ABSTRACT
It was Thursday afternoon, October 26, 1950, and a conference room in the Bossert Hotel in downtown Brooklyn was packed to overflowing with New York City sportswriters. "Comest thou here to see the reed driven in the wind?" quipped Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers president and general manager, who was expected momentarily to announce his resignation after eight very event-filled and largely successful years. I Rickey always liked to pepper his conversation with folksy homilies and biblical parables, to the bewilderment of the New York scribes. Only Milton Gross, sportswriter for the New York Post, could identify the source for the "reed driven in the wind" as the Book of Matthew. Rickey frowned in mock dismay when some other ink-stained wretches suggested Gone with the Wind. 2
The New York writers had coined many nicknames for this amazingly complex and fascinating man, whom John J. Monteleone in the introduction to the recent collection Branch Rickey's Little Blue Book: Wit and Strategy from Baseball's Last Wise Man, has accurately called "a capitalistlmoralistlcompetitor/do-gooder/reactionary/visionary all rolled into one.,,3 He was the "Mahatma," because he reminded sportswriter Tom Meany of a combination of "India's independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, your father, and a machine politician.'''' Another nickname was the "Brain," and Harold Burr,
Dodger beat reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, dubbed Rickey the "Great White Father" and called his office the "Cave of the Winds."s The most virulent moniker was "El Cheapo," coined and incessantly used by Jimmy Powers, sports editor of the widely read New York Daily News. 6
Yet there was no doubting that Wesley Branch Rickey was very good at what he did for a living, building championship baseball organizations. At the helm of the St. Louis Cardinals from 1917 until 1942, he pioneered with his first baseball revolution, the farm system of growing and nurturing one's own talent, and the Cardinals became a dynasty second only to the New York Yankees. When he came to Brooklyn after the 1942 season, Rickey built another great farm system and pioneered a second baseball revolution, signing Negro ballplayers hitherto banned by baseball's socalled gentleman's agreement against racial integration. By 1947, the Dodgers had supplanted the Cardinals as the National League's reigning dynasty, and Branch Rickey seemed content to spend the rest of his working career in Brooklyn.
