[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 98 (Friday, July 11, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7315-S7316]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         TRIBUTE TO LARRY DOBY

  Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, 50 years ago this week, a young 22-
year-old rookie named Larry Doby took the baseball field for the first 
time as a Cleveland Indian. Although Larry did not make a hit during 
that first at bat, he did something more: he made history. On that day, 
July 5, 1947, Larry Doby became the first African-American to play in 
the American League. I have had the great privilege of knowing Larry 
since our days growing up together in the streets of Paterson, NJ. I 
have developed a deep admiration for him. I ask that the text of an 
article that appeared recently in the Washington Post that captures 
Larry's character be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                [From the Washington Post, July 8, 1997]

   Neither a Myth Nor a Legend--Larry Doby Crossed Baseball's Color 
                         Barrier After Robinson

                          (By David Maraniss)

       There is only one person alive who knows what it was like 
     to be a black ballplayer integrating the white world of the 
     major leagues during the historic summer of 1947. If you are 
     young or only a casual follower of baseball, perhaps you have 
     not heard of him.
       Larry Doby is 72 years old now, and his calm manner seems 
     out of style in this unsporting age of self-obsession. He is 
     neither a celebrity nor the stuff of myth, simply a quiet 
     hero with an incomparable story to tell.
       This season, as the national pastime commemorates the 50th 
     anniversary of the breaking of the color line, the attention 
     has focused inevitably on the first black player of the 
     modern era, Jackie Robinson, who shines alone in baseball 
     history as the symbol of pride against prejudice. But Doby 
     was there, too, blazing his own trail later that same year. 
     He was brought up by the Cleveland Indians on July 5, 1947, 
     three months after Robinson broke in with the Brooklyn 
     Dodgers. Some of the strange and awful things that happened 
     to No. 42 in the National League happened to No. 14 in the 
     American League as well.
       ``I think I'm ahead of a lot of people because I don't hate 
     and I'm not bitter,'' Doby says softly now. He has spent a 
     lifetime ``turning negatives into positives,'' but he is also 
     sharp and direct in pointing out what he considers to be 
     myths surrounding the events of a half-century ago.
       Jackie Robinson in death has gone the way of most American 
     martyrs, transformed from an outsider struggling against the 
     prevailing culture into a legend embraced by it. In the 
     retelling of his legend it sometimes sounds as though most 
     people always loved him. Doby knows better. He was there and 
     he remembers. After that first season, he and Robinson 
     barnstormed the country with Negro leagues all-stars. They 
     rarely discussed their common experience in white baseball 
     (``no need to, we both knew what the situation was''), but a 
     few times late at night they stayed up naming the players in 
     each league who were giving them problems because they were 
     black.
       It was a long list.
       ``Many people in this world live on lies. Know what amazes 
     me today?'' Doby asks, his deep voice rising with the first 
     rush of emotion. ``How many friends Jackie Robinson had 50 
     years ago! All of a sudden everyone is his best friend. Wait 
     a minute. Give me a break, will you. I knew those people who 
     were his friends. I knew those people who were not his 
     friends. Some of them are still alive. I know. And Jack, he's 
     in heaven, and I bet he turns over a lot of times when he 
     hears certain things or sees certain things or reads certain 
     things where these people say they were his friends.''
       Playing and traveling in the big leagues that year was a 
     grindingly lonely job for the two young black men. Which 
     leads to Doby's second shattered myth: the notion that 
     Robinson, by coming first, could somehow smooth the way for 
     him.
       ``Did Jackie Robinson make it easier for me?'' Doby laughs 
     at his own question, which he says is the one he hears most 
     often. ``I'm not saying people are stupid, but it's one of 
     the stupidest questions that's ever been asked. Think about 
     it. We're talking about 11 weeks. Nineteen forty-seven. Now 
     it's 50 years later and you still have hidden racism, 
     educated racist people. How could you change that in 11 
     weeks? Jackie probably would have loved to have changed it in 
     11 weeks. I know he would have loved to have been able to 
     say, `the hotels are open, the restaurants are open, your 
     teammates are going to welcome you.' But no. No. No way. 
     No way.''


