Jackie Robinson's Last Home

The address was ninety-five Cascade Road, in North Stamford, in a neighborhood of large houses on wooded lots where the city gives way to something closer to countryside. Jackie Robinson moved here with his wife Rachel after he retired from baseball in nineteen fifty-six, and he lived here for the last sixteen years of his life.

Robinson had broken major league baseball's color line on April fifteenth, nineteen forty-seven, when he took the field at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The years of abuse that followed, the spiked legs and thrown pitches and vile mail and segregated hotels and management that asked him to absorb it without responding, are part of the American record. He absorbed it with extraordinary discipline, won the Rookie of the Year Award that first season, the National League Most Valuable Player Award in nineteen forty-nine, played in six World Series. The Dodgers won one championship with him, in nineteen fifty-five.

After baseball, Robinson lived in Stamford and worked in business and civil rights. He was the first Black vice president of a major American corporation, at Chock Full O'Nuts. He helped establish the Freedom National Bank in Harlem. He spoke at rallies, wrote a newspaper column, pressed the case for economic equality in forums where baseball no longer protected him from consequences.

He was also a father watching his eldest son Jackie Junior struggle with addiction after service in Vietnam. Jackie Junior entered treatment, got clean, and then died in a car accident in nineteen seventy-one, at the age of twenty-four. Robinson did not outlive his son by long. He had been weakened by diabetes and heart disease, nearly blind by the end. He died of a heart attack on October twenty-fourth, nineteen seventy-two, at his home on Cascade Road in North Stamford. He was fifty-three years old.