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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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 LESTER RODNEY ...dead at 98 -photo by Byron LaGoy |
Waking up the Echoes
With Lester Rodney
of TheColumnists.com
Lester Rodney died at 98 on Dec. 20. There was a feeling that justice triumphed when both The New York Times and Los Angeles Times ran long, glowing obituaries on him. And ESPN is planning a feature.
For a long time Rodney, The Communist Daily Worker sports editor/columnist, wasn’t given credit for his role in helping to bring about the integration of major league baseball. That changed when a Long Island University presented a Jackie Robinson conference in 1997 and Rodney was given his proper due. The obits in the big papers solidified his reputation as a worthy journalist.
I had known Rodney since I broke in as a cub sports writer for the leftist New York Daily Compass in 1950. We have had a long correspondence. Rather than repeat much of what I wrote about him in a column for www.thecolumnists.com, Sept. 3, 2003, I will dip into some of the Rodney musings and writings.
Lester became a nationally ranked tennis player in senior categories after he moved to Los Angeles. He eased off as he hit his 90s, and relayed this early in the new century:
“I’m back to playing social doubles a few times a week, but my tournament days are over. When I sighed and mentioned how much I missed it to one of the ladies I play mixed doubles with, she fixed me with an unsympathetic glare and said, ‘You know, my husband is six years younger than you, and he would just love to WALK out onto a tennis court without worrying about falling.’”
Rodney championed not only Jackie Robinson, but many black players. He particularly argued for Satchel Paige. After Bill Veeck signed Paige with the Cleveland Indians, Paige became a stalwart relief pitcher, Rodney sent along his piece in the Daily Worker about a game at Yankee Stadium on July 25, 1949:
“There were a lot of moments in Monday night’s game at the Yankee Stadium, but the big one had to be when Satchel Paige came in to face Joe DiMaggio. It was the last of the eighth inning. The Indians, playing grimly to get back into contention in a game which meant the difference between being three games behind or five behind, were ahead, 4-1.
Rodney described Phil Rizzuto and Tommy Henrich opening the eighth inning with base hits off Early Wynn. Indians manager Lou Boudreau came out to remove Wynn and:
“…the little fence in deepest left field opened and Paige walked out, jacket slung over his shoulder and glove in hand. There is always an air of drama in the changing of the pitcher--it’s a piece of theater, with a pause in the action, the exit of the central performer, and the entrance of a lone, newly important figure who walks in toward the middle of the diamond with measured steps and looms larger and larger as he comes.
“And this was Satchel Paige. Coming in to pitch to Joe DiMaggio….[Joe] had singled in each of his last two at bats. It was a Yankee situation, the kind where people have that Yankee feeling and say later they just knew the Yanks were going to break through and win.
“Only this time the Yankees didn’t. Paige finished his warm-up tosses to catcher [Jim] Hegan, the umpire brushed the plate, re-donned his mask and DiMaggio stepped in. It was all between Satchel and Joe. Back in 1937 when the subject of Negro players was all but taboo (and for those whose memories run short, only this paper considered it worthy of a story) the very young Joe DiMaggio had said that Satchel Paige, then already a bitter veteran of the Jim Crow trails, was the best pitcher he had ever faced, bar not a one.
“Now it is 1949, a crucial moment in a hot pennant race. In the anemic make-believes which pass for “baseball” movies, DiMaggio would have to either hit a home run or strike out….In real life this night the Paige of 1949 couldn’t quite keep DiMaggio from connecting solidly, but did keep him from doing much damage. He slipped through two quick strikes and, once ahead, made Joe hit the pitch he wanted him to hit. It was a long, soaring fly to deep left center. The run scored from third, but it was one big out, and the far- from- few Cleveland partisans in the crowd were very happy to get past DiMaggio that cheaply.”
Paige retired the next two hitters and the Indians went on to win the game. Afterward Rodney talked to Paige in the dressing room. The conversation included this:
“You pitched against DiMaggio years ago when he was a youngster, didn’t you?"
‘Yeah,’ the big man said as he finished undressing and stood up, 6-foot, 4-and-1/2 inches of him, to start for the shower. ‘I used to pitch against all of ‘em out on the coast after the regular season.’
“Did Joe ever hit you then?”
“Paige laughed as if he knew the answer would surprise me. ‘Yep, he did.’
Once Rodney wrote about going to the Polo Grounds:
“At 11 and 12 I was making the trip from Bensonhurst [Brooklyn] when ‘We’ were playing the damn Giants. No 8th Ave. subway then. Rickety 9th Ave. El, baby, standing on the platform between the cars, wondering with the little iron rail so close to the edge on the old wooden beams whether we would make that turn high above 110th St. Hey, we were going to knock that little left-hander Art Nehf out in the first inning this time.”
After I had gotten to know Rodney well, I was comfortable enough to ask him how he came to join the Communist party. He answered:
“The question could be posed this way: how could so many bright and decent and well-motivated men and women dedicated to a more humane way of life be so stubbornly stupid? You have to begin with our starry-eyed entrancement with the very notion of the world’s first country to proclaim itself socialist and put people above profits.
“The brutish nature of anti-communism, both abroad and here, just confirmed us, and probably delayed our coming to grips with our do-it-yourself brainwashing about the Soviet Union. ….Yet, if it weren’t for the Communists, the Scottsboro Boys would have been lynched, Communists-- not left liberals--went south into Klanville to work for black voting rights…In the early days of the depression, when families were thrown out of their homes for non-payment of rent, I saw only organized Communists, nobody else, carrying back furniture from the sidewalks into the families’ apartments...
“In brief, we felt righteous, and became self-righteous, often insufferable no doubt, and certainly blind to what Old Joe had really wrought…Do I feel badly about having been for so long an apologist for Stalin’s murdering of the socialist dream, and for sundry other simplistics, arrogances and stupidities? Of course.
Do I regret having devoted my prime years to the Communist newspaper and party? Hell no. Best years of our lives, amidst some super people, and we did some good.
He also frequently expressed pointed disagreement with pundits who equated rank-and-file Communists with spying.
I once wrote to tell him that a mutual friend had beaten prostrate cancer. He replied:
“I’ve had my problems, though not cancerous. Hey, if “man is made in the image of God,” do you suppose God has prostrate problems?”
©2010 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photo is courtesy of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. This column first posted Jan. 4, 2010.
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