Nashua Dodgers, the Second Front of Baseball Integration in 1946: Fortuitous Event or Planned Action?

By Charlie Bevis

Note: This article was originally published in Black Ball 10: New Research in African American Baseball History (2021), copyright (C) 2021 McFarland & Company, Inc.

The 2011 biography of Roy Campanella, written by Neil Lanctot, repeats the oft-cited “spurned by Danville, accepted in desperation by Nashua” chestnut to explain why Campanella, the third black ballplayer signed by Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey, played in 1946 for Nashua, New Hampshire, in the New England League rather than at Danville, Illinois, in the Three-I League.¹ Sixty-five years after the signing of Campanella, this story continued as the standard rationale for why Brooklyn’s farm club in Nashua became the second front of baseball integration.

While historians have more than adequately documented how Rickey spent two years planning the primary front for the integration of Organized Baseball to be at Brooklyn’s top farm club in Montreal, Canada, historians have devoted much less time examining how Rickey executed the second front of integration. One notable exception is Jules Tygiel, who did yeoman work in his 1983 book Baseball’s Great Experiment to unearth Nashua’s role in baseball integration. “The national press largely ignored the events at Nashua,” Tygiel writes: “The spotlight in 1946 justifiably belonged to Jackie Robinson. But Rickey’s ‘second front’ in the integration battle was as successful as the primary staging ground in Montreal.”²

However, Tygiel, like nearly all chroniclers thereafter, relies on one piece of evidence to establish how Nashua came to be that second front – Campanella’s recollection of several telephone calls made in March 1946 by Rickey’s assistant, Bob Finch. This recollection forms the foundation for the “spurned by Danville, accepted in desperation by Nashua” explanation that Tygiel fostered to explain how Nashua fortuitously became the second front of baseball integration rather than through planning by Rickey.

But can Campanella’s recollection be relied upon to establish the truth about how Nashua came to be the second front of baseball integration? This article is a case study of the importance to re-examine, or initially locate, information from primary sources before readily accepting the veracity of a longstanding secondary source.

The Original Evidence

The piece of evidence that has been primarily relied upon to posit how Nashua fortuitously became the second front of baseball integration is a story told in Campanella’s 1959 autobiography, It’s Good to Be Alive.³

Following his preliminary meeting with Rickey in October 1945, Campanella received a telegram from the Dodger president on March 1, 1946, asking him to report to Brooklyn by March 10. Campanella then met with Finch at the Dodgers’ offices to discuss signing a contract. Rickey was in Florida due to concerns about Robinson at Brooklyn’s spring training site. “Mr. Rickey feels it would not be wise to have you join the Montreal club at this time,” Campanella quoted Finch about the possibility of going to Brooklyn’s top farm club, at the AAA level. “He suggested I try to place you with our Danville club,” which was in the Three-I League, a Class B league. After Finch called Danville, Campanella quoted Finch as saying, “They don’t want you.” After reassuring Campanella that they’d find a place for him, Finch then said, without making any intervening phone calls, “Mr. Rickey told me to try Nashua. He thinks [Buzzie] Bavasi will take you.” After a phone call to Nashua, Campanella says that Finch told him, “It’s all set. Bavasi will take you.” Finch then added, “Let’s see, this is Tuesday. You come back here Thursday morning ready to go.”⁴ Finch also then mentioned that black pitcher Don Newcombe would join Campanella in Nashua.

The timing of the meeting between Finch and Campanella is important, since March 1 (the date the telegram was sent) was the first day of spring training for the Dodgers at Daytona Beach, Florida. Since Rickey and Finch were both already aware of the racial issues that were brewing in Florida, Rickey appears to have waited for this initial reaction to Robinson before proceeding forward to sign Campanella. Finch, through his words “this is Tuesday,” indicates that he and Campanella met on March 5, which was the day after Robinson first reported to spring training, where the racial issues had further manifested.

Campanella apparently was originally destined to be assigned to Montreal, since Finch said that “it would not be wise to have you join the Montreal club at this time.” This indicates that Rickey initially hoped to have only one front for integration, not two. After Robinson had signed with Montreal in October 1945, Rickey signed his next black player, pitcher John Wright, to a Montreal contract in January 1946. A November 1945 newspaper story about Campanella possibly signing with Brooklyn also indicated that he would join Robinson in Montreal.⁵

It made sense for Montreal be the single front for integration in 1946, given what the Montreal Gazette then described as an “absolute absence here of an anti-Negro sentiment among sports fans.”⁶ Branch Rickey, Jr., who was the longtime Brooklyn farm director, had intimate knowledge of the culture in Montreal to corroborate his father’s research into the relative lack of racial discrimination in Quebec as compared to America.

