Richard Goldstein

His death was announced by the Mets, who did not specify the cause. Jackson had a stroke in 2015.

The 1962 Mets, an expansion team in its first season, won 40 games and lost a record 120, but Little Al Jackson, as he was known — he was 5 feet 10 and weighed about 165 pounds — was a bright spot. He threw all four of the Mets’ shutouts that season, among them a one-hitter.

He won eight games and lost 20 for a team that finished in 10th place, but he did not lead the team in losses. The former Dodger right-hander Roger Craig, also victimized by the Mets’ dreary lineup, went 10-24.

Throwing breaking balls along with fastballs, Jackson was a mainstay for the Mets through their first four seasons. He then was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals and was a member of their pennant-winning 1967 team.

Jackson pitched for the Mets again in 1968 and briefly at the beginning of their “Miracle” season of 1969, when they rose up to become World Series champions. He was later a pitching coach and instructor, mostly in the Mets organization.

Jackson was a cheerful sort, but when he took part in Old-Timers’ Day at Shea Stadium in June 1972, the memory of his many frustrating outings continued to vex him.

“How do I explain to my kids what losing was like?” he lamented. “Every time you put on a uniform you want to win, but something would always happen to us.”

Jackson’s most remarkable outing came at the Polo Grounds, the Mets’ home for their first two seasons, when he went all 15 innings against the Philadelphia Phillies, throwing 215 pitches, on the afternoon of Aug. 14, 1962. He gave up just six hits but lost, 3-1, when the Phils rallied for a pair of runs after a two-base error by first baseman Marv Throneberry, known derisively as Marvelous Marv for his fielding and base-running mishaps.

Jackson got the Mets’ first victory at Shea in April 1964, shutting out the Pittsburgh Pirates, and he threw a two-hitter against the Cincinnati Reds that May. He outpitched the future Hall of Famer Bob Gibson, 1-0, on the final weekend of the season, when the Cardinals were fighting for a pennant — which they nonetheless went on to win.

He was a favorite of manager Casey Stengel going back to the Mets’ first spring training camp at St. Petersburg, Florida.

“He’s artistic,” Stengel was quoted as saying by the sports writer Leonard Shecter in his book “Once Upon the Polo Grounds” (1970). “I know this because he was fielding the bunted balls. He’s got a chance because how many pitchers have I got? He’s very intelligent and his wife’s a schoolteacher. He looks like he’s been pitching baseball for 10 years.”

“He rambles a little bit,” Jackson said of Stengel. “But I think I understand him.”

Alvin Neill Jackson was born on Dec. 26, 1935, in Waco, Texas, and grew up there. He was signed by the Pirates in 1955 out of historically black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and pitched briefly for them in 1959 and 1961. The Mets selected him for a $75,000 fee in the expansion draft.

Jackson tossed 10 shutouts for the Mets from 1962 to 1965. He was 8-20 for the second time, in 1965, but that year, as in the Mets’ inaugural season, he didn’t lead the team in defeats: Jack Fisher, like Craig, lost 24 games.

Jackson was traded to the Cardinals after that season in a deal that brought them the third baseman Ken Boyer, a former National League Most Valuable Player.

He posted a 13-15 record with a sparkling 2.51 earned run average for the 1966 Cardinals, then went 9-4 for their pennant-winners of 1967 and threw a one-hitter against Houston. But he was not included on the Cardinals’ World Series roster.

Jackson concluded his pitching career with the Mets and the Reds in 1969. He had a career 67-99 record with 14 shutouts.

He was the Boston Red Sox pitching coach from 1977 to 1979 under manager Don Zimmer, another original Met, and for the Baltimore Orioles from 1989 to 1991. He was later a bullpen coach for the Mets under Davey Johnson and a manager, pitching coach and roving instructor in their farm system.

His survivors include his wife, Nadine; his sons, Reggie, who pitched in the Mets’ minor league system, and Barry; and two grandsons.

Jackson threw out the first ball at Citi Field, the Mets’ current home, on April 15, 2015, a part of baseball’s annual commemorations of Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the modern major league color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1947.

Ron Darling, the former Met pitcher and current Met broadcaster, recalled that when he was with New York’s Tidewater farm team in the early 1980s, Jackson, then the pitching coach, taught him to throw a split-fingered fastball. More important, Darling said, was Jackson’s emphasis on the need for devotion to the craft in a serious, professional way.

In his book “The Complete Game” (2009), written with Daniel Paisner, Darling related how Jackson spoke of the times when black players were barred from segregated hotels and restaurants.

Darling took a lesson from that. “I had no choice but to take the gift of my situation more seriously,” he wrote. “I couldn’t take anything for granted.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/sports/baseball/al-jackson-dead.html" id="de88fec7-3882-3dd9-a356-7c68a19d1370">The New York Times</a>.

Al Jackson, Pitching Star of Woeful 1960s Mets, Is Dead at 83

Al Jackson, the slender left-hander whose pitching provided a semblance of hope for the historically woeful New York Mets of the early 1960s, died on Monday in Port St. Lucie, Florida. He was 83.

