Peanuts here get your peanuts!

Peanuts here get your peanuts!

The Nashua Dodgers came here, to play baseball.

In the spring of 1946, a farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

They played here at Holman Stadium in Nashua for only four seasons.

Played the game of professional baseball without big contracts or player agents.

♪ ♪ Some played for the love of the game.

Some played because baseball was all they really knew how to do.

♪ Whatever their reasons for playing, in the end, they gave more than they took.

They gave more to the sport than they took.

They gave more to the city than they took.

♪ What they did was simple, yet for its day, extraordinary.

♪ They simply played professional baseball on a team that excluded no one because of the color of their skin.

♪ A full year before it happened in the major leagues, and seven years before the Supreme Court made it the law of the land.

The color barrier was broken here, first.

This is the story of that team.

Hi, I'm Fritz Wetherbee, and this is New Hampshire crossroads.

♪ ♪ It was the spring of 1946.

World War Two had been over for six months.

The country was beginning to redefine itself.

And so was baseball.

Farm teams sprung up across the country, feeding rural America's hunger for baseball, and giving returning veterans one last shot at the big leagues In New England, eight teams formed one of the most competitive leagues in the nation.

The New England League was class B baseball.

Two steps from the majors.

They played from Portland to Springfield, barnstorming in broken down busses for a seven month, 120 game season.

The play was, was hard, fierce, clean.

You know when you went in to second base, you went in hard.

Break up a double play or something like that.

They played good baseball.

That season, a ticket to see the Nashua Dodgers at Holman Stadium cost $0.75.

[Crowd cheering] For loyal fans, that ticket bought a seat to some of the greatest baseball played outside of Fenway, New England has ever seen.

Players earned about $200 a month and one more shot at becoming the next Ted Williams.

♪ Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe began playing professional baseball as teenagers in the 1930s.

We knew, we were all Negro baseball players, we had to stay in substandard hotels.

We had to travel on a bus.

That was all right, because that was that was our Major League Baseball, the Negro Leagues.

And it was a stepping stone.

It was it was, again, you have to start somewhere.

Well, we started in the Negro Leagues.

♪ Though it was segregated baseball, it was some of the fiercest and most competitive baseball of the day.

Sometimes playing three games a day.

Campanella and Newcombe learned to play baseball with some of the greatest players of all time.

Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Jackie Robinson ♪ By 1946, Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers had earned a reputation as one of the most innovative and respected managers in professional baseball.

In the early 20s, Rickey had made a name for himself by pioneering the use of farm clubs to help train players for his major league teams.

By 1941, Rickey's Brooklyn Dodgers had one of the largest farm systems in baseball.

But in December of that year, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

[Explosion] [Fire roars] In less than two hours, they sunk eight battleships, six destroyers, and they also sunk minor league baseball.

By September of 1945, World War Two was finally over.

With peace came the rebirth of baseball.

Farm teams like the Nashua Dodgers formed in cities and towns across America.

For mill towns like Nashua, minor league baseball was a godsend after four years of war.

Baseball fans throughout rural America were starved for the game.

But like the country itself, baseball had lost many of its best and brightest young men to the war.

With the game in need of talented young prospects, Branch Rickey decided it was time for the all American pastime to finally include all Americans.

Mr. Rickey, this is Jack Robinson.

Rickey told him, he said, uh, He start right out.

He said, all my life I've been looking for a great colored ballplayer.

He said, uh, I have some reason to think that you might be that man.

He said, uh, I need more than a great player.

He said, I need a man that will turn his cheek, that will take insults, abuse, the worst kind of abuse.

A man that'll carry the flag for his race.

With that, Jackie Robinson was signed to the first major league contract offered to an African American in this century.

From Brooklyn, Robinson was sent to the Dodgers northernmost farm team in Montreal, Canada.

Two months later, Brooklyn Dodgers scout Clyde Sukeforth brought a 19 year old pitcher from the Negro Leagues to Branch Rickey's office in Flatbush.

That pitcher's name, was Don Newcombe.

That Brooklyn office, there was always a lot of confusion around there.

Now, having a stockholders meeting or directors meeting in the room where Mr. Rickey is.

So I said, this is too important to ignore.

I pound on the door and opened it up and said, Mr. Rickey that boy has to go.

When shall I tell him to come back?

Well, I go ahead and signed him.

And I said, well, what can I give him?

Well he said treat him like you would a white boy.

Along with Don Newcombe, the Dodgers signed a 26 year old black catcher, named Roy Campanella.

With that, they became the third and fourth blacks signed to major league contracts that first year of integration.

But just signing Newcombe and Campanella to Dodger contracts was only the beginning.

The Dodgers needed a farm team for them to play on.

Most professional baseball teams, especially in the South, refused to play on the same field with blacks.

We were supposed to go to, Danville, Illinois in the Three-I League, and the president of the league said, if you send those so-and-so's out here and I'm not going to use the word that he said, but, he told Branch Rickey, if you send them out, here we’re going to close the Three-I League down and they wouldn't play.

But Mr. Rickey called, Buzzie Bavasi, and they asked him if he would take two Negro baseball players on his team.

