56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports Read online

  Those early years, before they’d started playing ball with the Seals—first Vince, then Joe, then Dom—were the times that lingered richest for Dom. Joe, 27 months older, was bigger and better than he was at everything. Everything physical, that is. Of course Joe was pretty much better than everybody in everything athletic, proving deft and resilient even in the games of touch football the boys played on the horse lot. (In tennis, good lord! Joe could have gone professional if there had been any money in that.) Dom might tease Joe for never learning Italian, or for hating to go out on the boat, but none of that diminished the awe in which he silently held him.

  By now, in 1941, the family had left the house on Taylor Street. Ma and Pa were living in the Marina District in the new home Joe had bought for them; a bigger place and a better address. Mike was out fishing in his blue-and-white boat, also a gift from Joe. And Tom ran the restaurant, Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto, on the wharf. Marie and Mamie were married. Things were different for the DiMaggios—better, to be sure. Though for Dom nothing would replace those childhood years with Joe, before they started to drift, when the days stretched long and he felt like he had his big brother all to himself.

  The three of them ate that evening in the dining room of the penthouse, not saying much beyond the small talk that Dorothy facilitated. Dom knew not to point out the improbable fact of their current respective batting averages—when the daily DiMag-o-Log came out in The San Francisco Chronicle the next morning it would have Dominic on top at .339, Joe at .319 and Vince at .266. It was Joe, though, who brought up baseball during the meal, saying: “You’re playing a little shallow in centerfield, you know, just a couple of strides.”

  Dom stiffened. “I’m just fine playing where I do, Joe,” he said.

  Joe paused and looked impassively at his brother, as if to say “suit yourself.” But he didn’t say anything. He just let the moment pass and turned back to his plate.

  After dinner Dom said goodbye, took the elevator down and stepped out onto the street below the ginkgo trees. Before he could even ask, the doorman had hailed him a cab and Dom rode back to the Hotel Commodore to get some rest for the next day’s game.

  Anyone would have to say that the brothers played to a draw that weekend, which for Dom was an achievement in itself. Joe’s two-run single helped ensure a 7–6 Yankee win on Saturday—that was four wins in a row, plus the tie—but on Sunday, Dom doubled and scored three times as Boston’s old Lefty Grove, appearing in very good, if not vintage form, won his 296th career game, 10–3. Joe produced an inconsequential first inning single. That afternoon, May 25, Bill (Bojangles) Robinson attended and celebrated his birthday by dancing on the dugout roof. Near the end of the game, in what one newspaper the next day would call “a reminder of serious things,” an announcement came over the loudspeaker that the personnel of the U.S.S. George E. Badger, a destroyer docked nearby, needed to get back to their ship.

  For these last two games of the series, Dom made a small change. Upon getting out to centerfield on Saturday afternoon he surveyed again the huge expanse of Yankee Stadium grass, an area he had played on often before. Then, during the first inning, sometime before the number 2 batter, Red Rolfe, strode to the plate, Dom quietly took two long steps back toward the fence just as Joe had suggested he should.

  ________

  1 Vince DiMaggio, playing for the Pirates in Pittsburgh, covered centerfield brilliantly too, and could hit home runs. But he never put up much of a batting average and he struck out way too often, becoming the butt of running jokes among sportswriters. For Vince, the eldest of the three younger DiMaggio boys and the brother who’d first paved the way into pro baseball, Joe’s shadow was long and dark.

  Chapter 6

  America’s Voice

  THINGS WERE GOING badly in England. During the past two years the Nazis had taken the better part of Europe, run over nation after nation with astonishing and terrifying force. After overwhelming France, the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, Japan—had turned their sights and the German war machine on Great Britain, the gateway to the Atlantic Ocean. The Luftwaffe’s ongoing blitz upon England, which by May of 1941 had been unleashed off and mostly on for 10 months, had taken an audacious turn. Having already bombed the Port of London and many of England’s other harbors—Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and more—the Nazis now let fly upon London’s most sacred sites.

