Campanella Dead at 71 : Baseball: Hall of Fame catcher was three-time most valuable player and one of Brooklyn Dodgers’ all-time greats.

Roy Campanella, a Hall of Fame catcher and one of the all-time greats in Brooklyn Dodger history, died after suffering a heart attack Saturday night at his home in Woodland Hills. He was 71.

A three-time National League most valuable player, Campanella established major league records for catchers with 41 home runs and 142 runs batted in in 1953.

His career was cut short when an auto accident on Jan. 27, 1958, left him a quadriplegic.

“No one had more courage than Roy Campanella,” Dodger owner Peter O’Malley said in a statement released by the team. “To me, he was the greatest Dodger of them all. My thoughts are with his loving wife, Roxie, and his family.”

Born in Philadelphia on Nov. 19, 1921, Campanella was the son of a black mother and white father of Italian ancestry who peddled fruit and vegetables and later owned several small markets.

The young Campanella contributed to the family income by selling newspapers, cutting lawns, shining shoes and helping his brother deliver milk. He occasionally went to see the Philadelphia Athletics play at Shibe Park, but as a promising player, his love of baseball was restricted by the racial barriers of that time.

He played with a sandlot team called the Nicetown Colored Athletic Club and, at 15, signed with a black semipro team called the Bacharach Giants, who promised his mother that he would attend church on Sundays and paid him $25 a week for weekend games in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Campanella was eventually approached by the Baltimore Elite Giants, one of the most famous teams of the Negro National League, and signed for a salary of $150 a month. However, it wasn’t until 1946, nine years after he played his first professional game and the year that Jackie Robinson became the first black in organized baseball, that Campanella was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers and assigned to their Nashua, N.Y., farm club.

Two years later, at 26, he made his Dodger debut, following Robinson, Larry Doby and Dan Bankhead as the fourth black player in the major leagues.

In 1969, Campanella again followed Robinson, this time as the second black player elected to the Hall of Fame.

Though aggressive behind the plate and at bat, and soon a significant force on the Brooklyn juggernauts of the ‘50s, the gentle and soft-spoken Campanella resisted Robinson’s urging to play a more active and outspoken role in racial issues.

In an interview with The Times in 1985, Campanella said:

“I’ve always thought I was born at just the right time. My generation had a valuable opportunity and made a tremendous impact--and how many persons can say that? I was one of the first of my race to play in the major leagues, and I feel I helped the situation quite a bit. I’m proud of the way I conducted myself--on and off the field.”

In his first major league series, Campanella set the stage for what followed. He went nine for 12 with two home runs and a triple in four games against the New York Giants.

In 10 major league seasons, he played in the World Series five times. He was the National League’s most valuable player in 1951, ’53 and ’55.

A powerhouse at 5 feet 10 and 190 pounds, he had 242 homers and 856 RBIs.

“He was one of the great ones,” former Dodger Lou Johnson said Saturday night in the press box at Dodger Stadium. “Nobody did what he did in a 10-year period. I’m just sorry I didn’t get a chance to play with him. I’m just glad I got the opportunity to meet him.”

Though soon to be 36 as the Dodgers prepared to leave Brooklyn after the 1957 season, Campanella felt confident he could play several more seasons and had told owner Walter O’Malley that he would accompany the team to Los Angeles and predicted he would still be playing when the club moved out of the Coliseum and into its new stadium in Chavez Ravine.

Campanella, in fact, had already leased a house in Redondo Beach when he caught Danny McDevitt’s 3-0 shutout of the Philadelphia Phillies on the last day of the 1957 season, the Dodgers’ last game at Ebbets Field and the last game for Campanella as an active player.

He was at work in his Harlem liquor store on the night of Jan. 27, 1958, when he got a call from radio announcer Harry Wismer at Madison Square Garden.

“It was a Monday, and that night I had planned to go on Harry’s show after the boxing match,” Campanella said in a 1988 interview with The Times.

“It was a benefit to raise money for the YMCA summer camp, but Harry called and asked if I would mind coming on a week later so he would have a week to promote it. I said fine.

“So I stayed at the store and let all the employees go home early. I closed up the shop at midnight, did all the paper work and left for home.

“It had snowed a little that night, and the roads were a little wet and icy. I was about five minutes from my house when I hit some ice driving around a curve. I hit my brakes and the car slid across the road, hit a pole and turned over. I tried to reach up to turn the ignition off, because I thought the car would catch fire, but I couldn’t move my arm. So I just laid there.

“Then a doctor came. He had lived close by and heard the accident, and called the police. The police set the car back up, and I blacked out. When I came to, I was on an operating table at Glen Cove (Community) Hospital.”