Tygiel asserts that, other than Class AAA Montreal, only Class B Danville and Nashua offered “real possibilities” for the black players in 1946, since from Class B up “the Dodgers had few teams located outside of the South.”⁷ Brooklyn’s two Class AA farm clubs in Mobile, Alabama, and Fort Worth, Texas, did operate in segregated states, as did three of its five Class B clubs (Newport News, Virginia; Meridan, Mississippi, and Asheville, North Carolina). There were no Class A clubs. Brooklyn did have a second Class AAA club in St. Paul, Minnesota, which could have been ruled out because the American Association to which it belonged had a Southern team in Louisville, Kentucky. More likely St. Paul was not considered because Brooklyn only had a working agreement with that club, rather than outright ownership of it, as Brooklyn did with its Montreal, Danville, and Nashua clubs, where Rickey had complete control of each ballclub.⁸

However, this analysis does not explain the selection of Danville over Nashua, which Finch posited as the preferred location for the second front, which now needed to be implemented given the risk of sending Campanella to Montreal. But Finch provided no indication why Rickey preferred Danville. Rickey could have felt that his established friendship with the president of the Danville club gave him more influence in the handling of the newly signed black players. Rickey had a long history with Robert “Kish” Bookwalter, since Danville had been a farm club of the St. Louis Cardinals from 1925 to 1932, when Rickey was the general manager of the Cardinals.⁹

Danville, though, offered no obvious advantage to grooming black players, especially given its location about 150 miles northeast of St. Louis, near the racially divisive South. Both Rickey and Bookwalter would have been well aware of the adverse racial climate in southern Illinois in 1946. Although Danville has been painted as “redneck territory,” which made Bookwalter reluctant to tackle racial integration in 1946, there are other factors that indicate otherwise. The Dodgers, with Jackie Robinson, played an exhibition game in Danville on June 20, 1947, without incident. The Three-I League was soon integrated in 1949, along with six other leagues in Class B and Class C, during the first year of widespread integration in the minor leagues.¹⁰

The implication is that Bookwalter first heard about the possibility of black players in this March 5 telephone call from Finch. However, this cannot be definitely concluded from the evidence. Does it make any sense to broach this topic at this late stage of the planning for the 1946 season? Would not Rickey, the great planner, who “so carefully orchestrated the integration scenario” through a six-point plan over two years, have devised an alternate plan ahead of time?¹¹

Finch’s phone conversation with Bavasi in Nashua, when he agrees to take Campanella, is even less conclusive. Most troubling is that there was no intervening phone call to Rickey after Danville’s declination, as if Rickey had originally told Finch to call Nashua when Danville declined. And why was Rickey so optimistic (“He thinks Bavasi will take you.”) about Nashua? It all seems too easy, especially since Bavasi was supposedly hearing about the black players for the first time.

Nashua, located 40 miles northwest of Boston, Massachusetts, was a poor candidate for minor league baseball in 1946. The small city last had a minor-league team for an entire season in 1929. Its more recent attempt at supporting a team had been in 1933, when the franchise had been a miserable failure and had become an orphan team within weeks, playing all of its games on the road. During the war years, even with a new WPA-financed ball park in Holman Stadium, Nashua failed to field a team in the semi-pro New England League. Nashua did have a large French-Canadian population, though, which mirrored that favorable characteristic of Montreal.

In retrospect, there are numerous inconsistencies associated with the Finch telephone calls as well as in the relative merits of Danville and Nashua as a playing site for black players. However, that was of no concern until the 1990s. Campanella’s autobiography, published in 1959, gave an imprimatur of credibility to the “spurned by Danville, accepted in desperation by Nashua” story. Following the publication in 1983 of Tygiel’s seminal book on baseball integration, the Campanella version of how Nashua gained its place in the history of baseball integration was recognized for another dozen years. Nashua was viewed simply as a footnote to the primary front in Montreal.

Other Early Evidence

In the 1950s Newcombe went public with the Nashua saga. Although he was not privy to the Finch phone calls in 1946, Newcombe was told about them by either Campanella or Bavasi, who was the Dodgers general manager in the 1950s. The source was likely Bavasi, since Newcombe’s comments often emphasized Three-I League president Tom Fairweather, rather than Danville president Bookwalter.

At a dinner in Nashua in January 1950 that honored him as the 1949 National League Rookie of the Year, Newcombe talked about his assignment to Nashua, which he called “a Cinderella story,” rather than to Danville.¹² An article about Newcombe in the Saturday Evening Post a few months later noted: “Originally, the Dodgers tried to farm him out to Danville, Illinois, but the Three-Eye League’s president made it rather plain that Newcombe wouldn’t be welcome. Nashua proved to be the perfect choice.”¹³ In a 1955 profile in the New York Post, Newcombe was more forthcoming about the role of Bavasi: “Most people don’t know that Mr. Rickey assigned me and Campy both to the Danville, Ill., team in the Class C league. But the president of the league said he didn’t want any Negroes. So Mr. Rickey called up Buzzy Bavasi in Nashua (N.H.) and asked if he objected to Negroes, too. ‘If they can win ball games, I don’t care what color they are,’ Buzzy told him. So you know how I feel about that guy.”¹⁴

