Streak

by Seidel, Michael; Siegel, George ;

  Around the American League, Bobby Feller won his seventh straight game on June 6, shutting out the Philadelphia A’s while striking out 11 of them. And around the track on Saturday, June 7, another young sports figure, the great colt Whirlaway, won the third and final leg of the Triple Crown for 1941, taking the Belmont Stakes to add to his Kentucky Derby and Preakness titles. Whirlaway left the average bettor at Belmont with but scant change in his pocket, approaching the gate a 1 to 4 favorite and crossing the line a 31/2-length victor.

  A dramatic story was breaking even farther west than St. Louis on June 7. At North American Aviation in Los Angeles a wildcat strike crippled a plant essential for wartime defense production. This was the first confrontation between labor and Roosevelt’s new priorities for national defense, and the President immediately flexed his muscles. He was not about to put himself in the position of making an impassioned speech on emergency conditions before the entire world and then having workers at a crucial aviation plant take a hike on him. If the strike was not settled by Monday, June 9, the first workday of the new week, the workers of the local CIO union would find themselves looking down the barrel of a presidential gun. There had been nasty strikes earlier in the year at International Harvester and Bethlehem Steel, and Roosevelt knew from a recent Gallup Poll that the majority of Americans opposed strikes in any defense-related industry. Fully 85 percent wanted a federal labor board to settle disputes in such instances.

  June 7 was one of those days stocked with back-page newspaper items of interest and curiosity. The brand-new superdreadnought, the South Dakota, costing over $70 million to build, first slipped into the Atlantic on this day; it would later take a considerable beating at the pivotal battle for control of the Pacific near Guadalcanal in 1942. Another item off the wire services relayed the story of a 98-year-old Civil War veteran, David Sisk, who had just gained a divorce decree by claiming that his 55-year-old wife, Margaret Livingston (he presumed), had not told him she was on parole from the Davenport Institution for the Mentally Insane when she had married him in October 1940. One wonders if he told her he was a Civil War veteran.

  From Hollywood on June 7 came the story of Clark Gable returning from a fishing trip during which he had put on 15 extra pounds. A friend of his on a specially concocted and foolproof diet convinced the actor to give his regimen a try. It worked so well that Gable called up this June day to offer thanks. He was told to try the hospital—his friend was in serious condition, suffering from malnutrition and severe anemia. “Good God,” said Gable, hurrying off to Perino’s for dinner. In another medical story, The New York Times reported that the world-famous violinist Fritz Kreisler did something on June 7 he had first done as a child and had not done since April 26, 1941: he took a step. Back in April he had made the mistake of trying to cross Madison Avenue with a violin case as his only protection and was hit by a truck. He lay unconscious for days, near death with a fractured skull, and when he finally came to, his first words were about the safety of his violin, as if it were a near relation. The violin was well; Kreisler was getting better.

  Two new movies opened in New York City by the week’s end: Love Crazy, with William Powell and Myrna Loy battling over divorce procedures; and Million Dollar Baby, starring Ronald Reagan and Priscilla Lane. Reagan in this depression hangover comedy played a “stumble bum composer in a swing band” who teaches the baffled Priscilla Lane that a million dollar inheritance can’t buy happiness. We have all heard that before. In a feature also screening in New York and everywhere else in the country at the time, Reagan played the good guy to Wallace Berry’s eponymous Bad Man. Such early training has stood him in good political stead.

  GAMES 23 and 24: June 8

  The largest crowd of the year so far for St. Louis, 10,546—monumental for the Browns—witnessed the home team lose twice to the Yankees this Sunday, 9–3 and 8–3. DiMaggio thrived on St. Louis pitching with a marvelous display of power: two home runs in the first game and a home run and a double in the second, driving in a total of seven runs for the heady afternoon, the best power day of the entire streak, though some others came close. Meanwhile, Ted Williams took the collar in both ends of a Red Sox doubleheader against Chicago. He had kept pace with DiMaggio for the first 22 games of the legendary streak and, given a schedule difference, had actually hit in 23 straight since May 15, averaging .487 (43 for 88) to DiMaggio’s .368 (32 for 87). Williams still insists that the numbers he put on the board during his early matchup with DiMaggio’s great hitting streak made the difference in his finishing over .400, and the numbers do not lie.

