Thursday, 4/17/97 Glimpse of future in legend’s beginnings
Competition and determination led young talent to UCLA
By Kristina Wilcox Daily Bruin Senior Staff Jackie Robinson
displayed fierce determination and competitiveness from the very
beginning. Those qualities that characterized him as a stellar
athlete, competitor and civil-rights advocate later in life are all
Robinson family traits, passed down from Jackie’s mother, Mallie.
Mallie McGriff Robinson saw the toll of slavery in her own life.
Her father was a slave. As an adult, with five young children, she
lived in slave-like conditions, as her husband Jerry earned a
pittance, while laboring on a plantation near the Florida-Georgia
border. Robinson biographer Harvey Frommer, the author of "Rickey
and Robinson," quotes Mallie as saying, "We’re no better off than
slaves. Things have got to change around here." Things did change
when Mallie told Jerry to ask Jim Sasser, the plantation owner, for
a promotion. It didn’t mean things changed for the better. The
newly-increased income went to Jerry’s head. He spent it wildly,
and on July 28, 1919, he ran off to Florida with someone else’s
wife, never to see his family again. Recovering from this shock was
not made any easier for the Robinsons when Mallie and her family
were ordered off of the land. So Mallie moved her children, the
youngest being Jack Roosevelt (born Jan. 31, 1919), into the home
of a family for whom she had worked as a domestic before her
marriage to Jerry. But this was an awkward situation. In the spring
of 1920, the Robinsons moved again – to Pasadena. After living with
relatives for three years, Mallie saved enough money to buy a house
for her family. They moved into the middle of a predominantly white
neighborhood on 121 Pepper St. She bought it from an African
American man who had acquired the house through a
light-complexioned relative. The neighbors openly objected to the
new family, subjecting them to hostility and prejudice. In her
biography of her late husband, "Stealing Home," Rachel Robinson
recounts a childhood experience of Jackie’s: "When Jack was about
8-years-old, he was out sweeping the sidewalk in front of the house
one day when the little white girl across the street began to yell
‘Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!,’ at him. Jack retaliated by calling her
‘cracker.’ This brought her father storming out of the house, and
he started throwing rocks at Jack. Well, Jack picked up those rocks
and threw them right back until the man’s wife pulled him inside."
Jackie was a member of "The Pepper Street Gang," a group of
multiracial kids who behaved much like the fictitious "Little
Rascals." They would chase rabbits on the grounds of the Rose Bowl,
play pickup games on vacant lots (since their ethnicity only
permitted restricted access to the YMCA), they would swipe fruit
from sidewalk produce carts and collect lost golf balls to sell
them back to the country-club golfers. "We all looked up to
Jackie," former ‘Pepper Street Gang’ member and former Pasadena
Mayor Warren Dorn said in the Frommer biography. "He could hide in
a storm drain, (and could) run out on a golf course and grab a ball
and get back faster than the rest of us." This athleticism carried
into his high school competitions. He lettered in four sports at
John Muir Technical High School – basketball, baseball, football
and track. Rival teams were told to "Stop Robinson." But like Dan
Patrick of SportsCenter says, "You can’t stop him, you can only
hope to contain him." "We tried to make him mad," childhood friend
and junior high school rival Sidney Heard said in the Frommer
biography. "But we soon found out that the madder you made him, the
better he played." After high school, Robinson spent two years at
Pasadena Junior College, where he broke numerous records in those
four sports. At the same Rose Bowl where "The Pepper Street Gang"
had chased rabbits as a child, Robinson returned a kickoff for 104
yards against Cal Tech in the final game of a season. But it was on
another day that a legend was made. On the morning of May 8, 1938,
Robinson broke his brother Mack’s national junior college record in
a Claremont track meet (Mack had earned two medals in the Berlin
Olympics two years earlier). He then raced off to Glendale to play
shortstop for Pasadena Junior College in the Southern California
baseball championship game. Pasadena won, 5-3. With these athletic
skills, Robinson drew attention from colleges across the nation,
but he would choose to continue his college career at UCLA. Jackie
Robinson Foundation Jackie Robinson (second from left) with his
family. Jackie Robinson Foundation Jackie Robinson as a child. The
Jackie Robinson Society Negro Leagues Baseball Online Archives
Major League Baseball Players’ Association’s Jackie Robinson 50th
Anniversary Page Daily Bruin articles: Thanks to Robinson, a new
fan is born Score one for humanity Alumni made new baseball
stadium, name possible