From a simple gesture can come compelling history, and so it was with a handshake on a dusty baseball diamond in New Jersey 60 years ago today.

On April 18, 1946, Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier of pro baseball's modern era, playing his first game with the Triple-A International League Montreal Royals, the top farm club of the major-league Brooklyn Dodgers.

It was a dream debut for the gifted 27-year-old from Cairo, Ga., the grandson of a slave and one of five children fathered by a sharecropper who abandoned his family.

At Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, before an overflow opening-day crowd of 25,000, Robinson hit safely in four of his five at-bats, including a majestic third-inning home run.

Robinson also stole two bases and scored four times, twice on balks by pitchers he rattled with his basepath daring, to lead the Royals to a 14-1 victory over Jersey City, a farm team of the major-league New York Giants.

Today, a photograph taken that afternoon hangs in the home of George (Shotgun) Shuba, 81.

The native of Youngstown, Ohio, is nicknamed for the line drives that sprayed off his Louis-ville Slugger.

The photo is of Shuba, a 21-year-old outfielder for the Royals, squeezing the hand of a beaming Robinson as the former U.S. army lieutenant crosses the plate after his dramatic 335-foot home run.

This is the first known photograph of black and white ballplayers shaking hands on a field of play, and one Shuba still uses to teach youngsters the lessons of tolerance, of doing right and of respecting yourself and your fellow human beings.

"I couldn't care less if Jackie was Technicolor," Shuba said. "We'd spent 30 days at spring training, and we all knew that Jackie had been a great athlete at UCLA (in baseball, basketball, football and track). As far as I was concerned, he was a great ballplayer - our best.

"I had no problem going to the plate to shake his hand instead of waiting for him to come by me in the on-deck circle."

Theses and books have been written, plays staged and movies filmed about the courageous role in baseball and society of Jack Roosevelt Robinson, the subject of Dodgers president Branch Rickey's "great experiment" to desegregate the sport.

Robinson endured enormous mental anguish and physical abuse to blaze a trail from Montreal's Delorimier Stadium through the major leagues and into the Hall of Fame.

He wasn't the first black athlete in pro baseball, a handful having played in the late 19th century.

But they would be driven out of organized ball for six decades by racial hatred, bigoted owners and Jim Crow laws, named for a song performed by blackface minstrels, that trampled the rights of blacks in the post-Civil War U.S. South.

Robinson's highly anticipated and, in some corners, bitterly opposed debut with the Royals opened a long-locked door.

His season in racially tolerant Montreal was a revelation to all, as he batted a league-leading .349, stole 40 bases, had 65 runs batted in and led the Royals to victory in the Little World Series.

All accomplished while abuse and death threats rained on him during every Royals road trip.

Upon seeing Robinson swallowed whole by jubilant fans and chased three blocks from Delorimier Stadium, the Montreal Herald's Sam Maltin wrote: "It was probably the only day in history that a black man ran from a white mob with love instead of lynching on its mind."

George Shuba, the youngest of 10 children born to Czechoslovakian immigrants, was up from Ohio on a fishing trip near Peterborough, Ont., in 1945 when he first heard that the Dodgers had signed Robinson, a fine black prospect.

"I held my breath, then said, 'I hope he's not an outfielder, because if they've signed him to be the first black (of the modern era), he's got to be something special," Shuba said.

"When they said Jackie was a second baseman, I felt a lot better."

Shuba had travelled a remarkable path of his own to pro baseball, scouted by the Dodgers in 1943 when he took a few hours away from sandlot ball to attend a tryout camp in Youngstown.

He signed his first contract with the organization in winter 1944 for $150 a month, with a $150 bonus should he stick until July.

Shuba was assigned to the Royals for the 1946 season, a team managed by Clay Hopper that was stacked with good talent for obvious reasons.

"The Dodgers didn't want Jackie to be on a last-place club," Shuba said.

"They wanted the experiment to succeed."

The Royals won the pennant by 131/2 games, rolled to the International League's Governors' Cup, then defeated the Louisville Colonels four games to two to capture the Little World Series.