If we can find ballplayers within a ten mile radius of Nashua who are as good as Campanella and Newcombe, then we don't want Roy and Don.

But if they can play better than what we have, then we don't care what color they are.

-Buzz Bavasi, Nashua Dodgers manager.

Without a doubt.

I say again, if it wasn't for Buzzie Bavasi, and Walt Alston who was a field manager who accepted us, we, we would have still we would probably have gone back to the Negro Leagues.

[Typewriter clicks] The Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League have assigned two Negro players to their farm club in Nashua, New Hampshire.

They are Donald Newcombe, a six foot four, 22 year old right handed pitcher from Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Roy Campanella, 25, of Philadelphia, said to be the best catcher in Negro baseball.

The Brooklyn club is carrying through on its plan to give deserving Negro players a chance to make good in organized baseball.

New York Times, April 5th, 1946.

I mean, we had a meeting in New York before going.

I left to go to Nashua.

We had a meeting with Jackie Robinson, And he told us how we had to act and how we had to perform, and how we had to be careful of what we said.

You were there to play baseball, and you were there to represent millions and millions and millions of black people, black people, because this is what we were doing.

We were representing black people all over this world, because if we fail, the whole idea would be set back.

As far as New England fandom is concerned, the Negro ballplayers who will wear the colors of the Nashua Dodgers are a cinch to gain and even break or better.

As for the players who make up the league are concerned well, that remains to be seen.

Frank Stawasz, Nashua Telegraph.

Newcombe and Campanella had an agreement they would ride together on the bus.

They didn't want to force any interchanges, and they didn't want any players from the South, because they weren't used to it yet.

And we had some Canadians here.

In fact, one of the reasons they picked Nashua was because there were so many Canadians in the city.

French Canadians, they had a good background, discrimination, and they figured they would accept them.

It was agreed that Newcombe and Campanella would ride together.

They would room together.

And what they did is they checked out certain hotels, when we went on the road to Providence and Portland, Maine, we have two Negro ballplayers.

Would you put up with them?

So they found the hotels that would It was controversial, I mean, there was a lot of southern players, even on the Nashua team and in the New England League who came from the Deep South.

Who really, you know, times were very different then, and the prejudice was much more open and overt.

The two colored boys, who the Dodgers have just signed to play for the Nashua Farm Club, are considered to be the best major league prospects from the colored race that expert scouting could find.

But just being average good players will not suffice for the Nashua Negro Battery.

These two boys will have to be glaring standouts.

Else, they will find the atmosphere much to their dislike.

Even in these parts where color makes little or no difference.

Nashua Telegraph, April 5th, 1946.

On May 9th, the Nashua Dodgers took to the field for the season opener against Lynn Red Sox.

A couple of thousand fans and a handful of sportswriters peppered the stands at Fraser Field in Lynn, Massachusetts, batting fourth in the lineup.

Roy Campanella stepped into the batter's box at the top of the first inning.

For players and fans who saw only the color of his skin that day, Roy Campanella, responded in a way that only a great baseball player can.

Three out of four times at bat, he got on base and capped his first game at Nashua with a towering 440 foot home run in the bottom of the eighth inning.

In the end, the Dodgers lost that day 7-4, but Campanella’s gutsy opening day performance helped to make the team an instant hit for the Nashua fans.

And the guy that gave us the most, uh, you know, interest was Roy Campanella, their catcher.

He wasn't a tall man.

He was fairly stocky, well-built, strong.

And Roy would hit a ball out there well over 400ft.

And by the time the fielder recovered the ball, Roy was trotting across home plate.

It was something awesome to see that guy hit a baseball.

It's no wonder today he's a Hall of Famer.

The fans in Nashua were great fans.

They were nice people and these these people couldn't do enough for us, especially Roy Campanella and I who happend to be the first black players and the only black players in Nashua at the time, in 1946.

And they just treated us royally, and went out of their way to be nice to us, to show us that we were welcome in Nashua.

And really, what it did, it made it easy for Roy and I, to, to do our job as baseball players and not have to worry about, racism and all those things that went on.

♪ By July, the Dodgers were 50 games into their first season and battling for second place in the New England League.

Dodger home games drew 3000 fans a night, one tenth of Nashua’s population in 1946.

In street corners, in the coffee shops, folks in Nashua talked about the game the night before.

[Bat cracks] [Crowd cheering] We hung around the ball field because these were heroes to us.

I was 16 years old at the time, and, it was a pretty big deal.

In town, players became local celebrities.

Children asked for their autographs.

Local businessmen gave them free merchandise.

One local farmer named Jack Fallgren offered a unique incentive every time a player went to bat Well Jack, God bless him, would offer 100 chickens to any Nashua player who hit a home run Well, Roy Campanella was our top home run hitter.

I think he had 13 that year, and he got 1300 chickens and I had 2 or 300.

So I gave em to Roy because I had no way to raise chickens in New Jersey, nowhere to send them to, and, and nobody would raise them for me.

But Roy's father, raised the chickens for him, and I think they sold those chickens.

♪ By August of that season, the Dodgers were on fire.

