P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

JACKIE AND PEE WEE #3

EVERYONE MAKES EIGHT CENTS AN HOUR

I have a tiny bit of “Christian vandalism” to report to you as we keep on with our special radio series, JACKIE AND PEE WEE. A few weeks ago, as our producer, David Smith, was preparing the five scripts for the week, he happened to be walking one Sabbath morning by the high school where his daughter, Karli, is a senior. And I don’t know if it was a government class project, or just a civic-minded kid roaming around. But tacked up on all the trees dotting the campus was a quotation by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. And it was absolutely perfect for our Bible study right here, as we think about brotherhood and unity and racial reconciliation. So, since the quote was tacked up on all the trees — a tiny slip of paper on each — David felt justified in sneaking just one of them into his pocket, so that we could share it with you on our Wednesday program. Here it is:

“We cannot become Americans,” Wilson said, “if we think of ourselves in GROUPS. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular group IN America has not yet become an American, and the man who goes among you to trade upon your cultural origin, race, or language is not worthy to live under the Stars and Stripes.”

That’s a powerful statement, isn’t it? And you know, friend, this doesn’t have to be a United States kind of Wednesday sermon. Because no matter where you live, this same principle holds true. Canadians. Germans. Koreans. Anybody.

Or put it another way: we’re all members of the human race. Isn’t that enough of a group? Sons and daughters of God? Redeemed children of the King of the universe? No groups. No subdivisions. So special-interest constituencies. Just brothers and sisters.

We’ve been using as a springboard to our discussion all week that marvelous baseball story going back to the year 1947. Jackie Robinson, the first black ballplayer in the major leagues, was standing at first base there at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Boos and curses and obscenities and the ugliest of racial slurs were raining down on him from all quarters: from the stands and from both dugouts. And then all at once, a white Southerner, the shortstop from the Brooklyn Dodgers — and Jackie’s teammate — a kid named Pee Wee Reese, simply raised a hand to stop batting practice. He went over to Jackie and just quietly put an arm around him. And that huge stadium slowly grew quiet.

But there’s more to the story than that. Sportswriters John Thurber and Jason Reid remind us of the familiar background. Here’s a paragraph from their L.A. Times feature piece right after Pee Wee Reese died 2 years ago last August.

“During the spring of 1947,” they write, “when it was obvious the Dodgers were planning to bring up Robinson from their Montreal farm club, several members of the club, mostly Southerners, passed around a petition saying they wouldn’t play if Robinson joined the team.”

It’s hard to imagine such a thing today — well, some days as we weep over the headlines it’s not that hard — but here are grown men saying to their owner: “If HE plays, we won’t play. He’s not in our group. And we don’t care if he’s going to bat .297, score 125 runs for us, lead the National League with 29 stolen bases, win Rookie of the Year, help the Dodgers go 94 and 60, and help get us into the World Series. We don’t care about that. We just know that he’s black and we’re white. He’s in THAT group, and we’re in THIS group. And we don’t want anything to do with that group, that blank.” You can probably imagine how they filled in that blank.

Well, these guys with the petition were sure they could get Pee Wee Reese’s name on the dotted line. I mean, their shortstop was from Louisville, Kentucky. He was a Southerner in his heart; he’d been raised on “separate and not-exactly-equal.” And once they got their team captain to sign, Branch Rickey and Leo Durocher would have no choice but to send that boy, Jackie Robinson, back to the colored leagues where he belonged.

There was just one problem: Mr. Harold Henry Reese wouldn’t sign the petition. Pee Wee refused. “Get that paper out of my face; I’m not signing it.” And according to Roger Kahn, author of The Boys of Summer: “The momentum for the petition stopped right there.”

You know, somehow, I think that even heaven looked down and added its blessing to the Dodger experiment of 1947. I know Tommy Lasorda used to tell reporters that God was the great Dodger fan in the sky, although you couldn’t prove that by the final standings in recent years. But surely Pee Wee Reese and Martin Luther King, Jr. — and other great champions of unity through the years — had this Galatians Bible verse in their hearts:

“There is neither Jew or Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all ONE in Christ Jesus.”

Now friend, I don’t know how many Bible verses Pee Wee Reese had memorized, and tacked up on his locker there in Brooklyn. But he did grasp that he and Jackie Robinson were simply Dodgers. White and black did not matter, should not matter, on the ballfield. Hitting a ball mattered. Running hard for a pop fly mattered. RBIs and home runs and wins mattered. World Series championship rings mattered. With those goals in mind, he and Jackie were ONE on the ballfield. The huge encyclopedia, 20th Century Baseball Chronicle, in its anthology summary for the year 1947, tells us:

“After a group of [Dodgers] signed a protest petition during spring training — to which Rickey and Durocher responded by offering to trade any player who wished to go — the general attitude of the team mellowed to cold indifference. For weeks, none of them sat near Robinson; some refused even to speak to him.” Then the writers add, tongue-in-cheek: “Things changed when Robinson’s aggressive, running brand of baseball helped move Brooklyn into first.”

Well, friend, we’ve had a bit over 50 years now to learn and relearn this truth: we’re all the same. We’re all just humans, with frail human hearts and minds. Oh, the outside package is different for you than for me; some of us have a bit more or a bit less money or ability. We’re red and yellow, black, brown, and white. But we’re all ONE in the final analysis. Especially at the foot of the cross.

There was an intriguing story the other day, right next to the obituaries for that legendary hero, Pee Wee Reese. A profile of a guy in prison, just up the freeway from us in Lompoc, California. Inmate #04302-112. He looks just like the other guys in the joint: tan shirt, olive pants, white sneakers. He can have his pick of jobs there at the penitentiary; some jobs pay eight cents an hour, the really good ones can have him making up to 40 cents. His name is Bruce McNall, and he’s just in there with all the other men, pulling down his eight cents. There are no groups, no one richer than the others. You’re just #04302-112, a face in the prison courtyard.

Of course, in the outside world, Bruce McNall did a bit better than eight cents an hour. He was worth, oh, about $150 million. He had seven homes, his own 727 jet, racehorses. He owned the L.A. Kings, the L.A. Argonauts. A Rolls-Royce, a Bentley, a Range Rover, and of course, the “Three M’s” . . . an Aston-MARTIN, a Mercedes, and a Maserati. But now, along with guys like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milkin, he was in jail for bank fraud and conspiracy. With lockdowns. Breakfast when you’re told. Lights out when you’re told. You get out when you’re told. And in the meantime, eight cents an hour. The joke in the paper was that even there in prison, the sports-mogul, wheeler-dealer Bruce McNall couldn’t stop expanding his empire. He managed to “buy” two softball teams there in jail; it cost him a total of two bonus cans of soup.

But friend, prison can be a great leveler. No groups there. Everybody makes eight cents an hour. What a tragedy to lose everything, to forfeit your empire, to defraud others and then yourself, before you grasp that truth. Mr. McNall had to learn some hard truths the hard way.

That same baseball encyclopedia I just mentioned has a tidbit that drives the point home. The Dodgers had a standout star named Dixie Walker during that 1940s era. If you can give it a real Brooklyn accent, he was dubbed by fans as “The People’s Choice.” And no wonder; in 1944 he led the league with a .357 average. But in 1947, he was one of those passing around the petition: “No way will I play with Jackie Robinson. I’d rather leave the Dodgers than share the field with him.” Okay. Branch Rickey obliged by sending him off to play in Pittsburgh. That October — the first ever televised Fall Classic — I imagine Dixie Walker made enough money that year to buy a rabbit-ears TV set and watch at home . . . Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers . . . in the World Series.