Rusty Saber: Chance meeting reveals insight into Jackie Robinson

Joe McAdoo, former chairman of the communication department at Drury University, is on vacation, basking on the beaches in Hawaii. The following column is reprinted from SBJ archives.

It isn't often that we have the opportunity to chat with our heroes. As a boy growing up, my heroes were baseball p1ayers. I never expected to encounter an entire team of them all at once, but I did.

It was 1956. I was flying from Tokyo to San Francisco after completing my military obligation with the U.S. Navy. This was before the days of the big jets we are accustomed to today. I was aboard an old World War II vintage clunker with four engines. Trouble with one of the engines forced us down on Wake Island. We were told that it would take a couple of hours to repair.

It was sultry and there was no place to go to escape the heat. I was cursing my bad luck for having been placed on this airplane, instead of the other military transport that took off from Tokyo at the same time as my plane. I thought of those passengers being home while I was stuck for hours on some hot hunk of coral. Later, I was to find out that the other plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

At the time, however, I didn't know how lucky I was. And I was about to get even luckier.

The word began to spread, slowly at first, before developing into a red-hot rumor. The Brooklyn Dodgers were on the island.

It was no rumor. The Brooklyn Bums were, indeed, on the island. The Dodgers were en route to Japan to play an exhibition game. Their plane also had engine trouble. I had to go see for myself.

Let me put this into perspective. It was October 1956. The World Series had just ended. Any real baseball fan knows what happened in that series. New York Yankees pitcher Don Larsen pitched the only no-hitter in World Series history against the Dodgers just a few days earlier.

These were the "Boys of Summer" long before Roger Angell's book gave them the name. They still played in Brooklyn where they belonged not Los Angeles. They were my heroes.

I wandered into a group of ordinary looking men. Ordinary, until it dawned on me that I was rubbing elbows with the likes of Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese and all the rest. Heroes all. And then I saw him sitting on the wing of an airplane: Jackie Robinson one of my all-time heroes. He had his shoes off, and he was eating ice cream. His hair was gray, and he was heavier than I thought he would be. If they televised games then, I had never seen one. Still photographs and newsreels were all I had to go by. He looked older than the hero in my mind's eye. But he was my hero.

I gathered up all my courage and approached him. I have never before or since heard of a celebrity being as nice to a fan as Jackie Robinson was to me. I told him that he was one of my all-time idols and that my baseball glove was a Jackie Robinson model. He told me that he didn't suppose many white kids had grown up using his glove.

Later, when I was to learn more about Jackie Robinson the man, not just the baseball player, I would understand that his comment came from among the deep scars of racism inflicted on him as he opened up the national pastime to the entire nation.

We sat on the wing of that airplane talking baseball until the Dodgers' plane was repaired. I spent the afternoon talking baseball with Jackie Robinson! And my idol had no feet of clay.

When Jackie Robinson died Oct. 24, 1972, the events of that day on Wake Island came back to me. I realized that in those days I knew how to pick my heroes.