Remembering Pee Wee Reese, Who Rose Above Racism and Changed America. Happy Birthday!
As Captain of the post-war Brooklyn Dodgers, Pee Wee Reese of Louisville embraced Jackie Robinson as a good man who could help his team, and the result echoes yet.
Pee Wee Reese is in the center with a can of Schlitz in his hand. Jackie Robinson is beside him and the black hand of Roy Campanella is on Pee Wee’s shoulder.
“But It Was Pee Wee Most of All.”
by Terry Holland
Louisville has a new ball park. It has grass and seats close to the field and emanations of an earlier, romantic time when baseball reigned as the national pastime. Louisville had a baseball hero in that amber era, a player whose performance between the lines and whose decency and dignity off the field brought pride to all who knew him and followed his career. He was Harold Henry Reese, called Pee Wee for his boyhood prowess at marbles, and he was the shortstop, the captain, the heart, and the soul of the Brooklyn Dodgers when they were the team that defined baseball and changed America forever.
The Brooklyn Dodgers weren’t America’s Team. America doesn’t have a team; never did. We’re too big, too diverse, too argumentative for such agreement. We have niches, pockets of people across geography, whose circumstances form coalitions. Chicago’s Cubs, Green Bay’s Packers, Michael Jordan’s Bulls, others, have had solid constituencies bound by pathos, underdoggedness, brilliance, even cable access. Some have the gall to simply call themselves “America’s Team,” as though the repeated shout of the phrase will sufficiently impress. But, as Jell-O nailed to a wall falls under its own weight, so too do the shrieks of sloganeers.
Before Pee Wee, the Dodgers were a team whose hopelessness was so comic, whose players so scruffy, drunk, and clumsy, and whose city so unlikely a place for anything major to be located that they found a fit with a good-sized niche, America’s struggling, Depression-era underclass. If you liked baseball and a good laugh and could face numbing defeat year after year with an unsupportable faith that next year things would get better you were liable to be a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
In the first forty-one World Series, Brooklyn got there twice. In 1916 the Boston Red Sox dispatched them four games to one with the help of a pitcher named Babe Ruth and in 1920 Cleveland did the deed, five to two.
The 1916 Dodgers featured a right-fielder named Casey Stengel who had a lazy fly ball land on his head one day; the next day, as he took his position in the outfield to the jeers and derision he deserved, he tipped his cap to the fans and a bird flew out and away. In 1934, the Dodgers invented the self-inflicted, three-men-on-the same-base, double play.
When the Dodgers missed the Series, they missed by a mile. They lost the National League season race by margins that often had them out of the running by Mother’s Day. In 1905, the second year of the modern World Series, they finished 56 1/2 games back of the pennant-winning Giants. In the nine years between the Stock Market Crash and Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the Dodgers’ average hailing distance from the pennant winner was 21 1/2 games.
In 1939, a new general manager, the alcoholic and brilliant Larry MacPhail, and a new field manager, the contemptible and brilliant Leo Durocher, came on board and the Dodgers began a rise to competitive respectability. Durocher was a playing manager, the shortstop, that first year, but he was showing his age and having trouble going back for the pop fly into short left, so he and MacPhail planned for his transition to the bench by acquiring the contract of Pee Wee Reese from the Louisville Colonels for the startling sum of $75,000.
Pee Wee had begun his professional career in 1938 playing for the Colonels, his hometown team. The Louisville club was purchased in 1939 by Donie Bush and Frank McKinney who then opened a farm team relationship with the Boston Red Sox. Bush and McKinney thought they could sell Reese’s contract to Boston, thinking the Red Sox would see him as Joe Cronin’s successor at shortstop. But Cronin wasn’t ready to step aside so when MacPhail made his offer in July of 1939, just as Pee Wee was turning twenty-one, Bush and McKinney agreed.
“I was very disappointed,” Pee Wee recalled for Peter Golenbock in “Bums,” his 1984 oral history of the Dodgers. “It was July, and I was going to an all-star game in Kansas City, the American Association all-stars against the Kansas City Royals, who were leading the league at that point, and I was on the train, and one of the Louisville writers told me that I had been sold to Brooklyn. I said something like, ‘Gee Christmas, that’s the last place in the world I’d want to go to. All you ever read about is guys getting hit in the head by fly balls, three guys ending up on one base.’ Which was kind of a stupid thing for me to say. It didn’t go over too well in Brooklyn.”
The Dodgers rose to a third-place finish in 1939 and in 1940, Pee Wee’s first year, they finished second. In July, Reese was hit in the head by a pitched ball and missed eighteen games, and in August he broke his ankle sliding into second and was out for the year.
In 1941, Pee Wee started every game at shortstop. He hit only .229 and led the league in errors. The Dodgers battled the Cardinals for the league lead through August and September, and in Boston for a two-game series with the Braves that closed the season, Pee Wee booted a critical ground ball in the first game. But the Dodgers hung on to win the game.
That night, knowing that a Dodgers win and Cardinals loss the next, final day would clinch the pennant, MacPhail ordered Durocher to bench Reese and play himself. Leo considered it long and hard. But he stayed with the kid and the next day Brooklyn won, the Cardinals lost, and the Dodgers had their first pennant in twenty-one years. “In spite of me,” Pee Wee remembered, “we won the pennant.” The New York Yankees awaited.
In the seventh inning of the first game, Pee Wee killed a Dodger rally by getting thrown out going from second to third on a pop-up down the left field line. The Dodgers lost that game 3-2, won the second 3-2 and got back to Ebbets Field with a chance. But they lost the third game 2-1 and fell behind two games to one.
The next day they took a 4-3 lead into the ninth inning. With two out, the bases empty, and two strikes on Tommy Henrich, the Yankees batter, the Dodgers were about to tie the series. Henrich swung at Hugh Casey’s next pitch and missed. Strike three! Game over!
But Mickey Owens, behind the plate, missed the ball and as it rolled to the backstop, Henrich raced to first safely. The game wasn’t over, the Dodgers hadn’t won, the Series wasn’t tied, and fourteen long years of misery had begun.
The next four hitters went single, double, walk, double and those four runs won that game and with their angst, the next. Casey swore the pitch wasn’t an illegal spitball, but Pee Wee had a good view. “It was a little wet slider,” he recalled, “and the ball kind of broke real sharply to the right and kinda got by his glove. We had it in our pocket, and I’m saying, ‘It sure looks like we’re going to get our ass beat.’ And we sure did.” In his first World Series he got four hits in twenty at-bats and made three errors.
The Dodgers may have been better the next year but so was St. Louis. Reese’s batting average rose to .255 and he led the league in putouts, assists, double-plays, and chances per game. Late in September, the Cardinals passed them and won the pennant by two games. The Dodgers won 104 games in the 154 game season, but it wasn’t enough. MacPhail resigned in the last week of the season—the banks had cut off his lavish spending—and over the winter he was replaced by Branch Rickey.
Baseball went to war in late 1942, Pee Wee to the Pacific theater, where he fought with the Third Marine Division. On the way home in late 1945, Pee Wee heard that Rickey had signed three black players, including Jackie Robinson, to contracts with their Montreal farm club with the intention of grooming one of them to break baseball’s color barrier in 1947. Robinson was the one most likely. He had starred in four sports for four consecutive years in his time at UCLA, earning enough letters to start his own alphabet.
“I was coming home from Guam on a ship when somebody came and told me that the Dodgers had signed a black ballplayer,” Pee Wee recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, I can’t believe this.’ And then the guy came back and said, ‘Pee Wee, not only is he black, but he’s a shortstop.’ But I didn’t think a helluva lot about it, not really, until I went to spring training. I told myself, ‘If he’s man enough to take my job, he deserves it.’
“When I was growing up in Louisville, I lived in a poor neighborhood, but there were no blacks around there. There were a few blacks that lived in what we called the alley, not far from us, but they were not allowed in the parks. And they rode in the back of the buses and the back of the street cars. You just thought, ‘That’s the way of life. That’s where they should be.’ That’s the way we were brought up. I hadn’t gone to schools with blacks, no, no, no, oh lordy no. They had their own schools. All the schools were segregated. I can’t say that we really looked down on the blacks. We just thought that that was the way it was supposed to be.”
