J. Dennis Robinson: Negro League tales redefine baseball

It’s been 65 years since Joe Caliro of Portsmouth tried to contact baseball superstar Jackie Robinson.

Caliro was a training instructor at the time, teaching boot camp classes at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. Caliro was working on a lesson plan to orient young airmen from across the country to the harsh ways of the segregated South. Although the military was integrated, Blacks in the surrounding community were assigned separate water fountains and restrooms and required to sit at the back of the bus.

There was little diversity on base, Caliro recalls, but there were a few Asians and African American airmen. Caliro, who grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, wondered in 1955 how his Black students would be able to deal with the taunting and racial injustice all around them. How would they cope? For answers, the young instructor wrote to the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers in hopes of reaching Jackie Robinson, the man who had broken the color barrier in Major League baseball.

Robinson had been hired out of the popular, but segregated “Negro Leagues” in 1946 by Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey. After a year of training in Montreal, Robinson took the field on April 15, 1947 – the first public appearance of a Black player on a white baseball team, according to sports historians, since the late 1880s. Despite threatened strikes and walkouts by white players, despite rough play by opponents, racial slurs and harsh criticism, Jackie Robinson played on. Soon, the major league teams were tapping the Negro Leagues for their best players including Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Satchel Paige, Minnie Minoso, Willie Mays and many more. The Negro League, begun in 1920, would slowly fade as a result.

In 1950, Robinson enhanced his celebrity by playing himself in “The Jackie Robinson Story.” In the film, an actor portraying team owner Branch Rickey tells Jackie, “We’re dealing with rights here, the right of any American to play baseball, the American game.”

“He can run, he can hit and he can field,” a scout says of Jackie.

“But can he take it?” Rickey asks.

Later in the film, Jackie Robinson tells his girlfriend Rachel “Rae,” (played by actress Ruby Dee), “You marry me now and you’re asking for trouble.”

“All right Jackie,” Rachel says. “I’ll ask for it.”

The collector’s story

If anyone had the coping skills to deal with racial injustice, Caliro figured in 1955, it had to be Jackie Robinson and his wife Rachel. But he got no reply to his letter to the Brooklyn Dodgers. And his base commander at Biloxi decided, at the last minute, it was better to stick to the standard boot camp curricula, and avoid the touchy topic of southern segregation.

Caliro’s interest in Jackie and Rachel Robinson, however, led to his lifetime fascination with the Negro League that officially formed a century ago in 1920. Why, Caliro wondered, had Robinson been selected to break the color barrier?

“He wasn’t the best player in the Negro League at that time,” Caliro says. “But Jackie Robinson had been to college. He had been an officer in the military. He was engaged to a Black woman.” Robinson, in other words, was the safest choice for a risky social experiment. Drafted in the all-white major leagues almost 20 years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Jackie could “take it,” and his charm and talent changed history.

“I was raised in Providence, Rhode Island,” Caliro says. “I played ball with African Americans from the first time I could hold a bat and hit a ball.” Caliro was 6 years old when he saw his first Red Sox game with his father at Fenway Park in Boston. Slugger Ted Williams was a rookie player that year, Caliro later learned. It was Williams who would later promote inclusion of Black players into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

The Caliro collection

Joe Caliro bought his first Negro League baseball in the 1950s and has been hunting down treasured items for six decades. The collecting continued as he and his wife Mary moved on from Mississippi to Omaha, Nebraska. The Caliros settled in Portsmouth when Joe was stationed at Pease Air Force Base. After service in Thailand during the Vietnam War, he returned to Pease, retiring there in 1977 with the rank of master sergeant.

Before online auctions, the collector often worked with agents offering baseballs signed by former Negro League players. Today, his collection includes 55 signed and officially authenticated balls, each archived in its own clear plastic case. He has 376 baseball cards, all featuring major league players who began their careers in the Negro League. There are also reproduction ad placards, photographs, books, videos and all variety of sports memorabilia. The collection includes a pair of racist cartoons by Currier & Ives depicting Black baseball players in the 1880s.

