In other times and other circumstances, there would be much to look forward to in the following season. But the nation was at war, and Reese was called to duty. He joined the navy in January 1943, but, unlike many of his peers, the Louisville native did not have to worry about armed combat. He was initially stationed at a base in Norfolk, Virginia, where he supervised intramural athletic events. He was then shipped to Pearl Harbor, where he played on a baseball team with other major-league players who toured the Pacific Islands. (“You can have all the other ballplayers I saw on service teams,” said Yankee Hall of Fame catcher Bill Dickey, who managed the team. “I will take Pee Wee Reese.”)
Pee Wee was playing cards on a ship coming home from Guam after the war ended when he learned that the Dodgers had signed a contract with Jackie Robinson. “Hey, Pee Wee,” yelled a shipmate who had heard the news on a shortwave radio. “Did you hear? The Dodgers signed a nigger.” Pee Wee did not give it much thought and continued to play cards. And then the shipmate yelled out, “And he plays shortstop!” To which Reese responded, “Oh, shit.”
Pee Wee had never played baseball with a black. In fact, he had never had any real contact with blacks when he was growing up. They lived in separate neighborhoods, went to their own schools, and rode at the back of the bus. He could not even remember ever shaking hands with a black person. Not surprisingly, he would later say that “the first experience I had with Jackie was kind of strange really.”
Still, he wanted to be fair. Perhaps it was the lingering memory of that hanging tree. Or perhaps it was just his nature. Whatever. Pee Wee Reese was not going to let the color of a player’s skin change his approach. “If he’s man enough to take my job,” he decided, “I’m not gonna like it, but dammit, black or white, he deserves it.”
He did not have to worry about any competition from the new Dodger during the 1946 season. Robinson was dispatched to Montreal to play with the Royals, and Reese resumed his position at shortstop, where he continued his good fielding, improved his batting average to a career high of .284, and was again selected for the National League All-Star team. That performance gave Pee Wee the security he craved. Durocher was not about to replace the Louisville native with Robinson for the 1947 season. Robinson was therefore asked to play first base in that rookie year.
Reese was with the team in Panama when Dixie Walker circulated his petition protesting Robinson’s inclusion on the team. Dixie was a close friend, and so Pee Wee was one of the first teammates Walker approached. The Georgia-born Walker no doubt assumed that Reese would be sympathetic. After all, his good friend was from a border state where racial segregation was an integral part of community life. But Walker probably did not know about that hanging tree. Or perhaps he did not appreciate Pee Wee’s fundamental sense of fairness. “Look, man,” Reese bluntly told his friend. “I just got out of the service for three years. I don’t care whether this man is black, blue, or what the hell color this man is. I have to play baseball.” And so Reese told Walker that he would not be signing the petition.
Walker could not have been entirely surprised by Pee Wee’s response. The Dodger shortstop was the first one to walk across the field in spring training to shake Robinson’s hand. He was also one of the first to play cards with Robinson in the clubhouse before games—something, Reese remembered, that puzzled “some of the Deep South boys” who “wanted to know how in the hell you could do it.” For Reese there was no mystery. “After you played with Jackie for a while and realized how sharp he was, what a great competitor he was, what a great athlete he was,” he said, “I couldn’t just make myself dislike the man.”
All of that made it difficult for Reese to stand by idly while his new teammate was subjected to ethnic slurs of the vilest kind from fans and opposing players after the season began. As Durocher had asked in his first days with the club, Reese had taken charge of the team, and he felt obligated to do something when Robinson just stood there silently on the field—turning the other cheek, as Rickey had asked—while the verbal abuse reached a crescendo. Players’ memories about when the gestures were made are vague and sometimes inconsistent. Some said it was in Cincinnati. Some said Boston. And yet others said Philadelphia. The location was, however, secondary. Because there is no dispute that Reese would occasionally wander over to Robinson and casually place his hand on his teammate’s shoulder or simply stand by his side and stare at the people hurling the abuse. In most cases, that was enough to silence or at least moderate the tension. People now saw that the Dodgers’ shortstop—the team leader and, beyond that, someone from Kentucky—was prepared to stand by a black man.
