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GAME 20: June 3
Stunned by news of Lou Gehrig’s death when they arrived in Detroit, several Yankee players remember lingering in the lobby of their hotel to make the decision about who would return to New York for the funeral. Marius Russo still recalls the concern of those who had known Gehrig well—Bill Dickey, Lefty Gomez, Red Rolfe, and DiMaggio—for the immediate well-being of Eleanor Gehrig. It was troubling for these friends and former teammates to be out of town at this time.
The weather was damp and dreary on June 3, and few of the Yankees had their hearts in the day’s work at Briggs Stadium. At the beginning of the game the teams lined the front of the dugouts for a silent tribute to Gehrig. DiMaggio stood alone, facing the flag with his head bowed. It was in the same ball park 2 years before, on May 2, 1939, that Gehrig had told manager Joe McCarthy that he wanted to be taken out of the lineup after playing in 2,130 consecutive games, a record spanning 14 years from June 1, 1925. The record was so much beyond anything like it that Gehrig surpassed Everett Scott’s previous iron man sequence of 1,308 games almost 6 years before he ended the new one. At the time Gehrig passed Scott, August 17, 1933, a young Joe DiMaggio had just completed his 61-game Pacific Coast League hitting streak for the San Francisco Seals. When Gehrig’s iron man record came to an end in 1939, DiMaggio was in his fourth year in the big leagues.
Gehrig played through almost anything during his record sequence, including the worst day of all, in 1934, when he woke up one morning with excruciating lower back pain. He got to Yankee Stadium with great difficulty and required the assistance of the Yankee trainer, Dr. Painter, to dress for the game. Joe McCarthy put Gehrig in the leadoff spot to get him in the game and out of it with dispatch. In the bottom of the first, Gehrig took a cut at the first pitch and singled; he had to inch his aching body to first before the throw beat him to the base from right field. He just made it, and McCarthy took him out immediately for a pinch runner. Gehrig’s best day had coincidentally occurred on this date 9 years earlier, June 3, 1932, against Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s. He had already hit four home runs in the game when he came to bat in the ninth and blasted one on a line toward the right field fence. Al Simmons just managed to reach up and grab it with his back against the wall. Gehrig had come within inches of hitting five home runs in a single ball game.
McCarthy now had a difficult time controlling his emotions as he spoke to reporters in the same visiting clubhouse where Gehrig had spoken to him when he asked to be taken out of the game 2 years before: “He was the greatest player of all time, the grandest man.” The Yankee president, Ed Barrow, was the last representative of the club to see Gehrig alive, having visited him on Memorial Day. As he left the room, Gehrig told him, “I’m going to beat this thing.” Late in the afternoon of June 3, McCarthy and Bill Dickey, Gehrig’s former roommate, boarded the night plane for New York to attend the funeral in upper Manhattan. Tributes to Gehrig arrived from across the nation. NBC radio provided a hookup to various cities in America. Lefty Gomez, Bill Dickey, and Joe DiMaggio spoke for the Yankees in addition to Babe Ruth, then in New York and joined there by Carl Hubbell and Mel Ott of the Giants. Umpire Bill Klem also spoke from New York. Jimmy Foxx spoke from Boston, and Bobby Feller from Cleveland.
Babe Ruth’s remarks struck an unusual, though moving, chord, as if the things he remembered about Gehrig were things he missed in himself: “I never knew a fellow who lived a cleaner life. He was a clean-living boy, a good baseball player, a great hustler. I think the boy hustled too much for his own good. He just wanted to win all the time.” Ruth called this great man a boy almost as if he had forgotten the intervening years and chose to recall what Gehrig must have been like in Ruth’s eyes early in the ’20s, when the “boy” had just broken in with the magnificent Yankees of that era.
