RODNEY, Lester 1911-

(Benjamin Brewster, Lyman Hopkins)

PERSONAL: Born April 17, 1911, in New York, NY; son of Max (a salesman) and Isabelle (a milliner; maiden name, Cotton) Rodney; married, 1946; wife's name, Clare; children: Amy, Ray. Education: Attended Syracuse University.

ADDRESSES: Home—2137 Skycrest Dr., Walnut Creek, CA 94595.

CAREER: Journalist. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, stringer, 1920s; worked as a chauffeur and shipping clerk; Daily Worker, New York, NY, reporter, sports editor, 1936-42, 1946-57; Santa Monica Evening Outlook, Santa Monica, CA, feature writer, religion editor, special sections editor, 1946-47; worked for an advertising agency in Beverly Hills, CA, 1947-63; Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, feature writer, 1964-74. Military service: U.S. Army, 1942-46, served with the Fifty-second Field Hospital in the South Pacific; became sergeant.

AWARDS, HONORS: Honorary lifetime member, Baseball Writers Association of America; Pacific Coast Press Club awards, 1971 and 1973, for daily religion columns, and 1972, for op-ed; Bill Hunter Memorial Award for Excellence, 1973; recognized as California's number one tennis player in the eighty-five-and-older division.

WRITINGS:

(Under pseudonym Benjamin Brewster) The First Book of Baseball, Watts (New York, NY), 1950.

(Under pseudonym Lyman Hopkins) The Real Book about Baseball, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1951, revised edition, 1962.

Contributor to periodicals, including Negro Digest and In These Times; wrote column "On the Scoreboard" for Daily Worker.

SIDELIGHTS: Lester Rodney was a sportswriter and editor for nearly two decades with the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party. He wrote about sports but is most well known as an advocate of the integration of sports, in particular major league baseball, and a critic of the capitalist constraints that prevented minorities and the working class from having a share of the American sports dream.

Rodney was the third of four children born to Max and Isabelle (Cotton) Rodney, first-generation Jewish immigrants. Like many families, the Great Depression hit the Rodneys hard. Max, a silk salesman, turned to selling auto parts, and the family moved from Manhattan to the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Rodney enjoyed playing street ball as a child and ran track and played basketball in high school. On his thirteenth birthday, his parents surprised him with a reserved seat ticket for opening day at Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The year Rodney graduated from high school, his younger brother Ira died when a truck struck and killed him while he was roller skating in the street. Rodney's mother, a milliner, opened a hat shop in Newark, New Jersey and commuted daily in order to bring in some income. Even with some scholarship money, Rodney was unable to finish at Syracuse University, although he later took a few night courses. One of the courses was in journalism; during high school Rodney had covered school sports for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and he developed a knack for the genre.

Rodney read the Daily Worker "out of curiosity" and wrote to the editors with some ideas for the paper. In an interview with Paul Buhle and Michael Fermanowsky of the University of California's Oral History Program, he said that he was "just modestly suggesting how to improve their sports section and the importance of it, and I made the mistake of having a return address. I immediately was summoned in." Management wasn't sure there was a place for regular sports reporting. Space was limited, reader interest was an unknown, and the paper's communist ideology gave sports reporting a secondary priority at best. When they gave Rodney a chance, however, his weekly sports reports increased circulation and interest, with six out of seven respondents favoring its continuation, and he was offered a full-time position. There were skeptics, but the paper and Rodney thrived. Sports was taking up more and more column inches in daily newspapers, and the readers of the Daily Worker, mostly European and Jewish immigrants, benefited from an increased understanding, not only of their new country, but also of its national pastimes.

Rodney's sports section was never more than three pages, and during the Korean War it consisted only of the last page. He began by covering industrial league and union league games and began writing about mainstream sports and players when his readers clearly wanted more. About half of his coverage was of the soccer, baseball, and basketball leagues sponsored by the Trade Union Athletic Association in which his readers were participants, and the other half was about spectator sports. Rodney's columns enjoyed increased popularity, and in 1938 Yankee third baseman Red Rolfe agreed to write an article following each of the World Series games he played in that October. It was a first, as players were generally thought to be incapable of communicating their own ideas. Rolfe was a "tough New England democrat with a small 'd', " Rodney told Buhle and Fermanowsky. He was also a graduate of Dartmouth College and was immediately successful as a journalist.

By the time Rodney joined the Daily Worker, nearly all major sports except baseball had been integrated, and he immediately began calling for an end to discrimination against black baseball players. In 1937 Rodney printed a challenge made by Negro League pitcher Leroy "Satchel" Paige to the New York Yankees to play one game against Paige's All-Stars at Yankee Stadium. The challenge went unanswered, however, even though the Yankee roster included the likes of Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig. In addition to addressing the segregation issue, Rodney wrote about betting scandals, violence in college football, and the realities of pro boxing. He was a diligent researcher, and his regular column, On the Score Board, was a source of pertinent and well-rounded sports reporting.

