56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (6 page)

He waited on the news and sometimes, as a way to gain slightly better reception, Gay would steal downstairs and dim the spotlights in the dress department of his parents’ shop, then clamber back up to his room and the radio beside his bed, to listen through the crackling static for the voice of Mel Allen or some other New York announcer giving a report of that day’s game: which team won and, most importantly to Talese, what DiMaggio had done.

DiMaggio had that hold on legions of boys like Talese, and like Mario Cuomo, the son of two Italian-born parents who was himself about to turn nine. Mario lived in an apartment in South Jamaica, Queens, among multiethnic neighborhoods so tough that you gave people your whereabouts by police precinct—“I’m over in the 113th, how ’bout you?”—rather than by street name or school district. Looking out from Queens, standing outside his father’s grocery shop with his baseball glove seemingly permanently affixed to his left hand, young Mario might have followed any of the three New York teams. He had his justifications for rejecting both the neighboring Dodgers (essentially Mario held to a provincial disgust for Brooklyn, where people seemed haughty, more privileged. “They think who they are” is how South Jamaicans slangily put it) and the Giants (forget it; they played in a stadium with a name—the Polo Grounds—that sounded like it was made for the wealthy). But the real reason that Mario chose to rise and fall with the Yankees was because they in effect picked him, on the day that he learned about Joe DiMaggio, the greatest Italian ballplayer of them all.

When DiMaggio himself was nine years old he had never even thought of himself as Italian, or more accurately, he had never fully realized that there was anything different or unusual about that. Everybody in his San Francisco neighborhood of North Beach was Italian. Everyone’s mother cooked the sauce on Sunday, and made some version of
cioppino
, that dreadful fish stew. The men and women might get a piece of focaccia at the Liguria Bakery over on Washington Square and then sit beneath the willows and talk to one another in the old language. Joe and all the boys on the block had to go over and sit with the swarthy Italian Catholic priests at Saints Peter and Paul now and then. Everybody’s last name ended in a vowel.

It was only later, during his brief time as a student in the gray lockered hallways of Galileo High, where kids of many backgrounds mixed outside the classrooms, that DiMaggio had first really understood that being Italian was not a given, but that it was a badge—of one kind or another—that made you part of a group not everyone was part of.

When DiMaggio first reached the Yankees, the photographers wasted little time lining him up next to Lazzeri and Crosetti, each player posed on one knee with a bat in hand. “McCarthy’s Italian Battalion” read the photo caption a few days later. Even now, five years into his career, the newspapers often referred to Joe as Giuseppe—why he didn’t know. That was his father’s name, not his. Joe didn’t even speak Italian! But such details didn’t matter. Every Italian Joe was a Giuseppe.

For all of his gradually broadening appeal, DiMaggio was, in the eyes of many, still first an Italian star. In the spring of 1939
Life
magazine published a long story about DiMaggio, delving into his life back in San Francisco; his new restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto; the way he was raised and how during his rookie season his mother Rosalie had traveled across the country to see him, bearing an “armful of Italian sausages.” In the story, Joe’s heritage was not underplayed. The author, Noel Busch, described him as emblematic of Italians who, “bad at war, are well suited to milder competition.” DiMaggio, Busch wrote, wasn’t what you’d expect from a black-haired, dark-eyed 24-year old Italian kid: “Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease he keeps his hair slick with water. He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti.” Busch was wrong about the chow mein. Joe loved spaghetti—he whirled the long strands up off his plate in the same careful manner now that he had adopted as a kid, his fork tines pressed for stability into the spoon he held lightly in his left hand.

If DiMaggio had not been Italian, and famously so, he would never have met Jerry Spatola and all the guys from Newark. Spatola had read newspaper stories about DiMaggio during Joe’s early time in New York, read that he was shy and on his own without any nearby family. That was all it took. Spatola got over to Yankee Stadium, waited outside the players’ gate after a game and introduced himself to DiMaggio. Spatola could be that way, forthright and confident and then a breeze to talk to. He brought Joe to Newark and into his home.