Shuba played 20 games with Montreal in 1946, clubbing seven of his 11 hits for homers before he was shipped to Mobile in the Southern Association.

A left-handed pull hitter, he said, "I felt like I was in heaven" when he saw the right-field fence at Delorimier, only 293 feet from the plate, the Knit-To-Fit clothing factory a fat target beyond the wall and scoreboard.

Shuba was shuffled through the Dodgers system, playing 39 games in a Royals uniform in 1950 and then 92 in 1951, when Montreal again won the Governors' Cup.

Future Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda was on that club.

Shuba adored Montreal, and vividly recalls to this day rooming with the Fox family at 112 Willowdale Ave. in Outremont during his final season.

He rattles off the names of entire Royals rosters and speaks of columnists from three newspapers, two of them defunct, as though he'd read them yesterday.

"Montreal was a beautiful city," said Shuba, who last visited with his son, Mike, about 30 years ago.

"I'd look down on the city from Mount Royal, and I loved St. Joseph's Oratory."

Shuba made the most of his chance in 1952, batting a career-high .305 in 94 games with Brooklyn when at last he was called up to the majors.

Shuba stuck with the Dodgers for four seasons and is the oldest surviving member of the so-called "Boys of Summer," World Series champions in 1955 and the only Brooklyn team to win the championship.

He played his 355 big-league games over seven seasons with Robinson, who joined the Dodgers in 1947, and remains in awe of the way Robinson and his wife, Rachel, handled the stresses they endured on their path.

A diabetic, Robinson died of a heart attack at age 53 in 1972.

His courage and convictions are things Shuba has not forgotten, and he preaches this tolerance and honour to anyone who has the time to listen.

He asks: "What were the odds that a kid like me, playing sandlot ball in 1943, would in three short years be shaking the hand of the first black player in modern times to integrate baseball? I'd say a million to one."

The framed print - Handshake of the Century, as it's known in the game - has hung for nearly 50 years above Shotgun Shuba's easy chair.

He needs no other reminder of a baseball career that he's proud to link to the strong grip of a pioneer.

dstubbs@thegazette.canwest.com

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Shuba's 1955 World Series ring one of 31 pieces of memorabilia up for Internet auction

George (Shotgun) Shuba's distaste for wearing a ring soon will be to his benefit, and that of a deep-pocketed sports memorabilia collector with a taste for history.

Shuba is the oldest living member of the so-called Boys of Summer - the 1955 World Series-champion Brooklyn Dodgers - and among 31 pieces of magnificent sports memorabilia he has up for Internet auction is his mint-condition, almost-never-worn '55 World Series ring.

A 151-game veteran of the Triple-A International League's Montreal Royals in 1946, '50 and '51, Shuba also is selling his pristine Governors' Cup ring, presented to the league champions in '51, and two 11-by-14-inch team photos.

As of last evening, the Dodgers ring had attracted a top bid of $30,597 U.S. The Royals pieces, offered in a single lot, were at $477. Bidding ends on Friday.

Shuba's decades-long care for the items he is selling through Mastro Auctions - www.mastronet.com - will earn him a princely sum.

"The (Dodgers) ring already is at more than I probably made in my entire career," said Shuba, a native of Youngstown, Ohio, who played 355 major-league games, all with Brooklyn.

He hasn't worn either ring more than a few times in 60 years, and plans to put the proceeds toward the education of six grandchildren.

Shuba has an impressive collection of carefully mothballed uniforms, including two worn with the Dodgers, as well as bomber

jackets, pennants, jewellery, bats, a sweater vest and tie given him by the legendary Jackie Robinson, and 47 autographed baseballs that have been wrapped and stored in the dark, leaving Hall of Fame signatures in perfect condition.

One of the balls was hit by Shuba himself for a home run in the 1953 World Series and later retrieved from the sure-handed fan, the first Fall Classic pinch-hit homer by a National League player.

Dave Stubbs