'42' brings back Jackie Robinson memories

We loved Jackie.

It was that simple -- or perhaps love is all memory allows. Maybe everything less worthy is filtered out.

In 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers and general manager Branch Rickey signed the first black player to a major league contract. For the nation, it was a turning point. For kids on 69th Street in Brooklyn -- boys who announced themselves as Reese, Snider and Hodges when stepping up to the plate in daily summer stickball games -- it meant something more tangible. Maybe now, with Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn would at last beat the hotshot, highfalutin' Yankees -- the insufferable Bronx Bombers -- in the World Series, once October rolled around.

Almost anything about Brooklyn tickles my nostalgia reflex, and when the Dodgers are mentioned, I'm lost on memory lane.

So when the movie "42" reached theaters, I headed for the cineplex with the speed of Jackie stealing second -- allowing for age and achy joints, of course.

If suddenly appointed secretary of education (slim chance, given my high school record), I would order the film, drawing its title from Robinson's uniform number and recalling his rookie year, shown in every American classroom.

Is it a great movie? Nope. Like many biopics, "42" is not a study in subtlety. The good guys are very good. The bad, extra-awful. Time is collapsed. Facts are sometimes fudged. If you're looking for penetrating character study or startling psychological insight, sorry. This is history, Hollywood-style.

All that is beside the point.

The virtues of "42" have nothing to do with art -- and just as well. What the movie reveals in bold and simple fashion, and why kids, especially, should see it, is the narcotic lure of hatred, the awesome power of courage, the nobility of work well done despite the odds -- cop, teacher, surgeon, shrink, or ballplayer. Its message is as emphatic as a fastball down the middle. Work hard. Play fair. Don't flinch.

In other words, do like Jackie.

When Robinson arrived, we embraced him as though a brother. Black, white, didn't occur to us. He was a Dodger and therefore heaven-sent. We knew there was a stir in the adult world, some evil churning that was meant to say Jackie didn't belong. To children who knew little about race or the nation's equality struggles, the idea just sounded nuts. Didn't belong? Yeah, sure, and the Wonder Wheel didn't belong in Coney Island. Who would say such a thing?

I'm not claiming Brooklyn -- or my house, for that matter -- was a racial paradise. Later in life I learned that my parents, dear people, had their share of confusion about how blacks and whites should inhabit the same space at the same time. And the borough had plenty of neighborhoods where social attitudes were not exactly liberated. But it is true that when Jackie Robinson came to Ebbets Field, a necessary conversation, long overdue, got going. Still incomplete after all these years, healing of some sort had at least begun.

With broad strokes, "42" recreates the time and its passions and, through the honest and endearing work of Chadwick Boseman, the young actor who played Robinson, showed how much hurt was aimed Jackie's way and how this forthright and intrepid man found the strength and soul to survive.

On the diamond and off, that was the idea -- to endure.

One sunny midsummer afternoon in the early '50s, my father and I headed to Ebbets Field.

Robinson had been with the Dodgers four or five years, but no World Series flag fluttered over the ballpark. Brooklyn finally beat the Yanks in 1955, but -- how could we know? -- bad things were ahead. In 1956, management, incredibly, traded Robinson to the rival New York Giants, prompting him to retire. After the 1957 season, things got worse. Dodgers' owner Walter O'Malley moved the team to Los Angeles. It might have been the moon.

The day Dad and I walked from his job at the General Baking Co. on Flatbush Avenue to Ebbets Field, though, all was bright and beautiful. The only future I contemplated was the Dodgers taking batting practice.

I can't say what Robinson did that day, or if the Dodgers won or lost. I only remember seeing Jackie, and how his number, 42, seemed a sort of statement in itself, a big number for a big man. Robinson looked heroic to me, like all the Dodgers, and I was breathless to be in their presence, dizzy with the sight of white uniforms and brilliant outfield acreage and smoke from my father's Dutch Masters cigar.

Leaving Ebbets after the game, Dad slipped on an empty pack of Lucky Strikes. He hit his knee hard and pain stiffened his face. We took the subway home, Dad, silent. He went to work the next day but the job -- delivering bread -- soon proved too much. He left General Baking and found something else for less money. Bad luck but the way things worked out.

The world changes -- sometimes slowly, sometimes not. Soon, Robinson was out of baseball. The Dodgers were on another coast. Haltingly, the nation was revisiting its promise of liberty and justice for all. Maybe it shouldn't take a movie to remind us that once there was a man for the moment, a brave fellow who never flinched and came forward to say that, in Brooklyn, and America, everyone belongs.