GAMES 47 and 48: July 6
There were 60,948 fans jammed into Yankee Stadium on July 6 for Sunday’s unveiling of the center field monument to Lou Gehrig. Joe DiMaggio picked the occasion for one of the best days of his streak. As the Yankees beat the A’s twice, 8–4 and 3–1, to extend their current winning streak to 9 in a row while posting wins in 23 of their last 27 games, DiMaggio collected three singles and a double in the opener. He quickly canceled any potential second installment of the Johnny Babich story with a sharp single in the first inning. Babich had no chance to finesse DiMaggio into swinging at bad pitches because the Yankees knocked him off the mound before Babich got anybody out in the second inning. On his first at bat in the nightcap, DiMaggio jolted one deep to center off right-hander Jack Knott that landed over Sam Chapman’s head for a triple. Joe then doubled in the third inning for his sixth hit of the day.
DiMaggio reserved his tributes to Gehrig for the games. In the pregame unveiling of the monument that still graces the center field region of the Stadium, Gehrig’s former Yankee manager, Joe McCarthy; Lou’s roommate, Bill Dickey; Fiorello La Guardia, mayor of New York City; the A’s manager, Connie Mack; and Mrs. Eleanor Gehrig participated in the ceremony. La Guardia said of Gehrig that he “will be remembered as long as baseball remains. Lou Gehrig will be appreciated as long as good government exists.” By good government La Guardia might have meant his own city regime, since Gehrig had served in it as a member of the New York City Parole Commission, or more generally the mayor might have had in mind the light that shone so steadfastly in the presence and in the memory of the German-speaking Lou Gehrig in a world darkened by the dictatorial shadow cast by the Nazis at the time of his death.
As a warm-up for the all-star game scheduled in Detroit for July 7, Ted Williams raised his league-leading average to .405 with four hits in eight tries in Boston’s doubleheader against the Senators. During the span of DiMaggio’s streak Williams was hitting .425; DiMaggio had pushed his streak average up to .385 and his league average to .357. In the National League, St. Louis dropped another to the Cubs, 3–0, and their fifth loss in a row put the Cardinals three games behind the Dodgers in the pennant race.
A Hollywood movie about high-wire telephone repairmen, Manpower, opened in New York this holiday week. In the movie, Edward G. Robinson and George Raft did some fighting over Marlene Dietrich, but nothing like the real scrap that broke out during the filming when Raft and Robinson, failing to see eye to eye, squared off jaw to jaw. Film technicians had to separate the boys. Tough guy Raft was just warming up with Robinson; he also took a poke at Marlene Dietrich (this one scripted) and inadvertently knocked her down a flight of stairs, where she ended up in a heap with a broken ankle. Later in the production, Raft fell 30 feet off a telephone pole. This was war. Raoul Walsh, who directed Manpower, wanted to add his own touch of reality to the film’s dialogue, so he hired a waitress from Chicago as a consultant for a hash house scene. Fricasseed oysters were “angels on horseback,” a bottle of sherry turned into “grapes of wrath in a sports jacket,” eggs and bacon were “cackleberries and grunts,” a glass of water was “one on the city,” and a simple sugar bowl became “a gravel train.” Popular culture and the idioms of trade in America have always flung those words around like hash.
GAME 49: July 10
After the big Lou Gehrig Day doubleheader on July 6, the Yankees took a breather for the all-star game on Tuesday at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. Commissioners Harridge and Frick announced that the proceeds from the game this year would benefit the USO, as had the take from the auction of DiMaggio’s streak bat. The USO earned just under $1,700 from DiMaggio and just over $70,000 from the all-star game. On the first day of the break, Monday, July 7, President Roosevelt made a historic announcement. He informed Congress that he had, at Iceland’s request and with continuing assurances about the sovereignty of Iceland’s government, sent marines to take up positions on the large, strategic island. He also had instructed the Navy to protect with force the sea-lanes around Iceland.
In addition, the President sent troops to bases in Trinidad and British Guiana that had been secured in a swap agreement with the British back in April involving 50 of our supposedly old, surplus destroyers. Roosevelt informed Congress that he would in the near future request that the length of service for draftees be extended beyond a year and that the draftees be allowed to serve in any location outside the country deemed essential for defense. Furthermore, he intended to request a $5 billion increase in the national defense budget and a $7 billion increment for lend-lease. The President had reached a new wartime plateau.