Robinson trained with the Montreal club in the spring of 1946 and went north with them. Several of the Dodgers circulated a boycott petition putting themselves on record against Robinson and either of the other two black players on the Montreal roster, John Wright and Roy Partlow. When the petitioners’ leader, Dixie Walker, came to Reese, expecting the southern boy to side with them, he was refused. “Dixie was really one of my best friends on the ballclub. He was responsible for my wife and me getting married. He asked me to sign that I wouldn’t play with a black man. I looked at it and I just flatly refused. I just said, ‘Hey look, man, I just got out of the service after three years. I don’t care if this man is black, blue, or what the hell color he is. I have to play baseball.’ I wasn’t trying to be the Great White Father. I just wanted to play ball.”
The issue festered among many of the Dodgers but didn’t affect their play that year. Pee Wee hit a solid .284 and again they fought the Cardinals for the pennant, this time tying in the regular season before losing a three-game playoff in two straight.
In 1947, when Robinson joined the Dodgers, the tension among his teammates was as nothing compared to what he encountered from opponents. Robinson went hitless in his first twenty at-bats but broke out of the slump in Philadelphia. The team traveled then to Cincinnati where Robinson received three death threats. It was less well known that Reese had also been threatened, presumably by southerners disgusted with one of their own playing with a black.
Rex Barney, a Dodgers pitcher, told Golenbock: “I was warming up on the mound and I could hear the Cincinnati players screaming at Jackie, ‘You nigger sonofabitch, you shoeshine boy,’ and all the rest, and then they started to get on Pee Wee. They were yelling at him, ‘How can you play with this nigger bastard?’ and all this stuff, and while Jackie was standing by first base, Pee Wee went over to him and put his arm around him as if to say, ‘This is my boy. This is the guy. We’re gonna win with him.’ Well, it drove the Cincinnati players right through the ceiling, and you could have heard the gasp from the crowd as he did it.”
Barney also recalled a moment in Macon, Georgia, coming up from spring training, when the police reported to Dodgers management that Robinson might be shot if he played. “Jackie and Pee Wee are standing next to each other on the field, and Bruce Edwards and I are standing opposite them playing catch back and forth, and Pee Wee said, ‘Wait a minute, Jack, how about going and standing down there next to Rex?’ Jackie said, ‘Why?’ Pee Wee said, ‘Because if they shoot and miss, I don’t want them to get me.’ Well, that kind of took the edge off.
“That’s one reason Pee Wee was such an instrumental person contributing to Jackie’s success, Pee Wee more than anyone else because Pee Wee was from the South. Pee Wee understood things a little better, and still does. They became very close friends, and they understood each other. Listen, a lot of us did, (Ralph) Branca, (Carl) Erskine, Bruce Edwards, Pee Wee, myself. We did a lot for him. He hadn’t realized that there were people like us around. Thank God for him there were, but it was Pee Wee most of all.”
Not always was Pee Wee’s support so Gandhian. In August, battling the Cardinals again for the pennant, St. Louis’ sensational Enos Slaughter, a North Carolina native, spiked Robinson, playing first, on the calf as he crossed first base. Reese called aside Eddie Stanky, the second baseman, and told him to watch for an opportunity to catch Slaughter coming into second on a ground ball hit to Stanky. “Give me the ball fast so I can get him,” Pee Wee said. But that chance to submarine Slaughter with a hard throw to his chin didn’t come.
Reese hit .284 again in 1947 and Robinson was the Rookie of the Year as the Dodgers pulled away from St. Louis late to win the pennant by five games and earn only their fourth trip to the World Series in the history of the franchise. Once more, they would face the Yankees.
The Series went seven games. The Yankees won the first two at Yankee Stadium and the Dodgers the third at Ebbets Field. In the fourth, the Yankees pitcher, Bill Bevens, had a no-hitter alive with two out in the ninth when pinch-hitter Cookie Lavagetto doubled off the right field wall to score two runners and win the game for Brooklyn. The Yankees won the fifth on a home run by Joe DiMaggio, but the Dodgers won the sixth back in Yankee Stadium as substitute outfielder Al Gionfriddo ended a Yankee rally with an over-the-shoulder catch of a DiMaggio blast 415 feet from home plate. In the seventh game, both Reese and Robinson were thrown out stealing in the first inning. They had stolen five bases between them in the first six games, all off New York’s rookie catcher, Yogi Berra, but Bucky Harris replaced Berra with veteran Aaron Robinson in the final game and the Yankees went on to win 5-2.
