40 : APRIL 15, 1947 -- APRIL 15, 1987 : A Day of Little Challenges That Changed Face of a Sport

It was the morning of the day her husband would integrate baseball, 40 years ago today, but as she stood on a street corner in mid-town Manhattan, Rachel Robinson’s more immediate concern was integrating a taxicab.

She was holding her 5-month-old son, Jackie Jr. He was dressed in his California baby clothes and she was trying to keep him warm against the chilly New York morning. Rachel carried a bag filled with the standard baby gear, diapers and bottles. She tried to hail a cab.

Several stopped, but quickly sped away when Mrs. Robinson told them she had to go to Ebbets Field, across the river. Rachel was new to New York and wasn’t sure whether it was her skin color or the inconvenient destination the cabbies objected to.

She finally got a cab and arrived at the ballpark on time, but there were other little concerns. Where does a young mother warm a bottle of formula at Ebbets Field? Answer: At the hot dog stand, of course.

“Looking back, I think our worrying about the little problems--where to eat, how to get around--was our way of defending against being overwhelmed by the larger anxieties,” Rachel Robinson says.

The little things. For Jackie, things like what to wear. What is the proper go-to-work attire for the young man on his first day of integrating the national pastime? Robinson owned one suit, navy blue, but this was no time to overdress, to call attention to himself. It was just another ballgame. He was just another rookie. He wore sports clothes.

Little things, like how to act around teammates, some of whom a month earlier had circulated a petition denouncing team owner Branch Rickey’s plan to let a black man play on their team.

Little concerns, like what if Jackie is on base when Dixie Walker, or one of the other Southern-born Dodgers, hits a home run? Should Robinson stop at home plate, wait for his teammate and shake his hand, as dictated by baseball tradition and etiquette? Many of the Dodgers had never shaken a black hand, and to force them to do so in public might cause them acute humiliation.

Jackie and Rachel had plenty of little things to occupy their minds that opening day.

Only five days earlier, Jackie had learned that he would be playing in Brooklyn, not with the Dodgers’ minor league club in Montreal. The Robinsons, reunited after spring training, had no friends or relatives in New York, and not much money.

They took a small room at the McAlpin Hotel on 34th St., just off Broadway. It was cozy. Just Jackie, Rachel, Jackie Jr. and dozens of newspaper writers who streamed in and out of the room in those first few days to interview the man who would change baseball.

In the months and years to come, greater New York City would bow at the Robinsons’ feet. They would be respected and admired. Eventually they would live in style and comfort, and at the finest restaurants they would be whisked past long lines and given the best tables. But now they took turns eating in a cafeteria downstairs, and their tiny bathroom was a jungle of hanging diapers.

Fortunately, they were not unsuited to challenges. In fact, had Branch Rickey conducted a nation-wide search for a young couple to withstand hardship and to present a favorable image, regardless of race, it’s doubtful he could have done better than the Robinsons.

They were college educated, bright and articulate, not to mention attractive. Jackie was a handsome, powerfully built man who carried himself proudly, was religious, and didn’t drink or smoke. In a time when blacks customarily wore dark clothing so as not to accentuate their skin color, Jackie, who was very dark-skinned, always wore white shirts.

“He was very unambivalent about his racial identification,” Rachel Robinson says. “He was proud to be black, he had no feelings of inferiority.”

Rachel was simply a knockout, a pretty and poised young woman. In terms of pride, confidence and inner strength, she was easily her husband’s match.

Jackie and Rachel were very much a team. Their honeymoon had been an expenses-paid trip to sunny Florida for 1946 minor league spring training. En route, they were bumped off two airline flights for unspecified reasons, and when they finally boarded a bus in Florida, the driver ordered them to the rear.

Through many such indignities, they quietly endured together. Jackie would play 10 seasons for the Dodgers and Rachel would never miss a home game.

Opening Day, 1947, was marked by an absence of fanfare for Robinson’s historic debut. A less-than-capacity crowd of 25,623 turned out at Ebbets Field, although it is significant that at least half the fans were black.

Rickey took great pains that Robinson not become an instant one-man social crusade. The Dodger owner feared a white backlash against Robinson. A couple of months earlier Rickey had addressed a group of black community leaders in Brooklyn, urging them not to use Robinson as a symbol, not to wave him like a racial banner.

“The biggest threat to his success is the Negro people themselves,” Rickey told the audience.

