They remained on the field for about twenty minutes, then exited through the home dugout and up through the dark tunnel that led to the clubhouse. They did not enter the dressing quarters. Instead, George and Billy took a right and walked through the narrow, serpentine passageway underneath the first-base stands, which eventually wound to a flight of spare, timeworn stairs leading to the principal stadium exit and entrance. Every Yankee since the stadium opened in 1923—Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle—used this bunkerlike walkway with the blue-painted cinder-block walls.
On this day, George and Billy lingered at the bottom of the stairs talking in low tones. Then the duo climbed the stairs. At the landing, Billy and George shook hands. Billy exited onto the plaza outside the stadium, heading to his car in the team parking lot for the drive up the New York State Thruway to Fenton.
With a wave, George turned and headed for the elevator that would return him to his mezzanine-level office.
No one heard George and Billy speaking on the field or in the hallway during that late-November day. But several Yankees executives, security guards, and clerical workers noticed the uncommon, furtive meeting on the field.
And within a few days the phone rang at Clete Boyer’s home in Atlanta.
“Don’t get yourself another job—stay put,” Billy told Boyer, who had been fired as one of Billy’s coaches the previous year and remained out of baseball. “I’m going to be managing the Yankees next year and I’ll need you as a coach.”
In early December 1989, Boyer called Buck Showalter.
“Billy wants you on his staff next year,” Boyer said.
“The Yankees have a manager and it isn’t Billy,” Showalter told Boyer.
“Yeah, but George feels like Dent isn’t going to cut it and he told Billy to be ready to take over,” Boyer said. “He’s going to have Billy at spring training so he can watch the team up close. Then when Bucky Dent messes up, Billy just jumps in.”
The phone at the home of Willie Horton also rang. The message was the same.
“Don’t take another job in baseball for next season,” Horton said Billy told him. “I’m going to need you.”
Billy told Horton he might be back in uniform by May.
Lee Walls, another former Billy coach and bar buddy, got the call, too.
“Billy said to sit tight and I’ll call you as soon as they need me,” Walls said in 1990.
A few days later—it was now almost mid-December—Billy telephoned his favorite New York–area sportswriter, Michael Kay, who was then a reporter for the New York Daily News. Kay said Billy told him, “I’m coming back, kid. Once Bucky fucks this up, I’m in. I already got the word from George. And I’ve got my coaches all lined up. You can’t write it now but when it’s about to happen, I’ll give it to you first.”
Kay kept the story to himself, although he did check with some other Billy associates who confirmed that Billy had been calling his former coaches with the news. Kay couldn’t, and wouldn’t, break Billy’s confidence by writing the story. But he definitely was going to be on his toes if Steinbrenner adopted a pessimistic tone about Dent.
There was little doubt Steinbrenner was sincere about bringing Billy back. It was a secret but not all that well kept. Many years later, George would occasionally deny that Billy VI was coming, but in 1989 he had told others in the organization that Billy once again riding to the rescue was indeed Plan B for the 1990 Yankees season. During interviews in 2012 and 2013, after Steinbrenner died, those Yankees executives confirmed it. Billy was coming back again.
There was another factor that might have played into Steinbrenner’s decision. A group of Denver-based investors were backing a team that would become the Colorado Rockies, a new National League franchise. Their first season was three years away, but they were looking for a manager/general manager to build the team from the ground up. They had called Billy two weeks before George called the Fenton farmhouse in late November.
“The Colorado people were going to let Billy run the whole show,” Jill Martin said. “There was a lot of interest there.”
The Japanese professional baseball leagues had called as well.
Billy was revitalized by the attention. It was like old times. Though sixty-one years old, he once again felt he had something that baseball people valued. In the Binghamton bars, at Morey’s, the Bull’s Head, and the Fireside Inn, a buoyant Billy began dropping little hints that something big might be on the horizon for him.
At nearly the same time, Billy received some bad news, even if it was not totally unexpected. His eighty-eight-year-old mother, Jenny, who had been in declining health, was now hospitalized. Billy’s sisters had called and made it plain that while Jenny was not in immediate danger, Billy should come visit before Christmas to be safe. Jenny might rally and recover, which had happened before. But she might not.
