Would little Billy confess to stealing?
In the gritty, crowded, downtrodden streets of West Berkeley where Billy lived, there was almost nothing to steal. California in the Great Depression was indeed a Garden of Eden, “a paradise to live in or see,” as Woody Guthrie sang in a ballad of the era, but no one would ever sing the praises of Billy’s neighborhood. He lived in one of the hundreds of tiny homes crammed against the East Bay docks across from burgeoning San Francisco. The tightly spaced West Berkeley houses were scruffy, set back just ten feet from busy, unkempt streets. They were homes without lawns and with tattered backyard fences. Factories and fish-canning plants towered over the neighborhood and seeded the sky with a smoky haze. The smell of the processed seafood filled the streets.
Two miles east of the water, the verdant hills of greater Berkeley climbed, a setting dotted with two-story middle-class homes and princely estates belonging to the administrators, professors, and staff from the nearby University of California at Berkeley. The roads in those shady hills were lined with flourishing fruit trees, graceful sequoias, and ponderosa pines. These were homes spread across spacious lots, leaving room for front and back yards and a driveway for the family car. There was a steady breeze off the water, and except when it was foggy, their view was San Francisco and the shimmering distant harbor—so long as they did not look down at the roughly square mile of West Berkeley dreariness below them.
No, Billy Martin didn’t steal. Only if you count some of the cooked crabs kitchen workers left to cool behind Spenger’s Fish Grotto, the roomy seafood restaurant near the docks. But that truly was not stealing. The Spenger’s workers, who had walked the few blocks from their West Berkeley homes, left the crabs out on purpose, knowing it was a furtive way to help feed the neighborhood.
What else could Billy confess to? Cursing? Taking the Lord’s name in vain?
His mother, who, unlike her five children, did not go to confession, had that commandment cornered, splicing profanities into virtually every sentence.
“Swearing was like breathing to my mother,” said Billy’s sister Pat Irvine. “She didn’t leave room for anybody else to swear. And if one of us swore, we’d get the back of her hand across our face anyway.
“So we did not swear.”
What else for Billy to confess then?
There was nothing of note, and in the dark of the confessional, Billy would instead strike up a conversation with Father Moore. He was never shy, always at ease with adults even as an eight-year-old. He had a crooked mouth and bad teeth, but he flashed his smile easily, and Father Moore, like others in the neighborhood, enjoyed being around the little boy who lived at 1632 7th Street, next to the house his grandmother moved to near the turn of the century. Billy most often regaled the priest with tales of the games he played at Kenney Park, just ten blocks away. There was basketball, swimming, diving, football, boxing, table tennis, and, of course, Billy’s favorite, baseball. Father Moore, seated deep in a quiet corner of St. Ambrose’s white concrete cathedral, heard about them all.
And when Billy was done talking about sports, the priest would ask about school and Billy’s friends. And only then would Billy talk about being embarrassed to wear the same clothes to school when some classmates clearly had a closetful of choices. He talked about being ridiculed for his overly large nose and jug ears, knowing that other kids called him “Pinocchio” behind his back. They made fun of his dungarees, which were frequently marked with grass stains and dirt—the evidence of his nonstop play at Kenney Park. But he wore them every day anyway. They were the only pants he had that fit.
While there was always food on the table at home, Billy said he knew his stepfather, Jack Downey, had to work two or three jobs to produce enough money for a household of six and he worried for him. There never seemed to be enough money to go around in a neighborhood where few of the adults had gone to school past eighth grade.
His mother had no car and had to walk everywhere, and Billy said he wanted a car. In fact, he wanted a big car someday, like the ones he had seen in the Berkeley hills. The kids from the crowded, flat, and uninspiring streets of West Berkeley called the well-dressed people they saw striding up and around the hills “the Goats,” a term still uttered in West Berkeley today and still delivered with a familiar disdain.
Billy wanted a car like the Goats had. And he wanted their clothes. And he wanted the money to go to the movies every day of the week if he chose. And he wanted his own bedroom, even if he did not mind sleeping with his aging grandmother, who had helped raise him since birth.