  Bombs fell on the Houses of Parliament, destroying the House of Commons. The British Museum was hit, as was the centuries-old St. James’s Palace and then Westminster Hall itself. When the smoke at Westminster lifted, the very site where kings and queens had been coronated for more than 600 years lay under a mountain of bricks and ashes and shards of blackened debris.

  To many Americans this news, and the photographs of the wreckage, was somehow more galling than even the tragic raids that had earlier leveled scores of London’s small storefronts, put craters in Charing Cross, wiped out hospitals and sent up in flames the factories, railway lines and slums of London’s benighted East End. In the view of a late-May editorial in New York’s Journal American, these latest bombings widened the fight: “Long since, Westminster ceased to be a part of London and became a symbol beloved by all the world.”

  The Allies, which in effect meant Great Britain, battled gamely. Its Navy had just sunk the Bismarck, one of Germany’s most lethal ships. The British Army was making gains in Baghdad, having overturned a pro-Nazi coup that had seized control of Iraq. The slender silver lining in that most recent raid on London was that the German bombers had then been shot down. But these were small victories that scarcely stanched the relentless onslaught of the Nazis, the Italians, the Japanese. Germany had an iron grip on the continent, was staging the ground for an attack on Russia and was taking territory at every instance. Now German paratroopers were alighting with clear intentions on the shores of Crete. It had become evident that the Allies were not going to be able to sustain the fight without America’s help.

  Nor was the U.S. standing idly by. America’s cloak of neutrality, publicly donned in 1939 two days after Britain (and Australia) had declared war on Germany and less than 12 months after the last of the New Deal programs had gone into effect, had since been plainly shucked off. If there was concern over what the U.S. government could reasonably afford, having been tapped by the years of assistance spending during the Depression, any reluctance was gradually being overwhelmed by fear of what the country stood to lose. In March of 1941 President Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act, an agreement by which the U.S. would send war materials to the Allies in exchange for the lease of military bases in the West Indies, Newfoundland and elsewhere. Already 50 of the U.S.’s largest naval destroyers had been dispatched to aid Britain and Canada. Roosevelt had then gotten workers at tool factories and defense plants across the nation to agree to keep operations active seven days a week and around the clock, hoping to ensure that military supplies would be delivered at a rate nearer to meeting the demand.

  Even with the war’s engagements far from home soil, the U.S. Army began playing what it billed as war games crucial to the nation’s safety. Foot soldiers had been scattered along the coast of New Jersey to prepare in case of an unexpected attack. The government had twice ordered trial blackouts: for 15 minutes one night in Newark—lights out in the Vittorio Castle—and on another night for several hours across Oahu and the whole of the Hawaiian Islands. In late May, some 700 miles from a British port on the coast of Sierra Leone, the Nazis sank a U.S. merchant ship.

  Major league baseball players knew that a rifle might soon replace the bat in their hands. Greenberg and Hugh Mulcahy had been called to service and other players appeared on the verge, those who were unmarried and classified as I-A by their draft board. The All-Star quality outfielder Buddy Lewis and the .381-hitting shortstop Cecil Travis were among them, both players integral to the Washington Senators who, on the afternoon of May 27, were hosting the Yankees at Griffith Stadium.

  It was here in Washington six w
eeks earlier that the 1941 season had begun for DiMaggio and the Yanks, an Opening Day memorable not for New York’s 3–0 win but for the presence of the popular Roosevelt. He was determined, he’d said, to keep baseball going through the war and, with a happy overhand toss from his box behind home plate, threw out the season’s ceremonial first pitch. Senators owner Clark Griffith had presented the President with a golden card that granted him access to every major league stadium—as if Roosevelt wouldn’t have been let in without it!—and had given another to the First Lady, Eleanor. Roosevelt adored baseball, valued its intrinsic joys and believed in the importance of its wider societal reach, seeing the sport as a connective thread among American citizens even, or perhaps especially, in a time of troubling uncertainty.

  The red-white-and-blue Opening Day bunting was gone from Griffith Stadium now, as was the April chill. On this sun-filled afternoon, DiMaggio had his finest game in weeks: four hits, among them a three-run homer beyond the 402-foot sign in leftfield, in a 10–8 Yankees win. The game, though, slipped quickly from the thoughts of the fans making their way from the stadium and up to Georgia Avenue after the final out.

