42

In the eighth grade my teacher was an affable young man known to us as Mr. Flanagan, and the major league baseball team I followed--the teams were Back East--was the Brooklyn Dodgers. That was the team of Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider--local men--and the rest of the Boys of Summer. As it turned out, Flanagan had played on the UCLA baseball team with Robinson, and one afternoon he told us that Jackie Robinson had been an unusually aggressive and difficult person to be around. I don't think he liked Robinson. Flanagan was a serious and pleasant teacher. He wasn't the best teacher I ever had: that was a woman whose name I've forgotten who taught her class to listen to classical music, make paper from rags, set type by hand, and so on. But Flanagan was a good teacher. Neither he nor I had any idea what Jackie Robinson had dealt with in growing up and earning that 42 on the back of his jersey, the only number retired by every team in the show.