Jackie Robinson (86 page)

One of Jack’s pleasures now was listening to Rachel read from the galleys of his autobiography with Alfred Duckett,
I Never Had It Made.
He himself could not read the pages. His right eye was blind; the left eye was dim and strained. Still he was upbeat: “
I’ve gotten tremendous thrills,” he wrote, out of the pages he had heard.

To all inquirers, Jack gave a most cheerful answer about the state of his health. “
Health is a progressive thing,” he told a writer for the Los Angeles
Times,
“but I’ve felt a lot better in the last four or five years.” What Robinson meant by this statement is not clear. His physician, Dr. Cassell, saw Jack’s continuing optimism and also a mature graciousness that perhaps implied Jack’s new understanding of his mortality. “One day,” Cassell related, “
he had come to the office and was walking down the hallway. And this man, who was my contemporary, saw him and just blurted out: ‘Jackie Robinson! You’ve been my hero for my whole life!’ Now, most people, when others say that to them, are very diffident. They say, ‘Oh, well …’ But Robinson said,
‘What a wonderful thing to say to somebody!’ He meant, ‘What a great gift to give me!’ I thought, Wow, if I could only do that. I wanted to learn; I tried never to behave the other way again. Somebody gave him a gift and he took the gift and said Thank you! instead of giving the gift back, which is what most people do.”

But Cassell also knew the truth about Jack’s physical condition: “His legs had to go. They had to be amputated. I was getting him ready for that step. He was having increasing pain in his legs, when there’s not enough blood supply even when you’re not doing anything. What follows usually is gangrene and things like that. Amputation seemed on the horizon. I was relatively straight with him. He didn’t like bad news; most people don’t.”

Robinson forged ahead with his plans. On September 5, he proudly announced that his construction company would erect a $17 million apartment complex in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Making the project possible was a forty-year mortgage secured from the New York State Urban Development Corporation. Later that month, he was also prominent in a group of investors who announced plans to build a thoroughbred and harness race track on 430 acres of land in Newtown, Connecticut.

On September 6, he took part in a memorial service at the headquarters of the Anti-Defamation League in New York City to honor the Israeli athletes slain by terrorists in Munich at the Olympic Games that summer.

Meanwhile, pressured by his former Dodger teammate Joe Black to do something, anything, to honor Jackie Robinson on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his historic step into the major leagues, the office of the commissioner of baseball, Bowie Kuhn, invited him to make the ceremonial throwing out of the first ball at a game at Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati, during the upcoming World Series. Again, Robinson first resisted the invitation. Reached by Joe Reichler, the chief publicist in Kuhn’s office, Jack made it clear that he would use the occasion to criticize baseball—especially for its tired excuses as to why no black manager had yet been hired in the majors. Pointing to the potential of former players such as Frank Robinson, Jim Gilliam, and Elston Howard, Jack had assailed the owners and top executives on this score. “
As long as they keep digging down and hiring guys who have already failed in one city,” Jack said in Miami, “I’m not encouraged.” (In October 1974, with the Cleveland Indians, Frank Robinson would become the first black manager in the major leagues.)

The World Series, Jack knew, with the Oakland Athletics playing the Cincinnati Reds, would be a bully pulpit for this message. “
If you people expect me to change my thinking, or my speech, you’re mistaken,” he said to Reichler, “because I’m simply not going to do it.” Then baseball offered an inducement Jack could not resist: the event would also pay tribute to the
memory of Jackie and to the Daytop organization. “
How can a man say no to a dead son?” Dick Young asked in the
Daily News.

The entire family gathered for the occasion. In a loving, protective spirit, Rachel and Zellee; Sharon and her husband, Joe Mitchell; and David and his girlfriend all accompanied Jack to Cincinnati for his moment of glory. After a happy dinner at their hotel the night before the game, they crowded together for a group picture snapped by a magazine photographer. As they waited for the shutter to click, Rachel heard Jack murmur: “
The last hurrah.” On October 15, the day after Oakland won the first game against Cincinnati, Robinson threw out the first ball of the second game before a record local crowd and an estimated television audience of some sixty million viewers. Accepting a plaque marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of his entry into the majors, Robinson was brief. “
I am extremely proud and pleased,” he declared. But “I’m going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.”

(Daytop received a luxury station wagon, a gift from the Chrysler Corporation, and a double-decker bus, a gift from Greyhound. Major-league baseball, someone noted sardonically, donated the plaque.)

