HOW I ACQUIRED JACKIE ROBINSON

     I was born in 1941. At around the age of nine, I became obsessed with collecting baseball cards. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby had broken the "color line" in major league baseball by my sixth birthday, and I was childishly unaware of the social change that had taken place in my favorite sport. I only knew that I didn't much like Jackie Robinson, not because he was black, but because he was a thorn in the side of my home town St. Louis Cardinals. Every time the Cardinals and Dodgers played, Jackie Robinson seemed to do something to beat us--steal a base, make a great defensive play, or come up with a key hit. None of this however, diminished my desire to acquire the Jackie Robinson baseball card. I had Reese and Cox, Furillo and Maglie, Snider and Hodges, but even though every nickel I got was spent on baseball cards, Robinson wasn't in my collection. I must have chewed pounds of the flat, brittle pink gum contained in those packs of baseball cards before I finally found "Jackie Robinson, Second Base, Brooklyn Dodgers." There he was in the middle of four other now-forgotten players, covered with that whitish powder (flour?) that kept the cards and gum from sticking together. He wasn't segregated or specially marked and the other cards didn't seem to mind his being there. He was just another baseball card to add to my collection. I realize that life was lived in a simpler time and place for kids then, and I had not learned words like prejudice and bigotry. It was only as an adult that I came to know of the rigors and hardships Jackie Robinson endured during those childhood years of mine. His        selfless contributions to the game of baseball would pave the way for generations of African-American players who followed him. I was fortunate enough to see Jackie play at the old Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, but I don't think he noticed the white kid in the stands. I wonder if he would have seen me as just another kid.

Copyright 2005 Ken Ragan