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Nashua saga lay in the deep background until Tygiel began work on his 1983 book Baseball’s Great Experiment. Tygiel adds some color to why Bavasi agreed to accept the two black players: “If they can play ball better than what we have, then we don’t care what color they are.”¹⁵ Tygiel did not cite Bavasi as the source for this quote (nor for any material in his book), but rather quotes from Dick Young’s 1952 biography of Campanella. It is unclear where Young acquired this tidbit, since there are no footnotes in his biography. The credibility of the Bavasi quote is somewhat marred by Tygiel’s footnote that is an awkward mash-up of details combed not only from Young’s 1952 biography but also from Milton Shapiro’s 1958 biography of Campanella. Even more awkward, the Bavasi rationale is inexplicably absent from Campanella’s 1959 autobiography.¹⁶

Bavasi confirms this belief in his 1987 autobiography, Off the Record, which removed any stigma associated with Tygiel’s illogical footnote and the omission from Campanella’s autobiography. After being told by Finch that the two new players were black, Bavasi writes: “I couldn’t have cared less as long as they could play. It [their skin color] made no difference to me.”¹⁷ However, both Young and Bavasi have this thought articulated in a meeting in Nashua between Finch and Bavasi, not through a phone call as in the Campanella recollection. Young puts the meeting the day after the phone call – which makes sense since Finch told Campanella to come back two days later. Bavasi, though, is tantalizingly vague, writing about a “clandestine meeting” that was held “before the 1946 season.” Young and Bavasi both detail that Fred Dobens, managing editor of the Nashua Telegraph and future president of the Nashua ballclub, participated in the discussion about accepting the two black players in Nashua. Since the Campanella story had been around for more than 25 years at the time the Bavasi autobiography was published, there is a disconcerting lack of consistency about the timing of this critical event.

The 1946 newspaper reports about the signing of Campanella and Newcombe provide some insight. The timing, rather than the content, is the most revealing, since the signings were not publicly announced until April 4, four weeks after the March 5 meeting between Finch and Campanella. The four-week delay allowed Rickey to obtain a full picture of Robinson’s impact, both within baseball and the press, as well as render it too late for Campanella to join the Montreal team. With the white press focused on Robinson and largely indifferent to the greater social contours of the integration story, Rickey then proceeded forward with the signing announcement of Campanella and Newcombe, since it appeared that Rickey could easily manipulate this story in the press to suit his own objectives.  

The timing also coincided with the Dodgers’ press corps having just left Florida to head north with the team. Most white newspapers ran just a brief wire-service account of the transaction, which minimized the role of Rickey and focused on Dobens, who was quoted as saying he wanted “to give these boys every opportunity to make good in organized baseball.”¹⁸ The Brooklyn Eagle also focused on Dobens, but did add a little local color by mentioning Finch.¹⁹ Only the Nashua Telegraph had a focus on Rickey: “Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers will test New England fandom’s democractic attitude toward the racial question this spring it was revealed today with the announcement that the Brooklyn baseball club has signed two more negro players and will place them in organized ball with their New England League farm team here in Nashua.”²⁰

Through an examination of the original and early evidence, there is reasonable doubt that Bookwalter and Bavasi first heard about the black players on March 5, 1946. Many chroniclers have portrayed Campanella’s recollections of what Finch told him about his phone calls to be a primary source. However, that is only true for Finch’s side of the phone conversations that Campanella actually heard. As he admitted in his autobiography, Campanella didn’t hear the conversation at the other end of the telephone; he only heard what Finch said. The summaries of the other side of the conversations given to Campanella by Finch are therefore a secondary source. While Campanella believed Finch’s summaries to be true, that doesn’t mean historians can or should assume that they were the truth. By reviewing additional primary-source material, it seems more likely that Bookwalter and Bavasi first knew about the black players in December 1945.

Additional Primary-Source Evidence

In 1997, the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s integration of major-league baseball spurred the publication of a paperback edition of Tygiel’s 1983 opus on integration. That anniversary was also the impetus for some additional focus on the second front of integration that occurred in Nashua in 1946.

After Campanella died in 1993, Newcombe became more emotional about the Nashua saga and Bavasi’s role in it. Newcombe told Lois Shea of the Boston Globe in 1995: “The president of that league said, ‘If you send those so-and-sos down here, I will close down this league. They will not play baseball in this league.’” Newcombe then gushed, “I thank God for Nashua. I thank God for Buzzie Bavasi and [manager] Walt Alston. And I thank God for Branch Rickey and the chance he gave us.”²¹ After giving the familiar contours of the Danville-Nashua story to Michael Madden of the Boston Globe for a 1997 article, Newcombe added: “Suppose Buzzie Bavasi was a bigot and said, ‘I don’t want any damn niggers on my team.’ And suppose the president of the New England League was a bigot and said the same thing. And suppose Walter Alston was a bigot and he said, ‘I don’t want any niggers on my team.’ I mean, the Dodgers were down to one farm team. Our whole lives would have been different.”²²

Bavasi, who was elevated to general manager of the Dodgers in 1951 following Walter O’Malley’s ouster of Rickey from the organization, was silent for many years about his role in making the Nashua Dodgers the first integrated U.S.-based minor-league baseball team since the nineteenth century. To survive in the O’Malley-run Dodgers, Bavasi had to disavow Rickey, whom O’Malley despised.²³ Bavasi spoke out only after he retired from baseball in 1984. Journalists and historians contacted Bavasi in the mid-1990s as part of the fiftieth anniversary retrospective on Jackie Robinson. While Bavasi initially provided tantalizingly incomplete statements, he was blunter in his later years.  

