Rickey and Robinson (5 page)

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 himself 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.”

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 getting 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.