Entering the Oakland dugout, Jack was warmly greeted by the A’s manager Dick Williams, who embraced and kissed him. The black pitcher Blue Moon Odom also reacted effusively to Jack’s presence. But to at least one observer, Odom was the only player, black or white, to show any particular interest in Robinson. “
I was surprised by their indifference, especially the blacks,” Dick Young wrote. “There seems to be a feeling among the current black players that they owe Jackie nothing.”

Roger Kahn was with Jack at the game when a fan offered Robinson a baseball to autograph. “
I’m sorry,” Jack said, “I can’t see it.” Jim Murray, a nationally syndicated columnist with whom Jack had feuded at various times, called out to him. “Who’s that?” Robinson asked. “Oh, Jim! I’m sorry I can’t see you any more.” But Jack was not looking for sympathy. “I’ve lost the sight in one eye,” he told Kahn, “but they think they can save the other. I’ve got nothing to complain about.”

His love of horse racing remained strong. “
On Columbus Day,” Brenda Williams, Jack’s sister-in-law, said, “Jack called me and asked if I would go to Belmont to the racetrack with him. Chuck came along, and we had a good time, although Jack misplaced a bet one time, because of his bad eyesight, and he became embarrassed. But the people at the track were wonderful to him, as usual. Rachel joined us afterward for dinner in Manhasset. It was the last time we were all together.”

On October 23, Jack went into work at the office in Englewood Cliffs. Later that day, as he often did, he had his driver take him around to various wholesalers, where he collected a load of meat and some boxes of canned goods and other foodstuffs. Then they drove out to Brooklyn, where Jack left his donations at Lacy Covington’s Nazarene Baptist Church for distribution to the poor.

The next day, at 6:26 a.m., Rachel called the police, saying that Jack would need an ambulance. Two policemen arrived within a few minutes and administered oxygen to him. Shortly afterward, an ambulance arrived. At 7:10 that morning, on the way to the hospital, Robinson died. He was declared dead on arrival at Stamford Hospital.

On October 27, between 1 p.m. and 9 p.m., Robinson’s body lay in state at Duncan Brothers Funeral Home at 2303 Seventh Avenue in Harlem. On the two following days, viewing was at Riverside Church on Riverside Drive at 122nd Street, near Grant’s Tomb. With Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker’s help, the family prepared for the funeral. In lieu of flowers, contributions were to be sent to Daytop, Inc., in care of the Jackie Robinson Construction Corporation.

Tributes to Robinson poured in from the famous and the ordinary. President Nixon, who announced that he would not attend the funeral but would send an official delegation of some forty persons, lauded him. “His courage,
his sense of brotherhood and his brilliance on the playing field,” Nixon declared, “brought a new human dimension not only to the game of baseball but to every area of American life where black and white people work side by side.” The civil rights leader Vernon Jordan hailed Robinson as “a trail-blazer for all
black people and a great spokesman for justice.” Red Smith, the New York
Times
columnist, declared: “
The word for Jackie Robinson is ‘unconquerable.’ … He would not be defeated. Not by the other team and not by life.” The old Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, offering some plain words, spoke another kind of truth: “
He could beat you in a lot of ways.”

The funeral took place at noon on October 29, at Riverside Church. Some twenty-five hundred mourners heard the Reverend Jesse Jackson deliver the eulogy; Jackie Robinson had stolen home. Rockefeller was there, and Dick Gregory, Roy Wilkins, and A. Philip Randolph; Peter O’Malley, Hank Greenberg, and Joe Louis, too. Campanella was in his wheelchair; Sargent Shriver, Bill Veeck, Larry Doby, Henry Aaron, and Vida Blue. Outside, hundreds of ordinary folk awaited the end of the service.

Six former athletes carried Jack’s coffin, silver-blue and draped with red roses, out of Riverside Church and into the waiting hearse. One, Bill Russell, was a Boston Celtic; but the others were old Brooklyn Dodgers: Newcombe, Black, Gilliam, Reese, and Branca. Then the funeral cortege, stretching
several city blocks, rolled slowly across Manhattan toward Brooklyn and Jack’s final resting place, Cypress Hills Cemetery, where his son Jackie was also buried, only a few blocks from vanished Ebbets Field.

