Branch Rickey Read Online Free PDF Page B

electric shock he received when Jane Moulton, daughter of the owner of Lucasville’s general store, left a Valentine card under his door. Until then, Jane had been the fastest runner of all the girls in school. Her interest in finish lines waned as she began walking with Rickey. The Moulton family store had a sign stating, “Frugality, industry and sobriety are simple virtues any man can cultivate.” Rickey’s family motto was “Make things first, seek the Kingdom of God and make yourself an example.”
    If it had been left to Rickey’s upbringing, he never would have seen Charlie Thomas or even a college classroom. Rickey goes to college against his father’s will. Right up to the son’s last dawn at home, his father insisted that he should be helping on the farm.
    Jane Moulton attended college in Oxford, Ohio, and that was enough for Rickey. He applied to Ohio Wesleyan in the nearby town of Delaware. His baseball catching and football skills were not harmful to his application. At 5:00 a.m. of a chill March morning in 1901, he had breakfast, then took a newspaper, rolled it up, tied a string around it, kissed his mother good-bye, and was off to the railroad tracks. He stood alongside the rails until he heard a train coming out of the darkness. He lit the newspaper and swung it as a torch. The Norfolk and Western train headed for the state capital, Columbus, stopped for him, and he was on his way.
    Ohio Wesleyan had twelve hundred students, mostly from deeply religious Midwestern families. Tuition they charged him was five dollars per semester. For another 50 cents a week, Rickey got a room so small his toes rested against a wall when he slept. In his first day of Latin class, the professor, John Grove, asked Rickey to read from Virgil. Rickey got up, missed words, and stuttered. Grove asked which grammar book he had studied before and Rickey blurted, “Yours.” Which was true. But Branch hadn’t attended high school and knew Grove’s book only from study at the kitchen table. The class shrieked with laughter, which stung Rickey to tears. In his mind he ran over the timetable of trains home; he had arrived with the Norfolk and Western schedule memorized. The next one to Lucasville was 2:10 and he was going to be on it.
    The professor, however, was one of those who thought he was supposed to teach. He told Rickey to show up at 7:30 each morning for special help. This turned Rickey into a grateful Latin student. He now practiced his kitchen-table study habits on library wood and beneath real lighting, with great results. To survive, he waited on tables, which put him close to food, and tended furnaces.
    One winter night I am in Delaware, Ohio, at the college library, and the librarian brings out envelopes holding the details of Rickey’s life at the school. In one of them is a letter that Rickey wrote to an Ohio Wesleyan administrator in 1952.
    â€œI never did go to high school and never saw the inside of one until after I went to Delaware,” Rickey wrote. “I was a preparatory student with two years of so-called prep work to do in order to become a freshman. I carried as many as twenty-one hours in one term and never did catch up with any class until the spring term of 1904. As you know, I did the preparatory work and the four years of college work in 3⅓ years. I often felt that I did not deserve my Bachelor of Literature degree because in many respects I did not work hard enough . . . No boy could have had less money than I had in my first year in college . . . During my first term at Delaware I had one pair of pants, and only one pair of pants, and nobody saw me wear anything else. I cleaned them myself and pressed them myself, and not infrequently, and they saw me through.”
    The YMCA in Delaware, Ohio, had a speakers’ program set up by its part-time secretary, Branch Rickey. They brought in figures such as Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, and Booker T.