Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Gradually, Edelman’s role expanded within Jack’s business affairs; the vetting of proposals once reserved for Martin Stone now passed to him. “It’s very convenient for people to say that Jack was naive and that he wasn’t that smart,” Edelman said. “Jack was plenty smart; there can be no issue here. You could explain something to Jack and he remembered it, and it became a part of his analytical framework. He was not one to command the absolute small details, but he mastered the implications, he had an understanding of the financial impact, and he moved on.” If Jack was prone to any mistake, Edelman ventured, “it was in trusting people he happened to like.…”

  AS THE JACKIE ROBINSON Construction Corporation slowly established itself in the spring of 1970, Jack and Rachel were conscious of a mending in their lives, at least in some respects, after the horrors of 1968 in particular.

  At Mount Hermon, David was doing very well; a recruiter from Stanford University had given him a top rating as a prospect, and he was admitted there for the fall. Sharon was happy again. On Christmas Eve, she had remarried; Jack liked and respected her new husband, Joe Mitchell, a former SNCC member who was eleven years older than Sharon. They had met at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she was now studying to become a nurse and he was studying to become a doctor.

  At Christmas, too, Jackie had come home from Daytop, where his record had been inconsistent at best. Back in his old environment in Stamford he quickly backslid, according to his own reckoning. But after a while he headed back voluntarily to the discipline of Daytop. “It makes us happy,” Jack wrote his friends the Wallersteins, “for it indicates he really understands his problem.”

  Certainly Jack himself had come a long way toward understanding Jackie’s problems, and the menace of drug addiction in general. Earlier in the year, Robinson had spoken publicly about his experience as the father of an addict to a meeting called by the group Ministers Against Narcotics at the Holiday Inn at La Guardia Airport, attended by Governor Rockefeller and other high-ranking officials. He said that his decision to “stick by my son” had been “tremendously rewarding.” That month, on a Harlem street corner, he also addressed some two hundred people at an antidrug block party on the subject of the epidemic sweeping the city. “I’m here because I’m concerned about it,” he said. “I hope most of you will be concerned enough to go home and do something about the evil effects of this problem.”

  And in a letter to Jackie, he had expressed both his love and his determination to balance love with sternness and vigilance. “I know how difficult it is for you and realize as best I can what you are going through,” Jack wrote his son.

  I hope also you realize what we are going through. We have been so proud of what appeared great progress and you must know the disappointment we felt when you didn’t have the strength to resist the damaging urge you felt. I am happy you went back when you did for we didn’t know what to do but felt you would not be helping your future by staying away. Daytop seems to be your answer and if you have any chance for a decent future it will happen only if you understand yourself and become determined to succeed. Mother, Sharon, David, Grandmother and I are with you. We know how it is but pray you have learned your lesson.… We feel you will make it and we’ll be a family again. It seems much depends on you. We’re with you and while we are not completely satisfied we are confident.

  The turning point, in many respects, came in May of that year, 1970, after Jack and Rachel decided to host a picnic on the grounds of their home for about fifty members of Daytop as a way of thanking them for what they were doing for Jackie. The event, meticulously planned by the Daytop members themselves, led enthusiastically by Jackie, was a great success. In beautiful, warm spring weather, Jackie’s friends enjoyed an afternoon of fun and food. When it was time to leave on their bus, they lined up to thank Jack and Rachel for having them. At the end of the line, proud and happy, was Jackie himself. In 1964, when his parents had seen him off at the train station as he left for the Army, Jackie had embraced Rachel emotionally but had stopped his father when Jack tried to hug him. Now, at the end of the picnic for his Daytop friends, he embraced Rachel again but this time included his father. “I stuck out my hand to shake his hand,” Jack wrote, “remembering the day of his departure for the service. He brushed my hand aside, pulled me to him, and embraced me in a tight hug. That single moment paid for every bit of sacrifice, every bit of anguish, I had ever undergone. I had my son back.”