These announcements were electric, and hard-line isolationists found themselves in a state of shock. Burton Wheeler screamed to reporters: “What next? The Azores? Cape Verde Islands?” The senator demanded an investigation into other charges, circulating for weeks now in Washington, that we were already in the thick of it with German U-boats and had been engaging them since April 1941. Secretary Knox admitted that there had been an incident in which the destroyer Niblack had dropped a depth charge while picking up survivors from a sunken British merchant ship, but the Niblack had done so only to ensure the safety of the victims afloat in dangerous waters.
Lindbergh wrote in his journal the day after Roosevelt’s message to Congress: “The morning papers announce that American forces have occupied Iceland. This is, I think, the most serious step we have yet taken. It may mean war. Iceland is in the German war zone, and, in my opinion, it is definitely a European island” (July 8, 1941). For Roosevelt, Iceland’s longitude registered Anglo-American; for Lindbergh, European. Nothing could more emphatically demonstrate the kinds of thinking that divided the nation in the summer of 1941. Two days later Lindbergh steadfastly disavowed Roosevelt’s wider line of defense in a journal entry: “The President has very cleverly maneuvered us into a position where he can create incidents of war and then claim we have been attacked.” This was only slightly more circumspect than the senior Charles Lindbergh’s notorious remark back in 1918 that we had been “buncoed” into World War 1 by the sinking of the Lusitania, in which the undersecretary of the Navy at the time, young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the first lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had, according to Lindbergh’s father, conspired to ship explosive armaments in the Lusitania’s hold.
Befitting the dramatic year and the dramatic season in which it took place, the all-star game on July 8 proved a thriller. With Bobby Feller tabbed to start against Brooklyn’s Whit Wyatt and with DiMaggio and Ted Williams burning up the circuit, the American League hoped to avenge the previous year’s 4–0 loss to the Nationals. Before the game a rumor circulated that DiMaggio had hurt himself in an auto accident in the Motor City, and the big Detroit crowd of 54,674 shouted itself hoarse when DiMaggio was introduced. The fans not only were happy to see DiMaggio ready to perform, they were delighted to see him in one piece.
Led by Arky Vaughan’s two home runs, the National League took what looked like a workable 5–2 lead into the ninth. Vaughan, by the way, started at short for the Nationals after having warmed the bench for his current team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Manager Frankie Frisch had found himself a rookie shortstop named Alf Anderson, and the Pirates had won a few with Anderson playing and Vaughan sitting. Vaughan’s all-star performance didn’t help him when official league play resumed. Pittsburgh was going nowhere, and he continued to sit while the rookie played.
Down by four runs at 5–1, the American League began to edge back into the game in its half of the eighth. Joe DiMaggio doubled off Cub right-hander Claude Passeau and scored on his brother Dominic’s hit. In the ninth the American League loaded the bases against Passeau, and DiMaggio came to the plate again. He bounced what appeared to be a perfect double play ball to the Boston Braves’ shortstop, Eddie Miller. Miller grabbed it and threw slightly wide to the Dodgers’ Billy Herman at second. Herman got the force, but Cecil Travis tangled him up so that he couldn’t double DiMaggio at first
. With a run in and two on, Williams stepped up. In the previous inning he had argued briefly with umpire Babe Pinelli after being called out on a savage Passeau third strike. Passeau was a fine pitcher but also a bundle of nerves. He was so high-strung, he had permission from the Cubs, especially after winning 20 games for them in 1940, to skip curfew on days when he pitched because the only way he could work off the tension of the game was by wandering the streets late at night.
Passeau fidgeted, and Williams wanted another shot at him. This time he would not get behind in the count or let Pinelli have the last word on a called third strike. According to Williams, Passeau had great stuff; his ball had a way of breaking into left-handed hitters and clipping the corners. Ted cranked up a bit earlier than usual, but not so much that he’d swing at a bad pitch. He was ahead in the count 2–1 before taking a button-popping, uninhibited cut at a Passeau waist-high delivery. Ted crushed the ball, hitting it off the overhang of the right field roof, a glorious three-run homer. The pure joy of Williams’s home run trot told everyone in the park what a tremendous thrill the game winner was for this superb young power hitter.