♪ With 30 games left in the season, they were in second place, just four games behind the league leading, Lynn Red Sox.

Playing gutsy, hard fought baseball, the team earned the respect of both fans and players alike.

♪ The Dodgers have been a credit to this city.

They've offered Nashuans good baseball.

The young men and they are the youngest team in the league have won the hearts of the city, coming from behind, as they did in last night's game, is just another indication of the guts and fight in these kids.

This is why fans go to these games.

The club is never beaten until the last man is out.

Frank Stawasz, Nashua Telegraph.

Don't judge me on the color of my skin.

And we proved that the skin wasn't the factor.

Either you could or you couldn't play baseball.

That was the bottom line.

But there were times when it took more than great baseball to overcome the prejudice.

I thank God for our teammates.

They would fight battles for us.

Walt Alston fought battles for us.

Buzzie Bavasi fought battles for us up in the, up in the office, when Pip Kennedy one night was, was there with his Lynn Red Sox and he was, uh, up there to collect his money, and they made some comment about, about, about the black baseball players on the team.

Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, and Buzzie wouldn't pay him his money, and we took, and offered them outside to fight him if he wanted to fight.

But he wouldn't fight, he didn’t have guts enough to fight Buzzie.

Because Walt Alston was there and, they were they were looking up.

They protected us.

On the field, Newcombe and Campanella had earned reputations as two of the greatest baseball players in the league.

But Branch Rickey had told them this wasn't about just great baseball.

This was about acceptance and tolerance.

Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe were being tested.

[Crowd shouting] For Campanella, the test came during a mid-season home game with the Manchester Giants.

It was the top of the first inning.

A fiery young catcher for the Giants named Sal Evers, stepped into the batter's box.

Campanella crouched behind the plate, and prepared to take the pitch.

Evers stooped, grabbed a handful of dirt, rubbed it into his hands, and then threw it into Campanella’s face.

Spitting dirt from his mouth, Campanella sprang from his crouch, ripped the mask from his face, and charged Evers.

If you ever do anything like that again, Campanella says, I'll beat the living blood out of you.

Sal Evers said nothing.

The Dodgers went on to beat the Giants that day 5-2.

[Applause] We were down in Providence, Rhode Island, and Newcombe and I were both from New Jersey, we were very friendly.

He used to call me homie, you know?

And he was a big man, and we were gonna go into a restaurant to eat.

And they didn’t want Newcombe in there.

So we just turned around and we walked away, Because Newcombe knew what the name of the game was.

We didn't want any confrontations.

So we said, to heck with you, you know, So we went someplace else.

♪ By early September, the Nashua Dodgers had pulled within one game of league leading Lynn Red Sox.

[Radio commentar} A seat to watch the Dodgers play baseball had become the hottest ticket in town.

♪ Our Dodgers rattled baseballs like hail off a window this weekend.

A quick look at the records over the past ten days, we'll disclose that our Dodgers are the hottest thing on the circuit.

That smoke you saw pouring out of Holman Stadium need not alarm local residents.

It was only our Nashua Dodgers, hot as a four alarm fire.

Frank Stawasz, Nashua Telegraph.

The one game that stands out was the final game in the first season.

They had playoffs in those days in baseball, and they called it the Governor's Cup.

And the final game was between the Red Sox, the Lynn Red Sox and the Nashua Dodgers.

On September 9th, the Dodgers took the field for the last game of the season of 1946.

4000 fans packed the stands at Holman Stadium to watch the championship game that day.

Nashua Dodger ball games with the Lynn Red Sox had become bitter and hard fought contests.

That day's game proved to be no exception.

At the top of the eighth inning, the Dodgers were down 2-1 with two men on base and two outs.

Red Sox pitcher Jim Davis adjusted his visor and watched Roy Campanella step into the batter's box.

When fans saw the first game six months ago, they didn't know what to expect when Campanella came up to bat.

That day, they did.

Roy stepped up to the plate in the eighth inning with runners on first and second.

After looking over a number of Davis offerings, found one to his choosing.

Lined at some 475ft to left center field for four bases, three big runs and the ballgame.

Frank Stawasz, Nashua Telegraph.

Campy was the hero and everybody was, he was a star anyway, and uh, because he was most valuable player three times in the majors in a 5 or 6 year period.

And so he's a wonderful athlete.

But with all the adoration, he had his little boy David on his lap, who was at the time probably 5 or 6 years old, and he took a handkerchief out and somehow he by manipulating the handkerchief, he made it look like a bunny.

And David was fascinated by it.

And the rest of us were impressed by the fact that he was a guy in one of his shining hours, was paying attention not to the adoration of the fans, but to his kid.

The fact is that today, the story of the Nashua Dodgers is largely unknown.

But if Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe had been jeered and taunted while at Nashua, if fans had refused to go to games, if there had been fights with teammates, if baseball had taken a backseat to prejudice, then most people today would know who the Nashua Dodgers are.

But fans did not jeer.

They embraced.

They welcomed.

It's been said that the greatest thing about baseball is its history.

And in that great history, there will be forever a place for Nashua and the Dodgers.

♪ ♪