When Bavasi talked to Madden of the Globe in early 1997 he did not divulge anything new, but he did drop a couple of lines that put a different slant on the Danville-Nashua tale. “I was just back from the war, three years of infantry, and I was down in Sea Island, Ga., with my wife for four or five months of rest,” Bavasi told Madden about where he was in November 1945. “Then Mr. Rickey called me and asked me to come up to Nashua. I knew something was up.” Bavasi then added: “One of the first things we did was to make sure that the city of Nashua would be behind us. What we did was hire the [managing] editor of the Nashua Telegraph, Fred Dobens, to be president of the team. That way we knew the city’s newspaper would back us.”²⁴ The phrases “I knew something was up” and “One of the first things we did” were the telling lines uttered by Bavasi.

In 1998 professors Scott and Stephanie Roper published an article in Historical New Hampshire that added extensive context to Tygiel’s 1983 scaffolding about Nashua as the second front of baseball integration. Bavasi added a few new details in his 1994 correspondence with the Ropers, most notably acknowledging that he had talked to Bookwalter who “did not think his city was ready to break the color line.”²⁵ Left unexplored was why Bavasi knew this; evidently, Bavasi had talked to Bookwalter before Campanella and Newcombe were assigned to Nashua. 

In January 2000, Bavasi wrote a foreword to Steve Daly’s history of the Nashua Dodgers, which was published in 2002, where he delivered a different version of how Nashua came to be the second front of baseball integration than the standard Campanella-recollection story: “Mr. Rickey summoned me to New York and asked if I would operate a club in the New England League for one year. He was having difficulty finding a city for Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe to play in. Kish Bookwalter, owner of the Danville, Ill., club, did not think his city was ready for such an adventure. I was then asked to find a city where the young men would be welcome. After talking to the Nashua Telegraph’smanaging editor, Fred Dobens, I knew that Nashua was the place.”²⁶ For the first time, Bavasi acknowledged that he was hired specifically to find a location to groom black players for the Dodgers.

Bavasi added more detail in his 2004 correspondence to the author of the book The New England League: A Baseball History, 1885–1949, which was published in 2007: “After a week [of vacation], Mr. Rickey called and asked me to come to New York as he was having a problem. I flew to New York and then was asked to go to Danville, Illinois. The purpose of the Danville trip was to ascertain whether or not Mr. Rickey’s friend Kish Bookwalter, owner of the club, would entertain the idea of playing two black boys. The answer was definitely no, by the club and the league. The [Three-I] League was not ready for such action.”²⁷

With progressively more detail provided by Bavasi, there seems to be ample evidence that Rickey knew in December 1945 that Danville had rejected the black players and Nashua would accept them. Therefore, Finch’s phone calls in March 1946, which were overheard by Campanella, would have been a ruse to perpetuate the “spurned by Danville, accepted in desperation by Nashua” story to mask Rickey’s true intentions for Nashua to be the second front of integration in 1946. It would also make more sense why Rickey tapped Bavasi to run a team in a league that did not yet exist.

While these are very illuminating comments from Bavasi, the concern for historians is that Bavasi was an octogenarian when he provided these remarks between 1997 and 2004. Given his advanced age, these primary-source recollections do need to be viewed as possibly revisionist, or even inaccurate. Fortunately, there is corroborative evidence from contemporary newspaper accounts, many of which went unexamined by previous historians, to heighten the confidence level in the veracity of Bavasi’s aged recollections.

Unexplored Contemporary Newspaper Accounts

On November 27, 1945, the Nashua Telegraph curiously ran a story topped by the following headline: “See Possibility of Organized Baseball Here Next Year.”²⁸ Taken in isolation, the headline is ludicrous, given Nashua’s bleak history in professional baseball. Why would anyone think professional baseball could be successful in Nashua, which last had a minor-league team in 1933 that was woefully supported? This story does indicate that Rickey had likely talked with Claude Davidson, the former president of the New England League.

In the fall of 1945, Davidson had just returned to civilian life from his wartime military construction job to campaign to return the New England League to Organized Baseball for his third run as president of the league. Desperate for any way to revive the New England League, Davidson could easily have extolled Rickey on the virtues of Nashua and Manchester’s large French-Canadian populations, which could mirror Montreal as a US base for black players in the Brooklyn minor-league system. Exactly when Davidson first chatted with Rickey is unknown, but it could have been as early as October 1945 following the Robinson signing.