Spatola’s wife Rose cooked alltime Italian dinners, heaping plates of manicotti or lasagna that the Spatola daughters, Geta and Bina, would bring out and set before Joe. The girls adored DiMaggio and Bina began to keep a scrapbook of Joe’s newspaper clippings, a book that she could later pore over and show off to friends or to Joe himself the next time he came by. The Spatola cousins would come over for those dinners, along with any number of friends, and around the busy dining table plates were passed and red wine was poured. Amid the happy commotion, all those voices going and laughing at once, Joe would sit silently and eat, keeping to himself. He was relaxed. The dinners at the Spatolas reminded him of the best days as a kid back home with the family in San Francisco.

So, in some ways, did life in Newark’s First Ward remind Joe of North Beach. Every coffee shop and fruit stand in the First Ward, every candy store and bakery, had stenciled on its window an Italian family’s name. The peddlers walking down Garside Street or Seventh Avenue pushed carts filled with special meats or carried covered trays of warm pizza, and they would advertise their wares in loud voices using the Italian names. Spatola knew everyone in town it seemed. He ran the local funeral parlor below the family’s home on Mount Prospect Avenue, and he would organize Italian Catholic burials with all the right touches. It was the funeral parlor that led Spatola to get in with Richie the Boot. Richie all but owned that part of Newark, controlled its crime patterns, decreed who owed money to whom, and decided, often, what the local politicians would say. Richie was the guy that all the liquor and the numbers ran through. He wore a diamond as big as a baseball on his belt buckle.

The story was that Richie the Boot—Boiardo was his surname—wanted the store owners in the First Ward to “unionize,” that is to pay a little something on the side just to keep things nice and orderly, make sure that nobody somehow accidentally and unfortunately got hurt. But Spatola wouldn’t do it. The funeral parlor was his business, passed down from his father, and he wasn’t about to give chunks of it away for the privilege of being allowed to keep running it the way that he always ran it. Sometimes a couple of guys would stop by Spatola’s office and suggest to him again why getting in the union might make a lot of sense for a guy like him, with a young family and all. Spatola still said no.

One night Spatola was outside the place when he was confronted by an especially neckless man he’d seen around plenty of times and who was carrying something that seemed sure to make Spatola change his mind. “No,” Jerry said. “I’m not giving you money. I won’t pay.”

The bullet, it turned out, went down through the side of Spatola’s cheek and out the underside of his jaw; when he came upstairs and into the house that night, he was bloody and in a bad way. He had to go to the hospital, of course, and when the police heard about the injury and caught up to Jerry, to find out just what had happened in a neighborhood they were hoping somehow to get clean, he did not have much to offer. Spatola said it was just plain dumb luck that he had run into a mugger or whoever that was. He said that he had no idea who had shot him nor why. Unfortunately, Spatola said, he had just never gotten a real good look at the guy. The police gave up the case.

With that, Spatola won Richie the Boot’s respect. All the boys now knew to let Jerry Spats alone, and, more than that, to take care of him when he needed anything. That’s how Spatola became a regular at Richie’s restaurant, the splendid Vittorio Castle on Eighth Avenue, with its high ceilings and its heavy curtains in the doorways, street scenes of Italy painted on the walls. Spatola would bring DiMaggio here—or sometimes across the street to Vesuvius, another old-world Italian place—and Richie and his son Tony Boy and whoever else was hanging around that night made sure that Joe got treated right. In his immaculate suits and with his way of sitting quietly while others buzzed around him, DiMaggio fit right in. Even before they were married, he began taking Dorothy to the Castle sometimes too, for a meal with Jerry and Rose, and once for the party celebrating their engagement. Dorothy’s diamond engagement ring, four carats and emerald cut, had come to DiMaggio as a gift from Richie the Boot.

Spats did more than that for Joe. He lined him up a driver, a guy who could watch out for DiMaggio in the city or in Newark or wherever Joe needed him. In 1939 Spatola cooked up a testimonial dinner for DiMaggio, held at Newark’s upscale Essex House on the eve of the Yankees’ World Series opener against the Cincinnati Reds. More than 1,000 people turned out, all the local big shots, assorted New Jersey mayors and a dozen Yankees including Dickey, Gehrig, Henrich, Red Rolfe and even bat boy Timmy Sullivan. The Yankees sat flanking Joe at a long table set up at the head of the ballroom beneath a nearly life-size photo of Joe that hung luminously from a beam above. Dorothy sat with Rose and the Spatola girls at one of the big round tables nearby.