Campanella had broken his neck between the third and fourth vertebrae. Surgery removed pressure on the spinal cord. The early prognosis was that the paralysis in his lower body would disappear. It would be six weeks before he was up and around, Campanella was told, and he might even play baseball again.

“When I became conscious after the surgery, Walter O’Malley was there,” Campanella said. “He had come to the hospital and stayed through the surgery. The first thing I remember after the surgery was Mr. O’Malley saying, ‘Roy, don’t worry about a thing. I will always be by your side.’

“And all along, I didn’t think I would be paralyzed. I wasn’t worried about never playing baseball again. I was worried about how I was going to support my wife and three kids. Heck, I still thought I was going to spring training.”

Spring came and went. Campanella remained in therapy at the Rusk Institute in New York. Teammates such as Don Drysdale, Carl Erskine and Duke Snider took the train and visited him when the Dodgers played in Philadelphia. Campanella slowly came to the realization that he was a quadriplegic and would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

“In therapy, they would sit me on the floor and throw me a big basketball,” he said in 1988. “I used to catch hundreds of baseballs every day, then all of a sudden I couldn’t even catch this big basketball.”

Within a year, Campanella was dealt another blow. His estranged wife, Ruthe, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Campanella sent his two boys to a boarding school, and moved with his daughter to an apartment closer to the liquor store. A tough time, Campanella said in the interview, but “then I met Roxie, and she helped me put my life back together.”

He alluded to Roxie Doles, a nurse who found Campenella, according to her own recollections, in a lonely and deteriorating state. They were married in 1963. Times columnist Jim Murray, reviewing the 1974 television movie of Campanella’s life, “It’s Good to Be Alive,” wrote of Roxie: “The job she has done with Roy Campanella and family marks her the greatest relief pitcher of all time in my book.”

Roxie helped Campanella realize that the count was only 3 and 2, that, in his own words, “this could have been a lot worse.” She helped him realize that when his heart and kidney and liver railed against his battered body, there was reason to fight back.

The Dodgers helped, too. In 1959, about a year after his accident, they brought him to Los Angeles for a benefit exhibition game against the New York Yankees at the Coliseum. When Campanella was wheeled onto the field by former teammate Pee Wee Reese, the lights were turned off and a crowd of 93,103, the largest ever at a baseball game, was asked to strike matches. Campanella called that moment his greatest thrill.

And in 1978, Walter and Peter O’Malley asked Campanella to move to Los Angeles to help coach the club’s catchers and work with their community services department. He sold his liquor store, moved to Woodland Hills and--always dressed impeccably in sport coat, shirt and tie--seldom missed a game at Dodger Stadium or a spring training in Vero Beach, where he set up headquarters in an outdoor office known as Campy’s Corner, giving young catchers tips and regaling listeners with stories from the past, his spirits high, his cackle loud, the epitome of his oft-repeated statement:

“It’s a man’s game, but you have to have a lot of little boy in you to play it.”

Perhaps the most boyish of the Boys of Summer, Campanella is survived by his wife, Roxie, and his children Roy II, Joni, Anthony, John and Ruth.

Roy Campanella’s Statistics

REGULAR SEASON

Year Team G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI Avg. 1948 Brooklyn 83 279 32 72 11 3 9 45 .258 1949 Brooklyn 130 436 65 125 22 2 22 82 .287 1950 Brooklyn 126 437 70 123 19 3 31 89 .281 1951 Brooklyn 143 505 90 164 33 1 33 108 .325 1952 Brooklyn 128 468 73 126 18 1 22 97 .269 1953 Brooklyn 144 519 103 162 26 3 41 142 .312 1954 Brooklyn 111 397 43 82 14 3 19 51 .207 1955 Brooklyn 123 446 81 142 20 1 32 107 .318 1956 Brooklyn 124 388 39 85 6 1 20 73 .219 1957 Brooklyn 103 330 31 80 9 0 13 62 .242 Totals 1215 4205 627 1161 178 18 242 856 .276

WORLD SERIES

Year Team G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI Avg. 1949 Brooklyn 5 15 2 4 1 0 1 2 .267 1952 Brooklyn 7 28 0 6 0 0 0 1 .214 1953 Brooklyn 6 22 6 6 0 0 1 2 .273 1955 Brooklyn 7 27 4 7 3 0 2 4 .259 1956 Brooklyn 7 22 2 4 1 0 0 3 .182 Totals 32 114 14 27 5 0 4 12 .237

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS * National League most valuable player: 1951, 1953, 1955. * Set major league record for homers by catcher (41) in 1953. * Set major league record for RBIs by a catcher with 142 in 1953. * Was second black athlete to be elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame, in 1969. * One of eight Dodgers to have number (39) retired, June 4, 1972. * Eight time All-Star, 1949-56.