His death was announced by Gen. David L. Goldfein, the chief of staff of the Air Force.

The Doolittle raid was a low-level daylight attack in April 1942 that resulted in only light damage to military and industrial targets. But it buoyed an American home front reeling from unbroken reverses in the Pacific, beginning with the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941, and it shattered the Japanese government’s assurances to its people that they were invulnerable to an American air attack.

It also prompted Japan to launch a naval attack on the American base at Midway in the mid-Pacific in June 1942 out of the mistaken belief that the Doolittle bombers had departed from an aircraft carrier based there. The Americans, having broken the Japanese codes, knew the attack was coming and dealt the Japanese navy a major defeat.

The commander of the American bombing raid, Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, was awarded the Medal of Honor, becoming one of the nation’s first heroes of World War II.

The raiders’ story was reprised for succeeding generations at their annual reunions. Cole was among three survivors at the airmen’s final reunion, on Nov. 9, 2013, Veterans Day weekend, at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force near Dayton, Ohio.

On the morning of April 18, 1942, 16 Army Air Corps B-25 bombers flew to Japan off the aircraft carrier Hornet from a point more than 650 miles offshore.

Doolittle and Cole alternated in flying their bomber, armed with high-explosive and incendiary bombs.

“Everyone prayed but did so in an inward way,” Cole recalled in an account for the Air Force information office in 1957. “If anyone was scared, it didn’t show.”

Then came a moment that perplexed Doolittle. As Cole remembered it: “The tune ‘Wabash Cannonball’ kept running through my mind. One time I was singing and stomping my foot with such gusto that the boss looked at me in a very questioning manner, like he thought I was going batty.”

The five-man crew of the Doolittle plane spotted more than 80 Japanese aircraft while approaching its target area, the western section of Tokyo. But no fighters attacked them, and anti-aircraft fire made only a few holes in the bomber’s tail.

The lack of a formidable Japanese response evidently resulted from their belief that an American air attack was improbable, at the least. And the relatively few Doolittle bombers in the mission did not suggest to the Japanese that a large-scale strike was in progress, one that would require a furious response.

After dropping its bombs, the plane with Doolittle, Cole and their navigator, bombardier and engineer/gunner descended to treetop level to avoid flak. To the Japanese civilians on the ground in Tokyo, it seemed to be just another plane in the skies that day, when a scheduled civil defense drill was being conducted.

“People on the ground waved to us,” Cole remembered. “We could see the moat, the Imperial Palace and downtown Tokyo.”

After carrying out the bombings, the 16 planes were supposed to fly on to China and land at Nationalist Chinese airstrips, since they could not return to the Hornet. Army bombers were not designed to take off from or land on aircraft carriers, and the Doolittle planes had barely cleared the approximately 500-foot deck of the Hornet in their departures.

The planes ran low on fuel after their bombing runs, and none made it to airstrips prepared for them by the Chinese. Fifteen crash-landed in Japanese-occupied territory or ditched off the Chinese coast, and one plane flew on to the Soviet Union.

Doolittle, Cole and the other three crewmen of their plane bailed out in rain and fog soon after their bomber crossed the Chinese coast as darkness arrived. Cole landed in a pine tree atop a mountain and was unhurt except for a black eye. He made a hammock from his parachute and went to sleep. At dawn, he began walking, and late that day he made contact with Chinese guerrillas.

He was soon reunited with Doolittle, who had come down in a rice paddy, and their three fellow crewmen. The five joined up with other stranded airmen who had been rescued. The Chinese took them all on an arduous journey, much of it by riverboat, to an air strip, where they were picked up by a U.S. military transport plane and flown to Chungking, the headquarters for the Nationalist Chinese.

Three of the 80 Doolittle raiders were killed in crash landings or while parachuting. Eight others were captured by the Japanese. Three of them were executed, another died of disease and starvation in captivity, and four survived more than three years of solitary confinement and brutality.

The raid became even more the stuff of legend when it was dramatized, with the war still on, in a 1944 movie, “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” based on a book of the same title by Ted W. Lawson, a pilot in the raid. Spencer Tracy played Doolittle. (Cole was not portrayed on the screen.)

After the Doolittle mission, Cole flew transport planes over the Himalayas in the China-Burma-India theater.

Richard Eugene Cole, who was known as Dick, was born on Sept. 7, 1915, in Dayton. He became enthralled with flying as a teenager when he watched Doolittle, a trophy-winning aviation pioneer, making test flights from an airfield there.

After attending Ohio University, he enlisted in the military in November 1940. He flew Army Air Corps planes seeking Japanese submarines off the West Coast before he was chosen to be among the volunteers for what was described as a dangerous mission, with many of the details to come later.

Cole was the co-pilot on a training flight in Florida when its pilot became ill and Doolittle filled in for him. Doolittle was so impressed with how the crew worked together that when the ailing pilot was unable to return to duty, he became the pilot for that crew in the raid.

