Jackie Robinson: My Journey of Appreciation

Abstract

Approximately 120 years after the great Franz Schubert, composer of the imperishable "Unfinished" symphony, was born on a January 31st, Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn's immortal number 42, was born in 1919 in Cairo, Georgia. Quite a combo, or quinella—as they say. I was born just about 20 years after Robinson, in the Brooklyn to which he was to come, and galvanize, only a handful of years after that. Thus the recurring dream, its salient points teased from the jumbled reality that did happen. Would Freud have called this iterated nocturnal experience wish fulfillment? No matter, the dream persists; its facts did transpire. I'm a small boy, just about seven and a half. I'm holding the hand of, or rather my hand is being held by, Uncle Sol, my favorite uncle, my mother's youngest brother. He's in his early thirties and brimming with vigor, keen interest in a variety of things, and all sorts of vitality. He himself has no children yet, but he is holding my hand ever so gently. We are walking toward Ebbets Field, already in April1947 the hallowed grounds, the much-heralded home, of the Brooklyn Dodgers. It's a cellophane-crackling, fiercely bright, you're-glad-to-be-alive, early spring day. We climb the steep ramps that lead to the seats. Suddenly, through the large apertures visible from these ramps, through the stadium's steel girders, through its thrusts and struts and supports, there appears the green grass and brown base paths. It is the greenest, most vivid green I have ever seen, and the brown of the base paths is an enticing, mellow, rich chocolate, which seems soothingly inviting. The glaring white of the foul lines and of some of the uniforms in pregame batting practice (my uncle has to tell me why hitting, throwing, and running is already going on) adds to the brilliantly colored panorama. I, of course, could not have formed the phrase then, but—in the dream, as it was in reality—it is heart-stoppingly thrilling and extremely beautiful. Yes, now, but not then, almost in the way that an angelic-faced, surpassingly attractive woman is. [End Page 28] My uncle continues to hold my hand all the way to our seats. We are guided there by a spiffily uniformed usher to whom my uncle handed our tickets once we'd gotten off the ramps and emerged into the appropriate section of the seats running along the first base foul line. On the way to the ballpark, a short walk from the building in which my mom, dad, and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment, Sol had told me that the Dodgers, with whom I was soon to fall in love had a new player this season. (I had started getting a little interested in baseball at the tail end of the preceding, '46 season, when I began hearing about Pete Reiser, the great Dodger center fielder, crashing into walls and when my folks, who weren't normally intense about, or even much interested in, baseball would talk about the Dodgers race with the St. Louis Cardinals, in which the Cards ultimately, bested "our" Brooks, in a postseason playoff.) This rookie, as Sol referred to him (who, in fact, went on to win the first ever Rookie of the Year Award, of The Sporting News, at the conclusion of the '47 season, in which he would lead the Dodgers to the National League pennant in another very close fight with the Redbirds) was, as he was then called, the Negro, Jackie Robinson—or, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, as his mom, who soon became a single mother, had named him in honor of TR, Theodore Roosevelt, the early-twentieth-century president and standard bearer of that Republican Party which had, not much more than fifty years prior to Robinson's birth, been led by the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln...