Jackie Robinson Statue Assured

Sometimes you can get a scoop just by standing around at a cocktail party. Especially if the party is at Gracie Mansion and it is Mayor Bloomberg who is offering up the new inside information.“We now have all the money we need to build the Jackie Robinson-Pee Wee Reese statue in Brooklyn,” Mr. Bloomberg volunteered to me Tuesday night. “We have the sculptor’s design approved by the Robinson and Reese families. We got the last couple financial commitments locked in tonight. We will unveil it next June outside the Brooklyn Cyclones ballpark in Coney Island.”I even got a second source at the party: Mark Reese, the filmmaker son of the Dodgers shortstop and captain.“Thanks for all your help,” the son of my childhood hero told me. “The statue is definite now. And I’m going to produce a film for HBO about my dad, Jackie, and the 1947 Dodgers season. I think Billy Bob Thornton will play Dixie Walker.”Dixie Walker was the popular, Southern-born Dodgers right-fielder who tried to organize a mutiny among Robinson’s teammates against playing with him and showering with him. The mutiny collapsed and the man who ran the Dodgers, Branch Rickey, traded Dixie away to Pittsburgh in revenge.One of the most Robinson-friendly Dodgers, Ralph Branca – who won 21 games in 1947 – was at the mayor’s party. Mostly standing alone in a corner. He befriended Robinson as warmly as Reese did, although this is not in most of the history books.The cocktail party was an occasion to thank all those who had helped transform the statue from dream to reality. Since I had started advocating the idea in 1999, along with baseball writer Stan Isaacs, after Reese’s death I was invited to the event and happened to be the only working reporter in the room of 300 baseball fans and Brooklyn nostalgics wearing large type name cards.I got the scoop by default.My original idea, spelled out in a New York Post column that August, was to commemorate a turning point early in the 1947 season, during the Dodgers’ first road trip to Cincinnati – a very Southern city in the 1940s.The fans and the Reds players were viciously taunting both Robinson and Reese before the game. They were after Reese because he grew up in Louisville, just across the Ohio River, and they felt he was being a traitor to Dixie by supporting Robinson and disowning Dixie Walker’s racist mutiny.At a moment when the heckling was almost unbearable in its personal venom, Reese walked over to Robinson, placed his arm around Jackie’s shoulders, and glared at the cursing fans.He literally embraced the target of the bigots.This was not just a good day for baseball. It was a good day for America.The design of the statue captures this defiant gesture of cross-racial solidarity and reconciliation.One of the sweetest moments at the Gracie Mansion cocktail party was the mayor’s recognition and introduction of a teacher, Susan Pavone, from P.S. 7 in Brooklyn (where else?). She and her working-class students raised $250 for the statue, in dimes and quarters, and donated the money to the city. Her students chose the commemorative sculpture as their charity, when they might have raised the money for hurricane relief or the homeless.Something about a history-making friendship of half a century ago between a civil-rights legend and a Southern, white Hall of Fame shortstop, during the era of legal segregation, moved this generation of Brooklyn public school kids and their teacher.The whole statue project will cost $1 million, but that $250 will always be the statue’s heart.Other major contributors are the owners of the Yankees and Mets ($100,000 each); Mr. Bloomberg’s company ($100,000); the Starr Foundation ($107,000); Keyspan ($50,000), and Mayor Giuliani ($10,000.)The morning after my accidental scoop I went to see William Cunningham, Mr. Bloomberg’s communications director, who was a party to my conversation with the mayor. I am cautious by temperament and did not want to discover, after publication, that the mayor was speaking out of an excess of exuberance.Mr. Cunningham stood the story straight up for me.“The statue is getting built,” he said. “Write it.”And it happens that 2005 is the 50th anniversary of the Dodgers’ winning their only World Series.This is the perfect Flatbush karma – and smart politics.

Jackie Robinson Statue Assured

Jackie Robinson Statue Assured

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