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STAN ISAACS Out of Left Field |
 Pee Wee Reese |
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 Jackie Robinson |
Dodgers Reese & Robinson bonded
that day in a historic moment
By
STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
THIS IS ABOUT two revered baseball players, a statue, a wife
and the attempts of many good people to have a statue erected
to those ball players. The players are Pee Wee Reese and Jackie
Robinson, two of the mainstays of the Brooklyn Dodgers team of
the late 1940s and 1950s revered as "The Boys of Summer."
Reese and Robinson are joined forever in baseball history as
teammates and more so by an action that took place early in Robinson's
career after he joined the Dodgers as the first black player
in major league baseball in the last century.
The Dodgers were playing in Cincinnati, a very Southern city
in those days of legal segregation. The Reds players and fans
were subjecting Reese and Robinson to vicious race-baiting. The
hecklers were trying to get at Robinson by taunting Reese--a
native of nearby Louisville--as a traitor to the South for befriending
Jackie, even refusing to sign an anti-Robinson boycott petition
other Dodgers had signed. As the abuse escalated, Reese walked
from shortstop over to Robinson and put his arm around Jackie's
shoulder in a gesture of solidarity.
It was a moment that so marked Reese's character that when Reese
was inducted into the Hall of Fame, the incident was cited along
with his baseball statistics on his Hall of Fame plaque at Cooperstown.
Reese, ever modest about his baseball achievements, would wonder
aloud if he would have been voted into the Hall of Fame if not
for that gesture.
Shortly after Reese died in Louisville at 81 on April 14, 1999,
there were memorials for him in Louisville and Brooklyn. Because
I had covered the Dodgers in the Reese-Robinson days I was chosen
to say some words at the memorial at St. Patrick's Church in
the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn where Reese lived when he played
for the Dodgers.
I noted there had been memorials for New York players, notably
Robinson and Joe DiMaggio, and that those took the form of naming
highways and parkways after them. I said that those names came
up as part of radio traffic reports noting tie-ups and breakdowns
and questioned whether too-often jammed roadways were a proper
memorial for revered figures. I suggested instead that a memorial
worthy of Reese would be a statue in Brooklyn of Reese with his
arm around Robinson's shoulder commemmorating that wonderful
moment of Reese's solidarity with Robinson.
The suggestion was met with approval in many quarters. Notably,
Jack Newfield of the New York Post took up the cause. It led
to an announcement from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's office that
a committee was being formed to erect such a statue. Newfield
and I, along with the wives of the players and some ex-Dodgers,
would meet to select an architect and a site in Brooklyn for
the statue.
There was talk of official baseball, including the Mets and Yankees,
raising the money for the statue without any need to go to the
public. Beyond that a philanthropist, Ted Forstmann, was reputed
to have pledged the funding as well. All fine and dandy. But
that was the fall of 1999, the committee never met, and not much
really happened.
There was no movement beyond a publicity release out of the mayor's
office. The project seemed to be slowed when Randy Levine, a
deputy mayor with a baseball background who was put in charge
of the statue project, left the mayor's office to become president
of the Yankees.
There was also the sensitive issue of Mrs. Robinson's preferences.
While I had suggested that the statue honor the incident of Reese
putting his arm around Robinson, Mrs. Robinson said that although
she appreciated the gesture, she would prefer a statue in which
the players were depicted as equals. She remembered a photograph
in which the two are leaving the field shoulder to shoulder,
their hands almost touching.
This could be regarded as applying a current sensitivity to a
different time--when a white owner, Branch Rickey, defied many
baseball people to hire the first black player; when it took
some courage for Reese, a white southerner, to defy the hecklers.
And there is a statue to Robinson in Stamford, Conn. where he
lived after he retired from baseball.
For whatever reason, the project stalled. Now, though, given
a goose by the indefatigable Newfield, the statue idea throbs
to life again. Newfield wrote a column last month reporting that
the project has been put in the hands of of an expert fund-raiser
who is the wife of a deputy mayor. Tamra Lhota is in charge of
raising funds from private individuals to go with money from
philanthropist Forstmann, the baseball commissioner's office,
the Mets and Yankees, to meet the needed $500,000 for the project.
Individuals can make donations to New York Public/Private Inititiatives
Inc., 100 Church St., 20th floor, New York City 10007.
Ms. Lhota has contacted me, a sign that the committee may actually
meet for the first time. It raises hope that somehow in some
form a statue of Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson will wake
up the echoes of the glory that these two men brought to baseball
and Brooklyn.
© 2001 by Stan Isaacs.
You can comment on this column or contact Stan Isaacs with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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