Here’s to Mrs. Robinson for guiding Boseman
He was more than a half century younger than her, but the late Chadwick Boseman once said his highly acclaimed performance as Jackie Robinson was in large measure a credit to Robinson’s wife, Rachel, who celebrated her 98th birthday in July.
Obviously no other person knew better of the torment Jackie Robinson endured during his first two seasons as the first modern Black Major League Baseball player than Rachel Robinson.
Rachel met Jackie in 1940 while they were students at the University of California in Los Angeles (where Robinson was a football, baseball, basketball and track star). So it was that Rachel Robinson became a key adviser to Boseman in his first starring role, in “42.” He was outstanding as the fiery Robinson, whose career with the Brooklyn Dodgers earned him a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Mrs. Robinson watched much of the movie being made, giving advice to Boseman and offering suggestions to director Brian Helgeland and to Boseman.
“Meeting Mrs. Robinson, I realized what a huge burden they had to carry,” Boseman said.
I first met Rachel Robinson and her daughter, Sharon, then a midwife at Norwalk Hospital who later taught nursing at Yale, Columbia and Georgetown, in November of 1996 while they were on the sideline of a football game at King LowHeywood Thomas School (now King School) on Newfield Avenue in Stamford.
Rachel’s grandson, Jesse Simms, was a 6-foot-3, 270-pound lineman for King, and had already accepted a scholarship offer from his grandmother and grandfather’s alma mater, UCLA.
The setting was ironic since Rachel Robinson, her husband and their three children had stayed in the striking Colonial house to the rear of the field while looking for a home in Stamford 40 years earlier. It had since been converted into King’s administration building.
What stood out during the hour we talked and watched was Rachel Robinson’s elegance and grace and excitement at the thought of her grandson following her and Jackie to UCLA.
As it turned out, Jesse Simms, who
grew up in Norwalk, decided against going to UCLA and then to Penn State, though he did enroll at Penn State after telling legendary coach Joe Paterno he was not going to play football.
“He’s not going to enroll at UCLA or anywhere else,” UCLA coach Bob Toledo said at the time. “He’s going to take the next few months to evaluate his priorities away from the glare of the spotlight.”
Part of that spotlight occurred when Simms threw out the ceremonial first pitch during a 1997 ceremony at Shea Stadium commemorating the 50th anniversary of his grandfather’s first big league game at long-gone Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. He had lost his passion for football and discovered a new one in culinary arts, and in 2007 opened a culinary arts and business program at a school in Somerset, New Jersey, which specialized in serving special needs students.
“Ten years ago, I was Jackie Robinson’s grandson and an athlete and was on such a high pedestal that I almost lost sight of who Jesse was,” he said at the time. “I’m Jesse Simms. He was Jackie Robinson. I know I’ll never accomplish what he did, but I still have to carry on his legacy.”
Sadly, Jesse Martin Robinson Simms died in Brandon, Fla., at age 34. Once again, the Robinson family endured a tragedy. One of Jackie and Rachel Robinson’s two sons, Jackie Robinson Jr., who was wounded in Vietnam and then struggled with drug problems when he returned home, was killed in an auto accident on the Merritt Parkway in Norwalk in 1971 when he was 24 . Sixteen months later, Jackie Robinson almost blind from diabetes, died of a heart attack at 53. The youngest child, David, the father of 10, has been a coffee farmer and coffee exporter in Tanzania for more than 40 years.
At 98, Rachel Robinson, still much in demand and as gracious as ever, vividly remembers her years in Stamford as the wife of a legendary baseball pioneer who after turning the other cheek and enduring almost unbearable racial bias at the beginning of a Hall of Fame career became half of one of Stamford’s — and the nation’s — most endearing couples.