Site Where Racial Barrier Was Broken Is Now Blocked By A Wall

Jackie Robinson had quite a day when his Montreal Royals went to New Jersey to open the 1946 International League season against the Jersey City Giants before a sellout crowd of 25,000 fans in Roosevelt Stadium.

Robinson, playing his first game as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Class AAA farm team, banged out four hits in five trips to the plate, including a three-run home run in the third inning. Montreal pounded Jersey City 14-1.

Robinson’s debut with the Royals had a much greater significance than his impressive performance on the field, however. Roosevelt Stadium became the site of the first regular-season game in which an African-American player took the field as a member of a previously all-white professional baseball team. That was huge news in 1946, when the U.S. was essentially a segregated society.

Robinson became the first black player in the Major Leagues the following year when he was promoted to Brooklyn. He was named the National League Rookie of the Year in 1947 and played 10 seasons with the Dodgers. Robinson was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1962.

But Robinson made a contribution to our nation that went far beyond the statistics he compiled as a player. His Major League career broke through the wall of segregation and became a milestone in the civil rights movement. So Robinson’s presence in that nearly forgotten game 63 years ago makes Roosevelt Stadium a legitimate historical landmark just as much as the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina became a landmark after the 1960 sit-ins protesting the store’s refusal to serve black customers.

That Woolworth’s lunch counter is now in the Smithsonian Institution. But Roosevelt Stadium is long gone and all but forgotten. When my brother-in-law Bob Morrow, my nephew John Morrow and I went on our third annual post-Christmas search for ballparks of yesteryear, we found only a few scant reminders of the old stadium.

During the past two Decembers, John, Bob and I have visited the sites of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. The Ebbets Field trek was posted on Jeff Houck’s lively blog, SideSalad, and can be seen at http://sidesalad.net/archives/003056.html.

You can see the story of last year's visit to the Polo Grounds in the Drye Goods entry of January 5, 2008. Each time, I shot a photo of John standing in front of a marker denoting the sites of the stadiums.

I think we’ve discovered a definite trend about what happens to old baseball parks. Like Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, Roosevelt Stadium is now multi-family housing. Unlike the sites of the old New York ballparks, however, there’s no public marker designating the spot where Jackie Robinson started changing the world. Or if there is, the public can’t see it. What once was Roosevelt Stadium is now a gated community called Society Hill.

The guard at the Society Hill gatehouse told us that a stadium had once been there but we couldn’t enter. So instead of the usual picture of John standing in front of a marker, I got a shot of him standing in front of the wall that separates Society Hill from the rest of the world. As near as I can figure, the stadium’s centerfield wall would have been maybe 300 feet behind John, and home plate would have been 700 feet or so from where he’s standing.

The Associated Press photo at the top of this entry shows teammate George Shuba greeting Robinson as he touches home plate after his home run. In those days before high-fives and fist bumps, a handshake was the standard post-home-run greeting of congratulation.

Sixty years after that handshake, New York Times writer George Anderson wrote about the importance of the moment when, for the first time, a white player congratulated a black teammate for hitting a home run. For Shuba, the gesture was automatic.

“Our teammate hit a home run so I shook his hand,” Shuba told Anderson in the 2006 Times story. “It didn’t make any difference to me that Jack was black. I was glad to have him on our team.”

Anderson also reported that Shuba had had a framed copy of that photo hanging in his living room for 40 years.

We found a copy of that AP photo in a Capital One Bank at the Stadium Plaza shopping center near Society Hill. The photo is one of several large pictures of Roosevelt Stadium displayed in the bank’s lobby. But the bank manager wouldn’t let me take shots of those photos without getting permission from her boss, and we didn’t have time to wait for that.

The only other reminder of the ballpark we found was Stadium Pizza, a restaurant in the shopping center.

Roosevelt Stadium was built on an arrowhead-shaped peninsula known as Droyer’s Point that juts into Newark Bay. The ballpark was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration program that was intended to put Americans back to work during the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was designed by architect Christian Ziegler and was considered a prime example of Depression-era Art Deco architecture.