  One of President Roosevelt’s fireside chats, this one designed to make clear America’s policy of defense, was to air live that night at 9:30 p.m. Nearly 70 million people would tune in across the U.S.—about 75% of the population aged nine and above—and millions more would listen overseas. In Washington D.C., hardly a radio anywhere was turned off that night. Radios were certainly playing in the chandeliered lobby and in the polished rooms of the Shoreham Hotel on Calvert Street, where a day earlier the nation’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, had given a lecture on the danger of the Nazi threat, and where DiMaggio and the rest of the Yankees were now spending the night, two miles from Roosevelt’s broadcast microphone in the White House.

  The President had relied heavily and successfully on the increasing power of radio during his eight years in office and by now, in the first stages of his third term, his chats were deeply anticipated and cherished. Issues of pressing importance seemed to have shaped every moment of FDR’s Presidency and he addressed each with a firmness of content and a mastery of tone. He spoke with a fatherly eloquence, a confidence revealed subtly in his pauses and emphases. The language that he used was strong and unambiguous; Roosevelt’s talks inspired people, gave them faith. Some said that he sounded the way Moses must have. Newspapers sometimes referred to him as “the Voice.”

  At about 9:35 p.m., just a few moments into this night’s speech, Roosevelt went to the heart of the matter. “It is unmistakably apparent,” he said, “that unless the advance of Hitlerism is forcibly checked now, the Western Hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi weapons of destruction.” He spoke proudly of America’s expanding military and he reaffirmed that the Lend-Lease Act was not an act of generosity to the Allies but was “based on hardheaded concern for our own security.” Then Roosevelt lauded the way that “Britain still fights gallantly, on a far-flung battle line” and cheers went up in living rooms all over London. It was 3:40 in the morning there.

  They were listening too under the lights at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, delaying the start of the Cubs-Cardinals game. The public address system broadcast Roosevelt’s words as a crowd of nearly 16,000 sat quietly in the stands on the warm, moonless night. Inside the clubhouse, some of the Chicago players, among them outfielders Augie Galan and Bill Nicholson, and some of the Cardinals, including catcher Gus Mancuso and the old sidearming righthander Lon Warneke, mustered around a small radio that had been set up between the locker rooms.

  Roosevelt’s speech came over the loudspeakers at the Polo Grounds in New York as well, the gathering of 17,009 fans fairly fixed in their seats, the players in the dugouts, the 1–1 game between the hometown Giants and the Boston Braves halted after the seventh inning and set to resume when the President was finished.

  People listened in restaurants and nightspots in Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco. At the Stork Club and the Versailles in Manhattan not a drink was served, spirits temporarily on hold. Taxis with radios in them pulled to the sides of the lamplit city streets. The drivers turned off their meters, rolled down their windows, and strangers came and stood close to hear. Others lingered next to newsstands at Times Square and Grand Central Terminal.

  In Queens, the Bellefair and the other ice cream shops stayed open late, radios brought forth and set down onto the countertops as the customers leaned in. Even now, despite the late hour and the darkness of the sky, neighbors in Queens convened around portable radios on building stoops, just as they did in Brooklyn and the Bronx. It was not unlike the way many of these same listeners often gathered round for an afternoon ball game, to hear the Dodgers’ Red Barber, the best announcer going, unfurl a game in all its savory details, people as attentive to Barber’s syrupy Southern lilt—“They’re tearin’ up the pea patch!”—as they were now to Roosevelt’s raspy baritone.

  “In the Nazi book of world conquest . . . ” the Voice continued, “. . . they plan to strangle the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada.” Lose this fight, Roosevelt went on to say, and lose your way of life. The American laborer would have his wages and hours fixed by Hitler, his right to worship decided by Hitler. Roosevelt reminded people that in Africa the Germans were occupying Tripoli and Libya and threatening to claim Egypt. Again and again he came back to his essential point: “The war is approaching the brink of the Western Hemisphere. It is coming very close to home.”