The newspapers in prospective cities of the New England League, especially the Nashua Telegraph, are an important component to re-examining the original and early evidence. Very few researchers viewed this source material for dates prior to the official announcement of the Nashua ballclub in mid-January 1946. The examination of the Nashua Telegraph reports is very important, since Bavasi hired its managing editor, Fred Dobens, to be president of the Nashua Dodgers. Dobens was only the titular head of the club, but his connection to the local newspaper was essential. However, exactly when Dobens signed on as club president has never been definitively pinned down. It was surely before the official announcement on March 21, 1946.

In Madden’s 1997 Boston Globe article, Bavasi was quoted as saying, “One of the first things we did was to make sure that the city of Nashua would be behind us. What we did was hire the editor of the Nashua Telegraph, Fred Dobens, to be president of the team.” Every researcher presumed that Bavasi meant the first thing after Campanella and Newcombe were signed in March 1946. In their 1998 article, the Ropers even explicitly interpreted a similar comment by Bavasi by interjecting an explanatory parenthetical (“One of the first things we did [after the players were assigned to Nashua] was to make sure that the city of Nashua would be behind us.”).²⁹ However, Bavasi really did mean the FIRST thing, i.e., in December 1945, not after the players were signed in March 1946, given the volume and insight contained in reports published in the Nashua Telegraph. This helps to substantiate Bavasi’s explicit 2004 recollection that after Danville: “I then proceeded to Nashua and a meeting with Fred Dobens. After meeting with Fred, the Dodgers now had a club in Nashua.”³⁰

Davidson attended the annual minor-league meeting held in early December 1945, in Columbus, Ohio, where minor-league officials ratified the return of the New England League to Organized Baseball for the 1946 season. In a December 8 article, the Nashua Telegraph heralded Davidson’s expectations that minor-league baseball would come to Nashua: “Nashua may be represented in a newly organized baseball circuit if the efforts of Claude B. Davidson, one time president of the old New England League, now attending the baseball meeting at Columbus, Ohio, achieve the results hoped for.”³¹

On December 11, the Telegraph confirmed that Rickey would place a team in Nashua. “Nashua may well be the home of a Brooklyn Dodger farm team when the 1946 baseball season rolls around as the result of a visit of Branch Rickey’s personal representative to the city last night,” the Telegraph reported of Bavasi’s initial visit to the city.³² The Telegraph added that Brooklyn would not only place a team, but also own it, so no one in Nashua was expected to infuse any money. Bavasi was an employee of the Dodgers, which would have total control of the team’s operations and minimize adverse publicity over the black players.

Based on these reports in the Nashua Telegraph, Bavasi was most likely in Danville on December 7 (the day before the newspaper speculated on having a team) and almost definitely in Nashua on December 10 (the day before the newspaper reported the “visit of Branch Rickey’s personal representative”). Therefore, Dobens was recruited to be club president in December 1945, not March 1946, to provide a very favorable public perspective through his twin roles as newspaper editor at the Telegraph and president of the Nashua Dodgers.

On December 12, when Rickey was in Chicago for the National League meeting, he gave an interview to an Associated Press sportswriter which revealed plans for a club in the New England League. “The Brooklyn Dodgers will have the second-largest farm system in the Major Leagues in 1946, President Branch Rickey said today,” the AP story began. “When arrangements are completed for a team in the Class B New England League, which is being organized, Brooklyn will have 18 farm teams,” second only to the 26 farm teams of the St. Louis Cardinals.³³

Why would Rickey initiate a report on December 12 that the Dodgers were sponsoring a farm team in an unspecified location in a league being revived after it had experienced so many failures over the previous 30 years? There had to be an ulterior motive, not simply another team to stock with surplus returning postwar players. For the next several weeks, the Nashua Telegraph was quiet about the new ballclub.  With the strategy set and the main players in place, the official January 14, 1946, announcement of the formation of the Nashua Dodgers was strictly routine: “The Brooklyn Dodgers will own Nashua outright with E.J. “Buzz” Bavasi as general manager.”³⁴

Interestingly, in late January, Davidson reached out to the black community in Boston, a full two months before the signing of Campanella and Newcombe was announced. According to the Boston Guardian, a black newspaper, Davidson spoke at the Boston City Club on January 26 about “the use of colored ball players.” While Davidson toed the line of Organized Baseball in saying “there was no rule barring colored players,” the Boston Guardian commented that “we shall watch developments in the New England League and we expect to see colored players therein.”³⁵ Given the overt optimism by the black newspaper, it is entirely possible that Davidson dropped a broad hint to the Guardian sportswriter that blacks might appear in his league that spring.

The most compelling circumstantial evidence was published four and a half years following the April 1946 announcement that Campanella and Newcombe would play at Nashua, when Dobens penned a column on the editorial page of the Telegraph in November 1950.³⁶ The timing coincided with the naming of Bavasi to be the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In the column, Dobens recalled the first meeting with Bavasi to discuss the creation of a Brooklyn farm club in Nashua.

The meeting occurred at the newspaper office with Bavasi and Bill O’Connor, who was representing Davidson. Although the timing was not explicitly stated by Dobens, he did write that the New England League was just forming at the time. This indicates the meeting occurred either in December 1945 (after Davidson received approval at the Columbus meeting) or at the latest in early January 1946 (before the official formation of the Nashua ballclub).

