Free Branch Rickey by Jimmy Breslin Page B

through minor league teams. The first would be historic. The other two would follow shortly.
    Scouts Andy High and Wid Matthews pushed as forcefully as they knew how for Newcombe to go first.
    â€œHe has a powerful arm,” Matthews said. “And besides, he is a good hitter. There isn’t a pitcher in either league who can hit like he can.”
    Andy High was even more vehement—Newcombe first.
    If the scouts had their way, the team wouldn’t be stopping at three black players. When the Montreal team needed a second baseman, Mickey McConnell insisted that they get Jim “Junior” Gilliam of the Baltimore Elite Giants. Rickey said, “Try to acquire him for four thousand.” McConnell tried. The Baltimore owner said the team was broke and needed a new bus. For $5,000 Gilliam was Dodgers property, and to acknowledge receipt of their new transportation, Baltimore threw in a pitcher named Joe Black. Sukeforth dived into the pile of files and saw reports that Black was going to win a lot of big-league games.
    There would come a day when Sukeforth told Rickey that he had had the greatest luck imaginable: he got two World Series players for $5,000.
    Rickey answered, “Luck is the residue of design.”
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    As part of his master plan, Branch Rickey took the sport of baseball into politics, of which nobody in baseball today knows anything beyond giving city council members free box seats. Early on a Sunday in 1945, Rickey and his wife drove up to Quaker Hill, near Pawling, north of the city, a place where there was as much money showing as grass, to visit an old friend from college.
    Pherbia and Pinky Thornburg lived splendidly. Pinky had spent many years in China and always was exhilarating in conversation. His wife’s brother was a famous radio commentator, Lowell Thomas, who lived nearby. On the grounds of their golf course was a clubhouse called the Barn, which was a large room of high ceilings and dark wood and a stage where Thomas put on Sunday seminars for residents and visitors. On the walls were pictures of the club’s Nine Old Men softball team, whose roster included Quaker Hill farm owner Thomas E. Dewey, governor of New York. There were pictures of Dewey, in farmer’s overalls hunched forward to pitch, and with Franklin D. Roosevelt, from nearby Hyde Park. One year before Rickey’s visit, the two had squared off in a presidential race, and poor suckers all over the country had taken sides, expected to bring at least hatred to the polls. If the voters ever knew that these enemies were happy to be associated with the same softball team of the rich, they might have realized that it was proper to detest them both.
    An actress named Tallulah Bankhead, a loud dimwit from Alabama, once proclaimed Dewey to be the “little man on the wedding cake.” That caused great giddiness through a couple of elections. But Dewey, the record happens to show, did more for civil rights than any of the giggling Democrats. Branch Rickey knew this as he walked into the clubhouse that Sunday. Here was Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of the state of New York, talking with neighbors. Already, Rickey had met Dewey around state Republican politics. Correct politics were the social conditions for a handshake. But in the informality of the Barn, with Thornburg as his sponsor, Rickey was determined to get help from Dewey. Not jobs for relatives, nor road-paving contracts, nor state grants for the team. Branch Rickey wanted Thomas Dewey to pass a law that would put the first black man into baseball.
    In 1943, somewhere in these Sunday seminars in the cabin on Quaker Hill, Irving Ives, a state assemblyman, got a powerful new idea: all working men are created equal, and that includes circus performers and baseball players and anybody else who has to perform in public, and should not be penalized for any reason, including race. He started writing a law to that effect. He merely had to turn around to