For Lifelong Fan, Jackie Robinson Was ‘a Cut Above’

They’ll pack Dodger Stadium on Saturday night for the tribute to Jackie Robinson, and no one will watch with more reflective pleasure than Ken Kvammen of Newport Beach. His days as an idolizer of Robinson, or “Jackie,” as he always refers to him, go back to the late ‘30s, when, as the son of a Norwegian immigrant, Kvammen came under Robinson’s spell.

Kvammen’s father was taking English lessons at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles and, as a byproduct, became interested in American football. That diversion got passed to his son, who started listening to games on the radio. Like many boys before and ever since, young Ken Kvammen picked out certain athletes whose exploits fascinated and moved him.

For Kvammen, it was Jackie Robinson, then a running back for UCLA.

“I just got enamored with Jackie,” Kvammen said this week. “For the famous 0-0 game with USC in 1939, I begged my mother to take me to that game. She didn’t know football from Page 1, but she took me, and we sat way up in the stands. If UCLA had won, they would have gone to the Rose Bowl. They had first down on the 1-yard line and had four tries and couldn’t make it. And they didn’t give the ball to Jackie once.”

For a 12-year-old boy, that kind of game becomes the stuff of legend and sticks with you for a lifetime.

“I really didn’t have that many sports heroes,” Kvammen said. “Pro baseball was all back East, and Jackie was my introduction as far as sports heroes go. He just seemed like he was a cut above everyone else. You know how a little kid hooks up with that. If you had been living back in those days, they made a big deal out of Jackie, I guess because he was black and they didn’t have that many black athletes in those days. That was one thing about UCLA, because they did have black athletes, and I was the son of an immigrant and lived in southwest L.A.”

Robinson graduated and disappeared for a time from Kvammen’s sports consciousness. But when Robinson began his baseball career after World War II, culminating with his historic call-up to Brooklyn for the 1947 season, Kvammen, by then a civil engineer for Los Angeles County, again began following his hero through the newspapers and, occasionally, on TV.

“I still remember I was over at Catalina [Island] surveying in the mid-’50s. We finished early so we could watch the World Series on TV. We went over to a little bar on the isthmus, and here was Jackie on third base, dancing around. He was getting older and it was the World Series, so I was sure he wouldn’t steal home. But he took off, and my heart stopped. What’s he doing? There was a cloud of dust at home plate, and I could see the umpire signal him safe. I thought, ‘Oh my God, he made it!’ ”

One day in the early ‘60s, with Robinson long retired from baseball, Kvammen’s boss told him he would be the design engineer for a park planned for the Sun Village neighborhood in Antelope Valley. It was an African American neighborhood, and Kvammen’s boss told him that a name already had been chosen: Jackie Robinson Park.

“I told him, ‘Boy, am I going to do a good job on this,’ ” Kvammen said, chuckling as he recalled the conversation. “So we started doing the design work, and it really was a labor of love.”

Kvammen “gold-plated” the project, putting special touches on it that went beyond what would have been perfectly acceptable. “It was just a really beautiful little park when we finished,” he said.

The day the park was dedicated, Kvammen remembers, was a bright, sunny day with public officials giving speeches, balloons abounding and a high school band playing. He recalls being somewhat bored until a county official came to him and told him that Robinson, who was there for the ribbon-cutting, had asked who did the real work.

Kvammen remembers a supervisor’s deputy saying: “That’s the engineer over there, Ken Kvammen.”

Thus was the circle completed that day for the once-awestruck young boy who was then in his mid-30s. He waited as Robinson approached. “I had heard he was gruff and didn’t take much to people who kissed his ass,” Kvammen said. But he told Robinson as honestly as he could about his lifelong admiration for him.

“Here I was, just a nobody up there, and he was so charming,” Kvammen said. “I thought he’d say, ‘Nice job,’ but he was just so charming. He said, ‘We ought to get our picture taken together.’ ”

One click of a camera. Among the treasures of Kvammen’s life is the photo from that day, shot with a yucca tree in the background and showing Kvammen beaming from ear to ear, standing shoulder to shoulder with Robinson.

Although he has a file of other Robinson memorabilia collected over the years, that photo is the most prized.

So I guess it was a dumb question when I asked Kvammen, who turns 70 this summer, if he was going to Saturday’s Dodger game for the 50th-anniversary tribute to Jackie breaking baseball’s color line.

“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “Are you kidding?”

I thanked him for his time, but he thanked me instead.

“It’s just wonderful, this memorial year,” he said. “It was 50 years ago, so it’s like 60 years when I was watching him as a little kid. It’s still so much fun to talk about it.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.