Cole retired from the Air Force in 1967 as a lieutenant colonel with three Distinguished Flying Crosses. He settled in Comfort, Texas, about 45 miles northwest of San Antonio, and owned a citrus farm there. He was the subject of a 2015 book, “Dick Cole’s War: Doolittle Raider, Hump Pilot, Air Commando,” by Dennis R. Okerstrom.

Cole’s survivors include his daughter, Cindy Cole Chal, and his son, Richard. His wife, Lucia Martha (Harrell) Cole, who was known as Marty, died in 2003.

Jimmy Doolittle died in 1993 at 96.

The raiders raised scholarship money at their annual reunions to benefit students pursuing aviation studies.

The city of Tucson, Arizona, donated 80 silver goblets bearing the raiders’ names when it hosted their 1959 reunion, with the names of each airman engraved both right side up and upside down. At each gathering thereafter, the survivors turned down the goblets representing their fellow airmen who had died since the previous reunion — though their names, having been duplicated, remained right side up — and they toasted all the departed.

The raiders had planned to hold annual public reunions until only two remained, when they were to uncork a bottle of cognac — vintage 1896, the year of Doolittle’s birth — for a private final toast.

But early in 2013, they announced that their last public reunion would be held that April at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, where they had trained, and that they would have a final, private reunion later in the year, no matter how many raiders were left.

As a centerpiece of the Florida reunion, Cole flew a restored B-25 Mitchell bomber, alternating at the controls with the plane’s owner, Larry Kelley, during a 40-minute flight over Florida.

“I kept looking over the altimeter,” Kelley told The Associated Press afterward. “I told him to hold 1,500 feet, and I kept looking at the altimeter, and it was dead on: not 1,499 feet, not 1,501 feet. He had the altimeter pegged at 1,500 feet.”

Cole made a fine landing, then stuck his head out the cockpit window and told reporters: “It’s the same as it was then. All I did was prove how rusty I am.”

When the remaining raiders held their final reunion in November 2013 — an invitation-only event attended by more than 600, including family members and descendants of the men on the mission and the Chinese villagers who aided them — Cole was joined by Edward J. Saylor and David J. Thatcher, who were engineer-gunners on the raid. The fourth surviving raider, Robert Hite, a co-pilot who had been captured by the Japanese, was unable to attend because of health issues. All were in their 90s. (Saylor and Hite died in 2015 and Thatcher in 2016.)

Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, the Air Force chief of staff at the time, said that the Doolittle Raid had bestowed “a gift to a nation at war.”

Cole, who built the display case holding the goblets, which are on permanent display at the Air Force museum, then offered the final toast.

“To the gentlemen we lost on the mission and to those who have passed away since,” he said. “Thank you very much and may they rest in peace.”

In September 2016, tribute was paid to the Doolittle Raiders once more when Cole attended a ceremony in Washington, at which the Air Force announced the naming of a new long-range bomber it envisioned. It would be the B-21 Raider.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/obituaries/richard-cole-dead.html" id="a3766c1b-f27c-30d9-af15-dba57e493590">The New York Times</a>.

Richard Cole, Last Survivor of the Doolittle Raid on Japan, Dies at 103

Richard E. Cole, who was Jimmy Doolittle’s co-pilot in the lead plane of a storied mission in the history of American air power, the bombing raid on Japan in retaliation for its attack on Pearl Harbor months earlier, died Tuesday in San Antonio. He was 103 and the last survivor of the 80 Doolittle raiders, who carried out America’s first strikes against the Japanese homeland in World War II.

His death was confirmed by the Rangers.

He had dementia and was living at a long-term care facility in Ancaster, outside his hometown, Hamilton.

When Howell joined the Rangers in October 1952, he was among 14 rookies with the team that season. Most didn’t stick around too long, but Howell went on to play in 1,160 regular-season games as a Ranger, a still-standing team record.

The Rangers were often lackluster in Howell’s playing days, but he joined with Andy Bathgate on right wing and Gump Worsley in goal, his fellow rookies and future Hall of Famers as well, to give their frustrated fans of the 1950s and early 60s some hope.

Howell won the Norris Trophy as the NHL’s leading defenseman in the 1966-67 season and he was a seven-time All-Star.

Soon after playing in his 1,000th game, in January 1967, he was presented with the Medal of the City of New York by Mayor John V. Lindsay and he was honored at the old Madison Square Garden with the first “night” ever accorded a Rangers player.

Making his Ranger debut Oct. 18, 1952, facing the Maple Leafs in Toronto, Howell scored on his first shot. But he was known as a “stay at home” defenseman, usually sticking close to his blue line instead of looking for a chance to carry the puck up ice.

At 6 foot 1 and 195 pounds or so, “I was a big guy for the time I played,” he told John Halligan and John Kreiser in “Game of My Life: New York Rangers” (2008). “But I wasn’t the type of guy to go run people. I could take them out of the play, but I wasn’t going to skate 50 feet to hit someone.”

