The Victory Season Read online

  Spahn, after finally warming up and washing the stink off his body, moved on to the Ludendorff Bridge with the 276th. The battalion was responsible for ensuring that traffic flowed across the Rhine despite the missing parts and damaged girders. On March 16, 1945, a shell exploded near Spahn, and he took some shrapnel in the foot. Fortunately, once again it was a fairly minor wound. Spahn was out on the bridge the following day for a meeting during which his platoon was assigned the role of bridge security. He had just stepped off the main section of the span when it fell into the Rhine.

  For Spahn’s efforts under fire, he was awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. He was also the only ballplayer to be awarded a battlefield promotion, trading his staff sergeant insignia for a second lieutenant’s gold bar.

  Little more than a year after nearly meeting his maker on the Bridge at Remagen, Spahn, already bald with a bulbous nose, was back on the mound, a changed pitcher and a changed man. “Before the war I didn’t have anything that slightly resembled self-confidence,” Spahn told the Associated Press in August 1946. “Then I was tight as a drum and worrying about every pitch. But nowadays I just throw them up without the slightest mental pressure.”

  Spahn expounded on the easy transition back to baseball a few years later. “After what I went through overseas, I never thought of anything I was told to do in baseball as hard work. You get over feeling like that when you spend days on end sleeping in frozen tank tracks in enemy threatened territory. The army taught me something about challenges and about what’s important and what isn’t. Everything I tackle in baseball and in life I take as a challenge rather than work.”

  Spahn lost years of potential stats to the war, like the others who served, but unlike Feller or DiMaggio, who never let anyone forget the fact, Spahn was more philosophical. “I matured a lot in those [war] years,” he said after he retired. “If I had not had that maturity, I wouldn’t have pitched until I was 45.”

  Spahn’s battlefield promotion meant that he had to stay in the service through May. Meanwhile, the American League race was being settled. The Yankees won in St. Louis the day after flying into town, but went 7–6 on the long trip despite the accrued air miles. Boston likewise won after the train trip to the Windy City, but went 5–5 on its road swing, so little had changed in the standings when the Yankees returned to visit Fenway in late May.

  Chandler was again tasked with stopping the Sox and was coming off a three-hit shutout in Cleveland, leaving him 6–1 with a 0.58 ERA. In the ninth inning against the Tribe, Spud had barehanded a sharply hit grounder, badly spraining his middle finger and leaving him in a splint that had him perpetually flipping the bird. It was announced that he would have to miss the start in The Hub.

  But in the clubhouse before the game, Chandler dramatically ripped the splint off, flexed his hand a few times, and pronounced himself ready to go. Unfortunately, “he had no more business being in the box that Sunday [sic—the game was on a Saturday] than his youngest son did,” according to the Saturday Evening Post. Little Richard Chandler was one year old. Rip Russell hit a colossal three-run homer in the fifth as Spud was driven from the Fens, surrendering all the runs in a 7–4 defeat. Chandler would finish 20–8 with a 2.10 ERA on the season, but against the Sox, he went 1–4 with a 4.38 ERA.

  For the first time since the good old days when the Babe had sported the colors of the Olde Towne Team, the Sox were clearly better than the Yankees. After splitting a doubleheader the next day, Boston was six games clear of the Bombers, and, despite their pioneering use of air travel, things were trending downward in the Bronx.

  The Red Sox contentedly listened to the rhythmic clackety-clack of the rails and went from town to town, bashing baseballs at every stop.

  Chapter 16

  Montreal

  April 27, 1946

  “If you don’t take the field…you will be suspended from baseball for the rest of your life.”

  —Frank Shaughnessy, President,

  International League

  The telegram sent to every International League team by Frank Shaughnessy was a preemptive blow that immediately quashed rumblings of a leaguewide walkout to protest Jackie Robinson’s presence. It was one of the few times all year that management was able to prevent labor from striking. Between that and his opening-day heroics in Jersey City, Robinson could be forgiven had he relaxed and thought perhaps this wouldn’t be such an ordeal after all.

  The rest of Montreal’s season-opening road trip cured him of any possible cockeyed optimism.

