A Tribute to ... Captain Courageous

We were working on a film, Pee Wee Reese, his son Mark and myself, five years ago, and we were trying to get one memorable story right. The film was a one-hour documentary on the old Dodger captain and shortstop, which Mark had titled, “The Quiet Ambassador.”

The story we sought recounted a single brief, moving deed. But it had been told and retold and mistold so many times, we had a hard time reconstructing the scene. Was it Boston, that old abolitionist center, where the Red Sox practiced apartheid baseball until 1959? Was it St. Louis, the old major league city that was closest to the heart of the Confederacy?

In the end it turned out to be neither. The place was the river town, Cincinnati, and that made the story all the stronger.

Pee Wee Reese grew up in the Louisville area, when segregation reigned, and whenever the Dodgers traveled to play the Reds some of his old ball-playing friends from Kentucky made the easy drive up the Ohio River valley to watch Reese work his trade at Crosley Field. The year 1947 was different from what had gone before. The Dodgers were starting a black man at first base, the first to play in the major leagues since 1884. Now after 60 years, the Cotton Curtain was coming down. That was not to everyone’s satisfaction.

As the Dodgers moved into infield practice, taunts began. Fans started calling Jackie Robinson names: “Snowflake,” “Jungle Bunny,” and worse. Very much worse. Some Cincinnati players picked that up and began shouting obscenities at Robinson from their dugout. There Jackie stood, one solitary black man, trying to warm up and catching hell.

Reese raised a hand and stopped the practice. Then he walked from shortstop to first base and put an arm around Jackie Robinson’s shoulders. He stood there and looked into the dugout and into the stands, stared into the torrents of hate, a slim, white Southerner, who wore No. 1, and just happened to have an arm draped in friendship around a black man, who wore No. 42.

Reese did not say a word. The deed was beyond words.

“After Pee Wee came over like that,” Robinson said years afterward, “I never felt alone on a baseball field again.”

Reese detested bigotry, hatred against blacks or Jews or Latinos, whatever. I never knew anyone whose life was a more towering example of decency.

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. . . .” The words are Lincoln’s. The character that comes to mind is that of Harold Henry Reese, who died Saturday at 81. A funeral service was held for Reese on Wednesday in Louisville.

*

After starring in a Presbyterian church league, Reese turned professional in 1938, when he was 20. He had to quit his job as a line splicer for the telephone company and the foreman said sternly that the phone company would always be there, that by leaving it, Pee Wee was making a terrible mistake.

“I’m young, sir,” Reese said. “I can afford to take a chance.”

Recounting this, he gave me a gentle smile before he added, “Where that foreman might be today I do not know.”

He joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1940, when Larry MacPhail was restoring a ballclub that had been more famous for gag lines than base hits. The Dodgers had not won a pennant since 1920 and John Lardner wrote of one star slugger: “Floyd Caves Herman, known as Babe, did not always catch fly balls on the top of his head, but he could do it in a pinch.”

Another Dodger outfielder, Frenchy Bordagaray, came home standing up one afternoon and was tagged out.

“Why the hell didn’t you slide?” asked the manager, Casey Stengel.

“I was gonna, Case,” Bordagaray said, “but I was afraid I’d crush my cigars.”

Reese was droll and often very funny, but after he moved in as Dodger shortstop in 1940, comedy came only after winning. The Dodgers beat a fine Cardinal team for the pennant in 1941 and, after World War II, Branch Rickey picked up from MacPhail and assembled the team I called “The Boys of Summer.” Reese was a very fine shortstop, a great baserunner, and a superb clutch hitter. He played every inning of every game in seven Dodger World Series. He was a captain who led by civility, however difficult the circumstances.

Panama City, Fla., 1947. Spring training was winding down and Rickey was about to promote Robinson from the triple-A Montreal Royals. Some veteran Dodgers--Hugh Casey, Dixie Walker--prepared a petition that said, in effect, “If you promote the black man, trade us. We won’t play.”

Walker brought the document to Reese confident that, Southerner to Southerner, Pee Wee would sign. Reese refused. Five or six older players pressed him. Was he gonna let Rickey make him play with one of them?

“I’m not signing,” Reese said, and the petition died.

As it happened, I rooted for the Dodgers and Pee Wee Reese when I attended a Brooklyn prep school, and kept rooting from secondary school and college, and even when the New York Herald Tribune hired me to write sports, which meant that I was professionally neutral. I was neutral all right. Neutral for Brooklyn. When I was 23, the Tribune assigned me to cover the Dodgers and I walked into the clubhouse, trying to choke back awe, and introduced myself to Reese.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, “but you don’t want to hang around me.”

“Why not, Mr. Reese”

“I’m not good copy.”

We became closer than the journalism textbooks say is right. One night in Brooklyn, the late Joan Kahn, my first wife, was sitting in a photographer’s booth when a foul ball bounced out of the upper deck onto a metal support that held up the big lenses on the old-fashioned cameras and the ball spun backward, hitting her and breaking her nose.

As she was being cared for in the first-aid room, Walter O’Malley sent me a message in the press box: “Don’t bother to sue. Courts have held we don’t have to protect that location. If you sue me, you will lose.”

Pee Wee’s comment in the clubhouse was different: “How’s your wife getting home?”

“I’ll drive her,” I said, “but I have to write my story first.”

“Take your time with the story,” Reese said. “I’ll drive Joan home.”

When I finally arrived, he was applying soothing talk and an ice pack to a patient who was in pain, but delighted with the company.

The next spring at Vero Beach Reese said, “You’ve played a little ball. Why don’t you go out to left and shag a few?”