  When I recently asked him how aware he had been of matching DiMaggio early in the streak, Williams answered in no uncertain terms. “I certainly was conscious of my streak, and DiMaggio’s was just starting to get in the papers then. I went to Chicago with twenty-three games, and I did a big and glorious zero for eight [he went none for five, walking four times] in Comiskey Park against Ted Lyons and Thornton Lee, and Joe carried on. Don’t think for a moment that because a hitter hits .400, every pitch looks like a balloon. Some days getting a hit is the hardest thing to do in the world. Plenty of pitchers that I knew would be extremely difficult on any given day, either because of their stuff or a ball park’s background.”

  At the time in 1941, Dan Daniel made a point of talking to Williams about his torrid weeks in May and early June for one of his New York World-Telegram columns. Williams reminded Daniel that he had just taken the collar in two games on Sunday: “I know how tricky percentages can be.” But what Williams really wanted to do was wax lyrical on another subject, the cagey pitching of two seasoned vets: “Say, you should have seen Grove and Lyons fight it out for ten innings on Sunday. It was the greatest exhibition of pitching I ever hope to see. Certainly Feller is tops. But you should have watched those two old-timers maneuvering, outwitting hitters, making their heads do for them what their arms used to do. It was beautiful. I became so engrossed watching them, I guess I just forgot to hit.”

  The Yankees surely didn’t forget in St. Louis. Their power proved devastating to the Browns’ pitching on Sunday. Red Ruffing coasted to a win in the first game as four Yankee home runs sailed out of Sportsman’s Park. In addition to DiMaggio’s two, Henrich unloaded one in the eighth and Rolfe hit one in the ninth. But the most interesting Yankee play of the game occurred in the second inning. Bill Dickey caught Bob Swift’s foul along the first base line and looked up to see Johnny Berardino motoring into second base without having tagged up. Berardino for some reason thought the foul would bounce fair. Dickey just kept legging it to first with the ball in his catcher’s glove and stepped on the bag for an unassisted double play, home to first in one easy motion. Rare indeed.

  Marius Russo pitched the distance in game 2, aided by Charlie Keller’s three-run home run in the first inning followed almost immediately by Joe Gordon’s two-run blast to knock Browns’ starter Bob Harris out of the box early. After St. Louis scored two in their half of the inning, DiMaggio doubled to right in the Yankee top of the second, driving in two more. In the sixth DiMaggio iced the game by putting one of Bob Muncrief’s deliveries over the right field roof. The shell-shocked Brown pitching staff offered little resistance this Sunday as the Yankees extended their consecutive-game home run streak to 7. This was a rough day all over the country for St. Louis. Between them the Browns and the Cardinals lost four games before sundown, with the lowly Giants taking two from the Cards in New York. Brooklyn lost as well, so the Cardinals fell only a half game behind the Dodgers. Brooklyn center fielder Pete Reiser pumped his league-leading average up to .373 on June 8. Williams, of course, at .416. still led the American League.

  The strike situation at North American Aviation in Los Angeles had by now captured the attention of the nation, especially that of the parent CIO union to which the wildcatting strikers belonged. As the renegade strikers tested not only Roosevelt’s new determination in the face of world war but labor’s relation to a revivifying U.S. economy, the natio
nal CIO office turned against its local in cold fury. The New York Times flung its usual antiunion mud as well, noting that the Los Angeles local’s leader, Elmer Freitag, had admitted to Congressman Martin Dies’ Special Committee to investigate un-American Activities that he had registered as a Communist in a Los Angeles election in 1938. Roosevelt didn’t really need this sort of help from the Times, but they were ready enough to provide it.

