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JACKIE AND PEE WEE #4
WHAT’S IT LIKE BEING HIM?
It was the tail end of World War II, and a Navy kid
named Harold Henry Reese was riding a boat back from Guam to the U.S.
Even in the military, they all called him “Pee Wee” . . . and the Dodger
shortstop was eager to get back to Brooklyn and resume his all-star career
in baseball. Three years lost to the military was half of an average major
league career, and there were always hard-hitting, flashy-gloved infielders
in the minors waiting to take your position.
Then one afternoon a Navy petty officer came over to him: “Hey, Reese.
Guess what’s on the shortwave. Dodgers just signed up a colored guy. First
time ever. And guess what else?” The officer put on a nasty, teasing,
sing-song lilt to his next words: “He’s a shortstop. Ha ha ha ha.”
That’s the setup in Roger Kahn’s baseball book, The Boys of Summer. We
started off our Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday program recounting the
story where Pee Wee Reese walked over to first base, as Jackie Robinson
was having an entire stadium scream racial epithets at him, and quietly
put a teammate’s arm around the new player. But this story happens first.
A shortwave radio announcement on a Navy boat. Not only is the racial
barrier coming down in the big leagues, the so-called “Cotton Wall,” but
Branch Rickey has hired this black player and set him up to take YOUR
spot on the team, your position.
And Pee Wee Reese had to lay there in his bunk and think about it all.
What if he lost his position to Jackie Robinson? What would his friends
in Louisville say about that? “Reese, are you kidding? You weren’t man
enough to protect your job from a . . . BLANK?”
So he thought about that. But then he’d switch over to the other side
of the ball diamond. This was the game. This was baseball. Defending yourself
at your position from the kids coming up in the minors was how the game
was always played. Here’s a quote from the book:
“Wait a minute, Reese thought. What . . . did black
have to do with it? They’d signed a ballplayer. They’d signed others during
the war. White or black, this guy was gonna learn, like Cowboy Bill Hart
and Fiddler Ed Basinski, that the war was over now and that the real Dodger
shortstop was Pee Wee Reese.”
So his mind went back and forth. It’s a long boat ride
from Guam to the Golden Gate Bridge, and a bunk is a quiet place for soul-searching.
And apparently Pee Wee Reese’s thoughts went in two additional directions.
He thought about right and wrong. The majority of white players seemed
completely unwilling to open the baseball doors to black players. “Segregation
yesterday, segregation today, segregation forever.” Should he just stay
with the system, protect the way things were up there at “The Show”? Support
“separate but equal”? Was racism wrong? He thought about all of that.
And then young Navy sailor Pee Wee Reese thought about one more thing.
He thought about young Jackie Robinson.
“‘I don’t know this Robinson,’ Reese told himself,
‘but I can imagine how HE feels. I mean, if they said to me, ‘Reese, you
got to go over and play in the colored guys’ league, how would I feel?
Scared. The only white. Lonely. But I’m a good shortstop and that’s what
I’d want ‘em to see. Not my color. Just that I can play the game. And
that’s how I’ve got to look at Robinson. If he’s man enough to take my
job, I’m not going to like it, but . . . black or white, he deserves it.”
“WHAT’S IT LIKE FOR THE OTHER GUY?” This Southern-bred
ballplayer from Louisville, Kentucky, was able to keep that question in
his mind. What was it like to be Jackie Robinson? To be the only black
player in a white system? To hear boos and curses, not because you’d dropped
a ball or struck out, but simply because genes and chromosomes had caused
your skin — at conception — to be determined as black? What would it be
like to play endlessly in the minors, the colored league, riding crowded
buses from one dilapidated ballpark to another, and play to segregated
crowds, and know that you could NEVER make it to the bigs . . . simply
because you had black skin?
Roger Kahn closes out the tale with this:
“Reese did not speculate on the reactions of other
white ballplayers, but before the Navy transport docked in San Francisco,
he had made an abiding peace with his own conscience.”
And today we might all just think about that long boat
ride. “What’s it like to be the other guy? What’s it like to feel like
he feels, to hurt like he does, to know his loneliness and his fears and
his problems and his temptations?”