  Baltimore was long considered the northernmost city in the South, and it had a long racist legacy. John Wilkes Booth had fomented his plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln in Baltimore, and many of his cultural forebears came out to shout epithets at Robinson when the Royals arrived to tangle with the Orioles. Two virulent and leather-lunged types sat directly behind Rachel. Most of their sentences were punctuated with the phrase “nigger son of a bitch!” Black fans were forced to sit way out in the left field bleachers, where it was hard to yell loud enough for Robinson to hear their cheering. Only the knuckleheaded stuff reached his ears.

  Robinson played poorly in the three-game series, two of which the Royals lost. Robinson felt the pressure anew. He made a couple of errors and didn’t hit well either. His mistakes crushed him into a “deep depression.”

  Syracuse was even worse. As he came up to bat on April 24, a Chiefs player ran out of the dugout with a black cat, yelling, “Hey Robinson, here’s one of your relatives!” Robinson then responded by doubling, whereupon he yelled, “I guess my relative is happy now!”

  That was the way Jackie told it in his autobiography, anyway. A Time story from the next year said he had tripled with the bases loaded to win the game, to silence the feline lovers in the Syracuse dugout. Actually, according to the box scores, Robby didn’t hit any doubles on that trip to ’Cuse, and went 0–4 in the first game there, an 11–4 loss. Indeed, he didn’t have an extra-base hit all season at Syracuse.

  What is true is that the Syracuse fans and players unloaded on Jackie with epithets, racial and otherwise. “We called Robinson some of the foulest names he’d ever heard, the worst things you can scream at another man,” remembered the Chiefs second baseman, Garton Del Savio, to the Syracuse Post-Standard fifty years later.

  The Syracuse catcher, Dick West, said, “I remember the first time he came up to bat, our whole bench was hollering at him, and he looked down at me and said, `You got some players from the South.’” West, who was from Kentucky, recalled, “I looked up and said, ‘I don’t feel sorry for you. You can go to hell.’” Before one game, many members of the Chiefs actually were about to run out to play the Royals wearing blackface when they were stopped by their manager.

  There were some lighter moments. At one point, a Syracuse pitcher hit Robby on the hand with a pitch, but the umpire ruled he was in the act of swinging. A Chief yelled, “Alright Robinson, stop trying to hit the ball with your hand!” and even Robinson broke up laughing. That night, he was feted by the local Elks club and treated to a steak dinner with all the trimmings. Robinson was still carrying a live rabbit a fan had given him for luck back in Newark. Robby considered giving the bunny to the cook to complete the feast but instead gave the little hare to a young fan.

  As April turned to May, and the first signs of spring poked through the Canadian frost, the Royals came home to Montreal for the first time. They flew back from Baltimore in two large cargo planes, beating MacPhail to the punch by a few days. In the air, Jackie and Rachel were locked in deep conversation, not engaging anyone, according to Wendell Smith, who was traveling with the team (a coup that resulted in a six-figure boost to the circulation of the Pittsburgh Courier). Most likely, they were discussing a pressing problem that faced them upon arrival in Montreal, one that was shared by millions of Americans as well—where to find a place to live.

  Local newspapers made appeals for readers to help find the Royals apartments for the season. Some of the pl
ayers lived on couches, and at least a couple lived at the ballpark for a few weeks. Jackie was luckier, for he had Rachel as his real-estate agent. She toddled along on pregnant legs, tirelessly walking avenues and climbing stairs (mostly on the outside of buildings in the style in Montreal) of elevator-free buildings. It never occurred to her to look in a black neighborhood—Montreal’s Negroes made up only two percent of the city’s population, and what clusters there were tended to be poverty-stricken.

  She found a nice duplex on the East End, at 8232 de Gaspe Avenue in the predominantly French Villeray District. A French-Canadian woman who was letting the apartment welcomed her inside and served Rachel tea, an act of simple kindness that warmed her heart after the less-hospitable weeks in Florida. The landlord insisted Rachel use her china and linens, a grace note that didn’t go unnoticed. “What was nourished there in that house,” she told the Canadian Press, “had widespread influence in our society.” Rachel raced to sign the lease.

