[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 28 (Monday, March 16, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2001-S2002]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




CONGRATULATIONS TO LARRY DOBY ON HIS INTRODUCTION TO THE BASEBALL HALL 
                                OF FAME

 Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, I have risen on a few occasions 
before to pay tribute to a good friend and a man I much admire, Larry 
Doby. And I have excellent cause to do so again. Just last Tuesday, 
Larry Doby was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, not only for being 
a great baseball player, but also for being a person of outstanding 
character and drive.
  On July 5, 1947, Larry Doby became the first African-American to play 
in the American League with the Cleveland Indians, only 11 weeks after 
the famed Jackie Robinson stepped onto the major league diamond with 
the Brooklyn Dodgers. Because Robinson was the first African American 
to play professional baseball, Larry has often been overlooked as a 
deserving player of Hall of Fame status. But he is worthy of that 
distinction beyond the shadow of a doubt.
  I knew Larry when we were both students at Eastside High School in 
Paterson, N.J. He had already astounded all his observers by his 
exceptional skill in four sports--baseball, basketball, football and 
track. We would watch with envy and amazement as he won prize after 
prize in any of the sports in which he competed. All who knew him 
believed he would be successful. I was not surprised when he went to 
the Indians, only disappointed that it didn't happen sooner. He had to 
wait his turn, but then played with elegance and class. He waited his 
turn to enter the Hall of Fame, which he also did with same elegance 
and class.
  Mr. President, Larry Doby did more than play a good game of baseball 
in the major leagues. Larry swung at racism with every crack of his 
bat, opening the doors of opportunity to future generations of 
Americans.
  Larry weathered the racist insults and vicious invectives hurled at 
him both on and off the playing field as Jackie Robinson did. While 
traveling, he stayed alone in dingy hotels only for blacks, while the 
rest of his team stayed together across town. The color barrier had 
been broken when Larry started playing, but the blockades of prejudice 
in people's minds against blacks still stand.
  Mr. President, each of us takes a great measure of satisfaction that 
Larry Doby, this great athlete and superb human being, survived all of 
the obstacles put in his way to be recognized as the champion that he 
is. In honor of Larry Doby and his election to the Baseball Hall of 
Fame, I would like to share some recent commentary on this milestone 
with my colleagues. I ask that the text of the articles be printed in 
the Record.
  The articles follow:

                  [From the Star Ledger, Mar. 4, 1998]

                Hall Selection Caps Doby's Hard Journey

                          (By Jerry Izenberg)

       It was the punctuation mark that finally ended baseball's 
     most shameful unfinished business.
       Yesterday, down in Tampa, the Major League Baseball 
     Veterans Committee voted Larry Doby into the Hall of Fame.
       Fifty-one years after he integrated the American League by 
     following an agonizing trail that left him alone and 
     friendless through 90-mph beanball nights and lonely and 
     segregated through separate and unequal days, baseball 
     formally acknowledged the role Doby played in bringing its 
     mores into the 20th century.
       Along with Doby, the committee chose Lee MacPhail, former 
     American League president; ``Bullet'' Joe Rogan, a Negro 
     Leagues pitcher, and George Davis, a turn-of-the-century 
     shortstop.
       When a friend called Doby with the news out in California, 
     where he was visiting former Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe, he 
     spoke, as you might expect, about his wife, Helen, and the 
     bond they share that helped him endure what no man should 
     have had to endure simply because he wanted to play 
     professional baseball.
       He spoke about his grandmother, Augusta, and his mother, 
     Etta, and the quiet dignity they projected to him, starting 
     through his early years in South Carolina and Paterson, and 
     the way that dignity carried him on a journey through 
     baseball's version of Hell.
       And then he paused, because deep within the back roads of 
     his mind there was yet another memory--one of people he never 
     met and whose names he never knew but whose emotions were 
     joined at the heart with the pain he felt as he ran his 
     initiation miles in the kind of spiked shoes nobody else will 
     ever have to fill.
       They shaped his life and he promised he would never forget 
     them.
       He didn't.
       Not after his bat helped win a World Series for Cleveland 
     in 1948 . . . not after he won two American League home run 
     titles . . . not when he couldn't get a job in baseball . . . 
     not later when he wound up as a manager.
       Not then.
       And not yesterday, when the Hall of Fame doors finally 
     swung open for him.
       Not ever.
       In his mind's eye he still sees them--an ocean of black 
     faces in the left-field and center-field seats in St. Louis 
     and Washington, bracketed by the grandstand and the box seats 
     where they were not allowed and by faces that were always 
     whiter than the baseball. And when he thinks of them, he can 
     still hear the echoes of the Niagara roars they triggered 
     that grew in a steady crescendo that seemed to say:
       ``We are here. You can seat us in the outfield and make us 
     come in through the back door but we are not going to go 
     away. Swing that bat, Larry, and remind them that this is our 
     game, too, and we have come to claim a piece of it.''
       ``I always hit well in those parks,'' Doby said. ``I could 
     see them out there in the Jim Crow seats. I felt like a high 
     school quarterback with 5,000 cheerleaders of his own. I knew 
     who was making the noise and I knew where it was coming from. 
     And they made some noise. When I hit a home run, it was 
     deafening.