An avowed sports fanatic, after retirement Joe delivered sports color commentary for Continental Cablevision. He also packaged his collection to deliver lectures at libraries in New Hampshire and Maine.

“It took us about three hours to set up each show,” Caliro says. “I brought the whole shebang. It filled about 13 tables.”

After setting out each signed baseball, Joe and Mary placed a black ribbon in front of those players who have died. They reverently laid out a sheet describing the history of each player. Every baseball tells many stories.

“For example, one ball I have is signed by Zack Clayton,” Caliro says. “He played for the Negro League, he played for the Harlem Globetrotters, and he refereed the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.”

While the Caliro Collection focuses on the heyday of the Negro League beginning in 1920, he began each library talk with a quick overview. The murky history of baseball may date to the 18th century with roots in the European sports of cricket and rounders. But it was also played by enslaved Africans in the South who carried the game with them across America after the Civil War. Moses Fleetwood Walker, Caliro points out, was technically the first Black to play for a Major League team in 1883, and the last until Jackie Robinson. African American teams “barnstormed” the nation, playing exhibition games, often in small towns like Portsmouth, long before the rise of the Negro League.

Negro League games were fast, daring and exciting. The players were dynamic, talented and memorable. Their skill, energy and sportsmanship attracted large stadium crowds, sometimes with African American audiences segregated behind a chicken-wire fence.

As he did in his library lectures, Caliro talks about the economy that evolved around the Negro League, how small hotels opened to house the players who, banned from exclusive hotels, had been staying in people’s homes, on buses and in Black churches en route. He talks about the synergy between Black athletes and Black entertainers, especially between baseball players and jazz musicians. Jazz greats including Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong sponsored their own Negro League teams.

He talks passionately about the struggles Negro League players faced to play the game. Treated like heroes in Latin America, in the United States Black players were prevented from eating even in roadside diners. They were denied access to public bathrooms and locker room showers. Caliro recounts the story of one Negro League player who, taking a public bus to practice each day, had to stand on a small painted square at the bus stop until all white passengers had entered. Then the Black baseball player stepped into the bus, paid the driver, and was required to exit again, walk to the back of the bus and enter from the rear door.

It was 1962 before Jackie Robinson was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the first African American to be included. Today, 35 out of 300 players in the Hall started out in the Negro League.

“People came up to me at lectures and said ‘I had no idea they weren’t allowed to play, and I had no idea they weren’t in the hall of fame,’” Caliro says. “That’s what the players lived with, but they persevered because they loved the game”

Extra innings

Joe Caliro never met any of his Negro League heroes. He has yet to visit the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City. The pandemic has curtailed his library lectures. And at age 87, his collecting days may be over.

Will he sell the collection or donate it? Caliro is uncertain. “I would consider donating it to a place where it would be permanently on display,” he says. “But I’m not going to give it to anybody who is going to show it for a week or two and then stick it in a closet. It just means too much to me.”

“I’ve taught all my adult life,” he says, “and I thought this was an important message Americans need to hear.”

Caliro has been telling the story of the unanswered letter he wrote to Jackie Robinson for decades. Now, searching among the artifacts in his collection, he retrieves a sheet of paper encased in a plastic sleeve. It is a reply to another letter he wrote almost 10 years ago.

“I applaud your efforts to keep these historic moments alive,” he reads from the archived document. “It is important for young people to know what came before them. Thank you for your kind words and for taking time out to write. I’m sorry that we did not reply to you 60 years ago.”

The reply is signed by Jackie’s wife, Rachel Robinson. Jackie died in 1972, but Rachel Robinson, now 98, carries on.

Caliro pauses, still holding the letter. He clears his throat. “I prize that,” he says.

Copyright 2020 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved. Dennis is the author of a dozen books on topics including Strawbery Banke Museum, Wentworth by the Sea Hotel, and the 1873 Smuttynose ax murders. His new book, “Music Hall,” named best 2020 history book by the Independent Book Publishers Association, is available at a bookstore near you or at Amazon.com. He can be reached at dennis@mySeacoastNH.com or visit www.jdennisrobinson.com.