Free Rickey & Robinson by Roger Kahn Page B

mister
,
    Call me green or blue or red
.
    There’s just one thing that I know, mister
,
    Our hungry babies must be fed
.
    It is instructive to look at the results of the 1932 presidential election.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Democrat
22,821,857
57.3%
Herbert Hoover
Republican
15,761,841
39.6%
Norman Thomas
Socialist
884,781
2.2%
William Z. Foster
Communist
102,991
0.3%
    Although the actual bloc on the far left, 2.5 percent, may not seem large, almost a million Americans—987,772—voted either Socialist orCommunist. Not a mighty wind of change, perhaps, but certainly a noticeable breeze. Subsequently the Communist Party, USA, became a leading advocate for baseball integration.
    In 1933, the year of Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural, none of the 16 major-league clubs drew as many as 750,000 fans at their 77 home games. One club, the St. Louis Browns—sportswriters customarily called them the
Hapless
Browns
—
drew fewer than 100,000—for an entire season. In the National League, the Philadelphia Phillies—in sportswriter jargon the
Phutile
Phillies—drew barely over 150,000. We are talking about gatherings of 1,200 to 2,000 fans on sunny afternoons in ballparks built to hold crowds of 35,000. When my father took me to Ebbets Field during the mid-1930s, we could arrive 15 minutes before game time and find good seats between home plate and first base priced at $1.10. Until I grew taller than the old-fashioned Brooklyn turnstiles, I was admitted free. That was the policy, kids shorter than the turnstile gained free admission, provided, of course, that they were accompanied by an adult who paid for his ticket. (The range went like this: bleachers 55 cents; general admission $1.10; reserved seats $1.65; boxes $2.20. Luxury boxes? There was no such animal.)
    Inside, a nickel bought you a scorecard featuring the lineups and an advertisement for Between the Acts Little Cigars. These scorecards appeared in black and white. Glossy color scorecards had not yet been invented. All game long, vendors bellowed, “Hey, frank ’n’ a roll here!” as they hawked Stahl-Meyer hot dogs. I remember those hot dogs as being just about the finest food on earth. They cost 10 cents. The Gulden’s mustard was free.
    In 1934 the Dodgers drew 434,188 for 70 home dates. Empty seats were the order of the day. The team wasn’t much that year, finishing sixth under a novice major-league manager named Casey Stengel. Only one regular, third baseman “Jersey Joe” Stripp, hit .300. The pitching was mediocre except for the great fireballer Van LingleMungo, who won 18. But losing games was not the greatest problem facing the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc. Unable to pay down their bank mortgage, the Depression Dodgers faced a continuing threat of bankruptcy.
    Our family moved from Alsace, in eastern France, to Brooklyn in 1848, and came to develop great pride in their new native ground. But my father kept his civic pride well damped, except at the ballpark. Here, in casual conversations with other fans, he maintained, among the empty seats, that Brooklyn in truth was a great baseball town. The greatest. “If we had a decent team,” he’d say, “we’d draw a million.” (When the Dodgers won the pennant in 1941, after a wretched drought lasting 20 years, home attendance totaled 1,214,910, the highest in the major leagues by a margin of several hundred thousand. Branch Rickey came to agree with my father that Brooklyn was a great and special baseball town. It remained so until Walter O’Malley hijacked the franchise to Los Angeles.)
    Like most other businesses in Depression days, baseball was dominated by frugality. Although Lou Gehrig finally drew $40,000 a year from the Yankees, the average major leaguer’s salary in 1933 was $6,000. Ballplayers took winter jobs as factory watchmen, mill hands and clothing salesmen. (That persisted even into the 1950s when Gil Hodges, the Dodgers’ slugging first baseman, sold Buicks in a Flatbush