  Upstairs, in the upper-level of the duplex, lived a family with eight children. The children would rush out of the house to help with grocery bags and heavy packages when they saw the heavily pregnant Rachel coming down the street. She reciprocated by leaving fruit for them on their way to school. “Little things [like] that turn into big pieces of your experience,” she said much later. “They were friendly, they were protective, they were supportive and it was not something that I’d have expected.” Other neighbors provided her with extra ration books for butter and sugar and sewed her maternity clothes.

  Quebec was hardly a Negro paradise. While racism was far less overt than in the Jim Crow South, the local black population suffered from severe neglect, especially in education and health care. The first French word Rachel remembered learning was noir. The Robinsons were celebrities, and thus were given a more heartfelt welcome, but in general, Montreal’s blacks were treated as outsiders, aliens to be stared at in wonder, like creatures in a zoo, if not outright persecuted. The best thing about the city, as far as its black population was concerned, was that language and culture, French versus English, were the main points of division. Race came in a distant third.

  The Robinsons’ apartment wasn’t far from the Royals’ home park, Delorimier Stadium, which was plopped into the block at the corner of De Lorimier Avenue and Ontario Street East. Royals fans had a penchant for gambling, and they and the park had a bad reputation because of it. Thousands of dollars changed hands at every home game. Fans hollered to players during games, promising payouts if they got a hit or stole a base. A fan once commandeered the PA system to make an offer to a player. Undercover agents were put in the crowd, but that only slowed the action.

  On May 1, Jersey City repaid the Royals’ visit for the home opener. Nearly sixteen thousand fans filled the joint for the game on a sunny, glorious early-spring afternoon. Montreal’s portly mayor, Camillien Houde, threw out the first pitch, and “There Will Always Be an England” was sung as the Union Jack was raised.

  Jackie, resplendent in his home silver-and-blue Montreal uniform, singled and scored a run, but the Royals lost to the Little Giants 12–9. The crowd cared not a whit. Robinson posed for photos and signed autographs for nearly an hour on the field after the game, relegating the city’s main sports legend, hockey star Maurice “the Rocket” Richard, who was at the game, to the shadows. He went “almost unnoticed,” according to the Sporting News.

  Wendell Smith took his leave of the Robinson beat after the game, after spending two months at his side. His final column from Montreal sounded a hopeful elegy for the “Great Experiment.” “When I see (Robinson) attired in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform and performing on the fertile turf of Ebbets Field—something which is not altogether impossible—I will regard this particular assignment and story finished and, in the parlance of the marines: ‘Mission Accomplished.’ For on that great day I will be able to truthfully say ‘Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory.’”

  The Royals were 6–8–1 amid Jackie’s coming-out debutante dance, but once the hoopla settled down a bit, the team steadily demolished the International League. It was a strong club, with quality players like Herman Franks, Les Burge, Spider Jorgensen, and Al Campanis. Even though the team’s star from 1945, Roland Gladu, had jumped to the Mexican League, the Royals won seven straight and were 19–5 in May to seize control in the standings.

  Robinson was earning his $600 monthly salary. Swinging hard from his pigeon-toed stance, he hit .349 in May, scoring twenty-three times and dominating games from the base paths. “Like plastic and penicillin, Robinson is here to stay,” wrote Lloyd McGowan. Fans screamed Allez! as soon as he reached base, urging him to steal bases and wreak havoc. The Delorimier Stadium public-address announcer pronounced his name with a French flourish—YACK-eeeeeee RO-been-son!—that Jackie would say allowed him to pretend to be someone else while playing, his Franco-American alter ego.

  Away from the park, the Robinsons enjoyed the European flavor of Montreal. Rachel roamed the narrow streets and alleys of the city’s old district, prowling in bookstores and music shops and sipping tea in cafes. She went to every home game, of course, but only occasionally traveled on the road with the Royals, preferring to languor in a place where she could simply disappear into the cultural fabric, instead of bearing witness to her husband running through the brick walls enacted to halt baseball’s racial pioneer. That was exhausting territory, not to mention dangerous for a pregnant woman. She loved Jackie dearly, but she could be forgiven for wanting some time to simply escape into a book or walk down a street in peace or just stay off her feet for a while as Jackie Jr. grew inside her.

