Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book)

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  Of course, this wasn’t precisely Christian, but it all went together in North Beach. In the grand Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, there were a dozen statues of uncertain provenance that were nevertheless honored by the priests. What happened was, someone would visit the Old Country and come back with a sculptured “saint” (and the seller’s tales of miraculous power). The people of North Beach would begin to pray to this statue in some basement, and word would spread and the crowds would grow thicker . . . until the priests figured it was better to bring them all back to church. So, the statue would get a little chapel on the side; the priests would sprinkle Holy Water on it, and everybody would be back in the fold. For her part, Rosalie was a regular at Sts. Peter and Paul’s—morning Mass, rain or shine. (Giuseppe wouldn’t go, even on Sundays. Confession wasn’t for him. He used to say he wouldn’t tell his sins to any other man.)

  The only other time you’d see Rosalie out in the neighborhood was when she went to shop. She used to go with her sister, Maria (Mamie, they called her), who married the fisherman Joe Clima. They looked like twins, le Signore Clima e DiMaggio, even though Mamie was really the elder. If Rosalie went out in the evening (say, on those rare nights when Giuseppe wasn’t home), she’d take a daughter or two, and her basket of mending, and she’d sit with Mamie, talking and sewing. These days, they had a lot to talk about.

  For when Joe stopped speaking to Frank Venezia, he drifted away from his old crowd. He didn’t go to the playground, or play ball at the Horses’ Lot. He didn’t do much of anything, except hang out with Mamie’s son, Joe Clima. The cousins had become best friends. And Joe Clima wasn’t doing much either—except running with the fast crowd, scamming here and there for a couple of bucks, and playing cards for money.

  What was gonna become of these boys?

  You have to understand, in these ladies’ minds, the fate of their Joes was linked from the start—because of the name. The way Sicilians did the names, the first boy was named for the father’s father (so that was Sal for the Climas, and Tom for the DiMaggios). Then the second boy got the name of the mother’s father (so that was Mike for both families). The third son was named for the father’s oldest brother (Frank Clima and Vince DiMaggio). And the fourth was named for the mother’s oldest brother—that was Joe. And so, these drifting boys bore a name beloved to both these mammas—that of their brother Joe.

  In the Climas’ flat on Columbus Avenue, Mamie Mercurio Clima voiced the traditional Sicilian view. Rules had to be made. Something had to be done. These boys were going to end up in trouble. It was 1931, jobs were hard to find. How were they ever going to land on their feet?

  But Rosalie Mercurio DiMaggio had faith in her Joe. Why? Who could tell? Maybe she’d seen something in the oil and water in a dish on his head. Or maybe she’d beseeched the Madonna, and found answer to her want. But she said—as she spoke in matters of faith—against all comers and, at that moment, all evidence: “Leave him alone,” she said. “Joe’s gonna do fine.”

  PORTRAIT OF A PRO: SAN FRANCISCO, 1932.

  THE BOY WHO LOVED BASEBALL: VINCE DIMAGGIO.

  A CLASSY OUTFIT: THE ROSSI OLIVE OIL SQUAD.

  CHAPTER 3

  AS IT HAPPENED, THE TURN IN JOE’S LIFE TOOK about thirty seconds and was accompanied by no claps of thunder—no one saw the Madonna. Frank Venezia and Bat Minafo saw Joe, walking across the street. As Frank remembers, they were just hanging out at that Powell Street playground wall. And Joe was out shopping for his folks, on his way to Chinatown. Bat said, “How ’bout Joe? Go ask him.”

  Bat and Frank were choosing up for real, now. The guys had got together in a club—they called it the Jolly Knights. They had a clubhouse over a garage at Columbus and Filbert, where they’d sit around at night, playing cards. Joe came by a couple of times. But he wasn’t a member. He was busy with his pal Joe Clima. Once a month, once every six weeks, they’d hold a dance at the clubhouse, too. But, of course, Joe would never come to those.

  But this was the best part. Now they were going to have a ball team, an official team, with uniforms and everything. Bat was always half-mental—hyper, anyway—and now, with this team, he was jabbering. “Go ahead, ask him. G’wan, Frank. Ask him!”

  Frank said, “You call him.”

  “No, you call him.”

  “He ain’t talkin’ to me.”

