players, Ted Williams and Stan Musial. But Jack had flopped as a hitter in one crucial area: he had driven in only 59 runs. “Overall it was his worst season,” the Dodger statistician, Allan Roth, judged; “he failed to deliver in clutch situations, and in the clutch games.… He did not contribute to winning ball games as he had done in former years and he certainly wasn’t the aggressive runner as in the past.” That year, Robinson stole only seven bases, compared to seventeen in 1953 and twenty-four in 1952.

  Nevertheless, according to Roth, a healthy Robinson could have a “good” year in 1955. But Andy High, the chief scout of the Dodgers, strongly disagreed. Robinson had clearly passed his peak and might drag the team down in 1955. “I would trade him,” he wrote, “if he has any trading value.”

  Jack himself seemed ready to quit—except for the money. With expenses mounting on the house, he needed every penny he could earn. Still, he sometimes looked like a man on the way out. A reporter sent to learn Robinson’s plans found the aging Dodger lion sitting in the locker room, fully dressed but gingerly, even daintily, wearing shower slippers on his feet, which were sore and battered from the impact of spiked baseball shoes. As usual, he was frank. “How can I think of retiring now?” Jack asked. “Only injuries could keep me from playing again next year. I couldn’t afford it any other way. I’ve got more expenses now than I ever had before.”

  In September, the Courier predicted that come 1955, Robinson would either be a Pittsburgh Pirate, reunited with Rickey, or retired. (A year earlier, reports had Robinson and Reese on the verge of a trade to Pittsburgh.) Quite apart from Robinson’s injuries, the Courier reported, Walter O’Malley “is said to be fed up with Jackie’s insistence on getting into fights on and off the field, and is reported to have read the riot act to his star.” Another newspaper published an account, embarrassing all around, of an incident in a Brooklyn bar in which several Dodger players were overheard deriding and berating Robinson. Gamely, O’Malley dismissed talk of dissension on his club, but Brooklyn seemed in disarray, with Robinson the most disruptive factor. In October, Wendell Smith, once Jack’s bravest champion among newspapermen, wrote sadly about his decline. “It is tragic, in a way,” Smith ventured, “that his Brooklyn career should end on such a sorry note.” In the New York World-Telegram and Sun, Joe Williams was certain Robinson would be traded. “Hot or cold,” according to Williams, “he goes this time.… Jackie Robinson has gotten himself an upper berth in the Bums’ dog-house.”

  Robinson did not give up on himself. “I want to try and get back in the good graces of the fans next year,” he confided to Dick Young. Pressed by Young to explain himself, Jack pointed elsewhere in the club: “I mean I’ve made my last argument for Brooklyn. I’m going to leave the arguing up to Alston from now on. I decided that in Chicago that day, remember?” Would he like to be a manager? Not really—“I worry about myself, the crowd, the other guys. Managing would give me ulcers.” A black manager would come in the majors “eventually,” but it probably wouldn’t be him. Perhaps it would be Campanella: “Roy knows the game and men like him. Campy loves the game, too. That’s a big point.” Jack’s point seemed to be that men did not love him, and that he no longer loved the game, not as he was playing it, or not as it was being played.

  Weary of playing and fighting, and with no barnstorming chore at hand for the first time in several years, Jack allowed himself to enjoy the glorious autumn of 1954 in New England. At the Simons’ estate, the apple trees in the orchard between the white house and the road groaned with ripe fruit, and the air was crisp and clean. Golf had become his grand passion, and here he could play more easily, either as a guest at private clubs or on the municipal course in Stamford. The children, too, seemed to love their new life. Jackie Junior, eight years old that fall, was at Martha Hoyt, a quaint little elementary school with cobblestone walks; Sharon, not quite four, was at a nursery school; David, just past two, stayed at home. The Simons kept a courteous distance. Richard Simon made one impromptu visit, to see what was happening to his house, but Rachel passed the test with flying colors. After inspecting the house from top to bottom, Simon shook his head: “You really are a good housekeeper, aren’t you?” “Yes,” Rachel replied. “I really am.”

  A country squire in the making, Jack did not neglect his other commitments. In November, he and Rachel attended the annual meeting of the National Conference of Christians and Jews in Washington, D.C., and he committed himself to a tough two-week, cross-country NCCJ tour in the winter; in Minneapolis, on January 25, for example, he gave several talks to high-school assemblies and a gathering at a YMCA branch. Jack accepted the co-chairmanship of the New York Men’s Committee of the United Negro College Fund; a fellow worker was John D. Rockefeller Jr., who praised Jack in November as “one who has himself been a good friend of the Fund for many years.”

  He was still in demand as a public speaker. At Howard University, at a football banquet, Jack took pains to praise Joe Louis as a hero who had opened doors for other black athletes, including Robinson himself; Louis had just turned in desperation to professional wrestling, as the once-wealthy former boxing champion continued a sad free-fall into poverty. At the invitation of the alumni association, Jack also spoke at Winston-Salem Teachers College in North Carolina. In December, in New York, he appeared on a television program, Town Meeting, to help answer the question “How Can We Break Down Community Prejudice?”

  Meanwhile, through the fall and into the winter, as Jack kept his distance, Rachel dogged the builder Gunnar’s steps, anxious for word that the house on Cascade Road was finished. But she also kept suggesting fresh touches, which Gunnar was only too happy to make; he also made several on his own. At last, on February 16, 1955, with construction s
till not complete, the various parties gathered with their lawyers in downtown Stamford for the formal closing. Jack and Rachel loved the house, but the event was not joyful. Jack, who had kept his eyes averted while Rachel toiled on the project, was shocked. The basic cost of the house was one thing; it was the long list of costly extras, presented for the first time at the closing by Gunnar, that took Jack’s breath away. Unfortunately for Gunnar, his contract with the Robinsons severely limited added costs. “Jack’s reaction was horror, horror that this could have happened,” Rachel said. “Our lawyers also had a fit. They went after poor Gunnar. I myself got off rather easy, considering I was right there and knew that the costs were running up. But accounting just wasn’t Gunnar’s thing. We finished the closing, Gunnar looked sad, I felt sad, Jack was dumbfounded.”

  The base price of the house was $62,000. The extras agreed upon at the closing (only a portion of Gunnar’s list) amounted to $28,500. By almost any ordinary standard in 1955, it was an expensive house. Withholding $4,000 for work still to be done, the Robinsons wrote the necessary checks and took legal possession of their home at 103 Cascade Road.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Bottom of the Ninth

  1955–1957

  I could see the frustrations he had to endure, and the battle scars.

  —Don Drysdale (1990)

  THE BEAUTIFUL NEW HOUSE in Stamford, the challenge of this move to the white suburbs—these factors both elated Jack and weighed on his mind as he left for Florida near the end of February 1955. “I have been proud many times in my life,” he wrote Rachel from Vero Beach, “but never as much as when I noticed how happy you are about the house. It is going to be a big responsibility but I have no fear of the outcome.” She had been ambitious but could count on his support: “I just want you to know I am with you all the way in the house and am sure you will have as much fun living in it as you had in building it.” The children, too, seemed to love their new home, “and that’s all any man could ask for.” In another letter, about Rachel’s health, he made clear how much he depended on her. “I am sure you know why I am so concerned,” he wrote Rachel, “but I’ll tell you anyway. I depend on you more than the children, Rae.… Without you I am nothing.”