Mary was the consummate wife for a family of her day. Despite her famous father and family, she never challenged John for attention. In fact, she avoided it. I tried for years to get her to talk about her father or baseball, and she usually responded by changing the subject to John or one of his many activities and dismissing her days in baseball as "not very interesting."

Thanks to a bridge tournament organized by Marshall Lerner, the Beavers visited the Ecklers on a Friday evening. John was delayed at some activity, which left Mary alone to host us. And I asked her about my favorite player, Rogers Hornsby, who played second base for the old St. Louis Browns. She talked about a number of players, from Hornsby the rogue to Musial the gentleman.

She talked about how she and her sisters would travel every spring to all of the training camps in Florida to watch various exhibition teams. They would watch at least one game at every camp.

And she talked about her father, Branch Rickey.

Branch Rickey is most famous for giving Jackie Robinson the opportunity in 1947 to pursue a career in major league baseball. This was a large step not only in making baseball more representative of its audience, but in expanding the rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence to all people regardless of color.

Nevertheless, Rickey and his family suffered difficulties as a result. Mary told stories about a cab driver refusing to drive the Rickey family members, restaurants refusing to serve them, and other difficulties that the Rickey family encountered after Branch brought Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Mary said that Rickey knew that he and his family would suffer these difficulties because bringing Robinson to the Dodgers wasn’t an isolated act by Rickey. He was the first coach to introduce an African-American to college baseball. This was 1904! The player was Charles Thomas. A famous story in Delaware is about Rickey’s Ohio Wesleyan team going to play Notre Dame at South Bend. The local YMCA refused to house Thomas. Rickey ignored the refusal and took Thomas to Rickey’s own room. When the YMCA manager asked Rickey to have Thomas leave, Rickey reportedly said, "Under no circumstances will I leave or allow Thomas to be put out." Apparently Rickey won the confrontation, and Thomas stayed in Rickey’s room. More importantly to Rickey, according to Mary, the team rallied and defeated Notre Dame the next day.

To me, the only bad thing about Rickey is that after his OWU days he got his law degree from the University of Michigan. He also coached Michigan’s baseball team while going to law school. But despite the Michigan ties, he sent his daughters, or at least Mary, to his alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan where Mary met the young John Eckler.

Rickey. He judged people by their desire to work hard and perfect themselves. Hard word is the evidence of desire. Sweat together with desire, not color of skin, was the basis that Rickey used to select winners:

Sweat is the greatest solvent there is for most players’ problems. I know of no cure, no soluble way to get rid of a bad technique as quick as "sweat." The same thing is true on the part of the coach or the teacher – infinite patience. Make a man do it over and over again. Right there with patience and industry and constant work on the thing. If you just accomplish one little thing, you may move a man from the minor leagues to the majors.

It’s so hard for all of us to do things we don’t do well. It’s so hard for a man voluntarily to repeat a task where he has no artistry. He feels defeated all the time because he can’t do it well. At the end of every effort, it says "quit" – do something else that you can do more gracefully.

But a winner gets completely saturated with the desire to excel. He is on the high road to a personal championship. It makes men willing – indeed, anxious – to devote themselves with perhaps exclusive attention to their weaknesses. This consuming desire can make a faulty, youthful batman . . . into a great batsman. It can make a good base runner out of a slow runner. The greatest single thing that makes a championship player is his desire to be one. [From Branch Rickey's Little Blue Book.]

What attracted Rickey to men like Thomas and Jackie Robinson was their desire to be, and their work ethic to become, championship players. And although Mary in her unassuming way would never say so, her father had the fortitude to give them and, as a result, many others the opportunity to pursue that desire despite the color of their skin.