Free Jackie Robinson by Arnold Rampersad Page B

school system was designed to lead them to PJC. Pasadena High School was part of its campus, as its lower division; and the following year, 1938, Muir Tech itself would become the lower division of a new western campus of PJC. Some students attended PJC in order to qualify for entrance into a four-year college or university; others sought simply to complete the first two years of college. The Depression made PJC a deal that few could resist; for the poor, like Robinson, it was a godsend. Tuition wasfree; and with no dormitories, most students lived at home. With teachers said to be first-rate, a lively student body, and a tradition of excellence in sports, PJC enjoyed a local reputation as one of the finest junior colleges anywhere.
    Important for Jack and the sixty or seventy other blacks in a student body that numbered about four thousand, PJC was also among the more liberal institutions in Pasadena. All classes and facilities, including the swimming pool, were open to all students; blacks could attend official school dances without hindrance. Only in dance classes was the color line openly drawn; blacks could enroll only as couples, not as individuals. On the whole, PJC offered a friendly, relaxed environment, where Jack saw many familiar faces from his earlier schoolboy days.
    Already known as an athlete, Jack nonetheless arrived at PJC decidedly in the shadow of his brother Mack, who was also enrolled that semester. Following Jesse Owens’s decision to turn professional, Mack Robinson was now the premier amateur sprinter in the United States; on campus, he was almost a god, although he was only a sometime student, concerned almost exclusively with sports. Since leaving Muir Tech two years previously, he had spent only one semester at PJC, in the spring of 1936, just before the Berlin Olympics. But Mack had stamped his name on PJC athletic history as the college’s “iron man,” who carried the school flag in at least five events—the two elite sprints (100 and 220 yards), the sprint relays, the low hurdles, and the broad jump. No one expected Jack ever to rival Mack’s record. The younger Robinson, slender and wiry in the winter of 1937, weighed little more than 135 pounds—hardly the body of a champion athlete. Still, as Jack settled in at PJC, he set his sights on stardom in three team sports: baseball, probably his first love; basketball, which appealed above all to his passion for team play; and football, which offered the best chance by far for glory. In addition, he expected to compete, with and against his brother, in the broad jump.
    That spring semester, Jack quickly made the baseball team, which played in the Western Division of the Southern California Junior College Athletic Association. With his flashy fielding, steady hitting, and aggressive base running, he soon became a favorite of the Bulldog coach, John Thurman, who had helped develop Jack’s skills the previous summer in a city-sponsored baseball school in Brookside Park. In addition to playing shortstop, Jack was his team’s leadoff batter. Lacking home-run power, but showing a remarkable eye for the strike zone as well as unusual patience, he seldom struck out; one way or another, he usually found a way of getting on base. Once there, in what would become his bedeviling trademark as aplayer, he was a constant threat to steal bases and induce paranoia in opposing pitchers.
    The Bulldog season started slowly; then momentum began to build. PJC crushed the freshmen of the University of California. The Bulldogs lost to Modesto Junior College, the champion junior college team in northern California; in the third inning, however, Jack Robinson “created a sensation” among the spectators, according to the Pasadena
Post,
which also ran Jack’s picture with the story, when he stole second, third, and home to score a run for Pasadena.
    In April, Robinson came into his own. Against the elite University of Southern California freshman team, he went