Claire Smith was in third grade, and the only black person in her class, the day her teacher showed "The Jackie Robinson Story" in the basement of St. James Elementary School in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park.
Smith's mother, Bernice, had told her stories about Robinson. But the movie brought those stories to life.
"The movie was amazing because Ruby Dee played Rachel Robinson, but Jackie played himself," Smith said. "I put a voice and a face to the legend. It was Hollywood and it was corny. But every time it's on TV, I watch it."
And it might have ignited a sports writing career that has carried Smith to the writer's wing of the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.
"That story fascinated me," she said. "It probably helped me, in some subconscious way, to want to be a storyteller and tell stories such as that."
And 70 years after Robinson broke baseball's color barrier, Smith on Saturday was in Cooperstown, N.Y., as part of Hall of Fame weekend, receiving the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor for baseball writers. She is the fourth black writer to receive the honor, joining Wendell Smith, Sam Lacy and Larry Whiteside. But of the group of 68 journalists to be recognized by the Hall of Fame for "meritorious contributions to baseball writing," Smith is the first woman.
She loves baseball, listening to Brooklyn Dodgers games on the radio as a child, and loves to write. And it led to an extraordinary career that began in 1982 and included stops at the Hartford Courant, New York Times and Philadelphia Enquirer, earning two Pulitzer Prize nominations along the way.
Thorough, thoughtful and courteous, Smith was well-received by her colleagues — and almost everyone she covered.
