by Tom Clavin
The Karkines Indians, part of the Costanoan Indian group, had been the original inhabitants of that valley. In 1824, when California was owned by Mexico, the government gave 17,000 acres that included the Alhambra Valley to Don Ygnacio Martinez as thanks for his military services. Twenty-five years later, his son, Don Vicente, built an adobe house, beginning the Martinez settlement. Its only distinction at the time was a ferry service across the Carquinez Strait between Martinez and Benicia.
By 1849, California was no longer a colony of Mexico. The United States had coveted California for some time, and the administration of James Polk had actively encouraged separatist movements. The explorer John Fremont led the Bear Flag Revolution in the Bay Area in 1846, and in May of that year war against Mexico was declared. Three months later, the first American government in San Francisco was formed. When the war ended in 1848, California was a territory of the United States.
The humble ferry service became much in demand in May 1848 when a man named Sam Brannan announced that he had found gold dust during a visit to the American River south of San Francisco. The ferry provided one of the few means of transportation from that city to points south for the eager prospectors wanting to get to the gold fields fast. (This ferry service would operate continuously until 1962, when it was replaced by the George Miller Jr. Bridge.) Houses and other structures were built around the ferry landing site, and Martinez became the first town in the District of Contra Costa. It was designated the county seat in 1851.
Those not interested in seeking gold were joined by those who had failed at it to establish hundreds of farms in the Alhambra Valley, as well as in the nearby Reliez and Diablo Valleys. As it happened, most of these farmers were from Massachusetts or Missouri, and soon they were writing home encouraging friends and family members to head west and share in the fertile fields and generous climate. They grew wheat, peaches, cherries, pears, figs, and walnuts. The harvests were hauled to San Francisco, where they were sold and put on ships.
In 1869, John T. Strentzel (whose son-in-law was the naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir) invented a method of carting fruits in containers packed with carbonized bran that allowed them to remain fresh while being transported to distant markets. After a railroad line arrived in Martinez eight years later, even more crops could be sent on their way. In 1899, the year after Giuseppe DiMaggio arrived, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway began running trains in and out of Martinez.
Fishing became the other main industry in the area. The waters of the Carquinez Strait teemed with an abundance of sardines, salmon, and other fish, and initially there were not enough men to harvest them. Beginning in the late 1870s, fishermen from Portugal and then Sicily and other parts of Italy came to Martinez. They worked long days and sold their catches to canneries, to be shipped to San Francisco and from there to the eastern United States and Europe. The fishermen constructed serviceable docks for their boats and shacks for sleeping. As they made a few dollars and realized that they would be staying indefinitely, they sent messages home to wives and brothers, similar to the ones the farmers were writing to relatives back east.
According to Martinez: A California Town (1986) by Charlene Perry and others, the Italians “brought the age-old style of their former homes in Sicily and on the coast of Italy. All saved their earnings to send for families left behind. They lived by the special calendar of the fisherman, the two straits seasons of spring and fall and the Alaska salmon season of early and mid-summer. As soon as the fishermen could afford to send for their families, houses were bought or built for them in the area north and west of Alhambra Avenue and Main Street. Families settled near other families from the same old-country villages making Martinez a microcosm of parts of Sicily and mainland Italy.”
It had to have eased Giuseppe’s transition from Sicily to the Bay Area that just about all of the fishermen who lived in nearby shacks and tied their boats to Granger’s Wharf and other docks in Martinez were from Sicily too. No doubt there were Sundays when Giuseppe sat outside his own shack enjoying a thin cigar and a cup of wine, closing his eyes to listen to the voices and dream that he was home.
Rosalie arrived with their daughter in 1902. She could not have come with many expectations, since her husband had been uncommunicative about his experiences. But probably she was pleasantly surprised. Though a relatively poor community, Martinez had electric streetlights. Many fishermen’s boats had engines, those who didn’t fish worked in the town’s factories, and for much of the year the weather was more congenial than in storm-tossed Isola delle Femmine. She was reunited with her husband, and they had a house. Already it was like a dream had come true.