Pee Wee’s seven hits, five runs scored, four runs batted in, and three stolen bases were highs for his team. He made one error. He had become a major force on a powerful team, an undisputed star.
The 1947 Brooklyn-New York World Series was the first of six over ten years. In this span, baseball’s golden era and Pee Wee’s prime time, Brooklyn became the crucible of the sport, the team always there or thereabouts, either losing the pennant with enduring drama or winning it and then losing the World Series to the Yankees.
Four of their daily lineup would make it to the Hall of Fame—Reese, Robinson, catcher Roy Campanella, and center-fielder Duke Snider—and a case could be made for several others, including pitcher Don Newcombe, right-fielder Carl Furillo, and first-baseman Gil Hodges whose arrival in 1948 moved Robinson to second base.
The Dodgers of those post-war years were a magnificent team, although more than a little star-crossed. And always, at the center of it, there was Pee Wee.
Roger Kahn, who covered the Dodgers in those years for the New York Herald-Tribune, wrote this of the team and its leader in his memoir, “Memories of Summer.”
“Presiding over this Continental Congress of a baseball team was Harold ‘Pee Wee’ Reese, the shortstop and captain. Raised amid the racism of Kentucky, he had exorcised his own demons and worked quietly to get others to do the same. He didn’t lecture on civil rights. Reese disliked drawing attention to himself. He simply accepted Robinson as a buddy. At a time when a third of the country’s schools were still segregated, Reese and Robinson went to the racetracks together, played cards together, and warmed each other up with a thousand games of catch. Once the games began, they played hit-and-run and executed double plays with something close to genius.
“Reese knew that reporters and photographers and Pullman porters and bellhops had jobs to do that were important to them and significant to their sense of dignity. As team captain, he insisted, usually with success, that the other ballplayers act thoughtfully toward the people around them. Simplistically, Reese was the older brother everyone always wanted to have. In the words of Heywood Hale Broun, he was both a gentleman and a gentle man. Which is not to say he didn’t play rugged, competitive baseball. He was a wonder.”
In the 1949 World Series, New York, now managed by the same Casey Stengel who fielded the fly ball with his head for Brooklyn in 1916, won four games to one as Reese homered and hit .316.
In 1950, Brooklyn staggered late and lost the pennant by two games to Philadelphia.
In 1951, the Dodgers lost a big lead late in the season to the Giants, now managed by Durocher—Rickey had traded him there in 1948, unable to deal with the obnoxious little ferret any longer—and ended up in a three-game playoff.
They lost the first game, won the second, and led the third 4-1 going into the bottom of the ninth. Alvin Dark singled. The Dodgers pitcher, Don Newcombe, was ordered by Charley Dressen, the manager, to hold Dark close at first for reasons known only to madmen. This forced Gil Hodges, playing first, to stay on the bag and Newcombe to pitch from a stretch. They could have let Dark steal second, third, and home and it wouldn’t have mattered. Naturally, Don Mueller singled just beyond Hodges’ reach. Monte Irvin popped out. One down. Whitey Lockman doubled to left, scoring Dark and sending Mueller to third where he broke his ankle sliding into the bag. They carried him off on a stretcher. Bobby Thomson came to the plate. Dressen took Newcombe out of the game and brought in Ralph Branca who had given up a homer to the hot-hitting Thomson in the first game of the playoff. Thomson hit the second pitch out of the park and I stumbled out to the back porch steps and cried until Mom called me in for dinner.
In 1952, in a World Series match with the Yankees that echoes yet, Reese led Brooklyn with ten hits. The Dodgers won games one, three, and five. Pee Wee’s first game homer made him the first Dodger ever to hit two World Series home runs. Pee Wee and Jackie pulled a spontaneous double steal in the ninth inning of the third game and when Berra let the pitch get away they both scored giving the Dodgers a win. In the seventh game, with the Yankees leading 4-2 in the sixth inning on the strength of a Mickey Mantle home run, the Dodgers loaded the bases with one out. Snider popped out to Gil McDougald at third. Then, Robinson lifted a pop fly toward first base that caught in the wind and headed back toward home plate. Joe Collins, at first base, lost the ball in the slanting sunlight and Billy Martin, realizing the problem, ran hard from second base, lunged at the last minute, and made a diving catch. The Dodgers never threatened again. Reese made the final out in the ninth.
