By Bernie McCoy

All Saints Day, November 1, dawned, in New York's borough of churches, a beautiful, mild Fall day, giving lie to the ancient neighborhood legend that the only holy days blessed with perfect weather are Passover and Yom Kippur. In the quintessential Brooklyn location of Coney Island, two long-gone, but never forgotten saints from a non-denominational house of worship called Ebbets Field were honored on this, a most appropriate of days.

I took the subway out to Coney Island for the unveiling of a statue honoring Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson. The location is next to Keyspan Park, home of the N Y Mets minor league team, the Brooklyn Cyclones. The first thing I noticed as the train pulled into the Stillwell Avenue station, the final stop before the ocean, was the brand new terminal that had replaced an ancient subway station and an equally old staircase that formerly led a subway rider, perilously, down to Surf Avenue. The new terminal and Keyspan Park are part of a long promised renovation of the Coney Island neighborhood. But, as I walked the two blocks to the ballpark, I noticed that the renovation had not encompassed the entire neighborhood. Graffiti-scarred, abandoned buildings still outnumber the renovated structures, reminding one of Branch Rickey's lament about his downtrodden Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1950s, "we're in the eighth year of a five year rebuilding plan."

But this November day was about the Brooklyn Dodgers and the player that Branch Rickey brought to the major leagues in the most important and far-reaching move in the history of the game. In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first black player in the major leagues promoted by Rickey to play for the Dodgers. Rickey had chosen Robinson carefully and well. Jackie had already experienced blatant racism while a lieutenant in the U S Army and Rickey felt that experience along with Robinson's college education at UCLA made him uniquely capable of withstanding what Rickey knew would be unbearable mental and physical taunts and pressure that would accompany Robinson's arrival in the National League. The taunts came not only from opposing teams and fans, but also from a segment of his teammates on the Dodgers, led by star player, Fred "Dixie" Walker, who circulated a petition in the clubhouse to boycott Dodger games if Robinson played. 

While not all of Robinson's teammates resented his presence, in fact the majority appreciated his ability as a ballplayer, no one publicly supported him, outright, in the clubhouse or on the field. Not until an early season game in Cincinnati.  The details, to this day, remain sketchy. Some reports have the incident occurring during infield practice, others say it happened during the game, itself. What is not in dispute is that the insults from the opposing dugout and the stands were particularly vociferous in Cincinnati, at the time, one of the southern most cities in the major leagues.

Pee Wee Reese was a Louisville native. As the racial slurs and insults crescendoed, Reese, from his shortstop position, deliberately walked across the diamond toward Robinson's first base position. Once there, Reese leaned close to Robinson, put his arm on the bigger man's shoulder and whispered into his ear. To recognize the enormity of this act, recall that this was eight years before Rosa Parks in Montgomery, it was a time of routine discrimination everywhere from restaurants to hotels to drinking fountains. For a white man, a Southern white man, to support a black man in public, let alone, in the magnified atmosphere of a major league baseball park was, at the time, almost incomprehensible.

It was that incident in Cincinnati that prompted the statue that was being unveiled on All Saints Day in Coney Island. What has remained of a rag tag group of musicians called the Brooklyn Sym-phony, who once provided "music" for Dodger fans in Ebbets Field, warmed up the assembled crowd as the sun shown brightly on the new Keyspan Park and the old Coney Island boardwalk. "Juniors", a Brooklyn institution, which is to cheesecake what "Nathan's" in Coney Island is to hot dogs, provided "coffee and...", a must for every gathering of more than five people in Brooklyn. The requisite contingent of politicians was present including the current and future Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who a week later would be re-elected after spending almost $75 million dollars on the effort. The mayor was shadowed closely by the Brooklyn borough president and assorted elected officials. Several of these men spoke from the podium in front of the statue about Robinson and Reese, but in the prompted cadence of most politicians, evoked little or no interest or passion. It was left to the ballplayers' widows to bring nuance and perspective to the event.  Dorothy Reese, married to the Dodger shortstop for 57 years and still with the lilt of the South in her voice, spoke eloquently about the friendship between her husband and Jackie Robinson "on and off the field", noting, "they would have been friends even if they weren't teammates."   Rachel Robinson, who has defined her husband's legacy as a man and athlete for the 33 years he has been deceased, exhibited once again the meaning of quite dignity. She remembered that it was Pee Wee Reese who was the first to act, in the clubhouse and on the field against "some of (Jackie's) teammates" who objected to him as a Dodger.

Finally,  the statue, an eight-foot tall bronze monument, was unveiled. It depicted Pee Wee Reese with his arm once again on Jackie Robinson's shoulder; two baseball players once more canonized in the borough where they were a major part of a religious experience called the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was a good All Saints Day.

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