After celebrating the 6–5 last-inning win with his American League mates, officials, and reporters in the clubhouse, Williams wanted to escape the ball park without getting mobbed by Detroit’s fans. He slipped out from the clubhouse through a side door and tried to hail a cab on the street. No empty ones passed, but a man with a kid in his car pulled up and asked Williams if he wanted a lift. As the three drove toward midtown, the sparse conversation did not touch on baseball. Williams assumed the man and his boy were merely being tactful. When the car pulled right up to his hotel curb, Ted offered his thanks for the ride and then couldn’t bear it any longer—he burst out with the news that the American League had just won the all-star game. “Is zat so?” said the man. “I don’t follow baseball.”
The regular season resumed on July 10, and the Yankees were in St. Louis to play the Browns. Tommy Henrich joined the team after a brief honeymoon following his marriage to the attractive and wonderfully Irish Eileen O’Reilly. The streak had become an advertising bonanza for the teams along the circuit when the Yankees came to town. As Dan Daniel wrote in the Sporting News: “DiMaggio’s batting streak certainly captured the fans and fired their imaginations. Joe always is skillful and colorful. Dramatize a player like that with a streak like his and you have a superb, turnstile-clicking, electrifying situation.” For this Thursday’s game, scheduled under the lights, the Browns placed ads in all the local papers making it sound as if DiMaggio were coming into town not with the Yankees but with the Ringling Brothers Circus: “THE SENSATIONAL JOE DIMAGGIO WILL ATTEMPT TO HIT SAFELY IN HIS 49TH CONSECUTIVE GAME.” In tribute to the ad campaign and to DiMaggio, 12,682 showed up at the ball park. Five of the seven major league games on July 10 were at night, and the Browns added their share to the largest combined major league nighttime attendance of all time as 102,930 fans around the leagues watched the sun go down and the lights go on.
Former Browns’ star George Sisler participated in the pregame ceremonies and congratulated DiMaggio on breaking his own modern streak record and Wee Willie Keeler’s ancient one. Dizzy Dean, announcing his first game for Falstaff Beer on St. Louis radio station KWK, was also supposed to speak on the field and on the air in honor of DiMaggio, but Dizzy got to rambling about this and that and forgot to say a word about DiMaggio or the streak. No one seemed to mind.
Once again DiMaggio settled the streak early. He came to the plate in the first against Johnny Niggeling and bounced a slow grounder wide of Alan Strange at short, who approached it at an angle, just managing to knock it down. He obviously had no play, and the brand-new Sportsman’s Park electronic scoreboard flashed HIT. This was the fourth game in a row that DiMaggio resolved the hitting streak in the first inning. In the sixth, the rains came and the umpires called it a night. Not much happened after DiMaggio’s hit. Joe Gordon’s home run in the second was all the Yankees and Lefty Gomez needed to win the abbreviated but official game 1–0 and stay 31/2 games ahead of Cleveland. The Indians won their game against the A’s 3–2 behind Bobby Feller’s seventeenth win of the season, a win made possible when Feller tripled and scored the deciding run.
As a relief from the strains of war and the bleakness of European civilization in the summer of 1941, the great Benny Goodman went classical on a memorable July 10 in Philadelphia. Goodman played a Mozart clarinet concerto with the Philadelphia Philharmonic in an outdoor concert at Robin Hood Dell before a delighted audience of 10,000. On that same afternoon, along a boiling Highway 70, the forced march of the “yoo-hoo” company took place. The troops tried to make the best of their run-in with the golfing general by singing, “General Lear, he missed his putt, Parlez-vous,” to the tune of “Mademoiselle from Armentières.” The next day Everett Dirksen of the House of Representatives harangued Lear and reminded him that Congress paid not only the enlisted men but the generals, too: “They work for us, and for all taxpayers.” Dirksen wondered: “Who wouldn’t whistle at the girls? Imagine a contingent so devoid of the buoyancy and effervescence that makes the young American a great soldier.” For his part, Dirksen could do without an Army run “by golfing old generals and sourpuss soldiers.” Undersecretary of Defense Robert Patterson leapt to the general’s defense: “We always support our generals. Where would discipline be otherwise?” Where indeed? Surely not on Highway 70.