[[Page S2002]]

       ``Most of them had never been in a major-league ballpark 
     before except maybe for an occasional Negro Leagues game. 
     They weren't comfortable. They were nervous and some of them 
     couldn't afford it. But I knew why they came and I knew what 
     they wanted. Part of this honor today belongs to them.''
       They needed each other. They leaned on Doby with the same 
     intensity that a camel driver leans on the map that will 
     point the way to the next oasis. He, in turn, leaned on them 
     for strength in ballparks in towns like Boston and St. Louis 
     and Washington and . . . well, no place was easy.
       From the very beginning, he was virtually alone . . . alone 
     the day that Lou Boudreau, the Indians manager who didn't 
     want him, introduced him to a roster that felt the same way 
     and, with three exceptions, wouldn't even shake his hand . . 
     . alone that first day when he went out to warm up and nobody 
     would throw him the ball until Joe Gordon, a class act, waled 
     over and said, ``Are you gonna pose or throw with me?''
       ``I feel relieved,'' he said over the phone yesterday, 
     ``that this is off my shoulders. I never really thought it 
     would happen all these years, but then the last two or three, 
     people started talking about it and I got to thinking about 
     it. And now that it's happened, I thank God that I could make 
     it through all those years without losing my self control, or 
     who knows if Mr. Veeck (Bill, the Indians' owner) would have 
     been allowed to hire other African-Americans?''
       Bear in mind the way it was when Doby became the first 
     African-American in the American League in 1947. That same 
     year, Tom Yawkey, the owner of the Red Sox, had said, 
     ``Anyone who says I won't hire blacks is a liar. I have about 
     100 working on my farm down south.''
       Now, at 73, Doby would be less than human if he did not 
     remember the worst of it as if it were yesterday . . . the 
     Philadelphia shortstop who spit tobacco juice in his face . . 
     . the knockdown pitches that were thrown behind him . . . the 
     red-necked chain of segregated spring-training towns . . . 
     the barrage of beer bottles aimed at the back of his head 
     from the outfield seats in Texarkana . . . the exhibition 
     game crowd that drowned out the announcer with its boos and 
     curses down in Houston and the roar that shot back from the 
     Jim Crow seats when Doby hit the longest homer in the history 
     of the park . . . the times he put on his uniform in all-
     black boarding houses because he was forbidden to use the 
     dressing rooms in Washington and St. Louis and the times, 
     wearing that same Cleveland Indians uniform he had to enter 
     the stadiums through a back door.
       Small wonder there came a time when a heckler's comments 
     about Doby's wife were so vicious and so salacious that 
     Larry, who was in the on-deck circle, dropped his bat and 
     headed into the stands.
       ``I would have been gone except for Bill McKechnie (a 
     coach, who wrestled him to the ground),'' he said. ``He was 
     one of the guys who cared . . . him and Gordon and Jim Hegan. 
     And Mr. Veeck, who I believe did something courageous for 
     America.
       ``I remember something else.
       ``After the World Series game against Boston that I had won 
     with a home run, Steve Gromek (the winning pitcher) and I 
     were photographed embracing. That picture made all the papers 
     . . . a white man and a black man sharing a triumph.
       ``I believe America needed that picture and I'm proud I 
     could help give it to them.''
                                                                    ____


                 [From the Trenton Times, Mar. 5, 1998]

                          Honoring Larry Doby

       The first person to achieve something great gets the fame. 
     The second person to do it often is forgotten. Who was the 
     second pilot to fly the Atlantic solo? The second athlete to 
     run a sub-four-minute mile? The second surgeon to perform a 
     successful heart transplant? Though they faced many of the 
     same physical and psychological obstacles as their 
     predecessors, their names are far less familiar.
       One such ``second'' broke through this veil of obscurity 
     this week. Larry Doby of Paterson, N.J., the second black man 
     to play major league baseball in modern times, was voted into 
     the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, and no one deserved the 
     honor more. Three months after Jackie Robinson took the field 
     with the Brooklyn Dodgers to integrate the National League, 
     Doby was hired by the Cleveland Indian's Bill Veeck to be the 
     first of his race in the American League. Doby suffered the 
     same kind of appalling treatment as the far more famous 
     Robinson--beanball pitches at the plate and brutal tags on 
     the basepaths from opponents, the silent treatment or worse 
     from teammates, boos and insults from fans, segregated 
     accommodations on the road--and he endured it with the same 
     kind of quiet dignity and outstanding on-field performance 
     that distinguished Robinson's career. These unbelievably 
     courageous and self-disciplined men did much to change 
     American attitudes and pave the way for the civil rights 
     revolution of the 1960s.
       Doby's baseball skills were impressive. His bat helped 
     Cleveland win the 1948 World Series, he collected two league 
     home run championships and an RBI title, and he made the all-
     star team seven times. But it was as a pioneer that his place 
     in the history of baseball, and of American society, is 
     permanent.
                                                                    ____