  Bat insisted, “Just ask him. Go on! Ask him anyway.”

  So Frank called to Joe and trotted across the street. He tried to make his voice sound like it was special—that’s why he was trying to talk to Joe. “Hey, Joe, we’re gonna make a team. A real team—with uniforms and maybe shoes, and, well . . .

  “D’you wanna play?”

  Joe didn’t bat an eye, like he and Frank talked every day. Joe said, “Okay.”

  THERE’S A GORGEOUS MYTH about Joe DiMaggio—how he got into baseball—a tale so sweet it was in all the books for fifty years. The basis of the story is that Joe was the boy who only loved baseball. That’s why he wouldn’t fish. He’d rather play ball with his friends. He just had to play ball.

  And then his brother Vince got a job on the San Francisco Seals, and Joe went to see him at the ballpark. And he was peering through a hole in the fence (there’s always a hole in the fence in these stories . . .) when along came a scout, to ask: “What’re you doin’, boy?”

  In the best version of this tale—the one Joe would put into his own book, Lucky to Be a Yankee—the scout, Spike Hennessy, gets off a snappy line: “Never stand on the outside looking in, unless it’s a jail.” . . . Then, Hennessy hauls Joe up to the owner of the Seals, Charley Graham, who not only gives DiMaggio a fistful of passes, but asks him to work out with the team.

  And the rest, as they say in these stories, is history: how Vince gets Joe a chance to play, at the end of the ’32 season (when the Seals are looking for a fill-in shortstop); and Joe hooks on with the team for the ’33 season, and he’s a sensation—such a star that the Seals put him in the outfield, and they have to shuck one outfielder, so they get rid of Vince . . . and Joe takes his own brother’s job. (Ain’t that ironic?)

  It’s so good, so neat, that it ought to be true—hell, it almost is . . . except for the fundamental basis of the tale: Joe wasn’t the boy who loved baseball. Vince was.

  In fact, by 1930, Joe had walked away from baseball. If he played anything, it was tennis. Mostly, he just didn’t play. His attitude on baseball wasn’t too far from his dad’s: there was no money in it—so what was it good for?

  But it was true he found the game again, in 1931—when Bat and Frank signed him up to play for the Jolly Knights. That sounded okay to Joe: he signed up for the shoes.

  THE TRUE IRONY WAS, Joe didn’t get real spikes, just the regular old clodhoppers from Tragones. They nailed spikes onto the bottom. Still, things were different.

  Now, the boys were playing against good teams, men who played a serious game. There were club teams and company teams all over the city, grouped into leagues and scheduled on diamonds—three or four games in a row on every diamond in every park, every Saturday and Sunday, year-round. It was all organized by a human computer named Al Earl—he’d set up all the games—from a sporting goods store on Mission Street. Mondays, in the paper, there’d be a whole page of box scores: results for every team in town. And there was a column chronicling the semipros. That’s where Vince had got his first press notices (while he played for Jack’s Haberdashery). And that’s when the scouts offered Vince a paying contract. Those were stakes Joe understood.

  Joe was different, too. While he was away from baseball, he’d filled out. He was just about six feet now, and not so skinny. He’d always been able to hit some balls hard—but now, everything he hit was a shot. And there was something else new: his delight in his power. “Watch me hit this one out,” he’d tell Niggy Marino at the Horses’ Lot. Then he’d smash the next pitch toward those billboards in left center field. Even with a mushy taped ball, and a bat held together with nails and tape, he’d hi
t ’em over the billboards, onto Columbus Avenue. One time he hit a car, and that was the end of that game. Everybody ran like hell. The driver caught a couple of kids, but they wouldn’t squeal on Joe. He was a leader now: with Joe at third base or shortstop, the Jolly Knights were sweeping their league.

