![]() ![]() So when Jackie Robinson integrated the sport, according to Goodwin, blacks and whites “had to look at themselves differently, had to look at their relationships differently, and Robinson carried these hopes like a bridge up to Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. This resurgence of home and family after the war had launched baseball as the national pastime and everyone was a fan of one team or another. I went to bed dreaming about the Dodgers.†And so when Jackie Robinson broke through, it wasn’t just breaking through in one of any number of sports. It was a part of the fabric of your life. You could argue on your street corners or in local bars about who was the better centerfielder among – Mickey Mantle or Duke Snyder – et cetera, et cetera. ![]() up in Brooklyn and rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers with her father. You could walk down any block and you could hear what was going on from inning to inning because every radio would be turned on to baseball. During the past ten years when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was working on her. According to Goodwin, “No other sport had captured the hearts and the imaginations of the American people. Doris Kearns Goodwin speaks March 21 at La Salle University, an event of its 150th anniversary. It is a memoir of Kearns growing up in Rockville Center, NY a a time when baseball was king. Instead baseball of yesteryear only plays a small part of this tome. In those days baseball with its slow-pace allowed plenty of time for conversations with loved ones. I expected to discover that this book was Doris Kearns Goodwin's reminiscences about being a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. ![]()
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