A Jackie Robinson mystery
There’s a 55-year-old mystery involving two of America’s greatest innovations, jazz and baseball. Maybe you can solve it.
These days, few can resist capturing video at a concert. But in the 1960s, amateur film was a rarity.
Which has turned Loren Harriet into a detective in search of something that may not exist. Harriet is producing a documentary of the “An Afternoon of Jazz” concerts that took place at Jackie Robinson’s Stamford home starting in 1963.
He has the cooperation of Robinson’s family. He has an audio recording from the first show in June 1963, which featured Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Cannonball Adderley and Billy Taylor. He has spoken to performers and audience members. He has a carousel of photos.
You don’t have to be a gumshoe to crack the case of what he doesn’t have.
Harriet has faith someone couldn’t resist the temptation to film in the 1960s, though lugging home recording equipment in a crowd then was like fielding fungoes with a laundry basket.
“There’s only one X factor for us and that’s ‘Where is the video?’ ” Harriet says.
Film from the 1960s shows on Cascade Road may be grail for Harriet, but he’s had no more success finding footage from later benefit concerts for the Jackie Robinson Foundation that continued from 1984 until 2001 at Cranbury Park in Norwalk, near where Robinson’s daughter, Sharon, lived.
Robinson moved to 6 acres on Cascade Road in Stamford during his final season with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956, nine years after he broke baseball’s color barrier. A few months after that first show in 1963, the Robinsons held a second to host the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who called Jackie “one of those great, unselfish souls.”
King and NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins praised Robinson as a civil rights leader. They weren’t talking about his days on the diamond. That show alone raised $15,000 for groups battling segregation.
If you had a camera at the shows, here are some scenes you might have caught:
The 1968 show which spotlighted bands led by Thelonious Monk, Lionel Hampton, Ellington, Brubeck and Adderley.
Some kids from the neighborhood opening shows, including future superstar Carly Simon, whose family hosted the Robinsons on Newfield Avenue while their house was being built.
A poignant 1971 show, held days after Jackie Jr., was killed in a car crash on the Merritt Parkway. Robinson’s son grabbed headlines a few years earlier when he was arrested for marijuana and heroin possession after returning from the Vietnam War with shrapnel injuries. Robinson Jr. cleaned up and was working as a drug counselor at Daytop.
Jackie told the Advocate he went on with the show because his son planned it. The newspaper reported “Jackie Robinson Sr. walked around the festival, greeting all the happy faces with a smile on a face that so recently had been covered with tears.”
Brubeck, who lived in Wilton, said that day “I thought I wouldn’t be able to perform but the enthusiasm of the crowd and courage of the Robinsons made me feel great.”
A few months later, Robinson told Dick Cavett in a television interview that his son “was working hard on a jazz program so that he could repay Daytop in some way for the work that they had done in helping him rehabilitate himself.”
That wasn’t long before Robinson’s own death. His funeral at Riverside Church in New York concluded with Roberta Flack singing the traditional spiritual “I Told Jesus.” A year earlier she was performing on his lawn.
dOther scenes exist only in misty memories. Ill-guided editors decided to forgo coverage on some years, or limited it to a modest story.
Those early shows drew as a many as a reported 3,000, though acts do not appear to have been publicized in advance. A brief on page 34 of the newspaper advises readers to call “Mrs. S.C. Kweskin at Lakeside Drive for information.” No phone number is provided.
“My favorite thing is that the
kids had to clean up their rooms because they had to be used as dressing rooms for Ella Fitzgerald or Dizzie Gillespie,” Harriet says.
After the shows, when temperatures sometimes reached the 80s, audience members cooled off by jumping in the lake on the property.
Music in the Robinson home wasn’t limited to annual sevenhour concerts.
“Sharon told us the kids would wake up to jazz playing,” Harriet says. “Jackie’s favorite song was ‘Oh, Happy Day.’ ”
Harriet produced a concert tribute at UCLA featuring Smokey Robinson, Arturo Sandoval and Dave Koz on Feb. 5, six days after the 100th anniversary of Robinson’s birth. Rachel, 96, sat in the audience, some 100 yards from the spot where she met Jackie in 1941.
“It was the first time I’ve produced a concert where every person came off stage in tears because they looked at her (as they performed),” he says.
He laughs when I ask if he remembered to film the show. He likes to say the Robinsons’ benefit shows predated more famous efforts such as the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, or Live Aid in 1985.
The extraordinary thing about the backyard concerts isn’t the star power. Racism stalked Robinson off the ball field and through the suburbs. Finding a home brought more vile opposition, and this time Jackie and Rachel had to face it with their young children.
Yet the man who was not always welcome at home plate opened his house to strangers. It’s a profound gesture that united neighbors white and black.
Footage can’t enhance that story. As oral history it becomes legend; as stirring as a Duke Ellington set, as daring as stealing home in the World Series.