  In contrast to the happenings at North American Aviation, with the National Guard alert and ready to move in to ensure the continued manufacture of vital aircraft, a woman from Virginia, Mrs. Kelly Evans, dug into her own pocket and purchased a complete Spitfire fighter, fully equipped with eight guns, for England’s war effort. It cost Mrs. Evans $32,000 for the honor, and she forwarded the cash to the Wings for Britain Fund in Montreal, Canada. For months the British had come up with whatever ideas they could to enlist support in America for their solo enterprise against Hitler. Dressmakers in England had even forgone the usual floral print on items intended for export and substituted war-scene designs to help their nation’s cause. One dress depicted a Home Guard trooper, bayonet in hand, facing down a Nazi fighter-bomber. Another simply recalled Churchill’s words to the Royal Air Force after the Battle of Britain: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”

  At the same time that such pathos-ridden pleas for aid to England were heard and seen in America, a fascinating and complex international story about inadvertent aid for Nazi Germany began to break through leaks in the Justice Department. On June 8 bits and pieces of a government investigation came to light concerning a series of insidious, entangled, and far-reaching multinational negotiations involving oil, synthetic fuel, and rubber patents. The revelations this day focused on special deals and financial links between John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and the Nazi Germany conglomerate I.G. Farben.

  In effect, two major conglomerates in nations whose interests were growing violently apart had made contractual arrangements that yoked them firmly together. Furthermore, the area of their shared interests was essential to the war-making capacities of the Allied and Axis powers. In 1926 I.G. Farben began to build a huge synthetic fuel plant to produce oil from black coal. Carl Bosch, a name still famous in German industry for spark plugs, directed the project and opened the plant in 1928. I.G. Farben, with cash-flow problems at the time, arranged to sell Standard Oil the rights to market the process in America and outside Germany. Standard did not want the synthetic fuel so much as the right to keep other nations from getting it.

  For its part, I. G. Farben was given ownership of 20 percent of Standard Oil of New Jersey and shared an affiliate company, Jasco, set up for any new patents and processes. Hitler knew about the Standard deal in the late 1930s and instructed I.G. Farben to get whatever patents they could from Standard Oil without providing any themselves. Standard Oil did not bother to review the arrangement and kept sending Farben the results of work at Jasco. But by late 1939 some Standard executives got nervous. They asked our ambassador to England at the time, Joseph Kennedy, to set up a secret meeting between Standard and I.G. Farben officials at The Hague. All Europe was a cinder box, and as one Standard executive remembers it, “We did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi which would operate through the term of the war whether or not the U.S. came in.”

  What turns out to be especially significant about the state of these affairs on June 8, 1941, is that not only the Justice Department but the United States Senate had the matter under investigation. A midwestern politician from Missouri headed the effort which would boost his reputation throughout the country and put him in line to run for Vice President in 1944: Senator Harry S. Truman. By the time Truman was done with the Standard Oil—I.G. Farben scandal, his committee had raked John D. Rockefeller’s company over a public bed of hot coals, fined Standard Oil for what amounted to their foreign policy, and forced John D. himself to purge the company of executives with ties to Nazi Germany.

  Lindbergh was again in the news on June 8. He simply couldn’t keep himself out of it during DiMaggio’s streak, and he became a national obsession matched by his own obsession with Roosevelt’s war policies. For several days Japan had been dropping thousands of leaflets over Chungking that contained translations of Lindbergh’s May 29 speech in Philadelphia attacking Roosevelt for his “unlimited emergency” speech. The Japanese, playing on the famous Lindbergh name, wanted the Chinese, whom they were currently butchering, to think that America was in turmoil about its commitments abroad. Lindbergh now had the dubious honor of having his speeches translated and distributed by Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, two nations with which we would be at war by the end of the year. If this were not enough, the famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera launched a public tirade against Lindbergh and America First. He claimed that Lindbergh had no right to speak for all the Americas; indeed, his hemispheric bullying had made him “just as dangerous as the head of the Gestapo.” Though one of the least subtle of the attacks on Lindbergh during the spring and summer, it echoed the same general theme: Lindbergh’s previous activities, and presumably his current ones, had the mark of the Third Reich upon them.

