Bobby

In 1946, five years after the Dodgers lost the 1941 World Series, in the first fully postwar season, in the summer before my fourteenth birthday, in a year when Stan Musial hit .365, the Dodgers and the Cardinals tied for the National League pennant. There was a post-season playoff for the first time in modern baseball history, which for me seemed to stretch back primordially. The pennant was decided in a two-of-three playoff. I felt I was witness to a historical event. The Cardinals won two straight games. Howie Schultz, as I recall, struck out to end the season.

I was heartbroken. But I had puberty to worry about, and, in a few weeks, the pain receded.

In October of that year, Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey announced the signing of a Negro player, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, a four-sport star at UCLA, to a minor league contract with the Dodgers’ Triple A farm club, the Montreal Royals.

I was thrilled. Once again I was given the chance to bear witness to history. To be around when something happened that people a hundred years from now would write and speak of. I didn’t forget the playoff loss to the Cardinals. I haven’t forgotten it yet. But this seemed as if it might be sufficient compensation. There were pictures of Jackie and Branch Rickey at the signing. Rickey with his cigar and bow tie. Jackie gleaming black.

By then we had moved to a town east of New Bedford called Mattapoisett where the Dodgers games could still be heard, coming up the coast on WHN, which was now called WMGM. Negroes lived in the town, and went to school with me. I knew them. At least one of them was a friend, which did not please my mother. My mother said that if there was trouble it would be the colored guy that would get blamed and if I was with him, I’d be blamed too. I don’t remember now quite what I thought of that position, but I do remember that I continued to be friends with the colored guy in question.

Interestingly enough, in a group that had debated whether to have sex with Lena Horne, no one seemed shaken by Robinson’s signing. We were interested and excited, but no more so than we were by, say, the deal that sent Hank Greenberg from Detroit to Pittsburgh three months later. I, being the out-of-place Dodgers fan, was expected to react more intensely than anyone else, and I did. I cannot explain why I was so pleased, any more than I can fully explain why my racial attitudes differed from the norm. I know that I was pleased that the people in the news, doing the historic thing, were the Dodgers.

The war was over... The players were back... The Dodgers were pennant contenders... The team had just done something that no team had done before... I was fourteen... My voice was changing... I hadn’t had sex yet... But I would sooner or later... And the uncluttered world lay ahead of me to the horizon.

Hubba, hubba.

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