But as Father Moore related in a newspaper interview nearly twenty years later, “Life had already made Billy most vulnerable.” And that unnerved the priest.
“There was an insecurity, a lot of the kids from West Berkeley had it,” Moore said of Billy. “It’s the worry that you might some day have nothing. It was the idea, a constant fear, that it could all be taken away at any moment.”
But Father Moore also said that little Billy Martin had a plan. He knew the only way to get all the things he wanted was to work his way out of grimy West Berkeley. And at eight years old, Billy already knew that his way out was going to be baseball.
The greatest baseball team in the world in 1936 was the New York Yankees, the team of Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Tony Lazzeri, and Red Ruffing. Beginning in 1936, the Yankees won six of the next eight World Series and were runners-up in a seventh. It was a team that was a continent and seemingly a civilization away from 7th Street’s foundationless, rough-hewn houses, but Billy told anyone who would listen that he was going to be a New York Yankee.
“He told me he would play professional baseball in New York,” Father Moore said.
Billy told his best friend, Ruben de Alba, the same thing.
“We’d be walking down the street and Billy would say, ‘I’m going to play for the Yankees someday,’” de Alba said seventy-six years later as he sat in a Bay Area assisted living facility. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, sure, Billy.’ I kind of laughed it off. You know, like, ‘Yeah, sure, whatever you say, Billy.’
“But he wasn’t kidding. He would turn to me and say, ‘Listen, you wait and see. I’m going to come back here and remind you of this when I’m playing for the Yankees.’”
Father Moore, meanwhile, had less time for the wild dreams of the second-grader in his confessional. The priest eventually decided that while Billy’s aspirations were admirable, they were also driven in part by jealousy. Was not one of the commandments “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house” (or field)?
Father Moore ordered Billy to clean the church pews as penance. And Billy did. Father Moore then said he would see Billy at Sunday Mass. And Billy would be there. He even woke his cousins who lived in the neighborhood to accompany him.
“I’d be asleep and Billy would be tapping on my bedroom window telling me and my brother, Nick, to get up and go to church,” remembered Mario DeGennaro, whose mother was the sister of Billy’s mother. “My house was just a couple of blocks away and he’d come get me, badgering me until I went with him.
“It was easier to get up and go than to argue with him because Billy, like his mother, knew how to argue.”
DeGennaro, now in his eighties, has lived his entire life in the Berkeley area, where for many years younger locals would ask him to explain the Billy Martin he knew.
“There were a lot of things people completely missed about him,” said DeGennaro, whom Billy always called “Cousin Mario.” “The one thing that always surprises people is how religious Billy was, even as an adult. I know he did a lot of crazy and wild things, but even in his final days, he was a guy who would quietly go to church. You could find him sitting there thinking to himself.
“When we were kids, me and my brother, we would start talking or horsing around in the church pew. But Billy would jab us hard in the ribs with an elbow and say, ‘Shut up. Don’t do that here. Show respect.’
“Billy was one of the guys in our neighborhood�
�he fought and scrapped and wanted to get somewhere like the rest of us. But he always had this other side, too. Like in church. He sat there and behaved.”
After church, the DeGennaro boys—Nick was two years younger than Billy, and Mario the same age—would walk back from St. Ambrose’s—which was halfway to the Berkeley hills. They returned to the densely packed streets near their homes, near the intersection of 7th and Virginia streets.
“On so many of those walks Billy would be talking about baseball,” Nick DeGennaro said. “And he’d say to Mario and me, ‘I’m going to play for the Yankees.’ And we heard it so much we wouldn’t even look at him after a while. We would just say, ‘Yeah, sure, Billy. We know.’
“But we didn’t believe him. Not then at least.”
2
BACK IN 1928, IN mid-May, Jenny Martin wanted to have her baby. It was time. There was one problem. The doctor would not come to her house until it was wired for electricity.