Rodney served nearly four years with the U.S. Army in the South Pacific. When he returned to the Worker in 1946, he had additional help from Nat Low, who had handled the sports section while Rodney was overseas, and Bill Mardo, both of whom shared Rodney's passion about the injustices and discrimination to be found in sports. For a time, Rodney had the freedom to report on issues other than sports, and he went to Washington, D.C., where he covered Senate hearings on returning black veterans. In 1946 baseball was finally integrated with Jackie Robinson's first groundbreaking game with the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. Robert Klein wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that "Rodney's position on segregation in baseball was clearly and uncompromisingly articulated. Because of the comparatively low circulation and unpopular politics of the Worker, however, his role as one of the first to excoriate in print the sixteen club owners for their racial intransigence was only belatedly recognized." "Historian Jules Tygiel," said Klein, ". . . documents Rodney's tenacious efforts to publicize (and unabashedly politicize) Robinson's difficulties as well as his progress. Rodney and the Worker, Tygiel argues, have been unfairly overlooked regarding the beneficial effects their reportorial and political coverage had on the integration of baseball, especially during the decade or so leading up to Robinson's barrier-breaking season."

When trends shifted away from participant team sports, Rodney decried the lack of open space, such as vacant lots, where amateurs could play ball. He also continued to write about limited participation in professional sports based on race or economic status. But the 1950s brought a new threat: anticommunist sentiment that resulted in the lost jobs and liberties of people associated with communism, including those who had worked at the Party paper. Rodney was unable to publish his The First Book of Baseball under his own name, and so used the pseudonym Benjamin Brewster. He used another pseudonym, Lyman Hopkins, for his second, The Real Book about Baseball. His books are fact-filled but also include the kind of writing readers of his columns had come to expect. His emphasis is on the fact that the big stars of many nationalities and all races can work together successfully as a team.

When Althea Gibson became the first black player to compete in the National Tennis Championships, Rodney wrote about the event. "Present in the article," said Klein, "are his characteristically gentle, unerring reminders of the damaging effects of wrongs only recently righted and the inevitable restraints on human achievement they represent, as well as his sure grasp of the sport he is examining." When white boxer Jack Dempsey was praised as being a better fighter than "Brown Bomber" Joe Louis, Rodney brought out the statistics and compared the matches of both, proving that Louis was the superior boxer.

Rodney covered the 1956 Winter Olympic Games in Italy, writing about the harmony of the games between the many nations and personal pieces on American champions, including skier Art Devlin and skaters Tenley Albright and Dick Button. In his last years at the Daily Worker, Rodney wrote about racial integration and covered stories in Clinton, Tennessee and Montgomery, Alabama, where he reported on the observation of the first anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott. He resigned from both the newspaper and the Communist Party in 1957.

Rodney, his wife Clare, and their children, relocated to California in 1958, and Rodney worked for one year at the Santa Monica Evening Outlook. "I said I worked for the Brooklyn Eagle, and they didn't even know that the Brooklyn Eagle had gone out of business." He also used the name Les Rodney instead of Lester Rodney, which he said "didn't fool the Red Squad attorney." His next position was with a Beverly Hills ad agency, and his last, from 1964 until his retirement in 1974, was writing features for the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram. Kelly E. Rusinack, a contributor to Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports, and the American Dream, said that Rodney "helped to further legitimize sports as a social concern, and purposely gave a voice to the opinions of athletes formerly considered to be stupid and shallow.... Rodney's efforts, sincerity, and fair reporting earned him the respect of athletes he interviewed, as well as of other journalists, black and white."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 241: American Sportswriters and Writers on Sport, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001, pp. 232-239.

Dorinson, Joseph, and Joram Warmund, editors, Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports, and the American Dream, M. E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY), 1998.

Rader, Benjamin, Baseball: A History of America's Game, University of Illinois Press (Urbana and Chicago, IL), 1992.

Tygiel, Jules, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, Vintage (New York, NY), 1983, pp. 36-37.

PERIODICALS

In These Times, October, 1977, Mark Naison, "Sports for the (Daily) worker," pp. 12-14.

Journal of Sports History, spring, 1974, D. Q. Voight, "Reflections on Diamonds: American Baseball and American Culture," pp. 3-25.

Village Voice, June 10, 1997, Peter Duffy, "Red Rodney—The American Communist Who Helped Liberate Baseball," p. 122.

OTHER

Buhle, Paul, and Michael Fermanowsky, "Baseball and Social Conscience" (interview), Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), 1984.*