  The President reached far back into history, recalling the U.S.’s success in beating back the Barbary Pirates, in helping to expel Napoleon from Mexico. He cited the Battle of Bunker Hill and spoke of the dedication and effectiveness of U.S. convoys in the first World War. “In this Second World War, however, the problem is greater,” Roosevelt said, his tone deeper now, foreboding. The enemy, he explained, had far more dangerous weapons these days, more lethal submarines and a “bombing airplane, which is capable of destroying merchant ships seven or eight hundred miles from its nearest base.” In other words, the President was saying, this was no time to flinch.

  Now Roosevelt’s speech entered its coda and with it a series of emphatic vows:

  “We shall actively resist . . . every attempt by Hitler to extend his Nazi domination.

  “We shall give every possible assistance to Britain and to all who, with Britain, are resisting Hitlerism or its equivalent.

  “We are placing our armed forces in strategic military positions.”

  Then Roosevelt announced that he had issued a proclamation declaring that in America a state of “unlimited national emergency exists and requires the strengthening of our defense to the extreme limit of our national power and authority.”

  In a suburban tavern north of New York City, a man drained the last of his beer, slapped his hand on the bar and announced, “We’re in, boys!” In Washington, D.C., a crowd standing outside a Ninth Street restaurant soberly applauded. On a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, a woman said: “It frightens me. But what else can we do?”

  Who wasn’t frightened, even as Roosevelt’s words roused in his listeners a sense of resolution and solidarity? Who wasn’t afraid of war? There were those who simply opposed America’s involvement, isolationists or anticommunists such as the aviator turned public speaker Charles Lindbergh, who whipped up thousands as he toured the country decrying the Allies, saying that he’d prefer even an alliance with the Nazis than with any side that might soon include the Soviet Union. Or New York congressman Hamilton Fish who a few hours before Roosevelt’s fireside chat had addressed a crowd in a high school auditorium and warned that if the U.S entered the war “we would have chaos and revolution at home and Communism abroad.”

  Trepidation, though, wasn’t limited to the fear-mongers and alarmists. Even among the greater part of the American whole, those who believed in Roosevelt, those who nodded in approval when a Marine at a Times Square bar bellowed near the end of the President’
s speech: “Let’s go! We’ve taken enough dirt from those guys,” even those who were outraged at the impudence of the Nazi onslaught, who were appalled and angered by the treatment of the Jews, even many of those people were wary and reluctant when it came to engaging in war.

  So many families had been weakened, some torn asunder, by the effects of the Depression. Futures had been wiped out, dreams destroyed. Now, barely free of that awful economic time, they were going to be asked to send their young men to war? Mothers wrote letters to the White House begging President Roosevelt not to do anything that might take away their boys.

  Whippoorwills flitted noisily in the air above Sportsman’s Park as the crowd sat rapt and the President’s speech wound down. The teams’ respective batteries—the Cubs’ catcher Clyde McCullough and pitcher Jake Mooty; the Cardinals’ Mancuso and lefthander Max Lanier—came out to loosen up, the four players alone on the bright and otherwise empty field.

  At the Polo Grounds the 1–1 game was soon to begin again. Murmurs coursed through the stands, the people trying to sort through all they had just heard. We’re going to war I bet. . . . Maybe we’ll just send convoys again this time. . . . Wonder how long ’til Hitler hears that speech. . . . How old is your son again?

  “Old Long Pants” Carl Hubbell was on the mound for the Giants, throwing the last of his warmup pitches into Harry Danning’s glove. A pinch hitter, Lloyd (Little Poison) Waner, squeezed his bat handle in front of the Braves dugout, began to stride toward the plate. Mel Ott looked in from rightfield, Jo-Jo Moore from left. Then, even as the ringing of Roosevelt’s final words echoed through the Polo Grounds—a trenchant line from the Declaration of Independence: “we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor”—the rookie umpire Jocko Conlan pointed with both index fingers out to Old Long Pants Hubbell and shouted, “Play ball!”