Most revealing in the Dobens column is the overt motivation of the Brooklyn Dodgers to have a ballclub in Nashua. Bavasi and O’Connor had just come from Manchester, a few miles north of Nashua, to investigate putting a ballclub there in the fledgling league. O’Connor told Dobens that there were “too many angles” involved with putting a club in Manchester and that “Brooklyn wasn’t interested in getting involved with a lot of people in the course of putting a team in the league.” Undercutting the substantial negotiation leverage that he had, Bavasi then added, “If Brooklyn comes here it doesn’t want any local tie-ups, no one will have to furnish any money or be associated financially with the club.” For a major-league ballclub already with more than a dozen farm clubs, this was a highly unusual perspective, one that smacks of desperation. Bavasi was then blunt: “All we want is some evidence that the city is interested in baseball and that you have a ball park suited to organized baseball needs.”³⁷

Dobens writes that he was understandably skeptical of this overly magnanimous attitude of the Brooklyn Dodgers, until “Bavasi unburdened the whole story, what Brooklyn would do and what it expected.”³⁸ Unfortunately, Dobens never explains in the column what “the whole story” was, as if the story was obvious and thus did not need explanation five years later. Dobens does casually mention Campanella and Newcombe near the end of the column, but merely as players for the club, unaccentuated by an adjective related to skin color. While Dobens does not overtly refer to trailblazing racial integration as “the whole story,” it seemingly is inferred. What other desperate motivation – besides the lack of a viable site for black players in Danville, Illinois – could the Brooklyn Dodgers possibly have had then to place a club in Nashua?

This 1950 recollection of Dobens indicates that in December 1945 Rickey planned to have Bavasi establish a ballclub in Nashua to serve as a potential training ground for black players, in light of the known rejection of the idea by officials in Danville. Besides being known as a quintessential planner, Rickey was also renowned for using “elaborate charades to obscure his intentions,” which bolsters the idea that the Danville option was merely a ruse.³⁹ If Danville was, indeed, a ruse to deflect the focus on Nashua, what was Rickey’s motive to perpetrate a charade in March 1946 in front of Campanella to have Bavasi ostensibly respond to Danville’s apparent sudden spurning of black players?

Rationale for a Ruse

The most likely motive for Rickey to stage the Danville ruse was to obtain the needed cover to eliminate further backlash from Negro League ballclub owners for not compensating them when he signed ballplayers they had formerly employed. In 1945 Campanella played for the Baltimore Elite Giants and Newcombe for the Newark Eagles.

After Robinson was signed in October 1945, Rickey was immediately accused of conducting a “raid” on the Negro Leagues, since he refused to compensate the Kansas City Monarchs for their loss of Robinson.⁴⁰ Rickey seemed to be so concerned about future Negro League compensation issues that he moved to forestall them by leaking a story to the Brooklyn Eagle about the next potential signing of a black player. In early November, just one week after the signing of Robinson, the Eagle reported, “It’s believed that the second Negro is Roy Campanella, catcher and outfielder of the Baltimore Elite Giants.”⁴¹ This put the owners of the Baltimore ballclub on notice that they were likely to lose their star catcher. Given the timing of this newspaper article, this was likely the impetus for Rickey to abruptly cancel the vacation of Bavasi so that he could move forward to investigate the Danville and Nashua situations as an alternative to sending all new black players to Montreal.

While the Negro League complaints were easily dismissed, given their lack of formal contracts with the ballplayers, the compensation issue festered in the background of the signing of Campanella and Newcombe in the spring of 1946. Since Campanella and Newcombe would not be playing in Montreal at the highest level of the minor leagues as Robinson, Rickey could dampen the issue by portraying their “demotion” to Nashua as simply unavoidable, due to the difficult challenge to locate a place for them to play.

Rickey also faced criticism from black sportswriters Wendell Smith and Sam Lacy, who had rebuked him for his method of acquiring Robinson for the Brooklyn farm system. Smith and Lacy were the most influential sportswriters involved in the integration effort during the 1940s, as “Smith and Lacy combined eloquence in print with activist intervention and dogged persistence to expand the [integration] campaign beyond the black community.”⁴² Rickey appears to have enlisted Smith and Lacy to assist him in defusing the Negro League compensation issue.

As Brian Carroll articulates, black sportswriters had a quandary, due to their “conflicted relationship with Negro league baseball,” since they faced “a devil’s bargain” to either pursue the continued desegregation of Organized Baseball, which would “contribute to the further dilution of a distinctly black institution, the Negro leagues,” or “support those black leagues that owed their existence to raced-based discrimination.”⁴³ In the spring of 1946 the black weekly newspapers tried to support both sides of this mutually exclusive dilemma, which put Smith and Lacy in an uncomfortable position regarding future signings of black players by Rickey. Lacy began to nudge Rickey about possible additional signings of black ballplayers just days after Robinson arrived at spring training in March 1946. While Rickey was non-committal, he mentioned several possible candidates, including Campanella.⁴⁴

Although Rickey could have deftly manipulated Smith and Lacy to further his own purpose, it is more likely that Smith and Lacy were willing accomplices in encouraging further signings of black players. Smith or Lacy may have even originated the Danville ruse to help advance integration.

