56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (38 page)

H
OW LIGHT AND
easy DiMaggio felt after breaking Keeler’s record! That night after the game a photographer from the Associated Press came to the penthouse to shoot Joe and Dorothy sitting close together on the living room couch, he holding up a baseball with “45” printed in black ink between the wide stitches. DiMaggio’s eyes were warmly set on Dorothy and hers warmly upon him. She wore her hair brushed back, fresh lipstick and hoop earrings. Something about Joe, though, was different. A rare casualness. Although he looked sharp as ever—hair slick and neat, suspenders over a crisp white shirt—he had not shaved for the photo nor had he put on a tie. He smiled gently, his eyebrows raised.

A flood of calls came in for Joe, from his friends in and around New York—Toots and George Solotaire—and from Lefty O’Doul in San Francisco. He spoke with Giuseppe and Rosalie, of course, and when Tom called, Joe could hear the buzz of the Grotto customers in the background. Other calls came in from people DiMaggio hadn’t talked with in some time. Again and again he described to the different callers the game, and the home run that he had hit and the reaction of the fans. The phone calls were short and breezy and DiMaggio did not tire of them. He would pour himself something to drink and move around the apartment in a happy and untroubled way.

For Dorothy, everything was relaxed. The things she said and did that at other times might have bothered Joe, he now brooked and kept his easy mood. Dorothy’s parents and her sister were made to feel at home. They talked about the baby and about how the pregnancy had straightened Dorothy’s hair. There would be no autumn trip to Minnesota or San Francisco this year, with the little one due.

The baby’s name was chosen, Joseph Paul, and DiMaggio thought the timing of the birth was fortuitous. “He’ll always be able to say he was born the year I set the record,” Joe said. “That’ll make it easier for folks to remember his birthday.”

“Suppose it’s a girl,” Dorothy said.

“Then,” said Joe, smiling, “that’ll make it easier for folks to remember the birthday of Josephine Pauline DiMaggio.”

To the Olsons every moment spent in the lofty apartment felt luxurious. DiMaggio worked his train set for Dorothy’s little nephew Orin. The boy must have been no more than two, playful and engaged, and when at some point during his stay Orin rolled the “45” ball off the edge of the terrace so that it hurtled down nearly 200 feet to West End Avenue below, even that caused no trouble. A doorman saw the ball land and went after it. A baseball falling from the sky, especially one with 45 written on it, could have come from only one place, he reasoned, and he carried it in the elevator up to the DiMaggios’ floor. No one had been hurt and the ball was still in good shape. Everything now seemed charmed.

The Yankees were off the next afternoon and rain canceled the game on the afternoon after that—July 4. For Joe it was like he was frozen in place, frozen as a newly crowned king. The newspapers included many drawings of DiMaggio; one artist drew DiMaggio’s hitting streak as the eye of a storm around which many other events swirled. A writer suggested that given all the money that the Yankees were making off the streak, DiMaggio deserved a generous bonus. A top-of-the-page headline read:
NATION HAILS DIMAGGIO’S FEAT
.

Joe and Dorothy and her parents could recall how just six months earlier, during the visit to Duluth, he had walked unbothered through the town and into a flower shop where he had bought a bouquet of American Beauty roses for the Olsons’ home. It seemed impossible that he would be able to run an errand so unmolested now, anywhere.

Fan mail arrived from all over the country, scores of letters each day both to his home and to the Stadium. Many of the envelopes came with a lucky thingamabob inside—a bracelet or a small stone or a few lines of bad, original poetry or something soft to rub. People everywhere wanted in, wanted to feel in some small way a contributor to the streak. With the volume of mail being far too much for him or Dorothy to handle, DiMaggio turned the letters over to the Yankees’ front office to be opened.

