12 Crazy Meals That Jackie Robinson Devoured During His Wildest Years

Story of a REFUSED SEAT: Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line and, for three years, was not allowed to fight back. Restaurants would not serve him, hotels kept him out of their dining rooms, and he swallowed every insult in public. What almost no one knew was that diabetes was quietly taking his legs, his eyes and his heart. This is a countdown of the twelve foods that tell that story, from the bread and sugar water of his Pasadena childhood and the Kansas City ribs of his Negro Leagues season, to the Bond Bread that put his face on a loaf, the southern banquet tour that added 25 pounds, the St. Louis hotel dining room he still could not enter in 1954, and the pint of ice cream a doctor finally took away. Along the way: what these foods cost, what he was paid, and what the disease he kept secret did to him. Number 1 goes back to the day his mother saw it all coming. He was 53. On sourcing: his childhood and the 1946 flight come from his own words, Rachel Robinson's interviews (NPR, 2010; Smithsonian, 2015) and the Jackie Robinson Ballpark historical marker. His diagnosis and decline come from Arnold Rampersad's biography as quoted by diaTribe, and from Ken Burns's 2016 film. Baseball details come from SABR research, the Jackie Robinson Museum and 1948 wire reports. A few stories, like the Muskogee gas station and the 1954 Chase Hotel visit, are teammates' later tellings, and the narration treats them that way. Prices marked as estimates are period averages, not receipts. Nothing in this video claims his diet caused his diabetes; it ran in his family. Which one stayed with you? The bread and sweet water, the tomatoes he practiced on, or the shoebox at the New Orleans airport? Comments are open.