Of course, this is one of the great truths we proclaim about Jesus Christ.
We do it in our songs:
“Jesus know our every weakness; Take it to the Lord
in prayer.”
We find it in our Bibles. Hebrews chapter four:
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our
weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as
we are — yet was without sin.”
Just two chapters earlier, the writer says that Jesus
was “made like his brothers in every way, in order that He might become
a merciful and faithful high priest.” In some wonderful way, even though
He’s not a sinner Himself, Jesus understands what it’s like to BE a sinner.
To struggle with loneliness and fear and rejection. To feel like you’re
one color while the whole world is some other color.
Somehow on that Navy boat churning through the Pacific, Pee Wee Reese
was able to glimpse the difficult world of Jackie Robinson. And he made
up his mind, he settled his conscience on the determination that he would
not support the Cotton Wall of segregation any longer. That he would not
sign any petition to keep Robinson off the club. That he would not just
stand there when the Cincinnati fans — OR the Brooklyn fans, for that
matter — hollered racial obscenities at his teammate.
We’ve told this May 14, 1947 story — Crosley Field, and the arm around
the shoulder. But the influence of Pee Wee Reese and that sensitivity
— “What’s it like for the other guy?” — meant so much more. At Pee Wee’s
funeral 2 years ago last August, Don Newcombe, a black pitcher who came
up to the big leagues soon after Jackie paved the way, told reporters:
“Pee Wee was always a guy who tried to make things
better. You have to understand when black players first came to the Dodgers.
It wasn’t always the nicest place for us to be when we had to stay in
hotels. [But] Pee Wee helped change a lot.”
Because the captain of their team, Pee Wee Reese,
understood. He had decided to understand, to think from the other person’s
perspective, to try to feel with the other man’s heart. It’s no wonder
that a book entitled Teammates, written about this amazing friendship
between Robinson and Reese, is used today, more than half a century later,
to teach racial tolerance to elementary school children.
Well, after all these baseball stories, it really comes down to our own
consciences. Friend, are you trying to understand others? To know others?
To accept others and love them? And how about me? Am I trying hard enough?
Or do I get comfortable in my own neighborhood?
A story came in over the Internet about some young people in nursing school.
Classes had been in session a couple of months, and there were hard quizzes
and tests on a very regular basis. The student relating the story describes
how she always studied hard, learning all the facts and figures and formulas.
Then one day, on the test, the last question was very strange. “What is
the first name of the woman who cleans the school?” Huh? What’s that got
to do with anything? This student had seen the cleaning lady — a quiet,
tall, dark-haired woman, who looked like she was maybe about 50. But her
name? The student didn’t know. None of the kids knew. So she left the
question blank.
After the test session, another student raised their hand. “What’s the
deal with that last question? Are you really going to count that one against
us if we didn’t know the lady’s name?” And the teacher replied: “Absolutely.”
Then this little speech: “In your careers” — nursing, remember — “you
will meet many people. ALL are significant. They deserve your attention
and care, even if all you do is smile and say ‘hello.”
The student who passed along the story puts on this P.S. “I’ve never forgotten
that lesson. I also learned [that the cleaning woman’s] name . . . was
Dorothy.”
A Christian magazine a few years ago explored the enduring and ongoing
problem the Body of Christ has with separated worship. White over here,
and black over there. I guess instead of the “Cotton Wall,” it would be
the stained-glass one. And the writer didn’t bemoan the statistics, the
slowness of change, the demographic difficulties on all sides. But he
pointed out that really, only one factor ever seems to make a difference.
Not political bills in Congress, not resolutions passed by denominations.
Just this. Only this works: Men and women of different groups reaching
out and making friends with that other person. Me getting to know you.
You getting to know me. Blacks and whites and Hispanics and Asians who
simply become friends and break bread together and have evenings at each
others’ houses. Doing like Pee Wee Reese and thinking about — and then
finding out first-hand: “What’s it like for the other guy?”
No other factor breaks down the walls, but that one always does.
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