              [From the Asbury Park Press, March 5, 1998]

   Deserving Hall-of-Famer--New Jersey's Larry Doby Earned the Honor

       New Jersey's Larry Doby, the second black man to play Major 
     League Baseball, has always said Jackie Robinson deserves 
     most of the attention for breaking the color barrier in 1947. 
     Yet Doby, the first of his race to play in the American 
     League, faced the same dangers, the same insults and the same 
     pervasive discrimination when he began playing for the 
     Cleveland Indians 11 weeks after Robinson's National League 
     debut.
       One Tuesday, Doby received some long overdue recognition, 
     joining Robinson as a member of baseball's Hall of Fame. Doby 
     helped Cleveland win pennants in 1948 and '54. He led the 
     American League in home runs twice, with eight consecutive 
     seasons of 20 or more. He was a six-time all-star.
       Now 73 and battling cancer, Doby lives in Montclair, where 
     he has made his home since his retirement as a player. But he 
     grew up in Paterson, where he starred at Paterson High. In 
     his honor, the Paterson Museum will keep an exhibit, ``Larry 
     Doby, Silk City Slugger: First in the American League'' open 
     through Oct. 31. Last week, Congress approved a bill to name 
     a post office in Paterson for Doby.
       At the Statehouse ceremony in his honor last year, Doby 
     noted that baseball has ``a ways to go'' to eliminate all 
     vestiges of racism, but that in 1947, the game showed America 
     that people of different races ``could get together and be 
     successful.''
       Because he had to play in a different league with different 
     cities and different players, Doby faced obstacles equal to 
     those of Robinson. He did so with equal dignity and 
     professionalism. It is fitting that he, like Robinson, has 
     been recognized as one of the truly remarkable men who have 
     played the game.
                                                                    ____


                 [From the Bergen Record, Mar. 6, 1998]

                           A Baseball Pioneer

       Larry Doby's baseball statistics only tell half of his 
     story.
       Mr. Doby, elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame on Tuesday 
     by its Veterans Committee, will be remembered by some as The 
     Second. He became the second black player in the major 
     leagues when he signed with the Cleveland Indians in 1947 and 
     its second black manager when he took over the White Sox in 
     the 1970's.
       But Mr. Doby--who grew up in Paterson and starred in four 
     sports at Eastside High School--was as much of a pioneer as 
     Jackie Robinson, who made it to the big leagues 11 weeks 
     before him.
       Both endured hatred and scorn from fans, teammates, and 
     coaches. They were allowed to shine on the field, but 
     couldn't socalize with their teammates and were forced to 
     stay in separate hotels on the road.
       Despite those obstacles, Mr. Doby was a seven-time All-Star 
     and won two American League home run titles. During his 
     career with the Indians, White Sox, and Detroit Tigers, Mr. 
     Doby had a career batting average of .283, knocked in 960 
     runs, and hit 253 home runs.
       And he had some firsts of his own, including being the 
     first black to play in and to hit a home run in the World 
     Series. His election to the Hall of Fame was long overdue.
       More important, by holding his head high and refusing to 
     let racism stop him, Mr. Doby inspired millions and helped 
     open the doors for other black players.
                                                                    ____


          [From the New Jersey Herald and News, Mar. 6, 1998]

                       Larry Doby a Hall of Famer

       Larry Doby, the former Paterson Eastside High School 
     baseball star, should have been elected to the Hall of Fame 
     years ago. But, characteristically, after years of patient 
     waiting, Mr. Doby expressed only joy and excitement earlier 
     in the week when he was finally selected for the honor he 
     certainly earned.
       In 1947, Mr. Doby became the second black to play in the 
     Major Leagues and the first to play in the American League. 
     Mr. Doby, 73, appeared in seven consecutive All-Star games 
     with the Cleveland Indians, became the first black to compete 
     on a World Series championship team, and twice led his league 
     in home runs.
       He was a pioneer, breaking the American League color 
     barrier 11 weeks after Jackie Robinson played his first game 
     for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League.
       Mr. Doby persevered in a racist environment and he paved 
     the way for other blacks to follow in his footsteps. He was a 
     leader in fighting prejudice, although that meant he was 
     often alone and friendless in his pursuit of equality.
       Over the years, both Mr. Doby and Mr. Robinson have talked 
     about the indignities, other players spitting in their faces 
     and being told not to respond.
       It is coincidental but fitting that Mr. Doby is being 
     honored by a display in the Paterson Museum.
       Mr. Doby did not need the Hall of Fame honor to validate 
     either his life or career. However, he fought for this place 
     in sports history, and he has now been formally recognized by 
     the 13-member Veterans Committee for his vast contribution to 
     both baseball and civil rights.

                          ____________________