Billy had an appearance to make in Terre Haute, Indiana, on December 9. He planned to fly there and then continue on to California. He had to be back by December 15, when Jill had planned a lavish, black-tie Christmas party at the Fenton house.
In Terre Haute on Saturday, December 9, Billy spoke at a sports function benefiting Indiana State University, where Larry Bird had been a basketball star. The appearance went well, and afterward Billy went to the sports bar in Larry Bird’s Boston Connection Hotel where he was staying. As he was seated at the bar, and minding his own business, a gunshot suddenly rang out behind him.
The bullet hissed by his head, missing him by inches. It slammed into the ceiling above the bar. A female patron, who had been seated at a table near the bar, had a two-shot Derringer pistol in her purse that discharged when the purse was inadvertently knocked to the floor.
“Mr. Martin was a little shaken,” Terre Haute police chief Ray Watts said afterward. “It just missed his head.”
When Billy went back to his hotel room about an hour later, there was a message from Jill.
His mother was doing much worse. Billy had better hurry to Berkeley. He arrived the next day, rushed to the hospital, and found his mother infirm and frail and all but motionless under the white sheets of the hospital bed. They conversed and held hands. Billy told Jenny that he loved her and she said the same, adding that he looked handsome.
Jenny dozed off, and after about fifteen minutes Billy left the room. An hour later, Juvan “Jenny” Salvini Downey was gone.
Billy was overcome with grief, inconsolably so at times. He had seen his mother little in the past six months, and that absence weighed on his mind and filled him with guilt. He had felt prepared for her death, but the certainty of it had been a greater emotional blow than he had planned. Losing a parent is wrenching for any son or daughter, but as Billy kept telling everyone he saw in the old neighborhood, as the lone biological parent in his life, Jenny had been a guiding force. When Billy doubted himself as a youngster, as he often did, Jenny emboldened him.
“Take shit from nobody” might not have been the motto for his life, but it was a useful thought in many tight situations. It came from Jenny.
Jenny had been the sole connection to a singular heritage that made Billy different from his brothers and sisters. To be sure, Jack Downey had been a meaningful, pivotal father figure, and his siblings had helped shaped his life as well. But he derived much of his purpose, resolve, and personality from his mother. Billy, as he told one and all, felt something within himself die with Jenny. He was alone.
“He was really in rough shape,” his boyhood pal Ruben de Alba said. “He kept saying, ‘I’ll never be the same.’”
Jill flew from New York to California and joined Billy.
“His mental status was in the gutter,” she said. “I had never seen him so low and devastated.”
Billy’s family had a big reception at Spenger’s, the sprawling fish house by the docks where in the 1930s the workers used to leave crabs out by the back door for the local children to “steal.” Everyone from the old neighborhood was there.
“I was sitting at a table with my brother Nick and Billy came over crying,” said cousin Mario DeGennaro. “He smelled of alcohol but I understood—his mother had just died. But he was also all pissed off. There had been some argument with his sisters or brother, something about money or who was going to get Jenny’s house.”
There was indeed bad blood on the eve of the funeral, and some of it involved the house and money spent on it. Billy and his sisters remained at odds until a truce was called.
“I felt sorry for Billy in the middle of all this,” Mario said. “I got up to hug him and I was shocked at how bony and small he felt. Hugging him through his suit jacket, he felt frail and thin. Billy was always a wiry, strong guy. I don’t know what it was about that hug, but to me he felt so fragile.
“When he walked away I turned to my brother and said, ‘What happened to Billy?’”
There were a variety of reunions going on during Billy’s few days in Berkeley. One was with Billy Joe, who had flown to the wake and funeral from Texas. Billy Joe, who had graduated from Texas Tech that year, had remained in touch with Bill Reedy, who told Billy Joe to bring his college diploma with him to California.
The night before the funeral in Berkeley, Reedy, Billy, Sapir, and Billy Joe got together for a quiet drink away from everyone else.