  Before this spring weekend in June came to a close, the actress Madeleine Carroll, voted by her fans the most desirable of movie stars with whom to be marooned on a desert island, was marooned on a desert island. Madeleine and actor Sterling Hayden, aboard a small yacht near the Bahamas, were forced by a squall into a small island cove for protection. There they spent the night out of contact with those who expected them to return late Sunday. Fortunately or, as the case might be, unfortunately, the yacht had a crew and the actress and actor had company.

  GAME 25: June 10

  June 9 was a travel day, and the next day, before a small crowd of 2,832 in Chicago’s Comiskey Park, Yankee rookie Steve Peek went the distance for the first time in his career and notched the win. Peek had difficulty sweeping up in the ninth; he took a shutout into the inning but allowed the Sox five hits and three runs to whittle the final Yankee margin to 8–3. DiMaggio was fortunate this afternoon. His hard bouncer to third in the seventh handcuffed the slick-fielding Dario Lodigiani, the same San Francisco family friend who had made two great defensive plays that held DiMaggio to one hit on the day the streak began. The official scorer ruled the grounder too tough to handle, and the streak continued intact at 25.

  Having won four in a row, the Yankees edged ahead of the White Sox into second place, still 41/2 games behind the Indians, who beat the Senators behind Feller’s thirteenth win. White Sox ace John Rigney, perhaps with his June 20 Army call-up date in mind, just didn’t have it against the Yankees on June 10. He left the game in the sixth when New York batted around, with Frankie Crosetti’s grand slam home run capping the outburst. In commenting on Crosetti’s blast, the New York Herald Tribune picked up the Yankee consecutive-game home run streak and began its count at 8. Rigney’s induction day count was at zero minus 10, though he was able to bear the day’s loss more easily when he learned after the game that his induction appeal had gained him an additional 60-day delay under a complicated hardship regulation. Soon the hardship appeal became more trying for him than the draft notice in a nation whose consciousness of its role in the war was increasing day by day.

  Jack Smith’s column in the New York Daily News for June 10 focused on a story that would later play a significant role in DiMaggio’s streak, though Smith had no idea at the time and neither did anyone else. Tommy Henrich had come alive with the bat recently for the Yankees, and Smith explained that Henrich had been slumping badly prior to DiMaggio’s streak, not even playing against left-handed pitchers because his frustration was so great and his performance so slipshod. In a game with Detroit on May 21, Henrich had borrowed one of Joe DiMaggio’s bats, heavier than the model he usually swung, and got three hits, all to left or left center. Several Yankees, ribbing Henrich about his day at the plate, claimed that the bat swung him instead of he it. But Henrich told Smith he felt comfort
able with the DiMaggio model no matter how amusing his mates found his swing. He borrowed a few more from DiMaggio’s available stock and started honing and boning them. Soon he got his swing down pat, and since muscling up with the heavier bats he had hit seven home runs in 18 games. Smith’s column on Henrich swinging DiMaggio’s lumber would add color to the lore of the great streak 16 games from this one when a fan stole DiMaggio’s bat on the day he was after George Sisler’s modern-day record of 41 straight. One can guess what happened, but the details would fall into place on June 29.

  The weekend did not defuse the tense situation in Los Angeles at the striking North American Aviation plant. On Monday, June 9, Roosevelt lowered the boom. True to his word, he sent in the troops, 2,500 strong, to force open the plant for business and production. With its bluff called, the renegade local capitulated and voted to return to work immediately, leaving all wage demands in limbo. Meanwhile another locally sanctioned CIO union walked off the job in a Cleveland Alcoa Aluminum plant for one day but quickly announced its intention to return when Roosevelt threatened to bring in the Army reserves for another “consultation.” The President meant business in more ways than one. Labor had twice tested the President’s new unlimited emergency powers and twice had buckled. In many ways and in many sectors, Roosevelt’s moves were less ideological than historical. Preparedness took precedence over negotiation in these critical months. The national leadership of the CIO shared most of Roosevelt’s sentiments. They began this very day to purge the feistier left wing of their organization.