  Increasingly Jackie became attentive not only to his family on Cascade Road but also to his young daughter, Sonya Pankey, for whom he had developed a strong affection. Jack himself could see the difference. Jackie, he told the Wallersteins that summer, seemed finally to be “on the right track. He understands and communicates a great deal more but the most important thing is his concern for others. I think he has learned a valuable lesson and we now await his leaving Daytop to see what happens once he drops his crutch. While we are not positive we are confident.”

  Early in June came one of the most satisfying moments of Robinson’s life, when he delivered the commencement address at Mount Hermon before David’s graduating class. After a brief stay at home, and before leaving for Stanford in the fall, David was off to Springfield, Massachusetts, for a summer of social work. There, as his father wrote proudly, he was living frugally with a Puerto Rican family who spoke little English, and “eating rice and beans for every meal.”

  IN HARLEM THAT SUMMER, the old order changed. On June 23, 1970, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was defeated in the Democratic Party primary by Charles Rangel, who would go on to win Powell’s seat in Congress. Robinson had joined a broad group of black and white leaders backing Rangel, but his role was not small. Percy Sutton, then Manhattan borough president and young Rangel’s main champion, later praised Robinson both for himself and as a conduit to Rockefeller. “When you see Charlie Rangel today as a congressman,” he said, “you have to appreciate that Rockefeller, a Republican, gave me the first money to put behind Rangel. And it was Jackie who made that possible; it was through him we were able to get Connecticut people with money to support us, and a lot of them were Republican. Jackie also got the Republican Party to endorse Rangel. And there were other things Jackie did for us over the years, right to the end of his life.”

  But all the news was not good that summer. In July, the ax fell at Sea Host. Jack was at a Holiday Inn hotel in Coral Gables, Miami, when he received a letter dated July 17, air mail and special delivery, from the acting president of Sea Host, Samuel N. Rubin. Because of serious problems in cash flow, marketing, and general operations, Sea Host was now on an emergency footing. As of that day, July 17, Robinson was fired. The letter, almost certainly the same as sent to virtually all the employees, offered vaguely to help with finding another job but made no mention of compensation. Later that year, on November 19, Sea Host filed for bankruptcy in federal court in New York.

  Jack now had no regular source of income other than a small salary from his construction company. But even with his worsening illness, he and Rachel had no overriding sense of financial danger. Rachel and Jack had been careful in their planning. For many years, at the insistence of an accountant, Jack’s life had been heavily insured, as was the mortgage on the house in Stamford. In Manhattan, they owned two apartments that would yield a very nice profit when sold. But Jack also had high hopes for his construction company. “We are still struggling with business,” he wrote the Wallersteins, “but like the civil rights struggle are seeing the light at the tunnel’s end. We have a chance to develop something good but we have seen other chances fade so we will continue to do our job wherever we are and grab the opportunity to make it good if the chances come.”

  Still, with Jack’s failing health, Rachel could see the dark closing in. In the fall of 1969, she had resigned her position with the mental health program in New Haven and taken a one-year, unpaid leave of absence from Yale. “I told everyone that the idea was for me to study,” she said, “to read the mountai
n of books I had wanted to read but could never find time for. I really did spend a fair amount of time in the library. But I was also more available for Jack and Jackie.” Happy to see Jackie and Sharon turn around their misfortunes and David stay on course, she was nevertheless in growing pain herself because of Jack’s physical deterioration. By this point, she understood that he was dying. Examining Jack’s body, Arthur Logan could not discover a pulse in his legs. In two or three years, he told Rachel, Jack would be dead. “I was very angry at Arthur,” she recalled. “I did not want to hear such news. Jack definitely did not want to hear such news. He would not talk about death. Denial was his greatest prop, and he denied that he was dying. But after a while I knew I had to do something, so I went into therapy in order to learn how to cope with this terrible fact.”

  As her sabbatical year drew to a close in the summer of 1970, she seemed to Jack “like a caged lion with too much spare time.”

