Of Memory and Mystery Guests: Jackie Robinson, Soupy Sales, and ‘What’s My Line?’
This article was written by David Krell
This article was published in Jackie Robinson: Perspectives on 42
Publicity photo of Jackie Robinson as an ABC broadcaster for Major League Championship Baseball. Jackie Robinson’s TV credits include being an ABC color commentator for MLB games in 1965. In addition to the appearance on What’s My Line?, Robinson also made the went on talk shows to be interviewed by Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, and David Frost.
Memory is a tricky thing.
Soupy Sales, a popular children’s TV show host in the 1960s and 1970s, discovered this immutable concept when he met Jackie Robinson during an episode of What’s My Line? The show’s premise: Four panelists deducing the job or “line” of a guest, through “yes or no” questions. These guests were everyday people with everyday jobs. But each episode also had a famous “mystery guest” segment requiring the panelists to be blindfolded as they attempted to discover his or her identity.
Robinson appeared on the November 20, 1969, broadcast; What’s My Line? ran from 1950 to 1967 on CBS and from 1968 to 1975 in first-run syndication. John Daly hosted the CBS incarnation; Wally Bruner and Larry Blyden were the hosts in the syndicated version.
After the panel of Sales, Joanna Barnes, Arlene Francis, and Bert Convy failed to figure the Hall of Famer’s identity, they removed their blindfolds. Then Sales offered his memory of seeing Robinson play college football: “You want to know something? One of the big thrills of my life and I get a big kick out of telling people this. It was in 1944 and I was in the Navy and I went to the Coliseum on Saturday afternoon. And UCLA in their backfield at the time had Jackie Robinson, Bob Waterfield, and Kenny Washington. You played USC that day and whipped them good. He was an All-American football player before he was a baseball player.”1
It wasn’t true. Robinson corrected Sales – he did play with Washington at UCLA, but in 1939. Here’s what might have happened to cause Sales’s confusion.
UCLA played USC at the Coliseum in the last game of the 1944 season. It was a blowout: final score 40-13. But the Trojans were victorious in the November 25 contest, not the Bruins; USC secured an undefeated record and later won the Rose Bowl against the University of Tennessee Volunteers. Sales was right about Waterfield being the UCLA quarterback, though.
It’s possible that Sales talked with UCLA fans who reminisced about Robinson and Washington. In turn, he fixed them in his mind as playing in that game and subconsciously changed the winning team from USC to UCLA.
Robinson played semipro football in 1944 with the Los Angeles Bulldogs of the Pacific Coast Professional Football League. If Sales went to the November 26 game at Los Angeles’s Wrigley Field, he would have seen the San Diego Bombers thrash the Bulldogs. But Robinson was on the field for only one play before an ankle injury sent him to the LA bench.2 In this paradigm, one can presume that Sales talked with Bulldogs fans who mentioned Robinson and his exploits at UCLA. But it requires the supposition that Sales confused the two stadiums.
Sales going to both games on the last weekend in November and mixing the facts together is another possibility.
After correcting Sales, Robinson and Bruner had a brief conversation about the baseball icon’s involvement with the Freedom National Bank in Harlem, which focused on minority customers. Bruner then gave an effusive declaration of Robinson’s impact on baseball and the ex-ballplayer responded by acknowledging the import of Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey in signing Robinson to break baseball’s color line in 1947.
This was not Robinson’s first presence on What’s My Line? The Brooklyn Dodgers legend appeared on the August 16, 1950, show. Often, viewers saw great ballplayers in the 1950s be the “mystery guest” trying to stump the panel: Roy Campanella, Phil Rizzuto, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Sal Maglie, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, and the 1956 Cincinnati Reds are some members of the post-World War II baseball pantheon who graced the stage. Rickey appeared on a 1959 episode; his conversation with Daly included boosting the Continental League, of which he was president. The CL never launched, but it led to expansion: Los Angeles Angels, Washington Senators (second incarnation), New York Mets, Houston Colt .45s (renamed Astros in 1965).
Two days after he was elected to the Hall of Fame, Satchel Paige – Robinson’s teammate from the 1945 Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues – appeared on the February 11, 1971, episode. Although Robinson – who had been inducted in 1962 – notched a year with the Monarchs on his résumé, Paige was the first true Negro Leagues star to be acknowledged with an enshrinement at Cooperstown.
There was controversy because Paige did not meet the requirement of playing in the major leagues for 10 years. But it was an unfair fiat because Black players were not allowed to join the ranks of major leaguers. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn said, “Technically, you’d have to say he’s not in the Hall of Fame.”3 Fans, scholars, ballplayers, and executives differed from Kuhn’s blunt assessment, of course.
Sales served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946 on the USS Randall and left with the rank of seaman first class. He saw action during the invasion of Okinawa.4 Though primarily known for his comic antics, usually slapstick, Sales made a dramatic turn in a 1964 episode of Route 66.5 He played a carefree millionaire with an unusual fixation: helping sick women. But when women learned his inclination, they tried to gain his love – and potentially marriage – by faking illnesses including being wheelchair-bound. Sales’s trademark pie-in-the-face gag gives the episode comic relief; A scene in the dining room of the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, Florida, becomes a pie-throwing free-for-all.
Sales died in 2009. He was 83.
Robinson died in 1972; diabetes and heart problems led to his premature death. But the episode of What’s My Line? and interviews on The Mike Douglas Show, The Dick Cavett Show, and The David Frost Show in the late 1960s and early 1970s comprise a time capsule of a slowly deteriorating, gray-haired man who not only understood his significance in sports and society, but also showed terrific humility in recounting the times when he ran the basepaths with the speed of Mercury and the determination of Zeus.
DAVID KRELL is the chair of SABR’s Elysian Fields Chapter in Northern New Jersey and the Spring Training Research Committee. He wrote 1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK and Our Bums: The Brooklyn Dodgers in History, Memory and Popular Culture. SABR twice granted him honorable mention for the Ron Gabriel Award. Additionally, David edited the anthologies The New York Mets in Popular Culture and The New York Yankees in Popular Culture. He often contributes to SABR’s Games Project, Biography Project, and Ballparks Project in addition to speaking at SABR conferences and the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture.
Notes
1 What’s My Line?, Syndicated, November 20, 1969.
2 “Bombers Ramble Over Bulldogs Here, 41-14,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1944: 20.
3 Joseph Durso, “Paige Is First Star of Old Negro Leagues to Be Selected for Hall of Fame,” New York Times, February 10, 1971: 52.
4 Supman, Milton, S1C, Navy – Together We Served website, navy. togetherweserved.com/usn/servlet/tws.webapp.WebApps?cmd=ShadowBoxProfile&type=Person&ID=497615accessed November 27, 2020.
5 Ganzer, Alvin, dir. Route 66. Season 4, episode 19, “This Is Going to Hurt Me More Than It Hurts You.” Aired February 14, 1964, on CBS.