No one was more keenly aware of the demands of baseball in this respect than Robinson himself. “I’ll be very glad when this baseball is over and we settle down as a family,” he had written to Rachel five years before. “I would rather not be away so much.” The children obviously needed him. “When I would come home from a long trip,” he confessed to one writer, “it was just like a stranger coming into the house. I lost a lot of contact with my kids that way and now I want to recoup. I want to have meals with them like every other father.” To Rachel and their three children he was as lovingly committed as ever. “His devotion to them borders on the pious,” one reporter noted. “His gentleness, from so powerful a person, is almost a shock.” Although Rachel had built the house, Jack had quickly fallen in love with it and their life in small-town Connecticut. The front lawn, a magnet for children up and down the road, was large enough to serve as the neighborhood softball field.