“I pulled out my diploma and I showed my dad,” Billy Joe said. “He just broke down and cried. Then he started pacing around and he said, ‘Things are going to change.’”
Billy also spent considerable time with Kelly Ann. He frequently said how much he missed California and wished he had spent more time there.
And Billy went down to San Pablo Avenue to visit some of his old drinking haunts and met up with what was left of the West Berkeley Boys. Everyone was older and not in fighting shape.
“I remember somebody told Billy that most of us hadn’t been in a fight for forty years, but Billy had more than carried on the West Berkeley Boys tradition for us,” said Jack Setzer, Billy’s teenage friend. “He got a big kick out of that. I remember that at some point we sang the school song. We were a bunch of sixty-year-old guys singing an old song in the old neighborhood.”
Billy then drove north on San Pablo Avenue to catch up with Figone, visiting him at the office of his prosperous company. Figone said Billy told him he was going to leave Jill, sell the New York farm, and “come back home.”
“He told me he might need $100,000 to rebuild his life in California,” Figone said in 2012. “I told him I’d give him the money.”
Billy told Reedy of his moving plans, too. Reedy did not believe his friend. He had heard it before. He was resigned to the notion that Billy would never leave Jill.
Billy had another topic he wanted to discuss with Reedy. He desperately wanted Reedy to come to Fenton for the Christmas holiday.
“I don’t want to be alone up there,” Billy said. “You’ve got to come hang out with me, pard.”
Reedy knew that Billy had an aversion to Christmas. It went back to Billy’s childhood when he received few gifts in a poor household. Billy never warmed to Christmas, even when he had the money to enjoy it. Reedy knew of Billy’s mindset and he felt sorry for his grieving friend, but he wasn’t sure what his wife’s reaction would be to the trip. Then Billy suggested that the visit to Fenton could include a trip to Manhattan where the couples could attend Christmas Eve High Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It would be a spectacular sight with all the holiday flowers and decorations. This convinced Reedy, who knew his wife had never seen St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He would come to upstate New York for Christmas.
Jenny was buried with a traditional Italian funeral and a solemn prayer service. The gathering included some of Billy’s former Oakland Oaks teammates and former players, and the ex-Oakland A’s pitcher Mike Norris. Heather Ervolino attended.
Billy and Jill returned to New York, and the Christmas party at the restored Fenton farmhouse was a huge success. About sixty couples dressed in formal dresses and tuxedos arrived, most of them linked to the Binghamton fine arts community. Billy then made a quick side trip to Tampa. Steinbrenner had asked Billy to appear before two thousand underprivileged children at the Tampa Performing Arts Center. Billy read the children “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
George dressed up as Santa Claus. When Billy saw the portly Steinbrenner in costume, he said, “You don’t really need that pillow under your belt, George.”
After Billy returned to New York, Steinbrenner told associates that Billy appeared relaxed.
“His color was good and he was calm,” Steinbrenner said in a 1990 interview. “I remember thinking that being married and living on that farm was good for him.”
The Reedys arrived in Fenton on December 23. The same day, Billy and Reedy made a trip to Lowe’s, the home improvement store on Front Street. From Lowe’s, it was a short trip to the nearby bars. They drank for a few hours, then drove one exit east on Route 88 until they began their ascent to Potter Hill Road. Billy cooked dinner and started a blaze in the fireplace. Both women retired early, especially Jill, who felt as if she might be getting a cold.
Billy and Reedy sat up a few extra hours watching a Western movie and drinking. But it was not an especially late night. Everyone was anticipating the trip to Manhattan the next day.
Jill, however, awoke the next day seriously ill from what she felt was a powerful case of the flu. She had a high fever and was bedridden and much too sick to travel to New York. Billy was certainly not going to leave her alone on Christmas Eve. The trip to St. Patrick’s Cathedral was called off.
Disappointed but accepting, the Reedys did some last-minute Christmas shopping. Billy called around to friends he had made in the area to invite about a dozen people over to the house for a small Christmas Eve party and feast.