  That fall, Frank and Bat found a sponsor, a grocer named Rossi who had his own brand of olive oil—and that raised the pride in their club to near swagger. Al Earl put the Rossi Olive Oil team in the B division, but anyone could see they were a classy outfit: brand-new uniforms, twenty-five dollars a month for shiny new balls and bats (they even got Bat a catcher’s mask) . . . and, best of all, they went everywhere in the Rossi Olive Oil truck. They went to San Quentin for a nerve-racking contest with the prisoners. They had guards for umpires, and Rossi played pretty well. But the game was called a tie—four to four—because they almost had a riot. It got to the fourteenth inning, and the cons were throwing anything they could grab out the windows. Everybody had bets on the game. So the warden stopped it: “Okay! Time for dinner!” But the Rossi guys didn’t fight the call. You fought up there, you could get killed. Anyway, dinner was welcome: Hungry Geraldi ate four servings of boiled beef. Another time, Vince DiMaggio called from Northern California, and challenged Rossi Olive Oil to play his club, in Fort Bragg. So the North Beach boys rode up there and beat the hell out of them. Those Rossi Olive Oils were good!

  With Joe and Shabby Minafo in the middle of the order, they were always going to score. Sometimes, if he wasn’t fishing, Mike DiMaggio would come in as a ringer, and then it was a murderers row. If Joe played third, they’d have Frank Venezia at second base, Al Tomei at short (and leading off—Friggles was a sprinter for Commerce High School). Banchero could play infield or outfield, Ciccio or Red Albano would pitch. The lineup was set by the manager, Niggy’s brother, Joe. They called him, naturally, Connie Mack Marino. He was the first guy to try Joe D. in the outfield—because the first baseman, Fo Gelardi, used to beef: “Jesus! He’s knockin’ my hand apart. I can’t catch him!” (Joe liked to power his throws, too.)

  Joe didn’t care where he played—as long as he could knock in those runs. He’d do whatever it took to win. Once, he was at shortstop against Bayview Park, and a guy hit a pop fly to center. Joe turned around and took off. Everybody started yelling, “Let it alone! Joe’s after it!” . . . He caught that fly ball in dead center field.

  He always did something that made people talk. But if you brought it up to him—how well he played, what people were saying—he’d only shrug: “Well, it’s good they think I’m okay.” If Rossi won, Joe was all smiles. If they lost, he went silent and sour. If they lost and he had a bad day, you didn’t want to get near him. Mostly they won. They climbed straight to the top of the B division. The guys were sure they were going to be an A team. And then, who could tell? Maybe the Valley League, where they’d schedule your game at Funston Park, and there’d be five or six hundred people watching, and you’d pass the hat afterward—you could come home with five or ten bucks, just for playing!

  But they were still in their first year when they had the game at Jackson Playground, against a team called American Building. Joe hit a huge home run. The clubhouse was way out past left field, and Joe hit it over the clubhouse. There was a guy in the stands watching the game—Bummy Bumgartner: his team was called Sunset Produce, and they had the next game on that diamond. When Joe hit the home run, Frank Venezia got up off the bench, went over toward the baseline to straighten out the bats on the grass. He looked up—he was going to shake Joe’s hand—but Joe was over by the stands. Frank saw Bummy Bumgartner slipping Joe two bucks. The next week, Rossi Olive Oil had to limp along without its cleanup hitter. Joe was playing for Sunset Produce.

  IN FACT, he would play for five or six different clubs in that spring and summer of 1932. Joe became a hitter for hire. He was playing weekends, and most weekdays, too, into the long evening light. In his days with the Jolly Knights, even with Rossi, the other boys had to go to Joe’s house, wake him up, make sure he’d show. But now, for a couple of bucks, he’d be there early—any diamond in the city.

  For the most part, he was playing shortstop, where he made his share of mistakes—or more. Joe had never had any coaching. He hadn’t even played for Francisco Junior High (the teams were lousy). And with his years away from baseball, he hadn’t even seen as much of the game as the average sandlot kid his age. But now he was learning, so fast you couldn’t even see it happen—like Mozart learned piano: altogether, and instantly. Say, on a Tuesday, Joe saw a guy hook-slide into third base. Well, that Thursday, Joe would hit a gapper through left center, and he’d pound around to third and cap it off with the damnedest hook-slide anybody ever saw—catch the corner of the bag with the toe of his trailing foot—as if Ty Cobb had taught him, and he’d practiced for five years. Or say he saw some flashy shortstop take the throw on a double play while he was crossing second base, and make his own throw to first when momentum had carried him past the bag, past the runner, two steps toward right center field. Well, Joe’d try that, too. Of course, it was anyone’s guess where his throw would end up. But, what the hell. No one paid him for fielding. He was the kind of shortstop who might let in a couple of runs. But he’d knock in six.

