It did not take long for Dixon to recognize that he had made a smart decision in bringing Campanella on the team—and, to the young player’s good fortune, Dixon did not want to stand in the way of his protégé’s advancement. Dixon therefore had a quick response when he and Campanella encountered Biz Mackey, the legendary catcher for the Negro National League’s Baltimore Elite Giants, at the Woodside Hotel in Harlem. “Tom,” Mackey asked, “I need a catcher—a good young kid I can break in to give me a rest. I’m beginnin’ to get beat. You know anyone?” “You’re standin’ right next to him,” said Dixon.
Mackey subsequently met with Roy in Philadelphia and offered the fifteen-year-old catcher the opportunity to play with one of the premier teams in the Negro National League for $60 a month. Campanella protested that he was making more than that with the Bacharach Giants. “But that isn’t the big leagues, son,” Mackey responded. “This is only a start. There’s no telling how much you can be making in just a few years.” Mackey then gave Campanella an Elite uniform to try on, and the teenager was sold.
It was a summer job that Campanella loved from the beginning. School was a legal requirement until he reached sixteen, but Roy had no interest in scholastic studies. (“I just couldn’t work up any steam for the books,” he would later explain.) And so, when the Elite Giants offered him $90 a month to play on a regular basis, Roy pressed his parents to allow him to quit school. They could not resist the inevitable, and on November 20, 1937—one day after his sixteenth birthday—Roy Campanella left academia for good.
Life in the Negro National League was rewarding for a player devoted to baseball, but, like Jackie Robinson, Campanella learned that it was hardly luxurious. The team traveled from city to city in dilapidated buses, ate meals in restaurants that did not get high marks for cleanliness or quality, and stayed in hotels that provided little comfort. And never could a player afford to sit out a game because of injury or fatigue. (Years later, in describing life in the Negro National League to Carl Furillo, Campanella explained that there were only thirteen players on a team—eight fielders, four pitchers, and “a utility man who took care of bats and stuff.” Furillo was incredulous. “What happened if more than one guy got sick or hurt?” he asked. “Nobody ever got sick or hurt,” Campanella replied. “If a guy didn’t play, he didn’t get paid.”) Campanella displayed the endurance to play as much as needed—sometimes catching two doubleheaders in a single day. And he demonstrated skills behind the plate and at bat that earned him a selection to the league’s All-Star teams.
On September 3, 1939, he married Bernice Ray, a girl from his neighborhood. Two daughters were born in the first two years of the marriage, but it was not a union that would stand the test of time. Roy decided to play winter ball in Puerto Rico and then accepted an offer from Jorge Pasquel to play in the Mexican League during the winter, pushing his annual income above the $5,000 mark. But it was not a schedule conducive to married life (and, in fact, the couple never had their own home, living instead with their parents). It soon became clear to both of them that the relationship could not endure, and, as Roy later said, “We just agreed to call it quits.”
Still, the marriage did provide one incidental benefit: the local draft board gave the married father a deferment after Pearl Harbor to allow him to work at a defense plant making armor plating for tanks instead of requiring him to don a uniform. But Roy had little interest in that job when he saw a coworker get his arm “smashed to a pulp” by a hammer press. “I got a family to worry about,” he told the foreman, “and a baseball career.” He was switched to another department, and then—for reasons he never understood—his draft board told him he could return to baseball.
By the summer of 1945, Campanella was recognized as one of the most accomplished players in the Negro leagues, and it gave him the confidence one day to approach Hans Lobert, the Philadelphia Athletics’ manager, during a game at Shibe Park. “You can use a catcher,” Campanella said. “And I’m a good catcher. I can help this club.” Lobert suggested that Campanella call the team’s president, who told the black star that he was powerless to accept the offer. “The social times are not ready yet for Negroes in organized baseball,” the Athletics’ president explained.
However much he disliked that answer, Roy was content to return to the Negro leagues. He only wanted to play baseball—whatever the venue. He had seen film clips of Boston Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams skipping happily around the bases “like a kid” after he had hit a three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to enable the American League to win the 1941 All-Star game. The image captured Campanella’s perspective on baseball. “I don’t care how old you are,” he would later tell a sportswriter. “You have to have that spirit.” And so, in later years, long after he had become the most respected catcher in the National League, he never tired of saying that “you have to be a man to be a big-league ballplayer, but you have to have a lot of little boy in you too.”