  “Coming to Montreal at that time in our lives and the kind of reception we got was our honeymoon,” she remembered. “We were still recovering from our experiences in the South, and we were deeply in love. We needed that time alone. It strengthened our relationship.” The newlyweds were active in the city. Jackie was busy with charity appearances, often going to area hospitals and veterans’ administrations with members of the hockey Canadiens, who were sporting royalty in Montreal. The couple became close friends with Montreal sportswriter Sam Maltin and his wife, Belle. They dined together frequently, with Belle letting Rachel in on some of her “trade secrets” to preparing good Jewish meals, and the foursome often went to concerts on Mount Royal, the ridge that overlooks the city.

  Robinson wasn’t particularly close with his teammates, who respected him but didn’t hang out with him. One Royals fan, Alvin Guttman, recalled seeing a few players at the Chic-N-Coop restaurant, and congratulated them on having a fine second baseman. “Yeah, but it’s too bad he had to take a job from a white man,” came the reply. It was less racism than careerism. Like all minor leaguers, the players had a single goal—making it to the majors. They were after jobs in Brooklyn and were focused on that. Going out of their way to be humanitarians wasn’t part of the equation. Robby was helping them win at present, so that was great. Otherwise, he didn’t help any of them make it to Ebbets Field, so he didn’t really matter. Shotgun Shuba, who had put paid to any idea of team unrest by shaking Jackie’s hand in the opener, was gone after a few weeks, demoted to Mobile. In a great irony, the player Robinson was closest to was probably Campanis, who, on the television program Nightline four decades later, infamously would question the ability of blacks to run franchises, immolating his reputation.

  In another oddity, Robby was not particularly close with the other Negroes on the ’46 Royals, pitchers John Wright and, later, Roy Partlow. Wright was in a tough position, with everyone convinced he was on the Royals merely to be the “second Negro,” Jackie’s sounding board for all things black, as though the clubhouse were an ark that needed two of everything. Actually, Wright was an accomplished Negro Leaguer, once winning twenty-five games in a season, but he had control problems with the Royals and pitched rarely. A native of New Orleans, he spoke Creole French, and thus had a leg up on Robinson, who never learned the language. But Wright didn’t adapt to the cool climate and
European rhythms of Montreal, and in mid-May was sent to Class C ball at Trois-Rivières, a Quebec-based team seventy miles from Montreal.

  Wright was immediately replaced by Partlow, a veteran in his mid-thirties who was signed from the Philadelphia Stars in the apparent belief that Robinson still needed another black teammate. Partlow was a firebrand, and thus a peculiar choice to help integrate the game. When he too was demoted after not getting much action (“I’ve got seven pitchers and not enough work for them,” Hopper told the Afro-American), he disappeared for a spell, frightening the Negro press. The likes of Wendell Smith and Joe Bostic were still walking on eggshells, fearing that any misstep by any of the black players would sabotage “The Great Experiment.”

  When he finally turned up in Trois-Rivières, Partlow reeled off nine straight wins. Wright, too, played well once freed from Robinson’s orbit. The two Negro pitchers played key roles in the Class C playoff run Three Rivers made that fall. Partlow scored the winning run in Game Five of the championship series against Pittsfield as Trois-Rivières captured the championship. “Wright and Partlow, now they were nice boys,” recalled their manager, Frenchy Bordagaray, in a 1995 interview with the Montreal Gazette. “They were just perfect. They had to be. Otherwise, I was a dead duck, and so were they. Sure, it was a sensitive job. We were breaking down the color barrier.”

  But the kind words and the Class C title didn’t do much for Wright and Partlow, who never sniffed a chance at the majors again.

  While life in Montreal was grand, Robby and the Royals still had to cross the border and play in America, and their welcome continued to be a cold one. Race relations were not going to improve overnight simply because a black man was playing well in Canada, especially not in the Deep South. That fact was seared into the nation’s consciousness on May 9, when the skies over Stone Mountain, Georgia, were lit up, reflecting the massive cross burning staged by the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate blacks planning to register to vote for the first time in the state’s upcoming gubernatorial primary.