  In eighteen games with Sunset Produce—that was against A-league pitching—Joe hit for an average of .632. The Sunsets were so delighted, they gave him a prize: real spikes—the featherweights, kangaroo skin—the kind he’d wanted since the start. Looking back, that sounds like a small thing. But Joe would remember those shoes forever. Or maybe what he remembered was the feeling (it hadn’t happened so often in his life) when he set out to get something and, with baseball, he got it.

  And the Sunsets weren’t the only ones who took note. The world of baseball in San Francisco was woven together with a million strands of talk. The semipro players knew each other from school teams, boys clubs, playgrounds. They talked their game nonstop. Semipro managers and sponsors vied with one another to recruit the best talent. A kid who got on base two out of three times was never going to stay a secret. “Bird-dogs” and paid scouts reported to the professional teams, the San Francisco Mission Reds and the San Francisco Seals (not to mention the Oakland Oaks, across the Bay). The scouts and the teams made a living by finding local talent to develop and sell.

  In Lucky to Be a Yankee, DiMaggio would profess surprise—oh, he was shocked!—when the scout, Spike Hennessy, retailed his career to the owner of the Seals. “I hadn’t realized how closely Hennessy had been watching our sand-lot games until I heard him tell Graham all about me.” But that was just Joe doing his Gary Cooper thing (Aw, shucks). And it satisfied a 1940s American public that didn’t want its heroes to strive too much. (Our icons were good, as were we, and our nation, by grace of God, by the magic of America.)

  But the fact was, Joe was the hottest kid on the semipro circuit, and had been for months. One pro team, the Mission Reds, already had invited him for a tryout. Jim Nealon, the Examiner columnist on local baseball, started writing Joe up (“looks like a comer . . .”) when he hit two home runs for Rossi Oil in the B-league playoff.

  Nor could Joe’s new career remain any secret at home. But that was all right, now. The reason, once again, was Vince. The Seals had signed Giuseppe’s estranged son, and sent him to their “farm”—the Tucson club, in the Arizona State League. Vince got a little money to sign and even less to play. But after three or four months—who said he never learned from his dad?—he’d spent absolutely nothing. When the Arizona league disbanded in midsummer, the Seals called Vince back to San Francisco. And, unannounced, he walked back into the Taylor Street flat. Decades later, Vince told the story to Professor Jack B. Moore:

  “So with all the bonuses and everything that I had coming from the club, when I came home I had $1,500 . . . . So I came home and I walked in. My Dad—he didn’t say much—but I knew he was waiting for an opportunity. My mother, when she saw me, she put her arms around me. Dad was in th
e kitchen. He was having a little wine, and he had some peaches cut, and he was dipping peaches in the wine. When I went in and greeted him he looked at me and greeted me more or less saying, what are you doing here?

  “So I said, ‘Dad, I’ve come home. If it’s all right, I’d like to stay here.’ And I said: ‘This is what I earned, and this is what I’m bringing home.’

  “Right away, before he could say anything—I brought it in cash, I didn’t bring no check, I brought it in cash so he could see it was more than a piece of paper: he knows the cash, but he didn’t know anything about a check, so I had it all in cash—and the first thing he says when he saw the money was, ‘Where’d you steal that money?’

  “I said, I earned it. I said, you come with me, I’ll introduce you to my boss. So, the next day, sure enough, he went and talked with the owner, Mr. Graham, and they had a little conversation.”

  Of course, Mr. Graham talked English, and Signore DiMaggio spoke Sicilian. But the old fisherman got the point. The money was real, legal, and his. So Vince got to live at home for a few months. And Joe, he played baseball, whenever he wanted.

  AND THE REST really would be history—with a bit of myth on top. At the end of that ’32 season, the Seals outfielder, Henry (Prince) Oana was working up a barnstorming trip, starting in his native Hawaii. He asked for permission to miss the Seals’ last three games, and take the shortstop, Augie Galan, along with him. “Who’s going to play short?” asked the manager, Ike Caveney. And then, as a matter of historical fact, Vince DiMaggio did pipe up: “I got a brother who’s a shortstop—and a good one!”