But on this day, Oct. 15, 1972, during a ceremony prior to Game 2 of the World Series at Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium, her worry was visible as she gazed out onto the patch of sun-soaked AstroTurf where, surrounded by baseball dignitaries, her 53-year-old husband stood.
The man who 25 years earlier had broken baseball's color barrier was nearly blind, his eyes clouded by diabetes. That disease and a serious heart condition had slowed his always energetic gait to a wary shuffle. There was a hollowness in his high-pitched voice. And his hair had turned white, as white as the crisp white shirt that had first attracted 17-year-old Rachel Annetta Isum to him.
In the years between their initial encounter on the campus of UCLA and this ceremony honoring her husband's groundbreaking accomplishment, Rachel Robinson had been transformed no less than baseball.
The pretty but painfully shy 17-year-old from Northern California had found a cause when she found a spouse. In addition to being a mother of three - Jackie Jr., Sharon and David - an active baseball wife, and a professional woman with a distinguished career as a psychiatric nurse, Rachel Robinson had become committed to the virtues Jackie Robinson had come to symbolize. She had learned, the hard way perhaps, about the value of struggling toward a higher aim.
"If you have an overriding goal," she would say, "there are times when you must transcend the obstacles that are being put in your way. Rise above them."
Her commitment would not stop nine days later, when, on Oct. 24, 1972, Jack Robinson - she always called him "Jack," his given name - died of a massive heart attack in their Connecticut home at 53.
