Several months before Jackie Robinson, Paul Phipps broke his own color barrier in baseball. The year was 1946. After battling the Japanese on Saipan and Iwo Jima as a Marine officer, Phipps received an assignment to oversee sports at separate bases in North Carolina, one for white soldiers like him and one for blacks.
Several months before Jackie Robinson, Paul Phipps broke his own color barrier in baseball.
The year was 1946. After battling the Japanese on Saipan and Iwo Jima as a Marine officer, Phipps received an assignment to oversee sports at separate bases in North Carolina, one for white soldiers like him and one for blacks.
Down a catcher, a black team asked him to join. He accepted.
A year later, a former Army officer named Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.
"It was just before he showed up that I showed up," Phipps joked this week, the end of Black History Month, as he sat recounting the story in an upstairs retreat of his Main Street home.
Surrounding the 88-year-old were yellowed newspaper clippings, curled black-and-white snapshots and worn photo albums, many from his war days.
In one photo, exhausted Marines sit on a beach on Iwo Jima, listening to a sergeant play the fiddle as they wait for a ride away from an island that claimed many of their brethren. In another, Phipps smiles from a baseball dugout in Hawaii, the word "Marines" emblazoned on his uniform jersey.
He began playing as a teen, making Hopkinton's varsity team in sixth grade at a time when such feats were still possible. Later, while stationed in Hawaii with the Marines, he played against Brooklyn Dodger Pee Wee Reese and other major leaguers fighting in World War II.
Since Phipps managed one of the teams, he was sent after the war to run the sports programs at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune and the sister section for black Marines, Montford Point.
"We're not supposed to talk too much about that, I guess," Phipps said of the segregation.
In those days, Phipps said, the Marines, at least at Lejeune, had an unwritten edict: White soldiers and black soldiers could not play contact sports together.
"The headquarters at Camp Lejeune didn't look favorably at mingling at the time," he said. "They had rules."
The ban did not cover baseball, but the games still involved white teams playing black teams, at least at first. After helping with batting practice, Phipps was asked by one of the black squads to replace a recently discharged catcher.
When he went to headquarters to relay the request, the commanding officer told Phipps to make his own decision.
"He just looked at me sort of funny and asked me if I really wanted to do it," Phipps said.
For Phipps, it was an easy call, despite the strange looks he would soon get from the other white officers.
"We were all Marines," he said.
With their new catcher on board, the team played white and black military and civilian teams across the region. Phipps said he did not recall any harassment from opposing players, perhaps because he was a Marine.
"They didn't give me a hard time at all, which was most unusual in those days," he said.
As for fans, "I imagine there were comments, but we ignored them," Phipps said.
In the end, Phipps only played a few months, traveling back to Hopkinton when his wife endured a difficult pregnancy. He resigned his commission in 1947 when he realized Marine life would leave the pair living apart for long stretches.
Several months later, Robinson broke the Major League color barrier, enduring taunts and insults from players and fans. A year later, President Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces. Phipps said his actions held no larger import, unlike Robinson or Truman's.
"I thought it was great," he said of the Brooklyn Dodger's effort. "I thought it was unfair for the black athletes not to be recognized."
After leaving the Marines, Phipps tried out with a minor league team back in the Carolinas but got hurt. He later played with a Boston-area amateur team but hung up his spikes after slowing in his late 20s, turning down interest from a Boston Braves scout when he left the sport.
Instead, Phipps raised three sons with his wife, started an insurance company and enjoyed civic life, helping to form the town's Little League and its Chamber of Commerce. He never heard from his black teammates, and has no photos of the group because their time together was so short.
"He'd love to know, no question," said his son, Rob Phipps, adding that hearing his father's story as a child taught him not to back down from "bucking the tide."
Phipps has thought of writing an article on his Camp Lejeune experience for the Marine Corps magazine, but wonders if anyone wants to be reminded of those segregated days.
"I often wondered if I would get contacted," he said of his former teammates. "Of course, they're not kids anymore, either."
(Michael Morton can be reached at email@example.com or 508-626-4338.)