Also threatening his success were the Dodger players themselves. In spring training, before Jackie’s Montreal club opened a seven-game exhibition series with the Dodgers, Rickey told Robinson, “I want you to be a whirling demon.”

Rickey wanted Robinson to make such an impression on the Dodgers that the players would demand his promotion to the big leagues. It didn’t work out that way, although Robinson hit .625 in that series.

In one game, he beat out a bunt to second baseman Eddie Stanky. Stanky called time out and, in frustration and anger, hurled the ball over the grandstand.

No Dodger demanded Robinson’s promotion, but Rickey made the move anyway, as quietly as he could, and Jackie was the Dodgers’ starting first baseman 40 years ago today.

Robinson wasn’t sure that day what level of acceptance he might receive from his new teammates, but he wasn’t expecting much. He knew he would live apart from the others, at home and on the road, and that there would be no immediate camaraderie.

It was enough that he was getting a chance to play. He hadn’t always had that. As an officer in the Army during World War II, he had gone to the baseball field and asked to try out for the camp team. The officer in charge told Robinson, “You have to play with the colored team.” That was the officer’s little joke. There was no colored team.

But now Jackie was getting his shot. He didn’t want to blow it. Opportunities didn’t exactly abound. His older brother Mack, a college graduate and an Olympic track hero, was working as a janitor.

Robinson had to make a big impact, but he had to do it quietly. Rickey not only made Robinson vow to refrain from any physical or verbal retaliation for three seasons, but also insisted that Robinson do no radio interviews that first season, sign no endorsement contracts and write no magazine articles. Rickey even counseled Robinson to avoid playing cards with teammates on train rides, fearing touchy situations.

Many doubted that Robinson would be able to control his temper, which was legendary. He was not a man to suffer racial insults quietly. Now he would have to.

“We can’t fight our way through this,” Rickey had told Robinson. “We’ve got no army.”

Those were the kinds of little things on Jackie’s mind on opening day, besides the usual rookie anxiety and the challenge of playing a position he had never played until that spring.

The Dodgers were facing the Boston Braves, who had Johnny Sain on the mound. Robinson batted second in the order, behind Stanky. In the bottom of the first inning, Robinson grounded out to third.

He flied to left his next time at bat, then bounced sharply into a double play. He came to bat in the bottom of the seventh, the Dodgers trailing, 3-2.

The fans wanted action. Soon they would come to know Jackie as the most arrogant, exciting and intimidating baserunner in the game. Reading eyewitness accounts of his exploits, you picture Robinson dancing off third base, breathing fire.

For years to come, the most popular playground game in Brooklyn would be “pickle,” simple rundowns with the kid in the middle always playing the part of Jackie Robinson.

But for now, all the fans knew were rumors of greatness. With a runner on first, Robinson pushed a bunt toward first baseman Earl Torgeson. Torgeson knew of Robinson’s speed and his hurried throw to first hit Jackie on the shoulder blade. The ball caromed into right field and the Dodgers had runners on second and third.

Pete Reiser followed with a double, Robinson scored the go-ahead run and the Dodgers won, 5-3.

“The debut of Jackie Robinson was quite uneventful,” wrote Arthur Daley in the next day’s New York Times. “The muscular Negro minds his own business and shrewdly makes no effort to push himself. He speaks quietly and intelligently when spoken to, and already has made a strong impression.”

In the Los Angeles Times, the game rated two paragraphs and a box score. Robinson wasn’t mentioned until the second paragraph of the news-service story:

“Although he did not get a hit in three official times at bat, Jackie Robinson, first Negro to play in modern big league ball, signalized his official debut as a Dodger by sprinting home with the deciding run on Reiser’s smash and playing perfect ball at first base.”

It was a relatively uneventful day, considering what would unfold the rest of that season, and the nine to follow. The vicious racial taunts from opposing dugouts, the threatened player boycotts, would not start for another week or so. The regular death, rape and kidnap threats against the Robinson family hadn’t yet begun.

The Dodgers would win the pennant that season, and Robinson would be named rookie of the year. He would eventually be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

But that was all in the future. So was much of the battle to integrate the sport. Jackie Robinson didn’t exactly open the floodgates. By the end of the 1953 season, only 6 of the 16 major league teams had a black player.

Still, the first step had been taken. That would seem to have called for a celebration in the Robinson household. But to celebrate would have been to admit the enormousness of what Jackie and Rachel had done and of what was ahead. It served them better to worry about the small things.