When I got to left field, Gil Hodges stood in the cage. He slashed a nasty line drive over Reese’s head and the baseball came bouncing toward me, looking curiously like a hand grenade. Who else was on the field? Reese, of course, Robinson, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo.

“If there is a God,” I thought, “please don’t let this one go through the wickets.” I moved up slowly, dropped down to one knee and the ball plunked into my glove. Whew! Then the shortstop called my name.

“Yes, captain?”

“You’re supposed to pick up the ball before it stops.”

Reese could say things few others dared.

A dour, white-haired old Scot, Roscoe McGowen, covered the Dodgers for the New York Times. He loved to play cards and seldom won. After a night game in Philadelphia, Reese and I stood on a platform waiting for a midnight train to Penn Station. McGowen said he’d had a bad run of cards for three days, for the three days before that and longer.

“Damnable run of cards for the longest time,” he said.

“Roscoe,” Pee Wee said, with a soft voice and a warm smile, “did it ever occur to you that you might be a horse . . . poker player?”

Once, Robinson was raging against the steady run of knockdown pitches he had to endure.

Jackie was, in fact, a fierce competitor and a withering, sometimes unpleasant needler, hardly the bland saint baseball celebrates today.

“Jack,” Pee Wee said, “some guys are throwing at you because you’re black and that’s a terrible thing. But there are other guys, Jack, throwing at you because they plain don’t like you.”

Robinson blinked. No one but Reese could talk to him that way. Then Robinson nodded and said, “You’ve got a point.”

Reese had some rules. After he’d caught a pop fly, he never held up, say, two fingers signaling two outs.

“This is the major leagues,” he said. “You’re supposed to be able to keep track of the outs by yourself. Besides, they’re on the scoreboard.”

Once, the Dodgers’ backup catcher, Rube Walker, won a game at Ebbets Field with a home run and in the clubhouse a photographer took one picture after another. Finally Walker snapped, “That’s it. I got a bridge date with my wife.”

Reese bounded up from the captain’s chair beside his locker.

“Rube, you had a job to do on the field and you did it,” he said. “This man has a job to do here. You’ll stay in the clubhouse until he has all the pictures he needs.”

At length the New York baseball writers voted Reese their “Good Guy” award. He told me on the phone from Louisville that he was nervous about making a speech at the Waldorf Astoria and maybe I could meet him there and look over and edit the text.

“I’m getting some help here,” he said, “from a friend that knows the classics.”

Here is the speech that Reese presented to me--and delivered to an audience of 2,000. I didn’t change a word:

“Gentlemen, if I possessed the oratorical fire of Demosthenes, or the linguistic elasticity of Branch Rickey, I would wow you with superlatives. But frankly, fellers, I ain’t got it. Thank you very much.”

He was playing shortstop at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 4, 1955, when the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series. Fittingly the final out was Elston Howard’s ground ball to short, and some said Reese choked and threw the baseball in the dirt and only Gil Hodges’ great pickup saved him and all of Brooklyn. Nonsense. The throw was shin high, an easy catch for a big league first baseman.

Somehow Reese and I ended up late that night, toasting the universe on West 57th Street. Pee Wee’s face was shining, a child’s face on Christmas morning.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Sure.”

“Two out in the ninth. You’ve played on five [up until then] losing Series team. You’re one out from winning a Series. Howard’s up. What are you thinking.”

“I’m thinking,” said the bravest shortstop I’ve ever known, “I hope he doesn’t hit the ball to me.”

*

Reese probably didn’t want to manage the Dodgers. He was semi-offered the job in 1954.

He told me: “They said, ‘You don’t want to manage the team, do you, Pee Wee?’ Probably not and certainly not when they made the offer the way they did.”

He became a broadcast partner to Dizzy Dean and then an executive at Hillerich and Bradsby, the company that manufactures Louisville Sluggers, and gloves and hockey sticks. He invested sensibly. He never earned more than $35,000 playing shortstop, but he became comfortable.

We stayed close and on a terrible night in the summer of 1987, he rallied to my side. That July, I lost a child to heroin. He was 22. When I buried my boy and came home, I knew deep crevices of despair. Toward midnight the phone rang.

“Do you remember,” Pee Wee said, “that I was the captain of the team?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I just want to say for all the fellers, we are very, very sorry.”

Now, as Mark Reese was creating his documentary, “The Quiet Ambassador,” he brought Reese, Bobby Thomson and myself together on Bedford Avenue, the street that runs behind the late but well-remembered right-field wall at Ebbets Field. After some baseball talk, Mark said, “I’d like you to talk about your late son and Pee Wee’s phone call.”

“I’d rather not,” I said. “It’s very emotional. I don’t want to go misty in front of your camera.”

“You ought to get over that,” Mark said. “It’s not the way it used to be, the macho nonsense. Guys are allowed to cry.”

I looked at Pee Wee. The captain’s expressive face said--again no words--it’s your call.

The camera rolled and I told the story and there was Pee Wee right in front of me and I said, “So, I will be very, very grateful to you for all the rest of my days.”

I blinked away a little mist, and kept control, but there on Bedford Avenue, Pee Wee Reese burst into tears.

They were for my dead son, Roger Laurence Kahn, and they were for my grief but they were for more than that. They were for all the bereaved, the stricken, the bereft, all mankind. As I compose these lines, Pee Wee Reese, the immortal shortstop, has moved past tears.

One dreams of heaven, and, of course, no one is sure. But I know this: Pee Wee Reese is alive in the minds and hearts of everyone who knew him. And I also know that the atoms that were the man remain. Now we shall hear him in the thunder and see him in the lightning and feel him in the rain.

Facing the fatal hemlock, Socrates said, “To a good man, no evil can come, either in life or after death.”

Pee Wee is safe.