One mourner at the funeral was Jack and Rachel’s friend Robert Campbell, of Campbell’s Bookstore near UCLA. He had flown overnight to attend the funeral and would return that night to Los Angeles. “
The service was excellent,” he would recall, “except it was so sad.” Heading downtown after the cortege had left, he shared a cab with someone who said he was from the National Urban League. “We talked all the way back about Jack and what a fine person he was. We were all glad that he didn’t suffer longer, but we were sorry he had to go so young.”

The day before, on October 28, in Pasadena, almost three hundred persons had gathered on the steps of City Hall to pay tribute to Robinson. A choir was on hand, from John Muir High School, as well as a trumpeter from the bugle corps at Pasadena City College. After the choir sang some songs a cappella, the trumpeter sounded taps.

I
MMEDIATELY AFTER
J
ACK’S DEATH
in 1972, Rachel resigned from her job at Yale University. For about two months she lived alone, at her insistence, in the house in Stamford. Then, finding it too painful to remain there with Jack gone, she moved to one of her two apartments on West 93rd Street in Manhattan. She lived there for about two years before returning home.

In the meantime, soon after Jack’s death, she became president of the Jackie Robinson Construction Corporation. Along with Mickey Weissman and Richard Cohen, as well as Joel Halpern, another young real estate developer, she renamed the company the Jackie Robinson Development Corporation. Over the next few years, JRDC was responsible for building some sixteen hundred units of housing. Later, she formed a successful real estate management and training corporation, of which she was also president.

In 1973, she formally registered the Jackie Robinson Foundation. The other founders were Martin Edelman, her brother Charles Williams, and Franklin Williams. Through the foundation, she hoped to assist students from poor and minority backgrounds to attend college by giving them tuition grants. In 1977, the foundation awarded its first scholarships. By 1997, it had awarded more than five hundred scholarships to students whose graduation rate of almost ninety-two percent is thought to be the highest of all organizations with a similar mission in the United States. In 1997, 142 Jackie Robinson Scholars were attending colleges and universities across the United States. (The foundation offices are at 3 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001.) Rachel resigned as chair of the board of directors late in 1996, but Sharon and David remain active directors.

In 1986, Rachel sold her house in Stamford and bought a sixty-acre farm located about two hours north of Manhattan, where she still resides. (About one year after the sale of the Stamford house to a popular young musician, it was resold to a developer who then destroyed it and erected a new house in its place.) In 1996, Rachel published an illustrated narrative,
Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait.

In 1973, Sharon Robinson graduated from Howard University with a degree in nursing, then earned a master’s degree at Columbia University in midwifery. She practiced for about twelve years before joining the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH as one of its top officials. After five years, she returned to midwifery; at one time she held the rank of assistant professor in the School of Nursing at Yale University. In recent years she lived again in Stamford, and now owns a home in the neighboring town of Norwalk, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband, Molver Fieffe. In 1996, she published
Stealing Home: An Intimate Family Portrait by the Daughter of Jackie Robinson.

David Robinson, who did not return to Stanford University following his brother Jackie’s death, worked for some years in Harlem. Mainly through United Harlem Growth, a company he helped to form, he led efforts to rehabilitate decayed housing stock there in a “sweat equity” plan that helped local residents acquire property from the government in return for their labor. In the 1980s, he left the United States and emigrated to Tanzania. However, he returns regularly to the United States, and his mother has visited him at least once a year in Africa. In Tanzania, he first helped to form a fishing cooperative near Dar-es-Salaam, then moved deep into the interior, to Mbeya, where he acquired and cleared about one hundred acres of land for a farm. He now grows coffee and assists in a cooperative arrangement that exports coffee overseas, including to the United States.

In 1995, David’s daughter, Ayo Robinson, born in the United States but reared in Tanzania, enrolled as a first-year student at her father’s old prep school in Massachusetts, Mount Hermon, where she is still a student. Her older sister, Susan Thomas, works for the City of New York in the area of prisoner rehabilitation. Sharon’s only child, her son, Jesse Martin Simms, became a student at King and Low-Heywood Thomas School in Stamford. (The school occupies the former summer home of Richard and Andrea Simon, where the Robinsons had lived on first moving to Stamford in 1954.) An outstanding prep-school football player, Jesse committed himself late in 1996 to enrolling as a freshman the following year at UCLA. Sonya Pankey, Jackie’s daughter, has been for many years a member of the Ralph Lauren organization. Her own daughter, Sherita, Rachel’s only great-grandchild, works as a volunteer at the Jackie Robinson Foundation.