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only one year and four months old, was in his mother’s arms as the train pulled slowly out of Cairo to start the long journey across the continent.

CHAPTER 2

A Pasadena Boyhood
1920–1937
    I might have become a full-fledged delinquent.
    —Jackie Robinson (1972)
    O N A WARM J UNE night in 1920, Mallie Robinson and her band of migrants from Georgia at last reached Los Angeles, California. After a sometimes dreary, more often absorbing ride across the continent, the first vista of the city dazzled her; it was, she wrote home, “the most beautiful sight of my whole life.” The next day, passing through orange groves and winding upward toward the land under the San Gabriel Mountains, the train bearing the party reached its final destination, the city of Pasadena, about a dozen miles from Los Angeles.
    The California weather and scenery were spectacular, the city of Pasadena impressive—but the Georgia migrants started their new life in a shabby cold-water apartment of three small rooms, with a tin tub serving as a kitchen sink, near the railroad station. The next morning, Mallie resolutely began her search for work; except for three dollars sewn into the lining of her petticoat, she was broke. Soon, however, she had landed a job as a maid with a white Pasadena family, on terms she liked: eight dollars a week, and her working day ended in the late afternoon, not into the night as in Georgia. When her employers moved away suddenly, she lost this job; but she soon found another, also with a white family, the Dodges, whose trust and respect she quickly earned. Twenty years later she was still working for them.
    After a few weeks in the cramped apartment, the Robinsons and the Wades moved with Burton Thomas into a roomy house with an ample backyard at 45 Glorieta Street, in the tree-lined northwestern section of thecity. Like all of Pasadena, this area was mainly white; but it also formed the center of Pasadena’s small black population.
    Late in the summer, Edgar and Frank Robinson, ten and nine years old respectively, started school at Grover Cleveland Elementary School nearby; Cora Wade, who was too frail to take a regular job, was in charge of Mack, Willa Mae, and Jack as well as her own children while her husband and Mallie worked. This arrangement worked well for the Robinsons and the Wades, less happily for Burton. Uncle Burton was “really very much a loner,” Willa Mae later recalled, “and he definitely wasn’t used to children.” In 1922, after about two years in Pasadena, Mallie and Sam pooled their money and bought a house at 121 Pepper Street, on an all-white block just to the north of Glorieta. The 1921–22 Pasadena City Directory listed Sam Wade as owner and“Mattie” Robinson as a fellow resident there, but they were co-owners. According to family legend, a black real estate agent employed his light-skinned niece to buy the house, then sold it to Mallie and Sam. However, the county tax assessor’s records indicate only that the property was bought in 1905 by two men, Charles R. Ellis and William H. Harrison, who then sold it in 1922 to Mallie Robinson and Sam Wade.
    Two years later, in 1924, the Wades moved into their own home a few blocks away, at 972 Cypress Street. Mallie then became the sole owner of 121 Pepper Street, where Jack would live until he left home in 1941. In 1939, Mallie would also buy the property next door, 133 Pepper Street, at what was then the corner of Pepper Street and Navarro Avenue (years later, Navarro Avenue would be filled in at that point). In 1946, she acquired a third adjoining lot, at 1302 Navarro Avenue.
    P EPPER S TREET IN 1922 was a working-class district, but the black migrants from rural Georgia now lived in the wealthiest city in the United States, judged according to the size of its population. Twenty years later, despite the ravages of the Great Depression, Pasadena still ranked as “the richest city per capita in America.” Its main thoroughfare, Orange