Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson died at home in Stamford, Connecticut, on October 24, 1972, of a heart attack. He was fifty-three. Diabetes had already taken the sight in one eye. Born Jack Roosevelt Robinson in Cairo, Georgia, on January 31, 1919, and raised in Pasadena, he was a four-sport letterman at UCLA before the Army, a court-martial he beat, and the Negro leagues taught him how much of baseball was not the game. Branch Rickey wanted a man who would not swing at the first insult. Robinson agreed to the restraint for a time and then spent a career deciding, pitch by pitch, when restraint was strategy and when it was another man's comfort. On April 15, 1947, he played first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He stole home, won a Rookie of the Year that had to be invented for him, an MVP, and a World Series, and he did it while hotel clerks and opposing dugouts tried to make the diamond smaller. He retired into coffee, banking, and the NAACP, supported Nixon once and regretted the company, and testified for open housing. Number 42 was retired across the majors the year he died; he lived long enough to see the ceremony and not long enough to grow used to it. Stamford was the suburb where he and Rachel raised three children in a house that was not a museum. Brooklyn remained the borough that had watched him run. The funeral was at Riverside Church in Manhattan. He is buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn, on a slope that looks toward the parks he once crossed in a Dodgers jacket.