Living the dream was not easy. For Giuseppe, the six-day weeks continued, week after week, month after month, year after year, as there were more mouths to feed. Though he was a short man, the generations of fishing in his family had given him an especially strong neck and powerful shoulders. He could lift fish-filled nets out of the water into his boat with the best of them. He wore a fedora, a custom from the old country, to keep the sun out of his eyes. With his strong constitution, robust health, and the moderate weather of the Bay Area, Giuseppe rarely missed a day on the water. At the end of the day, after selling his catch to the agents waiting on Granger’s Wharf who represented San Francisco fish brokers, he tied up his boat on Alhambra Creek and trudged home to his wife.
It would be 47 years before they were separated again. Giuseppe was devoted to his wife, and Rosalie to him. He was not an articulate or charismatic man, but he was unquestionably the patriarch of the family. His priorities were always family and hard work. For the DiMaggios in America, that would be plenty.
The house had just two bedrooms to go with a kitchen and living room. Still, it had to be spacious for a family of three in their early days there. The bathroom was an outhouse perched on the bank of Alhambra Creek. Their next-door neighbors were Salvatore DiMaggio, Giuseppe’s brother, and his wife Frances, Rosalie’s sister. Everyone in the community spoke Sicilian because there was really no reason to speak or read English. The children would take care of that.
TWO
Two girls came first. Adrianella had been born in Sicily (her name was later shortened to Nelly), then Mamie in Martinez, the first of the DiMaggio children born in America. On the third try, Rosalie gave birth to a son for Giuseppe. They named him Thomas. Marie (born Mary) was the fourth child; then came Michael and Frances. Vincent was born on September 6, 1912. Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio Jr. was born on November 25, 1914. Though the fourth son, he was the one named after his father because in the Sicilian tradition the grandparents had to be taken care of first. Giuseppe and Rosalie were even less creative when giving their sons middle names—Gaetano and Michelli were given to Thomas and Michael, but it was simply Paolo as a middle name for the other three boys. Eight children are plenty for any family, especially one depending on the precarious income of a fisherman, but a ninth, the third son in a row, was born on February 12, 1917. Dominic would be the last DiMaggio of that generation, and like his eight siblings, he was born at home.
It was around the time of Dominic’s birth that the family of eleven, clearly having outgrown the house on Alhambra Creek, moved from Martinez to San Francisco. After a short stay at a place on Filbert Street, Giuseppe and Rosalie rented a house at 2047 Taylor Street in the North Beach section. Below them was Fisherman’s Wharf, the new home for Giuseppe’s boat. Joe was to write in Lucky to Be a Yankee (1946)—though published while he was still playing, it is the closest there is to an autobiography—that “my earliest recollections are of the smell of fish in San Francisco, where I was brought up.”
San Francisco had been growing by leaps and bounds since its emancipation from Mexico and the 1848 announcement of the discovery of gold. For the remainder of the century, the Bay Area became the destination of emigrants from two directions. First were the gold seekers, many from east of the Mississippi, who arrived
first by horse and wagon via new extensions of the Oregon Trail, then on the newly constructed transcontinental railroad, thus lending some credence to the “manifest destiny” of America. Later came the Asians and the Europeans like Giuseppe and Rosalie DiMaggio, who sought opportunity more than gold. Only two years after the end of the war with Mexico, in September 1850, California was admitted into the Union, becoming the 31st state.
In 1850 the population of San Francisco was 35,000. That year the first theater and the first free public school opened. A chamber of commerce for the city was organized. The Bavarian-born Levi Strauss arrived with a supply of clothing and dry goods to open up a business. There was a seamy side to growth too. The so-called Barbary Coast, the red-light district centered on Pacific Avenue, led from the wharf area to the city center and was known for gambling, violence and other crimes, and prostitution—of the 300 women living in San Francisco in those gold rush days, two-thirds were ladies of the evening. Despite occasional reform efforts, the Barbary Coast thrived for decades.
