BOISE, Idaho — On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier of Major League Baseball when he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Thirty years before them, the man who signed him, Branch Rickey, walked away from a failed career as a lawyer in Boise.
Branch Rickey was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1967 after he had a 50-year career in baseball management. He was also elected to the College Baseball Hall of Fame and the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. Rickey developed the modern farming system for baseball teams that has since been copied by all others and helped break the league's color barrier with Robinson.
However, he never would have found that level of success if he found even a sliver of it as a lawyer in Boise.
In 1911, Rickey had just ended his failed baseball career, was nearly 30 and had graduated from the University of Michigan's law school. He decided Boise where was he would make it out for himself, but even to his admission, it turned out to be a miserable affair.
He told Sport's Illustrated Geral Holland in 1955 about how he knew his career as a lawyer was over after meeting his first client in Boise.
"Finally, I was in court one day and the judge appointed me attorney for a man who was being held on a charge the newspapers used to describe as white slavery. I was apprehensive, but at last I summoned enough courage to go over to the jail and see my client.
Oh, he was a horrible creature. I can see him now, walking slowly up to the bars and looking me up and down with contempt. He terrified me. I began to shake like a leaf. After a minute he said, 'Who the hell are you?'
I tried to draw myself up a little and then I said, 'Sir, my name is Branch Rickey. The court has appointed me your attorney and I would like to talk to you.' He looked me up and down again and then spat at my feet. Then he delivered what turned out to be the final words of our association. He said, 'Get the hell out of here!'"
Rickey only played on working in baseball for one year before he started his 50-year long career as a scout for the St. Louis Browns.
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