Rich says, “my friends and I would hang out in front of Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers played—this was when we were ten or eleven years old—in the hopes that someone would have extra tickets at the last minute and bestow them on us. So we’d stand there and look forlorn, and it worked out for us a surprisingly high percentage of times. “Well, one day we were there, flipping baseball cards, and up the staircase from the subway came this big black man, and the next thing you know I was blurting out, ‘Hey—you’re Jackie Robinson!’ “I still remember exactly what he was wearing: tan slacks, brown loafers, and a short-sleeve sport shirt with a white and brown stripe. He was a very dark man, very good-looking, and he said, ‘Come here, kid.’ And I went over and lo and behold, he takes my hand in his great big huge black hand and walks across the street with me toward the ballpark. “I mean it was like I was dreaming. And he said, ‘You play ball, kid?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, yeah—and I do everything you do.
