This was, for me at least, the highlight of the 2017 Baseball Hall of Fame Induction Weekend. The three Robinsons — Sharon, Rachel, and David — had just arrived at the Otesaga Hotel and were checking in when friends Marty Lurie and Barry Bloom, with whom I had been chatting in the lobby, persuaded them to take a quick photo. Tomorrow Rachel would receive the triannual Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award in a ceremony at Doubleday Field.
I had spoken with Sharon not so long ago, shortly after the public-television airing of the documentary by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, in which we both had been featured — with the starring role reserved, of course, for her mother. The last time I had spoken with Rachel Robinson had been nearly thirty years ago, when my since departed friend Jules Tygiel and I had collaborated on a story for SPORT Magazine, “Jackie Robinson’s Signing: The Real, Untold Story.” Our research had revealed that Branch Rickey had never intended for Jackie to be the lone pioneer of the integration saga, and that several others — including future major leaguers Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella, and Sam Jethroe — were slated to become his teammates in Brooklyn.
I interviewed Rachel for that story in 1988, and she was utterly surprised to learn how circumstance, particularly New York City politics, had driven Rickey to act quickly, settling upon a solitary signing. On October 7, 1945 Rickey had written to Arthur Mann, the Brooklyn club secretary who was secretly preparing an article for LOOK Magazine:
We just can’t go now with the article. The thing isn’t dead, — not at all. It is more alive than ever and that is the reason we can’t go with any publicity at this time. There is more involved in the situation than I had contemplated. Other players are in it and it may be that I can’t clear these players until after the December meetings, possibly not until after the first of the year. You must simply sit in the boat. . . .
There is a November 1 deadline on Robinson, — you know that. I am undertaking to extend that date until January 1st so as to give me time to sign plenty of players and make one break on the complete story. Also, quite obviously it might not be good to sign Robinson with other and possibly better players unsigned.
Rickey “was such a deliberate man,” Rachel recalled in our conversation, “and this letter is so urgent. He must have been very nervous as he neared his goal. Maybe he was nervous that the owners would turn him down and having five people at the door instead of just one would have been more powerful.”
Rickey and Mann had arranged for LOOK Magazine photographer Maurice Terrell to take photos at San Diego’s Lane Field (surreptitiously, from the stadium rim) of Jackie and two teammates on Chet Brewer’s barnstorming team, the Kansas City Royals (thus the “R” on the cap below). The full story is told in three parts, commencing with: https://goo.gl/wo7gXa.
I showed Rachel some of the photographs that Terrell had taken, including one portrait that she had never seen and wished me to copy for her, because “Jack seemed so young, so vital.” This is that photo.
Every Picture Tells a Story was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.