In 1853 San Francisco could count twelve daily newspapers, six weeklies, and two triweeklies, one in French and the other in German. More people arrived by clipper ship after the completion of the Panama Canal, which sped up travel from the East Coast to the West Coast by way of Central America. A literary movement that began in 1860 boasted Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Ambrose Bierce among its notables, and by that year the city’s population had nearly doubled from a decade before. Relatively untouched by the distant Civil War and the Reconstruction in its aftermath, the population of San Francisco in 1870 was 137,419. Twenty years later, that figure was at almost 300,000, and San Francisco ranked as the largest city in California and the eighth largest in the United States.
The city attracted high-profile cultural and sports events, like the world boxing championship held in September 1892, when native son “Gentleman” James J. Corbett knocked out John L. Sullivan in the 21st round. Five years later, gold was discovered in Alaska, introducing another boom period for San Francisco. In 1898, when Giuseppe DiMaggio arrived from Sicily, the United States was at war again, this time with Spain. By order of President William McKinley, San Francisco was the base for the country’s Pacific operations and the embarkation point for ships and troops heading to fight in the Philippines. The year Rosalie DiMaggio arrived, 1902, San Francisco was lighted by electricity. Two years later saw the formation of the Bank of Italy (to become the Bank of America), the largest private bank in the world.
The DiMaggios had to have felt the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, but Martinez was spared any significant destruction. The quake struck at 5:12 A.M. on April 18. By noon, fires had spread throughout San Francisco. By the time they were brought under control three days later, nearly five square miles had burned, over 28,000 buildings had been destroyed, and 311 people were dead, with 252 reported missing.
The immediate impact on the DiMaggios and other fishing families in the area was the destruction of portions of the city’s waterfront and weeks of interruption of commerce. “Thousands of men who went to bed wealthy last night awoke this morning practically bankrupt,” reported the Evening Daily News. Yet when reconstruction began that summer, San Francisco was on its way to becoming one of the most famous and exciting cities in the world. Sports played a part in that. It was a special place for the athletic DiMaggio boys to grow up after the family moved there during World War I. Not long after they did, in 1920, the population of San Francisco passed the half-million mark.
The DiMaggio family was moderately poor, an income level that was typical for the large family of a fisherman who had emigrated from Europe as recently as the turn of the century. In the years before and during World War I, the waters in and around the Bay Area offered a steady supply of fish and shellfish. If a man like Giuseppe was willing to work long hours to tap that supply, he could put food on the table.
It made a big difference that he and his equally hardworking wife were frugal. For example, only Nelly and Tom, the oldest daughter and son, would know the experience of wearing new clothes. The rest of the DiMaggio children were on a regular cycle—after two years, the clothes of the two oldest were handed down to Marie and Mike, and two years after that those same (much-mended) clothes went to Frances and Vince, and so on. Joe and Dominic were at the end of the line. It’s no surprise that as an adult with spending power Joe would always appear in public dressed impeccably.
The DiMaggio daughters helped their mother keep house and care for the three younger sons. “My older brothers Mike and Tom were working on the boats with Dad, and our sisters—Marie, Mae, Nelly, and Frances—were helping our mother and going to school,” wrote Dominic in one of the autobiographical passages of Real Grass, Real Heroes (1990), a memoir he wrote with Bill Gilbert about the 1941 American League season.
That they were in America now didn’t mean that the DiMaggios didn’t follow traditions. The girls would be groomed for marriage, not careers, and whatever formal education they received was a luxury, maybe even a frivolous distraction, not a right. Still, most likely it was Rosalie, the former schoolteacher, who made sure that her children went to school. To Giuseppe, the boys being in school was time not spent helping him on and with the boat. In his version of the American Dream, a man got ahead through hard work and success was measured by his ability to feed, clothe, and shelter his family. Sons helped their father do that.