Howell finally broke the double-digit mark in goals scored in the 1966-67 season, when he had 12 goals and 28 assists.

“We had Boom-Boom Geoffrion,” he once told the Hall of Fame in recalling that season. “He came to us from the Montreal Canadiens as a power-play specialist. I’d pass him the puck on the right point. He’d pass it back to me. I’d pass to him. Finally, he said, ‘Will you please shoot the puck?’ A few of them went in.”

But for much of the city, the Rangers were often an afterthought, since they were regularly displaced from the Eighth Avenue Garden by more lucrative events.

“The first two weeks of the season, the rodeo was booked in,” Howell told the Hall, which inducted him in 1979. “The Kennel Club had dogs come in in February. And then the circus came in right at the end of the season, and if we made the playoffs, you’d be lucky to play two games at home, and the rest would be on the road.”

Henry Vernon Howell was born Dec. 28, 1932, in Hamilton, Ontario, where his father was a furrier. He joined the Rangers’ junior team at Guelph, Ontario, at 16, and was called up after three seasons there.

Howell was the Ranger captain for two seasons in the 1950s and was voted the team’s most popular player for three consecutive seasons in the 1960s.

He developed back problems leading to spinal-fusion surgery before the 1969-70 season. The Rangers offered him a management post, but he wanted to continue playing and was sold to the Oakland Seals.

After leaving the Rangers, Howell played another four seasons in the NHL, in the Bay Area and with the Los Angeles Kings, then moved to the World Hockey Association in 1973. He was a player-coach for the New York Golden Blades/New Jersey Knights franchise for one season, held the dual role when the team became the San Diego Mariners the following season, then concluded his career playing for the Calgary Cowboys, retiring in 1976 at 43.

He had 94 goals and 324 assists in the NHL, playing in 1,411 games, and seven goals and 36 assists in the WHA, appearing in 170 games.

Howell was later general manager of the NHL’s Cleveland Barons and briefly head coach of the Minnesota North Stars, and he scouted for the Rangers and the Edmonton Oilers.

Howell, who had worn No. 3 with the Rangers, and Bathgate, who had donned No. 9, were honored at the Garden in February 2009 when their jersey numbers were retired (in Bathgate’s case for a second time, since Adam Graves’ No. 9 had already been retired). Bathgate died in 2016.

And Howell was selected to represent the Rangers when Canada Post issued a series of stamps in October 2014, honoring a star defenseman from each team in the NHL’s Original Six, predating the league expansion of 1967.

Howell’s survivors include his daughter, Cheryl. His wife, Marilyn, died several weeks ago. A younger brother, Ron, who played briefly for the Rangers in the mid-1950s, died in 1992.

The Rangers never got beyond the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs when Howell played for them. But he did have his name etched on the Cup, when he scouted for the Oilers team that won the 1990 NHL championship.

“I wish it could have been with the Rangers,” he once remarked, “but a ring is still a ring.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/obituaries/harry-howell-dead-rangers.html" id="d9bb0858-ab45-3c99-a8c7-f8d0c9d1a333">The New York Times</a>.

Harry Howell, the Hall of Fame defenseman who became one of hockey’s most durable figures, playing with the New York Rangers for 17 seasons in a career that spanned 24 seasons in two leagues, died Saturday in Ontario. He was 86.

Harry Howell, Star Defenseman With Rangers for 17 Years, Dies at 86

The Dodgers announced his death but did not say where he died.

An imposing right-hander, at 6 feet 4 inches and 225 pounds, with an overpowering fastball, Newcombe claimed a string of achievements: rookie of the year in 1949; four-time All-Star; and the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1956, when he also won the first Cy Young Award as baseball’s top pitcher. Moreover, he was the first black pitcher to start a World Series game.

But he also faced adversity that went beyond the racial taunts hurled at the first black major leaguers, including his Dodger teammates Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. His career was cut short by alcoholism, and he was tormented by an undeserved reputation for failing to win big games, particularly in the World Series.

Newcombe had a career record of 149-90 with a 3.56 earned run average in 10 seasons with the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Indians, missing two years of play because of military service.

In his rookie season, he won 17 games and lost eight and led the league in shutouts with five. He had the league’s best winning percentage in 1955, .800, when he posted a record of 20-5, and in 1956, .794, when he went 27-7.

He was also remarkably proficient at the plate for a pitcher. He set a single-season National League record for home runs by a pitcher with seven in 1955, and over his career hit 15 homers with a .271 batting average.

Carl Erskine, the outstanding right-hander who was Newcombe’s teammate on the “Boys of Summer” teams, felt that Newcombe had not been given his due.

“If Newcombe had not had two years away in the service, he could very well have been a Hall of Fame pitcher,” Erskine told Peter Golenbock in his book “Bums” (1984).

Donald Newcombe was born on June 14, 1926, in Madison, New Jersey, and grew up in Elizabeth. His father was a chauffeur.