The day’s game, once it started, took but 1 hour and 39 minutes to play. Yankee rookie Steve Peek had his troubles early, with the Tigers jumping all over him for four runs in the first on doubles by Pinkie Higgins and Birdie Tebbetts. The Yankees got one run back in the fourth on a DiMaggio leadoff home run off Dizzy Trout, who went the distance for the Tigers, and another back in the seventh, but that was it: 4–2. DiMaggio’s blast to left field continued his own hitting streak at 20 and the team’s brief streak of consecutive-game home runs at 3. Earlier in the spring Lou Gehrig had spoken with reporters about DiMaggio. He thought DiMaggio the finest ballplayer in the major leagues, not merely because of his superb hitting but because of his outstanding skills as a fielder: “Joe DiMaggio is the greatest defensive outfielder in the game. Scarcely has to be told to move. And when told, he knows how.” For Gehrig, it was not only a matter of whether a ballplayer could catch a ball and throw it when the opportunity presented itself but what a player did before the opportunity presented itself. There are small moves and adjustments in the field, some of them imperceptible and some of them intuitive, that make baseball as much a game of anticipation as one of execution.
In America on June 3, the new war powers frenzy had gotten out of hand. Roosevelt found himself in a more ticklish position than he had bargained for when Congress rushed through a bill that would give him emergency powers to seize any real or personal property in the nation in the name of national defense. Astute politician that he was, Roosevelt saw this legislation as too sweeping for the present and as providing too ready confirmation of the noninterventionist charges that he sought dictatorial powers. He hinted that the bill ought to lie fallow in Congress for the time being until war was imminent. He did, however, take heart from a new national opinion poll revealing that a majority of Americans favored our convoying war matériel to England. Since the United States was now spending $27 million a day on defense and lend-lease, five times the level of the previous June, most people wanted to ensure that what was sent to England arrived there. In secret, Roosevelt and Churchill had already begun to formulate a de facto convoy policy, the nature of which would soon become clear.
GAME 21: June 5
The ball game in Detroit on June 4 was rained out, with McCarthy and Dickey in New York for Gehrig’s funeral. A different epoch ended this day with the death of another figure whose life reflected a bygone part of the century. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany died at Doorn in the Netherlands on June 4 at the age of 82. The kaiser symbolized the old Germany, from the blood and iron policies predating World War 1 to the broken dignity of the German nation after the Versailles humiliation in 1919. He had been living in exile since the end of World War 1. The führer sent his obligatory condolences to the family of the man whose very presence in Germany was anathema to the Nazis.
In Detroit, when the skies cleared on June 5, the Yankees lost their third in a row, this one in extra innings, 5–4. DiMaggio lined a shot to left off Hal Newhouser that rattled around in the corner near the foul line for a triple. The big hit extended his streak to 21 games, but it took Tommy Henrich’s clutch home run in the ninth to extend the Yankee consecutive-game home run streak to 4. New York moved ahead in the game by two runs after their DiMaggio-aided rally in the sixth inning, but in the bottom of the sixth Yankee right-hander Atley Donald wild-pitched in two runs and allowed another to score when he dropped catcher Buddy Rosar’s throw to the plate. Henrich’s home run tied it in the ninth, but Detroit got the run it needed to win in the tenth when, with the bases loaded, Red Rolfe at third waited for Bruce Campbell’s high chopper to come down and watched helplessly as the winning run scampered unmolested across the plate.
Joe Gordon, Yankee second baseman, got the longest single of his life in the sixth when he belted one about as far as possible to left center in Briggs Stadium. Buddy Rosar, thinking the drive would be caught, held his base, stalling traffic and forcing Gordon to stop at first in disgust. The Yankee loss dropped them back into fourth place, 31/2 games out. With the Red Sox playing Cleveland, Ted Williams had another great day at the plate, garnering three hits in four at bats and raising his league-leading average to a blistering .434. He had hit in
22 straight since May 15, one more than DiMaggio, and remained at .500 (40 for 80) during that run. DiMaggio’s season average was at .326, and his streak average was .354 (29 for 82).
The current issue of the Sporting News picked up one of those wonderful items which are bound to occur if enough players play for enough teams. One Joseph Morjoseph, playing for St. Joseph, Michigan, in the Michigan State League, was traded up to St. Joseph, Missouri, of the Western Association. Unless an imp in the front office had made up this item, Joseph Morjoseph, formerly of St. Joseph and now of St. Joseph, reserved his playing time for teams that clearly appreciated his nominal talents. Another back page note in the Sporting News about the league from which Morjoseph had come mentioned that a fledgling 18-year-old ballplayer led the Michigan State League in hitting in the first week of June at .431, almost matching Ted Williams in the American League. His name: Gene Woodling.