“Wait ‘til next year,” had become, over those agonies and frustrations, the off-season plaint of Dodgers fans everywhere, so Kahn started his front-page story the next day in the Herald-Tribune with this: “Every year is next year for the Yankees.”
In 1953, New York killed them again, four games to two. Pee Wee fielded without an error.
In 1954, the Giants ran off from the Dodgers, winning the pennant by eight games.
And then, in 1955, with Reese and Robinson both closing out their careers, Brooklyn won the pennant by 13 1/2 games and once more entered a World Series against the Yankees.
Pee Wee turned thirty-seven that summer and the Dodgers threw him a birthday party. They turned out the lights on a full house at Ebbets Field for Pee Wee Reese Night and 35,000 people held candles and sang Happy Birthday to their hero. They showered him with $20,000 in gifts and let his daughter, Barbara, draw the keys to a new car from among five donated by area dealers. The cars included a Cadillac, a Buick, and a Chrysler Imperial. She took out the keys to the cheapest, a Chevrolet.
Irvin Rudd, who organized the night, told Golenbock: “I’ll never forget Roy Campanella, a lovely, expressive man, his cheek bulging with chew, and he says to me afterward, ‘Irvin, how come you didn’t see that Pee Wee win that Imperial?’ We’re in the clubhouse in front of the whole gang. I said, ‘Gee, the kid picked the key to the Chevy.’ He said, ‘Sheet, man, I’m talkin’ about arrangin’ things.’ I said, ‘Arranging things? You don’t arrange something like that, Campy.’ He got down on his knees and he said, ‘Man, if there was a pile of hoss shit six feet in front of me, and that Imperial was on the other side, I’d wade through the hoss shit to get it.’”
In the first two games of the ’55 Series the Yankees powerful pitching prevailed. Robinson stole home in game one, but Whitey Ford held off the Dodgers. Tommy Byrne won the second and the Series returned to Ebbets Field with the Dodgers in a deep hole. But they won the next three. Robinson dazzled on the bases in game three, and Campanella, Hodges, and Snider homered to carry game four. Snider homered twice in the fifth game and left-fielder Sandy Amoros added another. The Series returned to Yankee Stadium with Brooklyn needing only one win to capture their first-ever World Series.
New York scored five runs in the first inning of the sixth game and Ford held Brooklyn to one run for a 5-1 win, tying the Series at three apiece.
The next day, in the seventh game, Campanella and Hodges produced a run in the fourth with a double and a single. In the Dodgers sixth, Reese singled and Snider, bunting, was safe at first on a throwing error. Campanella bunted, moving the runners to second and third. Hodges scored Reese with a long fly and the Dodgers were up 2-0.
In the Yankees sixth with none out, Billy Martin walked and Gil McDougald bunted safely, putting runners on first and second with Berra coming up. The Brooklyn pitcher, Johnny Podres, was tiring so the Dodgers outfield—Amoros in left, just in for Jim Gilliam, Snider in center, and Carl Furillo in right—played the left-handed Berra to pull to right.
Podres remembered the moment: “I threw a pitch that was high out over the plate, a fastball with something on it, and Berra didn’t get around on it too good and he sliced it to left field. At first when the ball went up I wasn’t too concerned. In fact, when he hit it, I bent over and picked up the resin bag and said to myself, ‘Well, there’s one out.’ But then I looked back and I could see the ball kept slicing toward the line, and when I saw Amoros running his butt off, I thought to myself, ‘Jesus Christ, what’s going on here?’ The ball seemed to hang up in the air forever and there was Amoros, still running. I wondered: Is he going to get it? I know Gilliam could not have made that catch, because he was a righty, and the only way Amoros got it was that he was left-handed and didn’t have to catch it backhanded. As great a catch as Amoros made, his relay to Pee Wee was even better. And Pee Wee, being a great player, knew just what to do with it. Just before he got the ball from Amoros, he took a quick look to see where the runners were, and when he got the ball he didn’t hesitate a second. Pee Wee fired that ball to Hodges and we had McDougald doubled off dead.”