Newcombe pitched for the Newark Eagles of the Negro leagues in 1944 and 1945 and then was signed by Branch Rickey, the Dodgers’ general manager, to a minor league contract before the 1946 season. Rickey went on to break the modern major league color barrier the next year by signing Robinson to a Dodger contract.

Newcombe had two outstanding seasons with the Dodgers’ farm team in Nashua, New Hampshire, and another at Montreal before joining the Dodgers in May 1949.

Dan Bankhead, who debuted for the Dodgers on Aug. 26, 1947, was the first black pitcher in the majors. But Newcombe was the first to be a star. He followed up his rookie-of-the-year season with a 19-11 record in 1950 and a 20-9 mark in 1951.

After two years in the Army, he had a mediocre season in 1954, then regained his form with 20 victories in 1955, when the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series championship, and 27 in 1956.

But his heavy drinking took its toll, and after going 0-6 with the Dodgers at the outset of the 1958 season, their first year in Los Angeles, he was traded to Cincinnati. He lasted two more seasons in the major leagues, finishing his career with Cleveland.

Newcombe’s reputation for failing in key games came largely from his 0-4 record in World Series play facing the New York Yankees, but he had proved himself in many a key moment. He pitched an outstanding game in his first Series defeat, in 1949, losing 1-0 on Tommy Henrich’s ninth-inning home run. He was a mainstay for the Dodgers in the final weeks of the 1951 season, then pitched superbly on little rest in Game 3 of the playoffs against the New York Giants before Ralph Branca yielded Bobby Thomson’s memorable pennant-winning home run.

Newcombe’s worst moments came in Game 7 of the 1956 World Series, when Yogi Berra hit two home runs off him in the Yankees’ 9-0 victory.

Long afterward, he remained bitter over his treatment in the press.

“Bob Feller never won a World Series game, either, but nobody said he choked,” Newcombe told The Plain-Dealer of Cleveland in 1997. “Ted Williams and DiMaggio had bad World Series, but nobody said they choked. But they said it about me.”

He acknowledged that he had never been on good terms with reporters. “I wasn’t the nicest guy in the world,” he said. “My attitude told them I didn’t care what they wrote.”

Newcombe drank heavily throughout his baseball career, and his problems worsened afterward. He said he stopped drinking in 1966, when his second wife, Billie, threatened to leave him and take their three children. He later spoke extensively on behalf of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

“We were a drinking family,” he once recalled. “I remember drinking beer Pearl Harbor Day in a bar when I was 15. The drinking kept me from pitching another four or five years.”

Newcombe returned to the Dodgers organization in 1970, when he became director of community relations. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2010, he described pitching to Joe DiMaggio in 1949 in the first All-Star Game to include black players.

“We never, ever dreamed we’d have a chance to play in the major leagues, so why even think about it?” he said. “We never talked about it, never thought about, never watched it. When I faced DiMaggio, I really didn’t know who he was.”

Survivors include his wife, Karen Newcombe; his sons Don Jr. and Brett; a stepson, Chris Peterson; a daughter, Kellye Roxanne Newcombe; and two grandchildren.

Newcombe was proud of his accomplishments as a pitcher. But he was immensely gratified as well to have played a role in the civil rights struggle by helping shatter baseball’s racial barrier.

“We were paying our dues long before the civil rights marches,” Newcombe recalled in a 1952 interview with The Sporting News. “Martin Luther King told me in my home one night, ‘You’ll never know what you and Jackie and Roy did to make it possible to do my job.'”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/obituaries/don-newcombe-dead.html" id="830ba701-f85e-3795-a66d-d078fba32241">The New York Times</a>.

Don Newcombe, the major leagues’ first outstanding black pitcher and a star for the Brooklyn Dodgers in their glory years, the 1950s, died Tuesday. He was 92.

Don Newcombe Dies at 92; Dodger Pitcher Helped Break Racial Barrier

His wife, Theresa Bragg, confirmed the death. She said he had been in failing health since having a stroke 10 years ago.

Competing in the era of relatively rigid aluminum poles, which required superior upper-body strength, the muscular Bragg, a 6-foot-3 200-pounder, dominated the pole vault in the late 1950s.

Already the holder of world indoor and outdoor records, Bragg vaulted 15 feet 5 1/8 inches at the Rome Games — exceeding by almost 6 inches the Olympic record set by Bob Richards in 1956 — despite having injured a leg muscle a few weeks earlier. Bragg dueled for 6 1/2 hours with teammate Ron Morris, who won the silver medal, and then climbed the victory stand and let out a Tarzan yell.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Bragg had idolized the ape man famously played for many years in the movies by another Olympian, swimmer Johnny Weissmuller.

“I went to a lot of Tarzan movies, and I was always trying to emulate him,” Bragg was quoted as saying in “Tales of Gold: An Oral History of the Summer Olympic Games Told by America’s Gold Medal Winners” (1987), by Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty. “I was always going to the woods, where I had a hideaway called Tarzanville. I’d be out there, swinging through the trees and trying to vault over poles that I’d place between the branches.”