                              The Embrace

       There was no transition for Larry Doby, no year of grooming 
     in the minors up in Montreal like Robinson had. One day he 
     was playing second base for the Newark Eagles of the Negro 
     leagues, and two days later he was in Chicago, pinch-hitting 
     for the Cleveland Indians in the seventh inning of a game 
     against the White Sox. ``We're in this together, kid,'' Bill 
     Veeck, the Indians' owner, had told him at the signing, and 
     that was enough for Doby. He trusted Veeck, then and always.
       Doby was only 22 years old, and his life to that point had 
     been relatively free of the uglier strains of American 
     racism. At East Side High in Paterson, N.J., he had been a 
     four-sport star on integrated teams. He remembers being 
     subjected to a racist insult only once, during a football 
     game, and he responded by whirling past the foul-mouthed 
     defensive back to haul in a touchdown pass. That shut the guy 
     up. In the Navy on the South Pacific atoll of Ulithi during 
     World War II, he had taken batting practice with Mickey 
     Vernon of the Washington Senators and found him to be 
     extremely friendly and encouraging. Vernon later sent him a 
     dozen Louisville Slugger bats and put in a good word for him 
     with the Washington club.
       Wishful thinking. It would be another decade before the 
     Senators broke their lily-white policy, but Veeck, who had 
     both an innate empathy for life's underdogs and a showman's 
     readiness to try anything new, was eager to integrate his 
     Indians as soon as possible. Doby was not the best black 
     player (that honor still belonged to old Josh Gibson), but he 
     was young and talented. Through the Fourth of July with the 
     Newark club in 1947, he was batting .414 with a league-
     leading 14 homers.
       His Newark teammates gave him a farewell present, a kit 
     with comb, brush and shaving cream, but there was no 
     celebration when he took off to join the Indians. ``We looked 
     at it as an important step as far as history was concerned, 
     but it was not the type of thing you would celebrate in terms 
     of justice for all, because you were going to a segregated 
     situation,'' Doby says. ``Maybe someone smarter than me would 
     be happy about that, but I wasn't. You know you're going into 
     a situation where it's not going to be comfortable. That's 
     what you're leaving. What you're leaving is comfortable 
     because you are with your teammates all the time, you sleep 
     in the same hotel, you eat in the same restaurants, you ride 
     in the same car.''
       When Doby was introduced to the Cleveland players that 
     afternoon of July 5 a half-century ago, most of them stood 
     mute and expressionless, essentially ignoring his existence. 
     There were a few exceptions. Second baseman Joe Gordon told 
     him to grab his glove and warmed up with him before the game, 
     a practice they continued throughout the year. Catcher Jim 
     Hegan showed he cared by asking him how he was doing. And one 
     of the coaches, Bill McKechnie, looked after him. ``He was 
     like Veeck, but there every day on the road--nice man,'' Doby 
     recalls.
       But there was no roommate for him on the road, no one in 
     whom he could confide. In every city except New York and 
     Boston, he stayed in a black hotel apart from the rest of the 
     team. Equally troubling for him, he rarely got the chance to 
     play. After starting one game at first base, he looked at the 
     lineup card the next day and was not there. Same thing the 
     rest of the year. The manager, Lou Boudreau, never said a 
     word to him about why he was on the bench. He was used as a 
     pinch hitter, and could not adjust to the role. He finished 
     the year with only five hits and no home runs in 32 at-bats 
     over 29 games.
       After the last game of the season, he was sitting at his 
     locker, wondering if that was the end of the experiment, when 
     McKechnie came over to him and asked whether he had ever 
     played the outfield. No, Doby said, always infield, in high 
     school, college at Long Island University for a year, Negro 
     leagues, the streets, wherever. ``Well,'' Doby recall 
     McKechnie telling him, ``Joe Gordon is the second baseman and 
     he's going to be here a while. When you go home this winter 
     get a book and learn how to play the outfield.''
       He bought a book by Tommy Henrich, the Yankees outfielder, 
     and studied the finer points of playing outfield: what to do 
     on liners hit straight at you (take your first step back, 
     never forward), throwing to the right bases, hitting the 
     cutoff man. He started the next season in right, and within a 
     few weeks was over in center, where he developed into

[[Page S7316]]