Amoros, in his broken English, recalled the moment. “They didn’t think Yonny Podres had much left and they figured Jogi was going to pull the ball, so they pulled me over to center field. So Jogi hits the ball to the corner down the left field line. I run like hawk. I run to the wall and I figure, ‘I can get it,’ so I catch it, and Pee Wee, he tells me, ‘Give me the ball. Give me the ball,’ and Pee Wee is standing on the line down third base and I throw it to Pee Wee and we make the double play.”
Brooklyn now needed only nine outs. Podres was perfect in the seventh and staggered through a scoreless eighth. In the ninth Moose Skowron hit a one-hop shot back to Podres that was so hard it tore half through the webbing of his glove. “After I fielded the ball,” Podres recalls, “I ran over to first base, struggling to get the ball out of my glove. If I hadn’t, I would have thrown Gil the glove with the ball in it.” One out. Bob Cerv hit a high pop fly that Reese settled under at short. Two out. Elston Howard fouled off six Podres’ fast balls and then, Podres remembers, “Campy called for another fast ball, but I shook him off. I think it was the only time in the whole game I did that. I threw a change-up, and Howard hit a ground ball to Pee Wee at short. When I saw the ball heading for Pee Wee, I couldn’t help thinking how ironic it was that all those years Pee Wee had been trying to beat the Yankees, and now the final out of Brooklyn’s first championship was going to Pee Wee. Then Pee Wee almost made a bad throw, but Gil picked it up easily and we were champions.”
Kahn writes, in “Memories of Summer,” of sitting with Pee Wee that night at the victory party that had been so long in coming.
“You know,” Pee Wee said, “I’ve played in every inning of every Dodger World Series game from 1941 on. I don’t mean to sound boastful, but I’m the only man who has. One thing about all those losses is that they cut a little deeper than the ballgames. You say to yourself, ‘Why can’t my team win a World Series?’ And then you start to wonder about your own character, your own courage.”
“Two out in the ninth,” Kahn said to Reese. “You almost have your first World Series. Elston Howard’s the hitter. Do you remember what you were thinking?”
“Oh sure,” Pee Wee said. “I was thinking, I hope he doesn’t hit the ball to me.”
Not that it matters, but Reese’s eight hits and five runs scored were team highs for the 1955 Series. The numbers Pee Wee put up were always respectable, sometimes spectacular, but he was never about personal statistics. He was about being professional, in some long-forgotten meaning of the word.
The Dodgers lost the Series the next year to the Yankees in seven games, fell to third place in 1957, and then were hauled off to Los Angeles by their owner, Walter O’Malley. Pee Wee went west with them, but played in only 59 games in 1958, as often at third as short, and then retired to a ten-year career in the broadcast booth with Dizzy Dean as his partner.
After that, he came home to Louisville and joined Hillerich & Bradsby. In 1984, he was elected to the Hall of Fame, a little late but better than never.
Pee Wee died in 1997 and baseball mourned and remembered. An old friend, Jim Morrissey, ponied up the money for a statue at the entrance to Slugger Field to make sure baseball fans in Pee Wee’s home town never forgot him. It’s of Pee Wee looking like he’s come up with a ground ball in the hole, turning for the long throw to first. If it had been low, Hodges would have dug it out.
That daughter who drew unlucky in 1955 grew up and married a Louisville man, Tom Dudgeon, who found out one day what a fan I was of his father-in-law and offered to get Pee Wee’s autograph for me. I gave him a ball that carried the autograph of Joe Charboneau, Cleveland’s 1980 Rookie of the Year. Another friend who managed the Cleveland radio station that carried the Indians’ games got it for me in the spring of Super Joe’s sophomore season. Super Joe got 131 hits in 1980 and only 42 in the next two, and last, years of his career. Maybe he hurt himself signing that ball.
Now, the ball, on one side, reads “To Terry, Best Wishes, Joe Charboneau, 1981.” On the other, it reads, “To Terry, Best Always, Pee Wee Reese.” That’s the side that faces out from the wall.