His positive attitude was evident to those who watched him play on a daily basis. “Campy is the most relaxed ballplayer I’ve ever seen,” said Dodger vice president Fresco Thompson after the Nicetown native had been with the Dodgers for more than six years. “There seldom is a crisis for him because he loves playing so much.” Dodger general manager Buzzie Bavasi understood that perspective. Long after Campanella had achieved fame as a Brooklyn Dodger, Bavasi sent him a contract and asked him to fill in the salary number that he wanted, Bavasi assuming that the modest player would insert a figure lower than the one Bavasi was prepared to give him. But Campanella turned the tables on Bavasi by signing the contract and returning it without filling in the blank. “You know I’ll play no matter what you give me,” he told Bavasi. “I’ll play for nothin’ if I have to. You can write in the number yourself.” And so Bavasi was forced to give his catcher the raise he deserved.
Campanella’s enthusiasm for the game was infectious and helped to make him a popular figure wherever he went. His Dodger teammates, for one, loved it in later years when he would walk into the clubhouse after a victory the day before, wearing a big Panama hat while chewing on an unlit cigar, and proclaim in his squeaky voice to anyone in earshot, “Same team that won yesterday is gonna win today.”
That optimism extended to almost any situation. And so Roy had no anxieties when Charlie Dressen, a Dodger coach, approached him during an All-Star game between Negro league and major-league players in Newark’s Ruppert Stadium in October 1945. Dressen cryptically said that Branch Rickey wanted to meet with the black catcher the next morning at the Dodgers’ offices in Brooklyn. Campanella had heard that the Dodgers might be forming a new black team—the Brooklyn Browns. He was not sure that a newly formed Negro team would be of any interest to him, but he agreed to meet with the Dodgers’ general manager.
The first thing Campanella noticed about Rickey were the man’s eyebrows. “They were thick and wild-growing,” the veteran catcher later recalled. He also saw that Rickey had a large notebook on his desk that, he soon learned, possessed all kinds of information on Campanella’s private life and baseball career.
At first, the two men said nothing to each other while Rickey surveyed the man who sat in front of his desk. After a few minutes, the older man broke the silence. “How much do you weigh?” he asked Campanella. “About two-fifteen,” said the five-foot-nine-inch catcher. “Judas Priest!” Rickey roared. “You can’t weigh that much and play ball.” “All I know,” Campanella replied, “is that I’ve been doin’ it every day for years.”
Rickey proceeded to explain, as only Rickey could, how important it was to find ballplayers with the right qualities. “I’ve rejected a number of possibilities,” he said, “who I’m sure have the ability. They’re lacking other requisites. It’s either character, habits, or what have you. You’re different,” he told Campanella. “Your record is good—no arrests, no trouble, good family, a hard worker who loves baseball, a man who gets along well with people.” And on and on it went. But never once did Rickey make Campanella an offer—or say anything specific about a new Negro league team. And so Campanella—assuming that Rickey was talking about the soon-to-be-formed Brooklyn Browns—told the Brooklyn general manager that he was making good money and was otherwise satisfied playing summer ball in the Negro leagues and winter ball in the Mexican or Caribbean leagues. Rickey did not clarify the situation for Campanella as the meeting ended. He asked only that the young player not sign any contracts without talking to him first. “I don’t sign no contracts,” Campanella replied. “I just play ball.”
Campanella took the train back to his home in Baltimore and recounted the details of the meeting to his wife, Ruthe, a vibrant black woman whom he had first met on one of his trips to New York City and whom he had married earlier that year. “Honey,” he told Ruthe, “that man sure can talk. He talked so much that he gave me a headache.”
Whatever Rickey had in mind, it was not enough to deter Campanella from returning to Venezuela to play winter ball. The first segment of the schedule would be a series of games with All-Stars from the Negro leagues, and they all agreed to meet in New York City for a short vacation before embarking on the trip to South America. Shortly after arriving at the Woodside Hotel in Harlem, Campanella encountered a black player from the Kansas City Monarchs who would be joining them on the Venezuela trip—Jackie Robinson. After a casual conversation, Robinson suggested a game of cards to pass the time. Campanella agreed, and before long the two men were sitting in Campanella’s hotel room, playing cards and talking about any number of things. And then Robinson mentioned that he had heard that Campanella had met with Rickey. The Elite Giant catcher was startled that Robinson knew of the meeting. “How did you know?” he asked. “I was over there myself,” said Robinson. “What happened with you?” Campanella then confessed that he had no interest in playing for a newly formed black team. “I’m an established star in our league,” said Campanella, “and I’m not going to give it up to take a chance on something that’s just getting started and might not last.”
