A gold medal respite from our hate-filled news
Just as we are feeling we must shield our children’s eyes from unintended exposure to news screens that gush the nonstop, hate-based latest — this just in from quiet, bucolic Cooperstown, New York.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame decided to give us the break we need now, more than ever.
Baseball’s hall has chosen to honor us all this Saturday by spotlighting the similarities that existed in the struggles of two quite different gold medal winners— Jackie Robinson and Jimmy Erskine. The Hall of Fame decided to present its Buck O’neil Lifetime Achievement Award to Jimmy’s dad, Carl Erskine, now 96, who was a star pitcher and Jackie’s Brooklyn Dodgers teammate and great friend.
In the process, baseball’s hall has given us an opportunity to explain (for all who never knew, but always wondered) the fascinating full significance of why, every April 15, all Major League Baseball players have been wearing only Jackie Robinson’s number 42 on their uniforms. We’ll get to that. But first let’s remember the achievements of those gold medal winners— Jackie Robinson and Jimmy Erskine.
Robinson, of course, became legendary for the courage he demonstrated in the face of the hate-filled protests and assassination threats in 1947 as the first Black athlete to play Major League Baseball with the National League’s Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson also went on to become a leading civil rights advocate the rest of his life.
In 2005, Robinson was awarded, posthumously, the Congressional Gold Medal, an honor first presented to George Washington. The FBI’S once-secret files quoted numerous vile threats against Robinson’s life in 1947. Others showed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was operating on the notion that anti-segregation efforts were linked to pro-communism.
Jimmy Erskine, the fourth child of Betty and Carl Erskine, was born with Down syndrome, after Erskine’s and Robinson’s baseball careers ended. Betty and Carl rejected doctors’ suggestions that Jimmy should be institutionalized and raised him at home, in Anderson, Indiana.
Carl would later say, in speeches, that he had two best friends — Jackie and Jimmy. And Jimmy would later win numerous gold medals in the Special Olympics, an effort Carl worked extensively to support.
In 2005, the year Robinson’s widow, Rachel, accepted her husband’s Congressional Gold Medal in a ceremony beneath the Capitol Dome, Carl Erskine wrote a warm, and in its own way most powerful, little book, “What I Learned from Jackie Robinson,” published by Mcgraw Hill. Erskine dedicated the book to Rachel Robinson and his own wife, Betty. Jackie suffered from heart disease and diabetes and died young, at just 53, in 1972. Jimmy, 63, is now retired from his career job at Applebee’s in Anderson, Indiana.
“Jackie and Jimmy, because of tradition, superstition, ignorance, fear, and arrogance, felt the bitterness of rejection,” Erskine writes. Also: “Jackie helped me to encourage other parents whose children had birth defects or physical disabilities or diseases. Jackie had his Rookie of the Year and his Hall of Fame plaque, and my Jimmy went on to earn gold medal after gold medal in the Special Olympics. I wish Jackie had lived to see those days because Jackie had a lot to do with Jim’s success.”
EPILOGUE: During spring training in 1949, two years after Robinson broke baseball’s color line, the Dodgers arrived for an exhibition game in Atlanta, where the Deep South’s racial segregation was still the law. The Ku Klux Klan was picketing outside the minor league stadium. In the clubhouse before the game, Dodger manager Burt Shotton read aloud to the team a letter threatening Robinson: “Take the field and you’re going to be shot!”
The players sat in stunned silence — until outfielder Gene Hermanski broke tension with a joke that signaled a serious team unity: “Why don’t we all wear number 42? Then the nut won’t know who to shoot at?”
“Robinson thought that was the topper of them all,” Erskine wrote. Now, indeed, that is the uniform of the day for all of Major League Baseball on Jackie Robinson Day. Still, only white fans were in the stands. Then Robinson, joined by Dodger stars Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella, protested to authorities. They allowed Black fans to sit (without buying tickets) on a levee behind the right field fence. Erskine wrote it was “just another sign that we as a country were two societies… and it was up to twenty-five men wearing a different type of uniform (the Dodgers’ flannels) to change the way America viewed itself and the way Americans viewed one another.”
We remain a work in progress.