When the stadium opened in 1937, Jersey City Mayor Frank “I am the law” Hague decreed that it would be named Roosevelt Stadium in honor of the president. John P. Gallagher, who was a boy at the time, wrote in a 1984 letter to the editor of the New York Times that “Roosevelt Stadium was our sports palace, playground and pride.” It became one of minor league baseball’s premier ballparks. In addition to hosting the game in which Robinson broke baseball’s racial barrier, the stadium was the site of 14 Brooklyn Dodgers’ home games in 1956 and 1957.

After the 1957 season, the Dodgers announced they were moving to Los Angeles. Jersey City officials scrambled to keep Major League baseball in Roosevelt Stadium, trying to persuade the Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Phillies and Cincinnati Reds to play some of their home games there. But all three teams refused the offer.

The New York Giants of the National Football League played a few exhibition games at the stadium in the early 1960s, and it was used for minor league baseball off and on until 1978, when it was abandoned. By the mid-1980s, Roosevelt Stadium had fallen into serious disrepair.

In 1984, the decaying ballpark was torn down. In his Times letter, John P. Gallagher lamented the destruction of his boyhood memory and had strong criticism for the forces that allowed the stadium to be demolished.

“Yet in our hearts we'll wonder what kind of a society we live in that has so little respect for tradition and destroys the structures that house them . . . .,” Gallagher wrote.

Shumaker saw newspapers' current problems coming decades ago

The Chicago Tribune and its affiliate publications are in bankruptcy, and somewhere in the Great Newsroom in the Sky, Jim Shumaker is shaking his head and muttering a few profanities.

At least, that’s what I want to believe, because the Tribune has long been known as a hard-nosed newspaper, and Shumaker was the epitome of the hard-nosed journalist. But if he were still alive, he wouldn’t let the above lede see the light of publication unless I’d confirmed that not only had he been shaking his head, but I could also quote in exact detail the profanities he’d used.

There’s deep trouble among newspapers across the U.S. Besides the Trib’s bankruptcy, the New York Times is essentially mortgaging its mid-town Manhattan home to keep afloat. And the Miami Herald, once a bastion of journalism excellence, reportedly is up for sale because its owner, the McClatchy Company, also is having cash-flow problems.

Newspapers are suffering from a steep decline in advertising revenue caused by both the emergence of the Internet and the current economic crisis. But there are other reasons, including dramatic changes in the national psyche and our sense of priorities. And Shumaker saw at least part of the change coming decades ago.

As a reporter and editor from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, Shumaker was fearless, stubborn, and driven to find the truth and report it accurately. He hated pomposity and pretense. And he had little use for reporters who avoided the vital nuts-and-bolts news stories and cherry-picked high-profile glamour stories with an eye toward winning awards.

Shumaker was a legend at the University of North Carolina when I was in school there. I wanted badly to get into his news reporting class, but it always filled up.

But I was lucky enough to become friends with him in the mid-1980s when I was managing editor of the News of Orange County, a county seat weekly in nearby Hillsborough. I’d drop by his office on the UNC campus every week or so. By that time, Shumaker had achieved an odd form of celebrity thanks to cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, one of Shumaker’s former students. MacNelly was the creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip “Shoe,” which starred an ill-tempered, quick-witted, sneaker-wearing bird named P. Martin Shoemaker, who was editor of the Treetops Tattler-Tribune.

Everyone around the UNC J-school knew that Shumaker had been the inspiration for MacNelly’s irascible bird/editor. But for the first few years of the strip’s life, the quickest way to get cussed out and booted from Shumaker’s office was to mention the comic strip in his presence.

By the time I started hanging out in Shumaker’s office, he’d accepted the link between himself and the cartoon bird. MacNelly had given Shumaker one of the original drawings for a Sunday “Shoe” strip, and Shumaker had framed it and hung it in his office in Howell Hall. Still, he referred to the strip’s main character as “the buzzard.”

During one of my visits, the subject of journalism awards came up, and Shumaker snorted. Awards mean nothing, he said. He told me about the time he’d been asked by the Florida Press Association to pick three winners from among dozens of news stories submitted by Florida newspapers. “Like a damn fool, I agreed to do it,” he said.

Soon, a big box of newspaper clips arrived. Shumaker opened the box, glanced at the contents, and shoved the box into a corner of his office.

Time passed. The Florida Press Association sent a polite letter gently reminding Shumaker of his obligation to pick three winners from among the entries. He ignored the letter. A second letter, not quite so polite, came to his office. He ignored that one as well.