Robinson then told Campanella in confidence that he had just signed a contract to play for the Montreal Royals with the expectation that he could soon join the Brooklyn Dodgers. “It’s the end of Jim Crow in baseball,” Robinson boasted. “I’m all excited. I’m proud, and I’m scared too.”
Campanella, realizing his mistaken assumption, just stared at Robinson. He now knew that Rickey had been interviewing him about the possibility of joining the Dodgers—not the Brooklyn Browns. But it was too late, or at least so Campanella thought, to turn back now. He went to Venezuela as planned and played the scheduled games, all the time wondering if he would ever hear from Rickey again. Then, on March 1, 1946, he received a telegram from Rickey: PLEASE REPORT BROOKLYN OFFICE BY MARCH 10. VERY IMPORTANT.
Campanella was too excited to wait. He got on the first plane to New York and was in Rickey’s office the following day. Bob Finch, Rickey’s assistant, explained that Rickey was at the team’s spring training camp in Florida but did indeed want to sign the young catcher to a contract. The initial thought was to have him play with Montreal, but when Finch called Rickey in Florida, the Brooklyn general manager explained that there had been some unpleasant repercussions from Robinson’s presence and that it would be better to find another home for Campanella. Finch then called the team’s farm club in Danville, Illinois, but they too made it clear that a black player would not be welcome. The third call went out to Buzzie Bavasi, at that time the general manager of the team’s farm club in Nashua, New Hampshire, a blue-collar town dominated by a local textile mill and French-Canadian immigrants—but with almost no blacks. Finch explained to Bavasi that Rickey wanted to assign two players to the Nashua team—Campanella and a nineteen-year-old pitcher named Don Newcombe. “Can they play?” Bavasi asked. “We think they can,” said Finch. “Then what’s the problem?” Bavasi responded. Finch did not mince words: “They’re colored.” Bavasi’s reacton was all that Finch could have wanted. “If they can play,” said the Nashua general manager, “that’s no problem.”
Nashua proved to be a hospitable environment for Campanella and Newcombe. Although Rickey had cautioned him to turn the other cheek in the face of verbal abuse, Campanella encountered very little hostility from the fans. In fact, the only inflammatory incident he could recall occurred when Sal Yvars, a twenty-two-year-old catcher on the New York Giants’ farm team, threw dirt in his face as he stepped into the batter’s box. Despite Rickey’s admonition, Campanella could not help but see red. “Try that again,” he snapped at Yvars, “and I’ll beat you to a pulp.” Yvars heeded the warning, and the incident was never repeated.
In the meantime, the Nicetown native quickly established himself as the team’s leader on the field and at the plate. Campanella’s skill with a bat and glove were complemented by his ever-endearing personality. He was cheerful, optimistic, and uncommonly polite. (There was the time in the beginning when Claude Corbitt, an opposing team’s leadoff hitter, came the plate with nothing more than an interest in getting a hit. “Good evening, Mr. Corbitt,” said the Nashua catcher. “How are you tonight?” Corbitt later said that he was “so stunned I could barely tap the ball back to the pitcher.”) Others also took note of Campanella’s effusive personality, and it was later reported that he “was perhaps the most popular player in Nashua.”
By the end of the season, Campanella had compiled a .290 average with forty-one extra-base hits in only 113 games and was chosen as the New England League’s Most Valuable Player. “He was the best player in the league,” Bavasi later crowed. “Nobody could touch him.” Campanella returned to Baltimore a happy man with high expectations for the future.
The Dodgers did not disappoint him. While Jackie Robinson was elevated to the parent club for the 1947 season, Campanella was assigned to the Dodgers’ top farm team in Montreal. The rotund catcher’s performance made it clear that the Canadian club was merely a stepping-stone to the big leagues. His batting average remained well above .300 until the end of the season, and, while his hitting cooled off as the year ended, he was still given the league’s Most Valuable Player award.