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A UMNS Report
By Linda Bloom*
7:00 A.M. EST Feb. 28, 2011
Jackie Robinson, who was also a phenomenal football player before he
switched to baseball and played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, shown in 1954.
Photo by Bob Sandberg, LOOK Magazine. Public domain.
An almost-forgotten link between Jackie Robinson and the Methodist
Church is now residing in the library of the Baseball Hall of Fame in
Cooperstown, N.Y.
The accomplishments that earned Robinson a place in the hall are
well-documented. The first player to integrate professional sports in
America had an impressive 10-year major league career with the Brooklyn
Dodgers.
His activities outside of baseball drew less attention. But a 1958
television program produced by the denomination offers a brief glimpse
of Robinson, who died in 1972 at the age of 53, in the role of civic
leader.
“This film was essentially unknown,” said the Rev. Robert Williams, top executive for the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History.
“The Baseball Hall of Fame was unaware of it. Jackie Robinson’s widow
didn’t even have memories that he had made the film. It seemed to be a
piece that had been totally forgotten.”
It all started with a planned road trip by baseball enthusiasts at the commission and Drew University in Madison, N.J., where the commission is based.
Williams, who grew up in Philadelphia, is a hometown fan who
remembers the 1958 batting average for Richie Ashburn of the Phillies.
Last fall, a colleague from the British Methodist Church, David
Worthington, was planning a U.S. trip and wanted to visit Cooperstown.
“Even though he’s English ... he’s a great baseball fan, especially a
Boston Red Sox fan,” Williams explained.
Williams mentioned the trip to Chris Anderson, Drew’s librarian, who
had previous contact with the Hall of Fame regarding another piece of
baseball memorabilia. “That jogged his memory.”
Looking at old films
While a student at Drew in 2004, Anderson worked on a project related
to films in the Archives and History vault. “We were planning to
digitize them, so we were really creating an inventory of the films,”
Anderson said.
Among the films were episodes of “Talk Back,” a TV program produced
by TRAFCO (Television, Radio and Film Commission) — one of three
predecessor agencies of United Methodist Communications — and
distributed by the Broadcasting and Film Commission of the National
Council of Churches.
While looking at individual film frames of a “Talk Back” episode on a
magnifier, Anderson said, “I noticed someone who looked familiar. I
thought it might be Jackie Robinson, but I wasn’t sure.”
After comparing the frame to images he found on Google, he determined
the identity was correct. “We marked it down as kind of an interesting
thing to find him in this film.”
Anderson, a Cleveland fan, remembers his grandmother talking about
Larry Doby, an African-American player signed by the Indians 11 weeks
after Robinson broke the color barrier, and Bob Feller, a pitcher with a
fastball called “the Van Meter Heater.”
So he decided to join the Nov. 1 road trip to the Baseball Hall of
Fame and asked his father, the Rev. David Anderson, a retired United
Methodist pastor and fellow Indians' fan, to come along. Kevin Newburg, a
Cubs fan and Drew doctoral student, also joined the group. Dale
Patterson, the commission’s archivist, provided the DVD copy they
presented to the hall.
Nelson Price, a retired United Methodist Communications
executive who was a producer for the program after the Robinson
episode, said that “Talk Back” was designed to help local communities
discuss important moral questions.
During the first half of the 30-minute show, actors in a scripted
drama would pose a moral or ethical dilemma. In the second half, a local
panel “discussed possible solutions to moral, ethical and religious
aspects of the question,” Price said.
“For the most part, it was a locally originated program,” he added.
“It really got a lot of pastors and lay persons involved in television
in the early days.”
Serving as moderator
Robinson, then an executive at the Chock Full o’ Nuts company, is not
prominent in the 1958 program, Anderson pointed out, but simply
introduces the morality play and moderates a panel of four respondents.
“His total time on the tape may not be more than two or three minutes,”
he said.
Whether Robinson had a Methodist connection “is still a little
fuzzy,” added Anderson, who cannot confirm if Robinson was a member or
attended a Methodist church at the time of the broadcast period. But
through biographies, he said, he had learned that Robinson’s mother and
grandparents were part of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and
that he attended a Methodist church in Pasadena, Calif., as a young
adult.
Williams surmised that Robinson’s participation in the “Talk Back”
show probably didn’t attract too much attention at the time. Today, he
added, “it’s much more striking to see him in a different role.”
Archives and History has retained the original 16-millimeter
black-and-white episode. Williams and Anderson recently delivered
another DVD copy to the Major League Baseball Productions studio in
Secaucus, N.J., which is doing a documentary on Robinson.
As an archivist, Williams considers the “Talk Back” episode to be an
example of why it is important to keep documents. “Unless we preserve
enough of our story, the past won’t have a future and the future won’t
have a past,” he said.
As a baseball enthusiast, the “back-lot tour” and thank you letter
with a lifetime pass to the Hall of Fame was equally rewarding. “For a
baseball fan, it’s just been great fun,” Williams declared.
*Bloom is a United Methodist News Service multimedia reporter based in New York. Follow her at http://twitter.com/umcscribe.
News media contact: Linda Bloom, New York, (646) 369-3759 or newsdesk@umcom.org.
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