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Someone said, "Ma'am, Pee Wee doesn't work here."
"But," she said, "he wrote a story in yesterday's paper about how to catch popups."
"Oh, that. You'll want to talk to the guy who wrote those stories for Pee Wee."
So the phone went across the desk to Pee Wee's ghostwriter on a series of instructional pieces for young players. The woman said, "I want you to know that my son read what you wrote yesterday."
"Thank you," I said.
"His nose hasn't stopped bleeding yet."
"Oh?"
"Don't you remember what Pee Wee said? To catch a popup, he said to get under the ball and watch it coming down like it's going to hit you in the nose."
"Oh."
"That's exactly what my boy did," the mother said, "and the ball hit him right in the nose."
That poor mother might have been the only person ever with a legitimate beef about Pee Wee Reese.
Such a wonderful life he gave us. You have heard the story about Pee Wee touching Jackie Robinson when lesser men wanted Robinson gone. The story tells us important stuff -- that a white man born and raised in a racially divided nation can treat a man of color the way he would want to be treated.
It happened in Cincinnati, and it happened in Boston. Racists screamed slurs at the black man until the white man from Kentucky walked across the infield and put a hand on Robinson's shoulder. The act said they were in this together. They were black and white, human beings and Dodgers.
There is an even better story. It defines Reese's personality and explains why so many people came to think of him as extraordinary. It tells us about his poise, wit and courage. It tells us why he was the Dodgers' captain and why, half a century later, his friends still call him The Captain.
It happened in Atlanta in 1947. A letter had come to Robinson with a promise that the Ku Klux Klan would kill him if he showed up in that city's Ponce de Leon Park.
That night, as the Dodgers were warming up, Robinson and Reese threw from spots alongside each other. Then Reese looked at Robinson. "Damn, Jackie, get the hell away from me, will you? The guy might be a bad shot."
They laughed and went on throwing. They were Hall of Fame players, and they were better people. In the winter of 1997, preparing a magazine story on the 50th anniversary of Robinson's rookie season, a sportswriter called Reese to talk about Robinson.
"Aw, no," he said. "You know the Jackie stories better than I do by now."
"But, Pee Wee, I need your voice."
"Just don't make me out to be a hero. It took no courage to do what I did. Jackie had the courage. If it had been me, a white man, trying to be the only one in the black leagues, I couldn't have done it. What he had to endure, the criticism, the catcalls -- I wouldn't have had the courage."
"Pee Wee, c'mon . . . "
"Jackie could help us win, I wanted to win, I wanted him on our team. That's it."
On a pure baseball level, that was it. Norm Iler, a Louisville businessman and Reese's friend for 65 years, said, "When Robinson came in, I saw Pee Wee coming out of the service and he said, 'Of course, he's gotta be a shortstop.' (Robinson was moved to first base.) But Pee Wee accepted him. It wasn't to make a statement about race. He saw a great athlete. His interest was in making the Dodgers a better team."
We know that Robinson, coming to a closed door, would have broken it down. Reese simply opened it for him. He made Robinson's baseball life easier. He made baseball's history shinier.
Major league clubs had voted, 15 to the Dodgers' one, to keep black players off their rosters. As dozens of NL players insisted they would boycott games Robinson played, even a cadre of Dodgers demanded he be excluded. Commissioner A.B. (Happy) Chandler ignored the vote and approved the contract.
So Reese's embrace of Robinson was an act of uncommon common decency. Now, on Pee Wee's death at 81, Lexington Herald-Leader sports columnist Billy Reed proposes that a statue be raised at Louisville's new minor league ballpark. And not just any statue. "It ought to be Pee Wee with Jackie," Reed says.
We grow up with heroes. The lucky ones among us have heroes who turn out to be the real thing. I'm luckier than that. I grew up watching the Dodgers, watching the little shortstop who wore No. 1. I grew up wanting to be Pee Wee Reese, and through a newspaper job I met him, and I walked with him in ballparks and I came to know what his friend Norm Iler had always known:
"The way Pee Wee handled himself forever, so gracefully, decently, never trying to impress anybody, accepting people for who they were, he did it without working at it. He was an artist at life."
I own one piece of sports memorabilia. It's a replica of a Dodgers jersey. Its number is 1.
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