Jenny’s mother arranged for the electrical circuitry, and Jenny’s son was born in the upstairs bedroom of the house and circumcised on the kitchen table of the first floor. He was named after his father, Alfred Manuel Martin, a truck driver for the City of Berkeley. But whenever Jenny’s mother, whose name was Raphaella but whom everyone called “Nonna,” held the baby in those first days of Billy’s life, she repeatedly cooed to him, “Bello,” Italian for “beautiful.”
“Bello” soon became “Billy” to the rest of the family. It was all anyone ever called the little boy with the bony facial features forevermore, although his half sisters and half brother still to this day refer to him as “Bill.” In the West Berkeley streets, he was “Billy” to everyone. On the first day of seventh grade, when a teacher took a roll call of the class, she asked for an “Alfred Martin.” Billy looked around the classroom, wondering who the new kid with his surname might be.
“I think that’s you,” the teacher said. “Alfred Manuel Martin.”
Billy told the teacher she was wrong.
“You better go home and ask,” the teacher answered.
That night Jenny told Billy the story of his name.
In Jenny’s world, names were frequently subject to change. Her own mother did not use her given name. Jenny, meanwhile, had been born Juvan Salvini. Her father, Nicholas Salvini, had emigrated to San Francisco, where his brother lived, from Italy in 1879. An arranged marriage soon united him with Raphaella, who began having the first of her ten children.
The Salvinis moved from San Francisco to the less prosperous shores of Berkeley at or about 1906, the year of San Francisco’s devastating earthquake. Different parts of the family disagree on whether the move was before the earthquake or spurred by it, but one thing was certain: after the earthquake, many of their relatives—and other Italian, Portuguese, eastern European, and Mexican immigrants—made their way across the bay and settled in the flat, farmable land directly next to the shore.
It was also a handy locale for those in the fishing trade, like Nicholas Salvini.
Juvan Salvini, born in 1901, never liked her name although her mother, who never learned to speak English, did not understand why. Like many children of immigrants, Juvan wanted to seem more American than European. Strong-willed and determined even as a child, the ten-year-old Juvan announced she was to be called “Jenny.” And so she was for the rest of her eighty-eight years.
Jenny did not get her way in all matters. When she was seventeen, she was ordered to marry Donato Pisani, ten years her senior. They had one son, Frank, whom Jenny for some reason—no one remembers why—called “Tudo.” What’s in a name?
But Jenny and Donato divorced after three years, and Donato headed back to Italy. In the many at-home interviews Jenny gave to reporters during Billy’s fame as a manager—she traveled to New York only once, on Billy Martin Day in 1986—she said Donato was not a faithful husband and that he died a few years after their divorce.
With Donato in her past, Jenny did a little wild living, running with a tough-talking, motorcycle-riding crowd that hung out in nearby Oakland or on the miles-long, wide boulevard that intersects West Berkeley, San Pablo Avenue. Jenny was at home in any group that existed just beyond the bounds of the law since her sister Theresa ran a small brothel and speakeasy a few miles away in the town of Emeryville.
Years later in his autobiography, Number One, Billy called it a cathouse as he recalled sitting on a sofa with his mother in Aunt Theresa’s place of business when he was seven or eight years old, drinking a soda as men came and went. Years later, it occurred to him that it was a whorehouse.
“I just knew that it was a place that the men would buy me a Coke and pat me on the head,” Billy said years later. “What a naive kid. What did I know?”
Jenny met Al Martin in Oakland on another summer evening as her mother baby-sat Tudo on 7th Street. Martin was a Hawaiian of Portuguese descent who sang, danced, and played guitar in local clubs. Though Jenny was only four feet eleven inches tall—she claimed she was five feet and could fly into a rage if someone insisted she was shorter—she was outgoing and at ease around men, who were drawn to her. She was shapely and had what people then called “a nice figure.”
As an adult, Billy recalled walking in the West Berkeley streets as an eleven-year-old with his mother at his side. Men whistled. Billy turned and glared. His mother grabbed him by the neck.