Reese’s moral support was critical to Robinson’s mental state at the time. “After Pee Wee came over like that,” Robinson said many years later, “I never felt alone on a baseball field again.” For his part, Reese could never explain why he made the move. He was not one to look for hidden meanings in the hanging tree or some other psychological meandering. “Something in my gut reacted to the moment,” he later said. “Something about—what?—the unfairness of it? The injustice of it? I don’t know.” In time, sportswriters and historians would make much of Reese’s support for Robinson. But he never attached much significance to it. “He was embarrassed by the notoriety of that simple gesture,” Rachel Robinson told me many years later. “‘So what’s the big deal?’ Pee Wee said. ‘He was a teammate.’”
Still, it was the impetus for a close friendship that would endure many trials during their playing years and survive separate paths during their retirement. It was, above all, a friendship that rejected pretense and thrived on candor. At one juncture during the Dodger years—after he had shed his passive response to racial abuse on the field—Robinson complained to Reese that pitchers were throwing at him because he was black. “No,” the shortstop replied, “they aren’t throwing at you because you’re black, Jackie. They’re throwing at you because they just don’t like you.” And later, after they had been teammates for many years, Pee Wee said to him, “You know, I didn’t particularly go out of my way just to be nice to you.” To which Jackie responded, “Pee Wee, that’s what I appreciated most—that you didn’t.”
It may have seemed spontaneous in retrospect, but dealing with the pressures in Louisville was not so simple. Pee Wee’s family did not understand how he could play ball with a black man. “My grandfather would turn over in his grave,” he told Rickey at the time, “if he knew I was playing on a team with a colored boy.” When Reese went home to Louisville, Pee Wee’s older brother Carl Jr. would kid him about the experience, saying, “I bet there will be watermelon seeds around shortstop.” Other members of the family made similar remarks, all believing, as Pee Wee’s son, Mark, later said, that the integration experiment “was going to blow up in Rickey’s face.” It may have seemed easy to sidestep those kinds of comments when he was on the field, but Reese could not so casually deflect them at home. “We all know what Jackie had to go through,” Mark Reese later explained, “but we don’t realize what Pee Wee had to face inside his own head. People have no idea how much my father had to endure.”
Despite that inner turmoil, Reese continued to enhance his reputation as the league’s best shortstop. In 1947, he duplicated his career-high batting average of .284, slammed a career-high twelve home runs, led the league in walks with 104, and wound up hitting .304 in the seven-game World Series that the Dodgers lost to the Yankees. He had a similar record in 1948 (along with a career-high twenty-five stolen bases), and, more than that, became the recognized leader of the club. Manager Burt Shotton, who wore a shirt and tie in the dugout and was therefore unable to walk out onto the field, had told Reese, “You take charge. You’re my man.” Branch Rickey gave formal recognition to Reese’s leadership role by making him the team captain for the 1949 season.
It was a role that suited Reese well. He would often sit in a captain’s chair by his locker in the corner of the clubhouse before and after a game, puffing on a pipe, and reading a newspaper or talking with teammates. “He had a quiet leadership quality about him,” Carl Erskine later said. “He didn’t say a lot. He didn’t yell a lot. He didn’t get on guys a lot. But,” Erskine continued, “you go in the clubhouse after you had made a mistake, and Pee Wee didn’t have to say much. He gave you a look and a couple of words. And you knew what he meant.” But there was more to his leadership than constructive criticism. He was there to provide his teammates with encouragement and advice inside the clubhouse (or, as in the case of Duke Snider’s earlier comment about Brooklyn fans, try to protect them against their own mistakes). “If anyone had a problem,” said pitcher Johnny Podres, “they went to Pee Wee.”
His leadership role was evident on the field as well. “Reese was the player I feared most on the Dodgers in those years,” said Yankee right fielder Tommy Henrich, who played for the Yankees in the 1941, 1947, and 1949 World Series against the Dodgers. “It was always my feeling that Pee Wee, more than any Dodger, had the ability to make things happen. He was capable of stepping into a pressure situation with the game, the season, or the World Series hanging in the balance and get the key hit, steal the key base, or make the key play in the field that his team needed at that crucial moment.”