When the crowd left, Reedy and Billy sat up late watching television again.
On Christmas morning, Jill was still sick but improving. Billy made everyone a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon, and pork chops. There was some more puttering around the farm to do—feeding the chickens, sheep, and other animals, including the ducks down by the pond, which had an aerator so it did not freeze.
Like some of the other farmers in the neighborhood, Billy had begun to raise his own quail. He did so in a brooder, which was like a miniature chicken coop. It was out by the barn, but on cold nights in central New York—and this night the temperature was expected to be in the low twenties—the brooder was warmed by a kerosene heater.
About 1:30 p.m., Billy came back to the main house and announced that he had to go to Binghamton to get kerosene for the quail brooder. Which may or may not have been true.
Whenever they were together, Billy and Reedy always seemed to need to go to town for something. It didn’t matter whether they were in Reedy’s hometown of Detroit or in Texas, Manhattan, or Oakland. They usually had to go get something, the errand always took at least a couple of hours, and they came back with alcohol on their breath.
Billy grabbed the keys to the Ford, and the two men buttoned their coats and headed out the door. Through a second-floor window, Jill watched the pickup truck roll down the gravel driveway and disappear through the stone entranceway with the iron gates. Billy was at the wheel, and he made a right turn to continue down the steep grade of Potter Hill Road. There was a storm in the weather forecast that was expected to bring either gusty snow showers or freezing rain.
In anticipation, some of Billy’s neighbors—preparing for work on Tuesday, December 26—had already spread sand and rock salt on their driveways.
48
IT WAS TEN MILES from Billy’s home to the Front Street highway exit in Binghamton. Billy’s usual stop, the Working Man’s gas station, was out of kerosene. Billy instead went to the Sunoco down the road, made his purchase, and loaded the kerosene into the bed of the truck. Then Billy and Reedy pointed the truck south on Front Street, looking for somewhere to get a drink.
Not surprisingly, most of his usual stops
were closed for Christmas. As the truck approached Morey’s, the lettering on display outside the restaurant read: HAPPY HOLIDAYS! SIRLOIN DINNER FROM 1 TO 6 PM.
Reedy, who gave multiple interviews about the day in 2009, said Billy pointed at the sign.
“They have a bar and if they’re serving dinner, they’re serving drinks,” Billy said. “We can get a few pops there.”
Billy pulled the pickup into Morey’s parking lot. They sat side by side at the bar and each ordered a screwdriver. After one drink, Reedy switched to Budweiser. Billy continued to gulp mixed drinks with Stolichnaya Russian vodka.
The bartender was Robert Dunlop, who worked at Morey’s only part-time. His real job was at Johnny Antonelli’s Firestone tire store just up the road. Antonelli, a former pitcher for the New York Giants in the 1950s, was an acquaintance of Billy’s since they had played in the same city for many years. After Antonelli retired from baseball in 1962, he returned to his native Rochester, about 130 miles from Binghamton, and opened a chain of tire stores throughout upstate New York.
But on this day Dunlop was working the Christmas afternoon shift, and he later said that he served Reedy about five beers across the nearly three hours that the two men were at Morey’s. Billy had several mixed drinks. Dunlop did not know how many, but enough that the barkeep was concerned about whether Billy would be driving home.
There were not a lot of employees in Morey’s that afternoon. Lisa Tierno was the waitress along with the owners, Morris and Dorothy Conroe, who opened the restaurant in 1966.
In the course of the three hours, only four other people came to drink at the bar. A bartender from another Front Street restaurant stopped for one drink, waved goodbye to his friend Billy, and left. A local golf pro had a couple of drinks, chatting about golf with Billy and Reedy. A car salesman made conversation with Billy and Reedy for about thirty minutes before he departed. A man who had tried to go hunting but was frustrated by the snow on the ground sat at the opposite end of the bar from Billy and Reedy. He had a puppy in his lap. He talked with Billy about hunting in the area and then paid his bill and exited as well.
Billy Martin Page 59