     an offensive and defensive star, a key figure on the fearsome 
     Indians teams from the late 1940s to mid-1950s. With Doby 
     driving in more than 100 runs four times and tracking down 
     everything in center, the Indians won the World Series 
     against the Boston Braves in 1948, and lost to the Giants 
     in 1954 after winning a league-record 111 games during the 
     regular season.
       It was during the '48 season that Doby set several firsts. 
     After batting over .300 during the regular season, he became 
     the first African American to play on a championship club and 
     the first to hit a home run in the World Series. His blast 
     won the fourth game that fall against the Braves. In the 
     locker room celebration afterward, a wire service 
     photographer took a picture that was sent out across the 
     nation showing something that had never been seen before: a 
     white baseball player, pitcher Steve Gromek, hugging the 
     black player, Doby, who had won the game for him.
       Doby says he will never forget that embrace. ``That made me 
     feel good because it was not a thing of, should I or should I 
     not, not a thing of black or white. It was a thing where 
     human beings were showing emotion. When you have that kind of 
     thing it makes you feel better, makes you feel like, with all 
     those obstacles and negatives you went through, there is 
     someone who had feelings inside for you as a person and not 
     based on color.''
       It was a rare situation that went easier for the black 
     person than his white friend. Gromek received hate mail and 
     questions from his neighbors when he went home. What are you 
     doing hugging a black man like that? Hey, was his response, 
     Doby won the game for me!
       But the world did not embrace Doby as warmly as Gromek had. 
     In St. Louis one day, McKechnie restrained him from climbing 
     into the stands to go after a heckler who had been shouting 
     racist epithets at him the whole game. His anger erupted one 
     other time in 1948, when he slid into second base and an 
     opposing infielder spit in his face. ``I didn't expect to be 
     spit on if I'm sliding into second base, but it happened. I 
     just thank God there was an umpire there named Bill Summers, 
     a nice man, who kind of walked in between us when I was ready 
     to move on this fella. Maybe I wouldn't be sitting here 
     talking if that hadn't happened. They wanted to find anyway 
     they could go get you out of the league.''
       Al Smith, a left fielder who joined the Indians in 1953 and 
     became Doby's roommate and close friend, said there was one 
     other way opposing teams would go after black players.
       Whenever Al Rosen or some other Indian hit a home run, the 
     pitcher would wait until Doby came up, then throw at him. 
     ``They wouldn't knock the player who hit the home run down, 
     they'd knock Doby down.''
       Common practice in those days, says Doby--he and Minnie 
     Minoso, a Cuban-born outfielder who was an all-star seven 
     years despite not becoming a regular in the major leagues 
     until age 28, and Roy Campanella, a three-time NL most 
     valuable player after playing for the Baltimore Elite Giants 
     of the Negro leagues, were hit by pitches 10 times more often 
     than Ted Williams, Stan Musial and Joe DiMaggio.
       ``You don't think people would do it simply because of 
     race,'' Doby says. ``But what was it? Did they knock us down 
     because we were good hitters? How you gonna explain DiMaggio, 
     Williams and Musial? Were they good hitters? So you see, you 
     can't be naive about this kind of situation.''
       But there was one setting where Doby and the other blacks 
     on the Indians' team felt completely protected--when teammate 
     Early Wynn was on the mound. ``Whenever Early pitched we 
     didn't have any problems getting knocked down. Early, he 
     would start at the top of the opposing lineup and go right 
     down to the bottom. They threw at me, he'd throw at them.''
       The segregation of that era offered one ironically 
     comforting side effect to Doby. Black fans in the late 1940s 
     were directed out to the cheap seats, the bleachers in left 
     and center and right. They were a long way from the action, 
     but very close to Doby. ``When people say, `You played well 
     in Washington,' well, I had a motivation factor there. I had 
     cheerleaders there at Griffith Stadium. I didn't have to 
     worry about name-calling. You got cheers from those people 
     when you walked out onto the field. They'd let you know they 
     appreciated you were there. Give you a little clap when you 
     go out there, and if you hit a home run, they'd acknowledge 
     the fact, tip their hat.''


                           Back to Cleveland

       At the All-Star Game at Jacobs Field in Cleveland on 
     Tuesday, all of baseball will finally tip its hat to Lawrence 
     Eugene Doby. Finally, he will emerge from the enormous shadow 
     of the man he followed and revered, Jackie Robinson. The 
     American League, for which he works as an executive in New 
     York, has named him honorary captain of its team, and he has 
     been selected to throw out the first pitch. The prospect of 
     standing on the field in front of a sellout crowd to be 
     honored has led Doby to think about what has changed since he 
     broke in with the Indians 50 years ago.
       ``A lot of people are complaining that baseball hasn't come 
     along fast enough. And there is much more work to be done,'' 
     Doby says. ``But if you look at baseball, we came in 1947, 
     before Brown versus the Board of Education [the 1954 Supreme 
     Court decision integrating public schools], before anyone 
     wrote a civil rights bill saying give them the same 
     opportunities everyone else has. So whatever you want to 
     criticize baseball about--it certainly needs more 
     opportunities for black managers, black general managers, 
     black umpires--remember that if this country was as far 
     advanced as baseball it would be in much better shape.''
       Doby rises from his chair and walks around his den, taking 
     another look at history. Here is a picture of him at the 
     first of seven straight all-star games to which he was 
     selected. He is posed on the dugout steps with three other 
     black players. ``There's Camp and Newk [pitcher Don Newcombe] 
     and Jackie,'' he says. ``I'm the only American Leaguer, 
     fighting those Dodgers.''
       Nearby is the picture of ``Doby's Great Catch,'' taken in 
     Cleveland in a game against Washington on July 20, 1954. 
     ``What a catch,'' he says softly, sounding modest even in 
     praise, as though it was someone else who climbed that fence 
     to make the play.
       And in the corner is a picture of the football team at 
     Paterson's East Side High back in the early 1940s. One black 
     player in the crowd--the split end. ``I was always the one 
     guy,'' he says, looking at the image of his younger self. 
     Sometimes he was overshadowed or all but forgotten, and in 
     the history books it says he came second, but Larry Doby is 
     right. He always was the one guy.

                          ____________________