Pee Wee’s willingness to fight for his team was evidenced in other ways as well. If the occasion warranted, he would confront umpires with bad decisions. (There was the time when George Magerkurth, a six-foot-five-inch, 280-pound umpire, called Reese out in a play at second base. The Dodger captain jumped to his feet and started yelling at Magerkurth, telling him how wrong he was. “Get back in the dugout,” Magerkurth instructed, “or I’ll bite your head off.” “If you do,” Reese shot back, “you’ll have more brains in your stomach than you’ve got in your head.”) And he would be the one to leave his position at shortstop to go to the pitcher’s mound if a Dodger hurler appeared to be losing control of the game.
Reese’s focus on the pitcher was perhaps epitomized by an occasion in the eighth inning of the second game of the 1949 World Series at Yankee Stadium. The Dodgers were winning, but the score was only 1-0 and two Yankees were on base when Tommy Henrich stepped into the batter’s box to face Dodger hurler Preacher Roe. Henrich had hit a home run to win the first series game, and Reese could see the tension in Roe’s face. Reese casually walked over to the pitcher’s mound. “Let’s you and I have a talk,” he told Roe. “Sure, Pee Wee,” the Dodger pitcher said, obviously welcoming the interruption. “What d’ya wanta talk about?” “Anything at all, Preach,” the shortstop replied. “Hunting? Fishing? Anything. Let’s just keep Henrich fidgeting up there and wondering what you’re going to throw him.” The short interlude had its desired effect. After a few minutes, Reese returned to his position and Roe got Henrich to hit a harmless fly ball to the outfield.
The formal elevation to captain in 1949 did not hurt Reese’s batting performance. He continued to excel as the team’s leadoff hitter, led the league in runs scored (with 132), and managed to hit a career-high sixteen home runs. His record over the next four years reflected the same consistency and contributed to a team record that enabled the Dodgers to come within one game of winning the pennant in two years (1950 and 1951) and then to win the pennant in two other years (1952 and 1953). That high level of consistency was duly noted in the press, and there was little surprise when sportswriters began mentioning Reese as a possible manager after the Dodgers fired Charlie Dressen at the end of the 1953 season. It mattered not to the press that Reese was still an active player. Durocher had been a playing shortstop when he took over the club’s managerial reins in 1939, and many other clubs had used player-managers.
Shortly after the 1953 World Series, the
New York Daily News
reported that the Dodgers were moving forward with “the installation of Pee Wee Reese as manager.” The report was not mere speculation. General manager Buzzie Bavasi did in fact fly down to Louisville to talk with the team’s shortstop about the promotion. Reese was flattered but eventually said no. “Playing is a full-time job,” he later explained. “So is managing. You can’t do a good job at either if you try to do both.” Other factors played a role as well. “He felt he was too close to the players,” Bavasi remembered from that long-ago conversation. Trying to discipline players who were his teammates on the field would undoubtedly prove problematic. And then there was the daunting challenge of being a successful manager for the Brooklyn Dodgers. “We just won the pennant two straight years,” Reese told Bavasi. “How can you improve on that?”
There was a certain irony in Reese’s assessment. The manager’s position was eventually given to Walter Alston. He had enjoyed considerable experience as a minor-league manager, but the Dodgers failed to win the pennant in 1954, finishing five games behind the Giants. It was a failure that could not be attributed to Reese’s performance. For the first (and only) time in his career, his batting average passed the .300 mark (.309) with a career-high thirty-five doubles. And he continued to play at the same level when the Dodgers took off in the beginning of the 1955 season.
He was, by now, not only the longest-serving Dodger on the team but also the most popular among the fans. Hilda Chester, a boisterous fan who attended virtually every game at Ebbets Field with a cowbell (which she rang regularly), would often call out to the Dodger shortstop, “Pee Wee, have you had your milk today?” When Happy Felton conducted his pregame television show at Ebbets Field (
Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang
)—which featured a Dodger player chosen by a Little Leaguer—Reese was the one most often selected. And when his thirty-seventh birthday approached on July 22, the Dodgers decided to give him a special night at Ebbets Field. The decision was made, however, with some trepidation. The Dodgers had tried to have a tribute night many years earlier for Dixie Walker, but the event proved to be a dismal failure. Irving Rudd, the Dodgers’ publicity director, promised a better outcome for the Reese event and, as an added inducement, Bavasi told Rudd he would give him a dollar for every fan over the eighteen thousand mark who attended the game.