“Do you know why they’re whistling at me?” she asked. “Because I have the best-looking ass in town and don’t you forget it.”
Al Martin, a tall man with a long, thin nose who sported the kind of pencil-thin mustache favored by movie stars in the 1920s, had a long list of girlfriends, but he was soon married to Jenny and then, on May 16, 1928, had a son with her, although the family does not believe Al was in Nonna’s 7th Street house when his namesake was born. There are different versions told of the first few months of Billy’s life, but everyone agrees that Al Martin left Jenny before Billy knew he existed.
The most established family history, now related by Jenny’s surviving children—Pat Irvine, her sister, Joan, and her brother, Jack Downey—is decidedly Jenny’s side of the story and not Al Martin’s. As told by Jenny, Billy’s dad liked to stay out late in the clubs where Jenny was convinced he was cavorting with other women. Billy himself for decades would tell the story of his mother finding Al Martin with another woman, and afterward going home and throwing all of Al’s clothes in a suitcase, which she threw out onto the street.
For good measure, and Billy used to smile when he told this part of the story, Jenny then went out to the curb and broke the windshield and the windows of the new car she and Al had just bought.
Billy’s face would become a weird mix of glee, pride, and sadness that acknowledged a certain fatalist understanding of life as she—and perhaps he—saw it: “She knew he would take the car. But she didn’t want him to have it without a cost. Even if it cost her too.”
Seeking vengeance with forethought but without much concern for the consequences was Jenny’s way. It would, it seems, become an inherited trait. But there was a tangible, lifelong consequence: she would never again see Alfred Manuel Martin Sr., her first love. Her sisters would later recall a period of melancholy, but Jenny rebounded in typical saucy fashion.
Every one of her children, and grandchildren, remembers how Jenny, even into her eighties, always referred to Al Martin. He was forevermore “the jackass.”
“She never used his name,” Pat Irvine said.
What’s in a name?
But Jenny’s story is not the only story of what happened to the Martin marriage. While Al Martin returned to Hawaii when Billy was an infant and all but remained out of his son’s life, he did occasionally return to the Oakland area and he would tell a different story to those who asked about his breakup with Jenny. And many years later, he kept in touch with Billy’s daughter, Kelly Ann, who had reached out to her grandfather and developed a close relationship.
Al’s story was that Jenny was work
ing the streets as a common hooker, something she learned from working at her sister’s brothel. Al would find her walking the streets and drag her home, Kelly Ann told Billy biographer David Falkner in the early 1990s. Al would go to work, or go out at night, and Jenny would return to the streets, pocketing extra cash, until Al would pick her up again and bring her back home.
This went on for weeks or months until one night, after Al had brought Jenny home from the streets, she picked up a knife and held it to the neck of their infant son. She threatened to kill Alfred Jr.—Billy—if Al did not leave and never come back. Al Martin left without another word.
Billy’s siblings and cousins from the neighborhood scoff at Al Martin’s version of things. They also vehemently deny that Jenny ever turned tricks.
Yes, they say, Jenny worked at Theresa’s speakeasy and whorehouse, but she worked downstairs serving drinks, not upstairs with the three or four girls that Theresa employed.
“She cleaned up and helped out,” Pat Irvine said of her mother. “It’s ridiculous to say she did more than that. She knew where to draw the line and so did Theresa. Most of us stayed away from that house.”
Before Billy’s first birthday, Jenny met another dashing man who wooed her with his singing voice. This latest interest was an Irish tenor by way of Toronto.
Again, there are slightly different accounts of how Jenny met her third and last husband. One thing is certain: Jack Downey was working one of the ferryboats that regularly crossed the bay since there were no bridges spanning that body of water at the time. In interviews, Jenny alternately said Jack was a cook or a singing waiter on the boat and that he had sung professionally in Chicago.
His name was John, but everyone called him “Jack.”
The children of the Downey marriage said they were told by their mother that she met their father on the ferry, and that he sang to her and a romance developed from there.
Billy Martin Page 2
