Branch Rickey (15 page)

Joseph P. Kennedy was on the porch of his house in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, with three of his sons, Jack and Robert and Edward, all of whom thought it would be a smart campaign move to fly the 250 students here from Kenya. Jack Kennedy asked his father if they could pay the airfare out of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation.

“When will they be at the airport in Kenya?” the father asked.

On a glorious day in the summer of 1960, Tom Mboya stood on a lawn with the Kennedys, and the Cape Cod water glistened alongside the family homes, as they spoke of a beautiful future for young blacks from Kenya's raw poverty. The airlift brought 250 young Africans to America. Rickey's team lost the election.

 

One afternoon, Bob Prince, the announcer for the Pittsburgh Pirates, visited Rickey at Fox Chapel. Rickey was showing him styles of bird hunting. He had his grandson, Branch III, bring out his favorite shotgun plus one for Prince. They went behind the house and young Branch scaled clay pigeons for Prince. Rickey instructed him and Prince fired.

Prince knew nothing about guns, which he revealed by blasting the air for twenty straight misses. “Let me show you,” Rickey said. The grandson handed his grandfather his favorite shotgun, but in handing it over, the gun went off. It was barrel down, so only blew up the earth between Rickey's feet. The boy remembers that his grandfather never mentioned the incident. “He wouldn't let me feel guilty about anything,” the grandson said.

 

The record of his last days shows that there were few invitations that he turned down.

An old program from a dinner at the Daniel Boone Hotel in Columbia, Missouri, on November 13, 1965, lists Branch Rickey as speaker.

He gets there after attending the seventh game of the World Series, in Minneapolis, in which Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers threw a two-hit shutout. Nobody could see his pitches. It was a mixed thrill for Rickey. Koufax came out of an Ice Cream League on Flatbush Avenue, blocks from Ebbets Field, but Rickey wasn't in Brooklyn to sign him.

When he got to St. Louis, Rickey was stricken with a high fever and the hospital couldn't figure out its source. Rickey demanded his release. He had in his pocket an invitation to his induction into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame at the Daniel Boone Hotel. Nobody wanted him to go, but he did. They arrived to sit in the wind and cold at the Missouri-Oklahoma football game. He sat in distress under a blanket. Missouri won. Back in his hotel, Rickey slept. Then he got up and went to speak at the dinner. He was sure he couldn't speak two minutes. He did somewhat better. All the time his chest was telling him that it was the bottom of the ninth.

“In football they call it guts. Courage, we call it in literature,” he said from the podium. “Is there a difference between them? . . . I'll call it moral courage, and I'll give you two illustrations of it.

“There was a fellow on my team in years gone, Jim Bottomley. He had courage, he had that sort of thing that when you come to the testing point, it never occurred to him whether he had it or didn't have it.

“When the game was in the eighth inning and the score was a tie, he came to bat and he got a base on balls. A fellow named Hornsby was the batsman and the question was, with a pitcher who couldn't hold runners on base, whether to let this base runner loose.

“It so happened that the day before the game began, Burt Shotton, who was the captain of our team at that time, came up to me and said, ‘Do you think Jim can play today with his bad hip? Have you seen it?'

“I said, ‘No, I haven't seen it today, although I did a couple of days ago.' He had a big slider, they call it, on the right hip.

“Bottomley dressed and I said to the captain, ‘If he doesn't object, if he takes fielding practice, let him play.'

“Bottomley took fielding practice and he did play. And there he stood on first base in the eighth inning with the score tied and Hornsby up.

“I had a little lecture that morning—I had morning meetings always about forty minutes long, every day for several years—and I had talked on paying the price, this thing of having some objectives on which there is no price tag. You either want it or you don't want it. You either want it so bad that it doesn't matter what the price is, you don't care what it is. The question is whether you can pay it.

“I did flash the sign to Bottomley and cut him loose to let him run if he wanted to . . . I saw him slide into second base, I saw the umpire motion him safe, a
very
close play. I saw him stand up and pull his pants away from his injured hip three or four times. I thought, That dumb fellow, he could have gone the other way, he need not have made the slide on that hip.

“The game was over. Hornsby singled. Bottomley scored. We won the game, 3-2, and I went into the dressing room.

“I said, ‘Jim, why in the name of common sense didn't you slide to the left and away from that hip?'

“He just looked up at me with the most innocent stare in the world and said, ‘Why, Mr. Rickey'—he always called me Mr. Rickey—‘didn't you see where Maranville was standing?'

“Maranville was the opposing shortstop standing on the inside of the bag to take the throw. Bottomley had to go the other way to elude the tag. It never occurred to him to think anything about prices for anything . . .

“For the other side of it, I will use an illustration from the Bible. I don't want somebody to say I'm an old molly-coddler or anything. It just happens that this chap I'm telling you about, in my judgment, had the greatest amount of courage as any man in the Bible, more than David, Samson, or Paul. Taken by and large, he was a little fellow. I don't think he could have been over five feet tall. Wealthy, he had embossed shirts and custom-made suits. He was dressed better than anyone around Jericho . . . He was a tax gatherer . . . hated by most people . . .

“I don't believe I'm going to be able to speak any longer.”

He stepped back from the podium and collapsed and fell into a coma. Branch Rickey died on December 9, 1965, a few days short of his eighty-fourth birthday. His funeral was held at the Grace Methodist Church in St. Louis. Jackie Robinson and Bobby Bragan found themselves in the back of the church. Bragan said, “Come on.” He and Robinson walked down to the second pew together and took a seat.

On those Brooklyn nights, her feet remembered, Jackie Robinson ran the ballpark into bedlam. Marie F. Lewis, New York City election official and boss poll watcher, swayed from one foot to the other in the crowded polling place on the first floor of the Jackie Robinson elementary school in Brooklyn.

She was mimicking Robinson tantalizing the pitchers when he was on base.

She was a short woman with glasses and wearing a gray truck driver's cap and a blue sweater. It was early November 2008, Election Night.

“My aunt took me to Ladies Night. I don't remember nothin' but this.”

She continued swaying from foot to foot. “Now you see me. Next, whooosh! I'm gone. Stealin' the base on you.”

Ebbets Field was a baseball park right across the street. Now it is a high, gloomy housing project whose ground floor bears signs that read “No Ball Playing.”

On this night people came across the narrow street, Sullivan Place, and into the Robinson school to vote for president of the United States. Ms. Lewis was doing her duty, watching her polls. On Election Day she usually has three hundred voters at her booth. So far today two thousand have voted here and there are hours to go. She is here until closing.

Ms. Marie Lewis sees something that stops her swaying and she walks up to this big, sullen kid with a Yankees baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. He had just tried to walk into a booth and the poll watcher wouldn't let him in.

Ms. Lewis advanced on him, her face right into his, her syntax meticulous Central Brooklyn.

“You lookin' at
jail time
.”

Then came James Clark, forty-seven, in the district for eighteen years, a food service manager at a big law firm in Manhattan. And a guy carrying packages from a supermarket who said he came here from Jamaica in 1965; another who said he was from Virginia fifty-five years ago; and I am asking if anybody else here remembers Jackie Robinson playing across the street, and then there was sudden noise and I don't know precisely what time it was, but the polls were closed and somewhere a television showed Barack Obama and a whoop ran through the corridor of the Jackie Robinson elementary school and the election workers were kissing and Ms. Marie Lewis was swaying and swaggering, her feet remembering the start of the long march that got us here.

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