Finally, a letter that was blunt enough to impress even Shumaker arrived. But it also made him angry. He hauled the box from the corner and dumped the contents into a pile on the floor. “I reached into the pile and started pulling out clips,” he said. “I said, ‘This is first place, this is second place, and this is third place.’ They never asked me to be a judge again.”

Shumaker also was bothered by the students he was seeing in his classes in the mid-‘80s. They weren’t taking his reporting classes to become news hounds. They wanted to learn to manipulate the news, and they wanted to be paid more than they could earn as reporters.

“They all want to go into (bleeping) public relations,” Shumaker said.

Shumaker was still a member of the UNC faculty when he died of cancer in 2000. By that time, what had been the School of Journalism had been reconfigured and re-named the School of Journalism and Mass Communication – a concession, I assume, to the growing trend of managing the news instead of reporting it.

A couple of years ago, I had lunch in Chapel Hill with Phil Meyer, whose advanced reporting class I’d taken at UNC. Before joining the UNC faculty, Meyer was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter in the old Knight Ridder chain. Meyer isn’t as earthy and profane as Shumaker was, but he is every bit the old-school journalist that Shumaker had been.

Our conversation eventually came around to Shumaker. Meyer said that Shumaker had been upset by the changes in the J-School and what he perceived as the dwindling number of old-fashioned journalists on the faculty.

The reasons why newspapers are struggling are complex and varied. But as Shumaker had noted, the roots of the current mess go back at least 25 years, when newspapers began turning away from substantial, in-depth journalism and started focusing more on bottom lines and superficial reporting.

The photo of Jim Shumaker is from the web page http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/shuendow.html

Fort Laramie was a crossroads of the Old West

For much of the 19th century, Fort Laramie, Wyoming was, depending on your point of view, an island of civilization and safety in the trackless prairie or a persistent reminder that your world was steadily being taken away from you.

If you were headed west on the Oregon Trail on a five-month journey to the California gold fields in 1850, Fort Laramie was a welcome sight. You could get a brief rest, have a blacksmith make repairs to your wagon, and stock up on canned goods and other necessities for the rest of your journey.

But if you belonged to one of the Plains tribes of Native Americans, Fort Laramie was a major source of trouble.

The old Army post is now Fort Laramie National Historic Site. I visited there with my sister and brother-in-law a few weeks ago, and was fascinated by the place.

The vista of the surrounding prairie can’t have changed much since the days when troops were stationed there. You’re still in the middle of nowhere, with only brown prairie grass and the trees that line the banks of the Laramie River for scenery. Despite the isolation, however, Fort Laramie was a crossroads of history. Mark Twain, “Wild Bill” Hickok, Wyatt Earp, “Calamity Jane” Cannary, and “Buffalo Bill” Cody were among the thousands who visited the fort or passed through on stagecoaches.

I expected to see the Hollywood version of an Old West fort – the rustic timber palisade with blockhouses at each corner. But Fort Laramie never had a palisade.

Only walls remain of many of the old buildings, but several have been restored to their approximate 19th century appearances.

The barracks, above, housed a company of soldiers.

The sleeping quarters were on the second floor . . .

. . . and mess hall was on the ground floor.

A couple of the officers’ residences also have been restored. This is the entrance to one of them. The house was built in 1884, only a few years before the fort was closed.

This shows the dining room table as it might have appeared for Sunday dinner around 1887.

It was a warm day when we visited Fort Laramie, and I came across this juvenile rattlesnake sunning himself on the graveled walking path. He looks bigger in the photo than he actually was because there’s nothing else to provide perspective. But he was too young to even have his rattle, which the snakes don’t acquire until they start shedding their skins.

There were small signs warning visitors to watch out for rattlers if they ventured off the walking path. I’m sure the soldiers at Fort Laramie had to keep constant watch for them.

The photo at the top of this entry shows soldiers stationed at Fort Laramie in the late 19th century.

Did you vote?

This rustic little community building is a polling place in Martin County, North Carolina. It's just off U.S. 64 a few miles east of Williamston.

Everything I've read says the turnout today is going to be phenomenal. The small parking area was crowded, and people were coming and going while I stopped to shoot these photos around 2 p.m.