Former Dodgers pitcher Clem Labine in February of 2005.

AP / RICK SILVA

Clem Labine, who went from the sandlots of Woonsocket all the way to the bright lights of the World Series, died last week in Vero Beach, Fla.

And in a sense, it was a fitting place.

One of the Boys of Summer dying where the Dodgers go every winter in search of another summer.

The couple of decades he’d been doing fantasy camps in Vero Beach, as if his career with the Dodgers might have ended in 1960, but they always owned a piece of his heart.

“He put that uniform on and it was like he was 10 years younger and three inches taller,” says his wife, Barbara. “He was so proud of his time with the Dodgers.”

She was Barbara Gershkoff when she first met Labine at the Kirkbrae Country Club in Lincoln in 1978. She was divorced, he was widowed, and she was looking for a partner for a golf tournament.

“He said his name was Clem Labine and I said, ‘Clem who?’ ” she remembers. “I didn’t now who he was. I had never followed baseball.”

But Labine already had earned his slice of Rhode Island immortality, one of this state’s all-time great sports stories. He spent 13 years in the majors, pitching in six World Series and three All-Star games, the majority of those years with the Dodgers, and for a while there in the 1950s he arguably was the best relief pitcher in baseball. In 1951, his first full major-league season, he was thrown into the middle of the famous three-game playoff series with the Giants and responded with a six-hit shutout, the day before Bobby Thomson’s dramatic home run won it for the Giants. During the ’55 Series he made four relief appearances in five games.

He also was a significant part of one of the great teams in baseball history, the Jackie Robinson Dodgers, the team that changed American sport forever. If Robinson was the player who broke the game’s color line, the Dodgers were the team that made it work. All those small-town kids from all over America who, in their own way, became part of Branch Rickey’s idea to integrate major-league baseball, this grand experiment that brought American sports into the future.

Kids like Labine.

He was only in his early 20s in 1951, a kid from what he called “Smalltown, USA.,” suddenly in the big leagues, going here and there, so far from the small fields of his childhood, almost like living in the middle of some sandlot fantasy. Until the day in central Florida during spring training when he looked around and saw that his three black teammates were not in the restaurant. And when, in his wide-eyed innocence, he asked why, one of his older teammates said, “They can’t eat here.”

This from a story by the late Bill Parrillo on Labine in 1985:

“And then young Clem Labine turned just in time to see a couple of waiters carrying box lunches out to the bus in the parking lot. While he and most of the Boys of Summer were sitting in that fancy restaurant ordering anything off the menu, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campenella, and Don Newcombe, three Dodger stars who happened to be black, were eating box lunches on a bus.”

Labine went on to tell Parrillo that of all his baseball memories, none is more vivid of that day in central Florida when he saw waiters carrying box lunches to future Hall of Famers who had to eat in the bus, the first time that he got an inkling that what was happening on the Dodgers was not just about baseball.

“Clem would often go out and sit on the bus with Jackie,” says Barbara Labine. “They were very friendly. Clem had been to Jackie’s house in Connecticut. He had a lot of respect for Jackie.”

She also tells of the time Robinson was receiving death threats and Gene Hermanski, one of the Dodgers, said, “Let’s all wear Jackie’s number and they won’t know who he is.”

“Clem loved that story,” she says, “for it shows they were all teammates.”

She still has a photograph that shows Labine embracing Robinson after a big win, a wonderful scene freeze-framed forever.

But Barbara Labine says Robinson also is a part of one of the biggest regrets in Labine’s life.

It was August of 1963, the March on Washington, one of the symbolic signatures of the growing Civil Rights Movement. Robinson asked Labine to go with him. Labine said no.

“He had a young family, and people were telling him that it was going to be dangerous, so in the end he decided not to go,” she says. “He always regretted it.”

Labine was one of the handful of players highlighted in The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn’s paean to that team, that era. That, too, has give him a certain immortality, although Tommy Lasorda, a former teammate, told the Associated Press over the weekend, “He was not recognized the way he should have been. He was a great pitcher, but he was surrounded by too many stars.”

Barbara Labine thinks it was because, for all his accomplishments, Labine remained a humble man.

“He never talked about himself,” she says. “Never. He was shy. He never spoke up.”

For the last two decades he and Barbara have alternated between Lincoln in the summer and Vero Beach, where Labine found another baseball life as an instructor at fantasy camps.

“He loved doing it,” she says. “He had a lot of respect for the way the Dodgers taught baseball.”

No surprise there.

For he was one of them.

A boy of summer.

Forever.

breynold@projo.com