  In August, Jack felt well enough to join Jesse Jackson, the national director of Operation Breadbasket, and Fannie Lou Hamer, vice-chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Party, in helping to judge a Miss Black America beauty pageant at Madison Square Garden. He and three other members of Jackie Robinson Associates also met with Rockefeller family aides to seek a loan of $150,000 toward the purchase of a black-owned office building in Washington, D.C. But a few days later Robinson was back in the hospital. Chronically tired, with his feet aching and pain throbbing through his legs, he had visited his doctor. Tests revealed Jack’s diabetes in a new, frightening stage; his weight had dropped notably, but his blood pressure and blood sugar were high. He had also suffered a mild stroke. In fact, that month he suffered two mild strokes, the first on his right side, the second on his left. Deceptive in that their effects were hard to see, the strokes left Robinson’s physical strength and his speech virtually unaffected but caused an unnerving loss of balance as well as a substantial loss of sensation on his left side. Most distressingly, they also ruptured blood vessels in his eyes, with episodes of hemorrhaging that seriously damaged the retina and diminished his sight. Jack seemed on his way to blindness.

  In September, on what she called one of the most harrowing days of her life, Rachel and Jack watched as their last child, David, left home. Behind the steering wheel of a little yellow English sports car, a 1969 MG Midget, David headed down the driveway, turned left on Cascade Road, and set out alone for Palo Alto, California, to begin his freshman year at Stanford. Now, after fifteen years, the big house on Cascade Road was a lonesome place. “It was so traumatic for me, to see David go,” Rachel recalled, “that I took off for Cape Cod and spent three days looking out at the water as I tried to come to terms with what was happening in our lives.”

  She returned in time to join Jack on September 14, when he received an honorary doctorate of civil law from Pace University at the dedication of its Civic Center Campus in lower Manhattan, and Terence Cardinal Cooke, the Roman Catholic prelate, was also honored. A week or so later, Governor Rockefeller announced that Robinson would be a deputy manager in his campaign for reelection that fall, when his main opponent was Arthur Goldberg, a former United States Supreme Court justice and ambassador to the United Nations. But Jack’s thoughts were mainly about his failing health. In October, after a persistent wheezing and coughing at night and an oppressive shortness of breath, he went to Minneapolis for a consultation at the celebrated Mayo Clinic. There, mysteriously, despite evidence of severe hypertension and congestive heart failure, with a blood pressure reading of 185 over 115, he was told, apparently, that nothing was wrong with him. Back home, his nighttime coughing and wheezing became worse, as did shortness of breath and an increasingly painful pressure in the middle of his chest. Twice his shortness of breath had become almost unendurable. In these moments of stress, as he told his doctor, his main relief was to lean forward, or to kneel down by his bed and rest his arms helplessly on the side of the bed.

  Still, an ailing Jackie Robinson had more energy than most other people. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in October, he and Rachel welcomed about three hundred guests to the grounds of their home for a cocktail party in support of Rockefeller in his bid for reelection. With Rachel striking in a tiger-striped gown matched by a flowing cape of the same material, lately purchased at an African boutique in Harlem, Jack made a bright speech to his guests and urged them to build a better, more purposeful Republican Party.

  Above all, he took comfort in his children’s growing sense of fulfillment. Earlier in the fall, Jack and Rachel had visited David in California. The antiwar mood of student life across the nation had reached Stanford, where David greeted his parents dressed in a preppy blue blazer, white shirt, and white cotton trousers—but with the American flag sewn across his bottom. In Washington, D.C., Sharon was happy with her husband, Joe Mitchell, and her studies at Howard. Most profoundly gratifying of all, on November 4, in an informal but unforgettable ceremony in Seymour, Connecticut, attended by the entire family, Jackie graduated from Daytop. In the eyes of even the hardboiled former addicts who ran the facility, he was now clean. Indeed, he showed promise of becoming an outstanding leader within the organization. Earlier that year, he had testified frankly and in detail about his drug experience before Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut’s Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the United States.