But this was not Isola delle Femmine, where little changed for decades. In America, you had to read and write English to get ahead. All the DiMaggio children spoke Sicilian at home and with their immediate neighbors, while learning English and studying American history at school.
Tom and Mike, the two oldest boys, were closest to sharing their father’s outlook. Tom was a bright kid with a good head for numbers and sound common sense, but neither he nor Mike went past the seventh grade. They worked with Giuseppe on the boat. Both would eventually take up the occupation of fisherman, to Giuseppe’s approval. In contented moments as he sipped wine (some of which he made himself) on Sundays, Giuseppe must have envisioned the day when he and all five of his sons would come home with their catches and the DiMaggios would be prosperous indeed.
Giuseppe did not approve when every so often Tom and the stockier Mike made time to play the strange American game called baseball. There was no gain in that. He would have to make sure that such a silly, unprofitable exercise was not passed along to his three youngest sons.
“My father always said that Tom was the best ballplayer of all the brothers,” says Joanne DiMaggio Webber. “But my grandfather was not going to allow him to play a game when there were responsibilities to the family and there was money to be made. He got his way with Tom and Mike. Then my father came along.”
THREE
Although its history is relatively unknown, baseball on the West Coast contributed mightily to the growth of the sport as the national pastime. More specifically, it had a profound impact on the DiMaggio brothers when they were exposed to it. But there would have been no DiMaggios at all in professional baseball if it hadn’t been for Vince.
He was the rebel of the family. Not that he was a rude or obstinate child, but he had an upbeat disposition and loved to talk, the opposite of his father. Vince also had no interest in fishing and didn’t hide that from his parents. There were two things Vince wanted very much to do: sing and play baseball, in that order. His chief ambition was to be on the opera stage.
From early on, Vince displayed a fine tenor voice and a good ear. He only had to hear an aria by Puccini or Verdi once to be able to sing it. Giuseppe didn’t necessarily object to this. The idea that Vince might become a professional opera singer probably seemed as fanciful as his becoming the mayor of San Francisco someday, but the boy could entertain. He was an outgoing, happy-go-lucky kid who would set up on a street corner and burst into song. Passersby impressed by selections from Rigoletto or La Bohème dropped coins in the prec
ocious boy’s hat, and he was good about bringing this unanticipated income home. As long as he kept doing this and didn’t shirk his fishing duties, Giuseppe was fine with his middle son’s singing.
Giuseppe Jr., or Joe, as everyone called him, looked up to all his older brothers, but was closest to Vince. They were just two years apart in age. Joe admired and envied Vince’s personality, the way he could make people laugh or swoon with a song. Joe was very quiet and rarely spoke. English hadn’t come easily for him. At school some kids made fun of him when he mispronounced words or helplessly slipped back into Sicilian. (They also made fun of his large, protruding ears.) Joe figured it was best, then, to say nothing, because no one could laugh at that. He couldn’t sing like Vince, and he had no interest in opera, but Joe did tag along when Vince snuck off to watch their older brothers play that strange but exciting game at the local sandlots.
By the end of the first two decades of the 20th century, baseball was big in the Bay Area. The sport had been brought west before the Civil War by gold seekers and others who emigrated from the East Coast. (Baseball teams had sprouted by the dozens every spring in New York City and New Jersey in the 1850s, with the borough of Brooklyn alone boasting 70 clubs.) Two years before the Civil War began, in 1859, the Eagle Base Ball Club was formed in San Francisco. Teams founded during the war in the Bay Area included the California Theater Baseball Club and the Pacific Base Ball Club. Many young men first played baseball between battles during the Civil War, and when they came home the sport expanded greatly. The Pacific Base Ball Convention was held in San Francisco in 1866 to coordinate the activities of the two dozen clubs existing by then in the Bay Area.