At the end of the night the people of Newark, it was announced, had given Joe a brand new convertible to drive off in. He deserved it, they all felt. This was
their
Joe DiMaggio. Whenever news spread that he was in town people came out of their homes and gathered near the rounded brick facade at the front of Vittorio Castle, or, depending on the hour, swung by Vincent’s barbershop at Eighth and Boyden to see if they could catch a glimpse of DiMaggio getting a trim, perhaps they could even say hello. A Yankees farm team, the powerful Newark Bears, played in town and everybody was a Yankees fan.

Joe helped out Spatola here and there, got him tickets to the games whenever he asked for them or went over to the Hospital and Home for Crippled Children on Clifton Avenue, one of Spatola’s causes, to sign balls and hospital gowns and brighten up the kids’ lives for an hour or two. Mainly DiMaggio’s presence leant a priceless cachet, his friendship a proof that Jerry Spats, gregarious and all about town, was truly someone special, someone to pay attention to. Richie the Boot and all the rest in Newark knew that it was mainly because of Spatola’s initiative that DiMaggio so often came around, baseball’s conquering Italian giving blessing to the neighborhood.

There had been Italians in the major leagues for years, and not just Lazzeri and Crosetti. Ernie Lombardi began his career as a .300-hitting catcher for the Reds in 1932. The next season first baseman Dolph Camilli broke in, and he had since become a power-hitting star for the Dodgers. DiMaggio’s old pal from North Beach, Dario Lodigiani was doing okay as a third baseman for the White Sox. None of those players, though, mattered much in Newark. Or in Ocean City, N.J., or in South Jamaica, Queens, or anywhere in the Italian diaspora. Joe was the show.

“DiMaggio has attracted a new type of fan to our game,” declared the Philadelphia Athletics’ manager and sage, Connie Mack. “He has made the Italian population baseball conscious.”

They came to see him on the road, and they came to see him at Yankee Stadium, up from the densely packed streets of East Harlem or Mulberry Bend, from Brooklyn and from the Bronx. They brought with them Italian flags of various sizes, small hand-held ones to be shaken back and forth, and others so large that four people had to get together to hold it properly aloft. They sat in the bleacher seats or in the upper deck at the Stadium and waved flags and cheered for Joe DiMaggio. To hell with Westbrook Pegler, or anyone else who might try to tell them which country was really their own. These were Americans, at a baseball game drinking Coca-Cola and still proud of their homeland. They loved Italy and they loved DiMaggio.

At this moment, early in 1941, DiMaggio still belonged to the Italians. He still belonged to the people of North Beach, who proudly watched him from afar—“That’s our Joe!”—and who each winter gathered by the thousands to greet him and welcome him back home to San Francisco. Not yet did DiMaggio belong to all of America, everywhere.

The newspaper guys called him Giuseppe, or sometimes, in reference to his prowess at the plate, the Wallopin’ Wop.

________

¹
Ten months later, with the U.S. officially engaged in the war, non-citizen Italians were classified as enemy aliens and placed under a nightly curfew that rendered the streets of the San Francisco neighborhoods where DiMaggio grew up desolate after 9 p.m. His father, Giuseppe, was barred from coming near Fisherman’s Wharf, from where he had set out on his boat each workday for more than two decades.

D
OM DIMAGGIO LIKED
coming to New York. He liked the bustle of the city, the swift pulse that beat through Grand Central Terminal and the Hotel Commodore, where the Red Sox always stayed when they came to town. And you knew there was a ballgame on when you played at Yankee Stadium, just like you knew it at Fenway. The noisy crowds, intense and savvy—they’d let you hear it on every pitch.

Dominic always felt a little something extra facing the Yankees, and not only because it meant playing against his older brother Joe. A couple of years earlier, before Dom got to the majors, the Yankees and Red Sox had brawled spectacularly at the Stadium, a fracas that started when Sox player-manager Joe Cronin and the Yankees’ Jake Powell grappled on the field (Powell took exception to the Boston pitcher, Archie McKain, throwing too close), then continued their disagreement as they both left through the exit in the Yankees’ dugout. The argument carried on in the tunnel beneath the stands and, to the thrill of a large and roaring crowd, players left the benches to join in while the umpires followed in hopes of keeping peace. When Cronin finally emerged, his face, along with those of several other players, was reddened and badly scratched.