Bragg used bamboo rods he got at a furniture store, where they had been used to wrap carpeting. While attending a track meet in Philadelphia when he was a sophomore at Penns Grove High School in New Jersey, he met Richards, who encouraged him to pursue the sport on a more formal basis.

Bragg was recruited for Villanova University by its renowned coach, Jumbo Elliott. In Bragg’s senior season, during the winter of 1957, he joined with runners Ron Delany, Charlie Jenkins and Ed Collymore on one of collegiate track and field’s greatest squads.

Elliott occasionally entered Bragg in sprint events to refine his approach to the pole-vault bar. “He didn’t know that much about pole-vaulting, but he did improve my speed,” Bragg said in “Tales of Gold.” Bragg won the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s outdoor championship in 1955 and was the IC4A pole-vault champion, both indoor and outdoor, from 1955 to 1957.

Soon after Bragg retired, flexible fiberglass poles were introduced, rewarding superior technique as well as strength and speed. Those poles, which can bend 90 degrees, act like slingshots, catapulting vaulters to heights far beyond those possible with the poles used by Cornelius Warmerdam, the first vaulter to clear 15 feet, and Bragg.

“If pro track had come along after 1960, I never would have retired,” Bragg once said. “But I couldn’t see learning how to vault all over again with the new poles just to win another medal.”

He broke the world indoor record, set 16 years earlier by Warmerdam, when he vaulted 15 feet 9 1/2 inches on Feb. 13, 1959, at Convention Hall in Philadelphia. That vault eclipsed Warmerdam’s mark by a full inch. He set a world outdoor record by vaulting 15 feet 9 1/4 inches at the Olympic trials at Stanford Stadium in July 1960.

Bragg carried his poles in canvas cases marked “Don (Tarzan) Bragg,” a flourish that evoked ribbing. “The Californians would always try to psych me out at their home meets,” he remembered. “They’d put a comic-book cover on my locker bearing a likeness of Tarzan and a chimpanzee, and the chimp would be saying, ‘Me Bragg, you Tarzan.'”

He had several chances to play Tarzan in the movies after he retired from the pole vault, but twice lost roles because of injuries and once saw a prospective film fall victim to a copyright-infringement dispute.

Donald George Bragg was born on May 15, 1935, in Penns Grove, New Jersey, one of four children of George Bragg, who did construction work for DuPont, and Jean (McCoy) Bragg, a homemaker.

Bragg and his wife operated a summer camp for boys in Chatsworth, New Jersey, in the 1960s and ‘70s that concentrated on remedial reading and mathematics. He was the athletic director at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (now Stockton University) in Pomona in the ‘70s and ‘80s and invested in real estate. But then came hard times.

After the New Jersey Legislature in 1979 passed the Pinelands Protection Act, which banned development on 1,000 wilderness acres Bragg had purchased, he went bankrupt. He later opened a kayak operation in the Pinelands area.

In addition to his wife, the former Theresa Fiore, Bragg is survived by their sons, Mark and Jeff; their daughters, Tracey Bragg and Renee Bragg; 11 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Bragg was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1996, but by then the fiberglass poles had long since made the 15-foot mark — cleared by Bragg 25 times at Villanova — as much a relic as baseball’s dead ball.

As he once put it: “It’s a different event now. The pole does all the work.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/obituaries/don-bragg-dead.html" id="2b63a1eb-9f39-3b4f-ab3d-d386575002f4">The New York Times</a>.

Don Bragg, who was denied his dream of playing Tarzan in the movies but parlayed his imposing physique into a gold medal in the pole vault at the 1960 Rome Olympics, died Saturday at his home in Oakley, California, near San Francisco. He was 83.

Don Bragg, Olympic Pole-Vault Champion, Is Dead at 83

Major League Baseball announced the death but did not specify the cause. The Baltimore Sun recently reported Robinson was in the late stages of a long illness.

Playing for 21 seasons, mostly with the Cincinnati Reds and Baltimore Orioles, Robinson was the only winner of the Most Valuable Player Award in both the National and American Leagues.

He was an intense and often intimidating presence, leaning over the plate from his right-handed stance, daring pitchers to hit him (which they did, 198 times), then retaliating with long drives, “pounding pitchers with fine impartiality,” as baseball writer Roger Kahn once wrote.

As a player, Robinson insisted that teammates match his own will to win. As a manager, he had little patience with lack of hustle.

Robinson won baseball’s batting triple crown in 1966, hitting 49 home runs, driving in 122 runs and batting .316 in his first season with the Orioles and helping the team capture a World Series championship for the first time in franchise history.

He batted at least .300 in nine different seasons, had 2,943 career hits, drove in 1,812 runs and played on five pennant-winning teams. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, his first time on the ballot.

Robinson made his debut as the majors’ first black manager with the Cleveland Indians on April 8, 1975, 28 years after Jackie Robinson (no relation) first took the field with the Dodgers. Rachel Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s widow, threw out the ceremonial first ball.