GAME 50: July 11
The Yankees continued to inch farther ahead of an idle Cleveland in the American League pennant race on July 11 by easily beating the Browns 6–2 behind their hot young lefty, Marius Russo. Now the Yankees sat on top of the league by 4 games, having won 11 in a row. All streak long DiMaggio thrived on St. Louis pitching, and this was no different. He singled three times off Bob Harris and then parked one off Jack Kramer in the ninth inning for his league-leading twentieth home run. DiMaggio’s single to center in the first continued the streak at 50, the fifth straight game in which he had settled matters on his initial trip to the plate. Phil Rizzuto, who had reentered the Yankee starting lineup when Frankie Crosetti was spiked, had now hit in each of his 14 games since returning at shortstop. The newspapers picked up Rizzuto’s streak and began charting it—the rookie was a mere 36 behind DiMaggio. Ted Williams took an “ofer” against Detroit in his team’s 2–0 loss, with Lefty Grove failing to win his 300th game. Next game Williams would twist his ankle, and Joe Cronin would relegate him to pinch hitting for several days. He dipped beneath .400 for the first time in weeks at .398, though he was still outhitting DiMaggio during the streak .416 (77 for 185) to .397 (79 for 199). DiMaggio’s four-hit day against St. Louis brought his season’s average up to .365. In the National League, the Dodgers pounded the Reds 12–2 and moved 31/2 games in front of the Cardinals.
The last installment of the “yoo-hoo” story wrote itself into the Congressional Record on June 11. With all the punished soldiers national celebrities of a sort, the mother of one of the exhausted yoo-hooers wrote to her member of Congress about the incident, saying she would like to slap General Lear’s face. About the raucous reaction to the general’s golfing party she wrote that “anything that makes a soldier smile is not a bad thing.” This was not too far from the nationally sanctioned philosophy of frontline entertainers such as Bob Hope during the war years. Hope’s movie, Caught in the Draft, had just opened all over the country, a comedy not quite as funny as the Abbott and Costello screamer earlier in the year, Buck Privates.
A very odd incident, probably so bizarre that only the likes of Abbott and Costello could have done it justice, took place this day in Belleville, Illinois. America was faced in 1941 with the task of training thousands of pilots to minister to the controls of the thousands of planes coming off wartime assembly lines. But romancing the skies too quickly had its problems, one of which—the midair rescue of a dangling paratrooper—had occurred the day DiMaggio’s streak began. On July 11 an even zanier if less heroic aerial spectacle took
place. An Army cadet, Victor Woodrick, just learning to fly, sat peacefully in the backseat of a PT-19 Fairchild trainer with his civilian instructor in the cockpit. The plane was cruising between 500 and 1,000 feet above the ground when it hit a patch of turbulence, and Woodrick, who apparently had failed to latch his shoulder harness correctly, vaulted out of his seat and did a complete somersault, finding himself perched on his back on the tail assembly of the fuselage. He had nothing to grab on to but the taut canvas covering of the trainer’s frame. The civilian pilot in front couldn’t believe his eyes, but in a near panic he brought the plane down for a landing as gently as he could. The trainer taxied to a stop with the young cadet still splayed out on the fuselage. His knees and ankles made a permanent impression in the fabric covering, though the total damage for this escapade turned out to be a torn sock and the prospect of recurring nightmares for Woodrick.
GAME 51: July 12
DiMaggio did not get a hit on his first at bat this day. He waited until the fourth inning to extend his streak to 51 straight by doubling to center against Eldon Auker, the same submarining righthander who had held him hitless until his tense last at bat in game 38. In the middle of the Yankees’ 7–5 victory over the Browns, the team’s twelfth in a row, Phil Rizzuto, with a single in the fourth, extended his hitting streak to 15 straight; the New York Herald Tribune noted that the rookie shortstop had attained DiMaggio’s figures in reverse. The Browns as usual were sitting ducks for the Yankees. A five-run fourth, aided by DiMaggio’s and Rizzuto’s streak hits, plus Bill Dickey’s two-run homer, broke the game open. The Yankees added two in the sixth, and only a three-run pinch home run by Chet Laabs made the game look more respectable than it was. With the Indians dropping one 4–2 to Philadelphia, the Yankees increased their league lead to five games. Things had changed so radically since the days of dolor near the beginning of DiMaggio’s streak in mid-May that for their last 30 games the Yankees were clipping along at a winning percentage of .867.
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