One fact is certain: black newspapers contained the only public disclosure in the spring of 1946 about Danville possibly being the minor-league farm club where Campanella and Newcombe would be assigned. “Unconfirmed rumors that Roy Campanella, hustling 26-year-old Baltimore Elite Giants catcher, was destined to join the Danville club of the Brooklyn Dodgers, were denied by Pres. Branch Rickey on Monday,” Lacy wrote in the Baltimore Afro-American in early April. “Rickey told the Afro-American that he knew of no plan to send Campanella, who batted .365 in Negro National League play last year, to the Danville club … and emphatically denied that any of the colored boys will be sent there as a start.”⁴⁵ Following the announcement of the Campanella and Newcombe signings, Smith noted: “Branch Rickey originally had decided to place his latest Negro ‘rookies’ with Danville of the Three-Eye League. For some unknown reason, however, he changed his mind in favor of Nashua.”⁴⁶

By divulging only to the black community the alleged challenge of securing minor-league placements for Campanella and Newcombe, when there was no desperation, Rickey hoped to avoid public criticism and, if necessary, lower his cost to compensate Negro League clubs. Rickey could not know then that in 1947 black fans would almost immediately shift their attention away from the Negro League teams to Robinson and major-league baseball, thus rendering moot the potential backlash related to his 1946 decision to place Campanella and Newcombe in Nashua.

Lack of Other Published Recollections

Before he died in 1965, Rickey seems to have left no amplification of how the Nashua franchise came into existence. Beyond some tidbits about the Robinson signing, the Rickey papers at the Library of Congress “add surprisingly little to the familiar contours of the integration saga,” according to respected historians, and “are strangely silent about the critical 1944-1948 period.”⁴⁷ In its summary of the Rickey papers, The Library of Congress bluntly notes: “Items relating to the Brooklyn Dodgers relate primarily to the sale of Rickey’s stock in the Dodgers and contain no material relating to Robinson’s integration of baseball.”⁴⁸ Rickey’s biographers barely mention the second front of integration in Nashua, focusing almost entirely on the signing of Jackie Robinson and his early days with Montreal.⁴⁹

Most of the other men who could shed light on the situation left no published recollections before their death. Bookwalter and Fairweather both died in 1951, and Finch and Davidson both died in 1956.⁵⁰ Dobens, who died in 1967, appears to have left nothing other than his 1950 editorial.⁵¹ Bavasi, who died in 2008, is the only participant who left extensive published memories. At his death, Bavasi was revered as a crucial advocate of racial integration within the confines of the standard Campanella-inspired story: “Rickey sought to place them [Campanella and Newcombe] with the Dodger club in Danville, Ill., but the management said no. Then he tried Nashua. Bavasi said yes.”⁵² While many of Bavasi’s memories were recalled when he was an octogenarian, which could diminish their veracity, contemporary newspaper reports corroborate the basic outlines of those late-age remembrances.

Conclusion

There is a preponderance of primary-source circumstantial evidence that lends credence to the idea that Rickey planned for Nashua, New Hampshire, to be the second front of baseball integration rather than it fortuitously happening there due to the rejection by officials in Danville, Illinois. While we will never have documented evidence to substantiate the truth about how Nashua was selected to be the site of the first integrated U.S.-based minor-league baseball team in the twentieth century, an extensive exploration of the extant evidence to re-evaluate past conclusions by historians and researchers leads to the conclusion that Nashua was a premeditated choice to be the second front of baseball integration in 1946.

Notes

1. Neil Lanctot, Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 128.

2. Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 152.

3. While often cited to the 1959 autobiography, Campenella’s recollection originally appeared in two earlier biographies, Dick Young, Roy Campanella (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1952), 23–26, and Milton Shapiro, The Roy Campanella Story (New York: Julian Messner, 1958), 69–71. While neither book contains footnotes, the source for the story in both books is undoubtedly Campanella.

4. Roy Campanella, It’s Good to Be Alive (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959), 119–121.

5. Harold Burr, “Dodgers to Sign 2nd Negro,” Brooklyn Eagle, November 3, 1945.

6. Dink Carroll, “Playing the Field,” Montreal Gazette, October 25, 1945.

7. Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment, 145.

8. Harold Burr, “Rickey Sees Phils Gaining Castoffs,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 12, 1945.

9. “Ding-Dong Drive in Danville Raises $60,000 for Three-I Club and Park,” The Sporting News, October 25, 1945; Arthur Mann, Branch Rickey: American in Action (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 153, 171.

10. Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment, 145; Harold Burr, “Shotten Expecting Better Flock Play,” Brooklyn Eagle, June 21, 1947; Rick Swaine, The Integration of Major League Baseball: A Team by Team History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 239.

11. Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment, 104.

12. “Decade of Decision Here for Americans, Bridges,” Nashua Telegraph, January 27, 1950.

13. Harold Rosenthal, “He Made a Difference for the Dodgers,” Saturday Evening Post, April 8, 1950.

14. Ted Poston, “The Don Newcombe Story,” New York Post, June 12, 1955. 

15. Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment, 145–146.

16. Young, Roy Campanella, 26. Chapters 11 to 18 of Campanella’s 1959 autobiography are largely a rewrite of Young’s 1952 biography, with many sections, including the assignment to Nashua, barely modified. The omission of Bavasi is therefore puzzling, although Campanella did credit Rickey more than Bavasi for getting him into Organized Baseball (Campanella, It’s Good to Be Alive, 159).

17. Buzzie Bavasi, Off the Record (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1987), 23; Young, Roy Campanella, 26.

18. “Dodgers Send Two Negroes to Farm Club,” New York Sun, April 4, 1946; “Dodgers Will Send 2 Negroes to Nashua Club,” Boston Globe, April 5, 1946.

19. Ben Gould, “Dodgers Sign 2 Negro Aces for Nashua Farm,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 5, 1946. Interestingly, Finch would leave the Dodgers organization after the 1946 season.

20. “Nashua Dodgers Sign Two Negro Baseball Players,” Nashua Telegraph, April 4, 1946.

21. Lois Shea, “Newcombe Found a Warm Welcome Up North,” New Hampshire Weekly section, Boston Globe, May 14, 1995.

22. Michael Madden, “Nashua, N.H., Was Safe Haven,” Boston Globe, March 28, 1997.

23. Bavasi, Off the Record, 39–41.

24. Madden, “Nashua, N.H., Was Safe Haven.”

25. Scott Roper and Stephanie Abbott Roper, “Baseball Integration and the 1946 Nashua Dodgers,” Historical New Hampshire, Spring/Summer 1998, 7.

26. Steve Daly, Dem Little Bums: The Nashua Dodgers (Concord, NH: Plaidswede, 2002), ix.

27. Charlie Bevis, The New England League: A Baseball History, 1885–1949 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), 262.

28. “See Possibility of Organized Baseball Here Next Year,” Nashua Telegraph, November 27, 1945.

29. Roper and Roper, “Baseball Integration.”

30. Bevis, New England League, 263.

31. “Nashua Set for Spot in Proposed N.E. Baseball League,” Nashua Telegraph, December 8, 1945.

32. “Nashua May Be Home of Brooklyn Farm Team in 1946,” Nashua Telegraph, December 11, 1945.

33. “Flock to Run 2d Largest Farm System,” Washington Post, December 13, 1945.

34. “Nashua Set in NE Baseball League,” Nashua Telegraph, January 15, 1946.

35. Boston Guardian, February 9, 1946, quoted in Bevis, New England League, 265.

36. [Fred Dobens], “Around the Town,” Nashua Telegraph, November 6, 1950. Although the column lacked a byline, it was almost certainly written by Dobens, since it was published on the editorial page (Dobens was the managing editor of the newspaper) and was written in the first person as a participant in the meeting (no other Nashua citizen was involved in the creation of the ballclub).

37. [Dobens], “Around the Town.”

38. [Dobens], “Around the Town.”

39. Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment, 241.

40. “Rickey Takes Slap at Negro Leagues,” New York Times, October 25, 1945.

41. Burr, “Dodgers to Sign 2nd Negro.”

42. Brian Carroll, When to Stop the Cheering? The Black Press, the Black Community, and the Integration of Professional Baseball (New York: Routledge, 2007), 90.

43. Brian Carroll, The Black Press and Black Baseball, 1915–1955: A Devil’s Bargain (New York: Routledge, 2015), 95–96.

44. Washington Afro-American, March 9, 1946, quoted in Chris Lamb, Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 77.

45. “Report Roy Campanella Headed for Dodger Farm,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 6, 1946.

46. “Dodger Farm Club Signs 2 More Stars,” Pittsburgh Courier,April 13, 1946.

47. Jules Tygiel and John Thorn, “Jackie Robinson’s Signing: The Untold Story,” Sport, June 1988, 65–70.

48. “Branch Rickey Papers, 1890–1969,” Baseball Resources, Library of Congress, accessed February 27, 2017, http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/baseball/aids.html.

49. Arthur Mann, Branch Rickey: American in Action (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 234; Murray Polner, Branch Rickey: A Biography (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 191; Lee Lowenfish, Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 397.

50. Bookwalter obituary, The Sporting News, July 11, 1951; Fairweather obituary, The Sporting News, January 31, 1951; Finch obituary, The Sporting News, May 9, 1956; Davidson obituary, Lynn Evening Item, April 19, 1956.

51. Dobens obituary, Nashua Telegraph, August 1, 1967.

52. Richard Goldstein, “Buzzie Bavasi, a Dodgers Innovator, Dies at 93,” New York Times, May 2, 2008.