42|Luther Williams Field — Where the Montreal Season Opens

Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City is a housing development now. So the scene of Jackie Robinson's first game in organised white baseball — 18 April 1946, opening day for the Montreal Royals, four hits and a three-run homer — was shot in a 1929 ballpark in the middle of a public park in Macon, Georgia.

Luther Williams Field is the second-oldest minor league park in the country. Brick and stucco front, a covered wooden grandstand, a field that sits low inside Central City Park with the trees pressing in behind the outfield. It has never been renovated into anonymity, which is exactly why the location scouts wanted it. You cannot build this texture; you can only find it.

The park had done this work before. In 1976 it played the Negro Leagues in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, with Billy Dee Williams and James Earl Jones. Robinson himself passed through Macon in his playing years, when the Macon Peaches were a Dodgers farm club.

It is still a working ballpark. The Macon Bacon, a summer collegiate team, fill it on humid June nights with a crowd that comes as much for the noise as the baseball, and the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference brings its tournament here. The city owns it. Tickets are cheap.

Buy one for a night game and sit down the first-base line. The lights buzz, the grandstand roof cuts the sky off at a low angle, and the frame you are sitting inside is the same one the camera used for the moment Robinson stopped being a Negro Leagues star and became a Dodger prospect.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.