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was where Jackie and the rest of us learned that we all have to be brothers and sisters. We didn’t have any racial restrictions. We played together—blacks, whites, Mexicans, Japanese. Anaheim and Long Beach were cities that were very prejudiced. Jack knew this, but he had no fear. He got us playing there because he knew we could play ball and win.
    “Whenever we played, wherever we played, Jack was always the best. The grown-ups, the people from the city yard, used to come and watch us. They would come and watch every evening. They came mainly to see him. He was doing things that you just don’t see young kids do. Jack just excelled in any kind of game, any sport, and he made an individual who played with him play much better.”
    The young Robinson followed the accomplishments of white sports stars, especially Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, and marveled at the way the New York Yankees kept winning. Although Sundays were family days, church days, he would rise at four in the morning and set out on his paper route delivering the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Examiner. He read the sports sections, immersing himself in the·statistics and the glories of the athletic world. Basebalfs color barrier precluded any thought of playing major-league baseball, but he was sure of his talents and sure that his future lay in sports.
    Growing up during the Depression, with no father at home, Jackie took any job that was available. He ran errands; he watered shrubs in the languid Pasadena evenings. He built a shoeshine box and went around polishing shoes. He went to many sporting events where, with one eye on the action and the other on hungry fans, he sold hot dogs. He ate meat sometimes on a Sunday when there was some extra money from his odd jobs and the supplemental employment his mother was able to obtain.
    Growing into manhood, Jack felt new strength. Tall, lithe, and alert, he exuded the healthy handsomeness of a young man in full possession of his powers. He had the look of an earnest, clean-cut American kid, despite the hardships he had been through.
    At John Muir Technical High School, he played with the same frenzy that he displayed on vacant lots with the Pepper Street Gang. He won letters in football, basketball, baseball, and track. Some mistook his will to win and his unwillingness to suffer incompetence gladly as cockiness and arrogance. Teams keyed on him. Rival coaches constructed game plans to cope with Muir Tech teams and ended their lecture with two words: “Stop Robinson.”
    He was the catcher on Muir’s baseball team and played on the Pomona Tournament All-Star squad in 1937. His teammates included outfielder Ted Williams of San Diego Hoover and third baseman Bob Ll;lmon of Long Beach Wilson.
    Robinson;s athletic career in college is the stuff of storybooks. He began inauspiciously as a freshman at Pasadena Junior College. In his first football practice, he broke an ankle. He missed the first four games. Pasadena lost every one of them. When he returned to action, the Bulldogs began a winning streak that did not end as long as Robinson was on the team.
    He was the piston that powered Pasadena to eleven straight triumphs in 1938 and the junior college football championship. Churning out over one thousand yards from scrimmage, he scored seventeen touchdowns and accounted for 131 of his team’s 369 points. He paced Pasadena’s 33-0 victory over San Francisco with a seventy-six-yard touchdown run on the second play from scrimmage; he scored three touchdowns in the game. Against San Bernardino, he ran for three touchdowns and passed for three more. He drew thirty-eight thousand fans to Pasadena’s game against Los Angeles. In a 31-19 victory over Santa Ana, he racked up an eighty-three-yard run, a field goal, and four conversions. More than forty thousand watched him in action against Compton Junior College. He scored two touchdowns and passed for another. In the stands that day was a Compton student named