Though the Yankees were washed out on Independence Day, baseball was played in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Detroit. Each of those games paused in the middle or late innings so that those in the stadium could listen to some words from Roosevelt. He gave a short and pointed speech that denounced isolationism—men like the aviator Charles Lindbergh had been preaching exactly that, or, worse, an alliance with Germany—and the President urged people to overcome their fears as he appealed again for national unity. Americans needed to rally together with a common purpose, the voice said. “We must pledge our work, our will and if necessary our lives.”

Listeners had gathered in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and around the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and at theaters and public squares across the land, and when Roosevelt had finished speaking the newly appointed Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone led the nation in reciting the pledge of allegiance. The fans in the baseball stadiums rose at their seats and the ballplayers stood on the top steps of their dugouts, caps held over their hearts. Three days earlier, the U.S. had registered more than 750,000 21-year-olds for the service draft; the Japanese had just drafted a million of their own. On the
Boston Herald
editorial page, a piece titled
DIMAGGIO DOES IT
weighed Joe’s feat against Keeler’s. Next to that appeared an editorial on Russia’s defense strategy; just above the DiMaggio story ran an analysis of a British general who had faltered in the field and thus been dismissed.

THE BAT CAME
back, just in time for the July 5th game. Peanuts, wearing a tailored white suit, appeared with it at the Yankees clubhouse. He and Spatola had tracked it down to some guy a few miles north of Newark in Lyndhurst. Just how they had tracked it down Peanuts didn’t say.

The good fellows of Newark were fully attuned to the hitting streak and they too wanted to put a mark upon it. One of the police guys that DiMaggio knew from around the Vittorio Castle, a detective who had once been willing (when it became necessary due to an unfortunate misunderstanding) to testify in court on behalf of Richie the Boot’s honorable intentions, had given Joe a Winchester 21 shotgun engraved with DiMaggio’s name and the date June 30, 1941, the day after he’d passed Sisler’s mark. What Joe would do with a duck-hunting gun wasn’t immediately clear, but still he appreciated the gift.

In the July 5th game against the Athletics, before a crowd of some 20,000, in his first at bat on the first pitch he saw, DiMaggio hit a home run into the Yankees bullpen, caught there on the fly by the coach John Schulte. Now the streak was at 46 consecutive games. Afterward, wearing a double-breasted suit with a kerchief in his pocket, DiMaggio autographed the barrel of the bat he had used to hit the home run that broke Keeler’s record. The bat would be flown to San Francisco via United Airlines; United had a stewardess, Polly Ann Carpenter, on hand to witness the autograph and then carry the bat across the country to be raffled off at the Seals doubleheader the next day, to benefit the USO. Before the first game at Seals Stadium a telegram arrived from FDR himself commending the USO’s “essential and patriotic duty” and adding, “I am deeply impressed by the invincible Joe DiMaggio surrendering his favored and record-breaking bat to the USO cause.”

DiMaggio sent a telegram as well and wired money to buy 100 of the 25-cent tickets. “If I win it, raffle it over again,” the telegram read, and DiMaggio added: “Tell all my friends I am appreciative of the hundreds of telegrams and air mail letters sent to me in the past several days.” Between games at the same stadium where eight years earlier Joe had begun his professional career, Giuseppe and Rosalie DiMaggio presented the bat to the winner of the drawing, a young San Franciscan named Jim Osborne. The bat raffle had raised $1,678.

More than 10,000 fans turned out to see the Seals that day, July 6th; at Yankee Stadium there was six times that—60,948 and for the second time in six days the Yankees’ largest home crowd of the year. Hours before the doubleheader against the A’s began, before the Stadium gates had opened, fans had formed lines outside. The rain of recent days had cooled the air and there were clouds mixed into the blue sky. Each ticket had on its face an image of Lou Gehrig, and it was Gehrig who would be honored this day.