While the Yankees were waiting out their rain delay on June 4, a sorry event took place in the halls of the House of Representatives in Washington that touched upon one of the undercurrents in America, indeed in the world at large, during the days of DiMaggio’s streak. John E. Rankin, a Democrat from Mississippi, rose to speak about a rally for the free world that had just been held in New York City. He ridiculed the rally as “inspired by Wall Street and a little group of our Jewish brethren.” The condescension and prejudice were appalling to Michael Edelstein, a member of Congress from Brooklyn. Edelstein took the platform and spoke passionately about the values of the United States and the plight of the dislocated populations in Europe. He was so upset by Rankin’s words and tone and by the blindness to the situation in Europe that he worked himself into a near frenzy: “Hitler started out by speaking about ‘Jewish Brethren.’ I deplore the fact that anytime anything happens in America, whether it be for a war policy or against a war policy, men in this House and outside this House attempt to use the Jews as their scapegoat.”
Edelstein then left the floor, and moments later in the Speaker’s Lobby, he collapsed dead from a heart attack. The next day, June 5, the day after Gehrig’s funeral in New York City, 15,000 mobbed the streets for the representative’s funeral. Edelstein was eulogized as a “martyr to democracy.” Though most in the crowd had little idea of the enormity of the Jewish policy just beginning to take final shape in Nazi Germany, the sense of victimization was getting clearer and nearer day by day.
The notion of the complicitous figure of the warmongering Jew in a world whose Jewish populations were increasingly outlawed and finally annihilated struck a disturbing chord in 1941. Committees in Congress such as the Nye-led Senate Committee investigating possible Jewish influence in antiwar films, and, of course, figures in America such as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford ended up following similar low roads against Jews whom they improbably dubbed as unscrupulous policy-fabricating manipulators of the western democracies. In fact, Lindbergh’s downfall as an effective voice for the noninterventionist cause came later in the summer, when during his infamous Des Moines speech he went too far and blamed the Jews for Hitler’s hatred of them. Behind the rather primitive and primitively confused fear of the “international Jew” lay the deeply anti-Semitic notion that the periodic purging of Jewish influence from the affairs of Europe was not only inevitable but desirable.
With the overseas war news at something of a lull on June 5, an interesting item came off the wire from Japan. Admiral Nomura proclaimed his confidence that the United States and his country could end the strain in their relations amicably. What Nomura did not say was that the Japanese Admiralty had just finished drawing up and refining plans for a surprise attack from aircraft carriers on the American naval installation at Pearl Harbor. The only question was when, and the answer awaited a favorable shift in the Japanese cabinet. As conciliatory as Nomura seemed toward the United States, he took mock umbrage at the boasting of the Luftwaffe commander, Hermann Göring, that the Germans had proven by the performance of their air and ground forces on Crete that they could take any island in the world. Göring meant England, but Nomura reminded the Nazi field marshal that Japan was also an island.
Back in America, the movie Billy the Kid, starring Robert Taylor, opened all over the country this week. Though the film could in no way rank with the better ones enjoying premiere engagements during DiMaggio’s streak—Citizen Kane, The Lady Eve, Major Barbara, Man Hunt, Sergeant York—it had a curious secondary claim to fame. Its release delayed that of the Howard Hughes movie, The Outlaw, all set to screen in 1941 with a steamy new starlet outfitted in such a way that during the war she would wreak havoc with the hormonal flow of U.S. fighting forces. Hughes held back the film for this season because Billy the Kid was too close in subject matter to his own movie. He wanted the decks cleared, as it were, to introduce his discovery: Jane Russell. Hughes canceled the premiere, but The Outlaw was a scandal around the country because publicity stills of the lovely Miss Russell managed to burst out all over even before June did so. The Hays film censorship office was bug-eyed and up in arms, targeting the movie industry for displaying its starlets in revealing sweaters and skimpy blouses, and Jane Russell was exhibit A. Eventually, the still of Jane that caused all the furor ended up much more famous than The Outlaw. Her inviting torso rivaled Veronica Lake’s golden hair, Rita Hayworth’s sultry and silk décolletage, and Betty Grable’s tush and gorgeous legs as classic military pinups of World War II.