Frank Robinson, who was still an active player, punctuated the historic occasion by hitting a home run in his first at-bat, as the designated hitter, leading the Indians to a 5-3 victory over the New York Yankees.

He managed for all or parts of 16 seasons, with the Indians (1975-77), the San Francisco Giants (1981-84), the Orioles (1988-91), the Montreal Expos (2002-04) and their successor franchise, the Washington Nationals (2005-06). He never managed a pennant winner, but the Baseball Writers Association of America named him the American League manager of the year in 1989, when his Orioles finished second in the East Division, two games behind the Toronto Blue Jays.

Frank Robinson was born Aug. 31, 1935, in Beaumont, Texas, and grew up in Oakland, California, the youngest of 10 children. He played baseball at McClymonds High School in Oakland, where he was also a basketball teammate of Bill Russell’s. He signed with the Reds organization in 1953 and made his major league debut as Cincinnati’s left fielder three years later.

When the Indians announced in October 1974 that Robinson would become their manager, he received a congratulatory telegram from President Gerald Ford.

“I don’t think I was hired because I was black,” Robinson said. “I hope not. I think I’ve been hired because of my ability.”

When Robinson lined up with his team in front of the Indians’ dugout at their 1975 season opener before a crowd of 56,204 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, he received a resounding ovation.

“One hundred thousand fans could not have been louder,” he recalled in his memoir. “It was the biggest ovation I ever received, and it almost brought tears to my eyes. After all the years of waiting to become a big league manager — ignored because so many team owners felt that fans would not accept a black manager — I was on the job and people were loudly pleased.”

Robinson’s wife was Barbara Ann Cole. They had a son, Frank Kevin, and a daughter, Nichelle. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/obituaries/frank-robinson-hall-of-fame-slugger-and-first-black-baseball-manager-dies-at-83.html" id="cd3dcca0-3a58-301d-a0fd-c31625233604">The New York Times</a>.

Frank Robinson, the Hall of Fame outfielder who hit 586 home runs and became a racial pioneer as the first black manager in the major leagues, nearly three decades after Jackie Robinson broke modern baseball’s color barrier playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.

Frank Robinson, Hall of Fame Slugger and First Black Baseball Manager, Dies at 83

Major League Baseball announced the death but did not specify the cause. The Baltimore Sun recently reported that Robinson was in the late stages of a long illness.

He was an intense and often intimidating presence, leaning over the plate from his right-handed stance, daring pitchers to hit him (which they did, 198 times), then retaliating with long drives, “pounding pitchers with fine impartiality,” as baseball writer Roger Kahn once wrote. He broke up double plays with fearsome slides.

He managed for all or parts of 16 seasons, with the Indians (1975-77), the San Francisco Giants (1981-84), the Orioles (1988-91), the Montreal Expos (2002-04) and their successor franchise, the Washington Nationals (2005-06). He never managed a pennant winner, but the Baseball Writers’ Association of America named him the American League manager of the year in 1989, when his Orioles finished second in the East Division, two games behind the Toronto Blue Jays.

“He had great, great baseball instincts and tremendous physical attributes that allowed him to do everything right on a ball field,” former Orioles manager Earl Weaver wrote in his memoir, “It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts” (1982).

As Weaver put it: “He never griped and he was always willing to counsel any younger players who sought his advice. At times I know he counseled a few who didn’t seek him out when he heard them complaining. ‘That’s enough!’ he’d holler. ‘Don’t rock the boat.'”

Orioles’ Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer told Baseball Digest in 2006 that Robinson’s arrival in Baltimore via a trade with Cincinnati had kindled the franchise’s resurgence. “If Frank saw something, Frank was going to say something,” he said. “When he came over here, he was the leader. He was the guy. He made us all better.”

Another of the Orioles’ leading pitchers of that time, Dave McNally, was quoted in John Eisenberg’s oral history of the team, “From 33rd Street to Camden Yards” (2000): “As good as Frank was, it was how hard he played that really made an impact. The intensity the man had was really incredible.”

In that season he hit 38 home runs in a lineup laden with power hitters like Ted Kluszewski, Wally Post and Gus Bell, and was named Rookie of the Year.

Robinson went on to hit 37 homers, drive in 124 runs and bat .323 for the Reds’ 1961 pennant-winners, and he was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player that year. He remained a formidable figure at the plate for Cincinnati through the mid-'60s.

Robinson described his approach at bat in his memoir “Extra Innings” (1988), written with Berry Stainback.

“I was as aggressive at the plate as I was on the basepaths and in the outfield,” he wrote. “I stood as close to the plate as I could and stuck my head out over it so that I could get the best possible view of the ball when it left the pitcher’s hand and so that I could protect the outside corner. If pitchers jammed me, my wrists were quick enough to get around on the pitch.”

In what became one of baseball’s most one-sided deals, the Reds traded Robinson to the Orioles after the 1965 season. Cincinnati received pitcher Milt Pappas and two other players, none destined to make much impact. Bill DeWitt, the Reds’ general manager, was quoted as saying that Robinson was “an old 30,” suggesting that he was past his prime.