Nearly five weeks had passed since his death and in centerfield, next to the flagpole and the monument to Miller Huggins, a granite block now stood, wreathed and bearing a newly cast bronze plaque. Before the game, the Yankees and Athletics players assembled in the outfield. Gehrig’s widow, Eleanor, stood in a dark dress next to the monument. Dickey and McCarthy together lifted a draped American flag to unveil the plaque which read, below Gehrig’s name: “A man, a gentleman and a great ballplayer whose amazing record of 2,130 consecutive games should stand for all time. This memorial is a tribute from the Yankee players to their beloved captain and former teammate.”

In the brief eulogies that followed, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia said that Gehrig “will be remembered as long as baseball remains and as long as good government exists.” Connie Mack advised “the army of youths of America to follow in his footsteps.” Dickey got out that Gehrig was “the greatest first baseman and pal in the history of the game” before he broke down and couldn’t go on. Lou’s parents were there, sitting together behind the Yankees dugout.

A quiet settled over the crowd during these proceedings, a near silence through which the public address system crackled and the speakers’ voices rang and echoed. There was in DiMaggio and the other Yankees a return of the feelings they’d experienced in Detroit during those dark, dreary days in the beginning of June when the news came that Gehrig was gone. Back then, the hitting streak had been in its first days and DiMaggio was still dogged by his early season slump and the Indians were regarded as the favorites in the American League.

Now, against the A’s, the Yankees would win both ends of the doubleheader and they would do so behind DiMaggio. He had four hits in the first game. In the second he had a long triple and a single; four RBIs all told. In centerfield he had never been more alive. He caught 10 balls in the doubleheader and one observer described “no less than eight” as “breathtaking.” He went deep into centerfield to steal, with a leap, a triple from Bob Johnson in the opener. Then in the ninth inning of the rain-spattered nightcap, Johnson hit another one over DiMaggio’s head and Joe, loping through the rain and slosh, covering ground out near the granite block that bore Gehrig’s name, calmly, over his shoulder and still on the run, made the catch. It was Lou Gehrig’s Day at Yankee Stadium but these Yankees were beyond a doubt Joe DiMaggio’s team. Since leaving Detroit on the heels of Lou’s death he had batted .409. He had driven in 35 runs in 27 games. He had hit 11 home runs and he had struck out only twice. The Yankees in that time had gone 23–4 and had risen from fourth place to first, 3½ games ahead of the Indians. “DiMaggio,” said McCarthy, “is the greatest ballplayer in the game.”

After the final out the fans rushed onto the field, this time with particular zeal. Some grabbed handfuls of dirt and grass, and many went straight for DiMaggio. He had to really run for safety, feinting and dodging his way to the dugout. He would be leaving town again, bound first for the All-Star Game in Detroit with Dickey, Gordon, Keller, Ruffing and Russo, and then the Yankees would travel for two weeks more. The train for Detroit left the next day. This night DiMaggio would spend with Dorothy. They would stand together on the penthouse terrace and look out over all of New York City. The moon was low and big and nearly full.

D
IMAGGIO WAS HARDLY
the only lure for the nearly 55,000 fans now settling in at Briggs Stadium. There were stars all over the field for this game, the most anticipated of the season. Rapid Robert Feller would pitch for the American League; lanky Ted Williams, at .405, would bat cleanup; old Double X, the Red Sox’ burly Jimmie Foxx, would come off the bench as the only player to have been chosen for every All-Star Game since it began in 1933. Little Dominic DiMaggio had made it for the first time, as a backup to big brother Joe. And the Detroit fans would see National League players that they had only read about: the Cardinals’ big Johnny Mize, who swung not two but three bats as he swaggered off the on-deck circle, and his teammate, spikes-up Enos Slaughter. The Dodgers’ sensational Pete Reiser, batting .360 and at age 22 the baby of the All-Stars, would play centerfield. For a baseball fan anything seemed possible in a game like this. The Mutual Broadcasting System would air every inning from coast to coast. The sun was high and bright, the air crisp, and even before the playing of the national anthem a marching band struck up in front of the stands. Bunting hung from the stadium facades. Joe Louis sat with an entourage behind the American League dugout. The Tigers’ own Rudy York was in the lineup at first base.