GAME 22: June 7
The Yankees arrived in St. Louis after a travel day to play the Browns on June 7. Three games before, St. Louis had changed managers: Fred Haney departed, and Luke Sewell replaced him. The Browns had won every game for their new manager until they ran into the Yankees. Sewell watched in disbelief as the Yanks scored five times in the last inning to blow his sad team off their home field 11–7 before 2,394 loyalists. Joe DiMaggio contributed three singles to the Yankee effort, and his streak was never in jeopardy. His ailing neck and shoulder, bothering him less and less since his error-laden debacle in Boston, began to feel much better.
After only a brief lull, the overseas war heated up again on the Yankee off day, June 6. The British Air Force launched an extensive and devastating bombing raid on Vichy France—mandated Syria, if for no other reason than to stem the tide of criticism that raged in London about the fiasco on Crete. RAF bombers annihilated what little there was of the Vichy Air Force on the ground at the Aleppo and Tadmur airfields. British ground forces the next day, June 7, spearheaded across the Iraqi border. The French were helpless without Axis support, and support was not forthcoming from Hitler. Vichy forces tried frantically to fit out the inadequate defenses in their Syrian mandate. Meanwhile, Pétain appealed to the world for sympathy, claiming Vichy’s neutrality. Hitler, in what the Vichy regime must have thought an instance of backhanded graciousness, announced that France had every right to defend Syria, implying that it had every right to do so on its own, since Hitler had no intention of committing forces to the middle east just before his invasion of Russia. Free French General Charles de Gaulle, headquartered in England, saw the move on Syria as the beginning of France’s liberation from the Nazis.
On the train into St. Louis, any Yankee inclined to do so could have picked up the current issue of Life magazine, which finally ran the interview that Lindbergh’s friend, the former United States ambassador to Belgium, John Cudahy, had conducted with Hitler, which he had been trying for 2 weeks to get into print. The lyrical awe and sycophantic whine of Cudahy’s interview were appalling, and it was now obvious why Time magazine didn’t want to run any of it, though their kissing cousin, Life, which had commissioned it, went ahead on June 6: “Through the largest bay window I have ever seen, the snow-sheeted Alps seemed startlingly close and white as antimony in the spring sunshine. Far down, the green valley was polka-dotted with spring flowers. The distant silhouette of Salzburg looked vague and fluttering against a cumulus cloud embankment, like a phantom city.” Cudahy was as interested in the decor of Hitler’s Bavarian Berg
hof—“The whole color scheme has a garnet tint”—as he was in the brutality of the führer’s policies. Life felt compelled to run a rider before the piece: “Life is well aware of its grave responsibility in printing this article at such a critical time. It does so because it is confident its readers can intelligently recognize this interview for what it really is—an essential part of Hitler’s political strategy of ‘softening up’ the U.S. with large denials of aggressive intentions.”
Cudahy’s lips moved as Hitler spoke: “Convoys mean war.” We hear the strains of an aggrieved Hitler: “He said that he never heard anybody in Germany say that the Mississippi River was a German frontier,” which had been the very observation of an outraged Lindbergh just after Roosevelt’s “unlimited emergency” speech. Cudahy ended the first installment of his interview with these palliative words of the führer: “He said that time after time he had tried to emphasize that the position of Germany and his plans were not inimical to the U.S. but that his efforts had always proved futile.” Life then found it appropriate, in a gesture that must have infuriated their correspondent, to reprint part of Roosevelt’s May 27 “unlimited emergency” speech and at the same time run a picture review of the fate of nations whose positions were supposedly not inimical to Germany’s: Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Denmark, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece.
In the ball game on June 7, Lefty Gomez had some difficulty adjusting to the western time zone in St. Louis and walked four men in the first inning to force in a Brown run. But by the top of the third the Yankees had forged way ahead on the strength of Charlie Keller’s bases-loaded home run, his first grand slam of the season, a nifty variation to go along with the inside-the-parkers he had recently been hitting. St. Louis kept pecking away at Gomez and finally snuck ahead in a wild eighth inning featuring a Walter Judnich home run, a run scored on a sacrifice bunt that went unplayed, and a DiMaggio peg to third that nabbed George McQuinn trying to sneak a base on a run-producing sacrifice fly to center. In the top half of the ninth the Yankees scored five times and sent nine men to the plate. Walks, errors, and hits filled the bases for matching two-run singles by Johnny Sturm and Bill Dickey.