But Robinson was named MVP for the American League and MVP for the World Series in 1966, when the Orioles swept the Los Angeles Dodgers with a lineup also including Boog Powell at first base, Davey Johnson at second and future Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson at third.

The Orioles also had a superb pitching staff led by McNally, Palmer, Wally Bunker and Steve Barber. Robinson hit two home runs in that Series, both off Don Drysdale, the first in Game 1 and the second in the Series-clinching Game 4, a 1-0 Baltimore victory.

In his six seasons with the Orioles, he helped lead the team to four pennants and two World Series championships.

On June 26, 1970, Robinson hit two consecutive grand slam homers for the Orioles against the second Washington Senators franchise at RFK Stadium.

Before managing the Indians, Robinson had been the first African-American manager of an integrated professional team outside organized baseball’s structure — Santurce of the Puerto Rican winter league. He held the post for several seasons, beginning in 1968-69, to gain experience toward becoming a major league manager.

“The black players thought I was getting on them more than the white players,” The New York Times quoted him as saying while he was in that post. “But it was always said in a joking way.”

Robinson was traded by the Orioles to the Los Angeles Dodgers before the 1971 season and later played with the California Angels and briefly with the Indians. After being named manager, he continued to play as a designated hitter.

When the Indians announced in October 1974 that Robinson would become their manager, a milestone event in baseball’s race relations, he received a congratulatory telegram from President Gerald Ford.

He added, “The only wish I could have is that Jackie Robinson could be here today to see this happen.”

Jackie Robinson had urged the hiring of a black manager in the majors when he threw out the ceremonial first ball at Game 2 of the 1972 World Series. He died later that October at age 53.

When Frank Robinson lined up with his team in front of the Indians’ dugout at their 1975 season opener before a crowd of 56,204 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, he received a resounding ovation.

The Indians had been a losing team for years, and Robinson’s ballclubs finished fourth in the American League East in 1975 and 1976. After a 26-31 start in 1977, he was fired.

Reporters asked if he thought race had anything to do with his dismissal. “If race was a factor,” he told Kahn for a column in The Times, “I’m not aware of it. I never heard a serious remark about race. I never heard secondhand of anyone making a remark. I have no bitterness about Cleveland. I did the best I could.”

When Robinson returned to the managing ranks with the 1981 Giants, the path he pioneered had been followed by two others. Larry Doby, who became the first black player in the American League with the 1948 Indians, was named manager of the Chicago White Sox in 1978. Maury Wills, best known for starring with the Los Angeles Dodgers, was named the Seattle Mariners’ manager in 1980.

After finding modest success managing the Giants and the Orioles, Robinson twice had winning records with an Expos franchise, which had been taken over by the MLB and allowed only a relatively meager payroll. After managing the Washington Nationals for two seasons, Robinson held administrative posts in the baseball commissioner’s office under Bud Selig and later Rob Manfred.

President George W. Bush presented Robinson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, at a White House ceremony in 2005, citing him for “extraordinary achievements as a baseball player and manager and for setting a lasting example of character in athletics.”

The Orioles, Reds and Indians have erected statues of Robinson at their stadiums.

Robinson entered the Hall of Fame with Hank Aaron, baseball’s home-run king at the time. Rachel Robinson attended the ceremony, and she was asked about her husband’s legacy in leading the way for the game’s first generation of great black players.

“Jackie would not want to upstage them,” she said. “But they represent the epitome of what Jackie wanted: excellence.”

Major League Baseball reported the death but did not say specify the cause. The Baltimore Sun recently reported Robinson was in the late stages of a long illness.

Frank Robinson, the Hall of Fame outfielder who hit 586 home runs and became a racial pioneer as the first black manager in the major leagues, nearly three decades after Jackie Robinson broke modern baseball’s color barrier playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, died Thursday at his home in Southern California. He was 83.

Major League Baseball reported the death but did not say specify the cause. The Baltimore Sun recently reported that Robinson was in the late stages of a long illness.

Frank Robinson, who was still an active player, punctuated the historic occasion by hitting a home run in his first at-bat, as the designated hitter, leading the Indians to a 5-3 victory over the Yankees.

He managed for all or parts of 16 seasons, with the Indians (1975-77), the San Francisco Giants (1981-84), the Orioles (1988-91), the Montreal Expos (2002-4) and their successor franchise, the Washington Nationals (2005-6). He never managed a pennant winner, but the Baseball Writers Association of America named him the American League manager of the year in 1989, when his Orioles finished second in the East Division, two games behind the Toronto Blue Jays.

As Weaver put it: “He never griped and he was always willing to counsel any younger players who sought his advice. At times I know he counseled a few who didn’t seek him out when he heard them complaining. ‘That’s enough!’ he’d holler. ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ ”

Robinson described his approach at bat in his memoir “Extra Innings” (1988), written with Barry Stainback.

Richard Goldstein

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