  To Jack, as he faced the growing ravages of his heart and lung disease and the specter of his increasing blindness, this was a source of sublime comfort as he looked ahead to the few years left to him.

  CHAPTER 17

  Heading Home

  1971–1972

  I always thought I’d be the first to go.

  —Jackie Robinson (1972)

  FEBRUARY 10, 1971, was a special day for the Robinsons, their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Jack surprised Rachel, who loved fine cars, with something special. She had given her 1969 MG Midget to David to drive to Palo Alto. Now Jack gave her, in its place, a sporty convertible two-seater Mercedes Benz 280SL. It was only a token of the gratitude he felt for her love and support of him over the years.

  A few days later, he was a patient in the French Hospital again. Feeling poorly, he had gone on February 12 to the New York offices of Dr. Eric Cassell, whose mentor before and after medical school had been Jack’s physician of many years, Dr. Cyril Solomon. Examining Robinson, Dr. Cassell found him in alarming condition and ordered him into the hospital for a series of tests. On February 17, also at Cassell’s insistence, Jack underwent a cardiac catheterization at St. Vincent’s Hospital. A catheter was passed through the groin up into the heart; dye was then pumped into the heart to measure its performance. Dr. Cassell found clear evidence of advanced heart disease caused both by hypertension and by severe blocking of the arteries; he also diagnosed chronic, obstructive lung disease. Cassell put Robinson on strong medication for his heart and his lung troubles and increased his daily dosage of insulin. Jack was also given diuretics that dropped his weight by several pounds.

  Once, working for Dr. Solomon, Cassell had gone to the New Yorker Hotel to draw blood from Babe Ruth, who was living there. Although Ruth’s body was wasted, as he slowly succumbed to lung cancer, he had seemed immense to Cassell. Robinson was like Ruth in that way. “Meeting Robinson,” Cassell recalled, “I thought, ‘This is a big man.’ My response had nothing to do with how much he weighed; it was that he and Babe Ruth were men who inhabited their own authority, who inhabited themselves to the fullest. They knew who they were and what they were about.” Nevertheless, Robinson was also “modest. He was relaxed, he didn’t make a big fuss about things. He certainly did not advertise his celebrity. He was who he was.” He would remain Cassell’s patient for the rest of his life.

  After six days at the French Hospital, Jack was discharged. Sending him off, Dr. Cassell pressed on him the need to stick to his medications, to watch his diet, and to walk at least a half-mile every day, to try to force blood into his deteriorating legs. Back home, Robinson tried to keep u
p his exercising but found the going tough. Physical discomfort was one reason; another reason was psychological. “Every time I go to do what you want me to do,” he told Dr. Cassell, “all I’m aware of is what I cannot do.” Walking was now painful. Then Jack tried riding a stationary bicycle and found that he liked it better. The circulation in his legs seemed to improve. Over the coming year, his blood pressure would drop from 180 over 110 to 125 over 80, or normal.

  Jack’s hospitalization early in 1971 and his growing weakness did not stop him altogether. In January, he had gone to Chicago to speak on behalf of a young political leader in whom he was becoming more and more confident, as he looked for bold, far-sighted new black leaders. His man in Chicago was the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a former disciple of Dr. King in SCLC and now with a firm political base in Chicago through his grass-roots organization Operation Breadbasket, on which Jack had been serving as a board member for some time. Out of this venture, following Jackson’s resignation from SCLC (when he could no longer work amicably with Dr. King’s successor at SCLC, Ralph Abernathy), would come, in December 1971, Jackson’s PUSH—People United to Save Humanity—which he would announce with Jack standing beside him in New York City. “I have hopes for Jesse Jackson,” Robinson would write. “I think he offers the most viable leadership for blacks and oppressed minorities in America and also for the salvation of our national decency. I think Jesse’s leadership is potentially one of majestic proportions. He is totally dedicated and if we are to arise out of this deepening pit between us as a people, it will be by supporting the kind of leadership Jesse Jackson offers.”