Word: robinsons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...luck to fall in love with baseball at the start of an era of pure delight for New York fans," she writes. "What a storied lineup my Dodgers had in the postwar seasons: Roy Campanella started behind the plate, Gil Hodges at first, Jackie Robinson at second, Pee Wee Reese at short, Billy Cox at third, Gene Hermanski in left, Duke Snider in center, and Carl Furillo in right...Never would there be a better time to be a Dodger...
Goodwin's tone is serious throughout: she treats her childish, five-year-old fears and reverence for Jackie Robinson with the same kind of gravity with which she later treats her perception of McCarthyism and the problems of adolescence. Bereft of landmarks that indicate change in maturity and voice, one never knows exactly how old Goodwin is at a given moment. On the other hand, growing up is indeed an invisible process--one is seldom conscious of growing older. Thus, the book's greatest problem is also that which lends it the most credibility...
...What Robinson was forced to endure stoically when he came up with the Dodgers was, and remains, unspeakable: beanballs and spikings from opposing players, isolation on the road because he was not allowed to stay with his teammates at segregated hotels, and relentless invective from spectators. His wife Rachel, who went to all the games she could, sat in the stands and helplessly heard her husband called "nigger son of a bitch" and even worse...
Amazingly, Robinson not only triumphed on the field--he was the 1947 Rookie of the Year and the National League's Most Valuable Player in 1949, and he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, his first year of eligibility--but he also retained his humanity. Late in his career he wrote an eloquently spare letter to a white New Orleans journalist who had abused him in print: "I wish you could comprehend how unfair and un-American it is for the accident of birth to make such a difference...
Read today, the simplicity of that sentence seems shocking. Robinson never, despite all the reasons his society gave him for doing so, regretted the color of his skin. He simply believed that race should not affect personal freedoms. He educated, at great sacrifice, his era. His lesson lives in Rampersad's book...