The DiMaggios Read online

  The DiMaggios

  Three Brothers,

  Their Passion for Baseball,

  Their Pursuit of the American Dream

  Tom Clavin

  Dedication

  to my family

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  PART I

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  PART II

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  Photo Section

  PART III

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Tom Clavin

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  It would have been impossible to write empathetically about the relationship between the three baseball-playing DiMaggio brothers without the information and insight offered by family members. I am grateful to the time given to me by Emily DiMaggio Sr., Emily DiMaggio Jr., Elaine Calloway DiMaggio Brooks, Joseph DiMaggio, and Joanne DiMaggio Webber and Paul DiMaggio, who were especially generous. My respect for the entire DiMaggio family grew because of my contact with them.

  Also helping me enormously were the contributions of the people interviewed for this book who knew Vince, Joe, or Dominic during or after their baseball careers. My thanks go to Vic Barnhart, Matt Batts, Yogi Berra, Dean Boylan Sr. (and to his son, Dean Jr.), Dr. Bobby Brown, Larry Cancro, Ellis “Cot” Deal, Ike DeLock, Bobby Doerr, Dave “Boo” Ferriss, Dick Flavin, Dick Gernert, Lee Howard, Ralph Kiner, Ted Lepcio, Babe Martin, Sam Mele, Jimmy Piersall, Charlie Silvera, and Don Trower.

  I also benefited greatly from the help of many people who provided research or contact information. A sincere tip of the cap to the Pacific Coast League historian Dick Beverage; Dick Bresciani and Sarah C. Coffin of the Boston Red Sox; Margie Cowan; Bill Francis, Pat Kelly, and John Horne at the Baseball Hall of Fame; Kathleen Iudice at the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society; David Kaplan at the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center; Doug Kelly; Sally O’Leary of the Pittsburgh Pirates; Mark Macrae; Bill Nowlin for his wonderful books on Red Sox players and history; Henry F. Scanell and Jane Winton at the Boston Public Library; Michael Tusiani and Alexandra Trochanowski of the New York Yankees; and the staff at the John Jermain Library and East Hampton Library. Deep thanks to Valerie Hanley for her transcribing skills and consistent support.

  I am indebted to writers whose works proved to be strong sources of information about the DiMaggios or baseball in general. Topping that list are Lawrence Baldassaro, David Cataneo, Richard Ben Cramer, Harvey Frommer, Richard Goldstein, David Halberstam, Martin Jacobs and Jack McGuire, Roger Kahn, Kostya Kennedy, Barbara Leaming, Richard Leutzinger, Leigh Montville, John Snyder, George Vecsey, Fay Vincent, Donald Wells, Richard Whittingham, and Paul Zingg and Mark Medeiros.

  This book would not have happened without the suggestion, guidance, and nudging of Bob Rosen. He would not take no for an answer, and I am grateful for that. Big thanks to the others at RLR Associates, especially Scott Gould and his smarts and infinite patience. It has been an inspiring experience to work with Daniel Halpern, Libby Edelson, and John Strausbaugh at Ecco.

  Finally, the encouragement and steadfastness of family and friends enables me to survive the book-writing journeys, including this one. Leslie Reingold knows most of all what that journey is like and should be nominated for sainthood. Also on my team have been my children, Kathryn and Brendan Clavin; my mother, Gertrude Clavin; my siblings, Nancy Bartolotta and James Clavin; and John Bonfiglio, Heather Buchanan, Bob Drury, Michael Gambino, Phil Keith, Bob Martin, Ken Moran, Jacquelyn Reingold, Tony Sales, Lynne Scanlon, Bob Schaeffer, and David Winter.

  PROLOGUE

  There were 53 former players on the field at Fenway Park for Old-Timers’ Day in May 1986, but most eyes were on the three men whose last name was DiMaggio: Vince, Joe, and Dominic, together for the first time in many years in a major league ballpark. The cheering crowd of over 31,000 people did not know that one of them was dying and that this would be the last time the DiMaggio brothers were together anywhere.

  There were plenty of other luminary players with ties to Boston on the field—Carl Yastrzemski, Warren Spahn, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and the greatest of all the Beantown ballplayers, Ted Williams. Many of those in Fenway Park had witnessed Yaz in the pennant-winning 1967 season when he won the Triple Crown, a feat that would not be replicated until Miguel Cabrera achieved it 45 years later. Some had seen Ted Williams, the “Splendid Splinter,” roam left field and set records at the plate, and no doubt a few had been there on September 28, 1960, when a weary 42-year-old homered in his last at-bat, a godlike feat immortalized in a brilliant essay by John Updike. There was also the rare pairing of Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson, who had combined in a playoff game in 1951 between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to produce arguably the most famous home run in baseball history. Less well known but still warmly embraced retirees included Tommy Holmes, Carroll Hardy, Tex Hughson, and Boo Ferriss.

  And this wasn’t just any Old-Timers’ Day. The Red Sox were celebrating the 40th anniversary of their 1946 American League championship, which had been their first pennant since 1918. Since then, few men were more revered in Boston than Dominic DiMaggio. The 1946 season had been a brilliant one for Dominic and his teammates.

  For Vince, however, 1946 had marked the end of his major league career. And Joe, after three years in World War II service, was back with the Yankees in 1946, but at 31 his greatness was waning. He hit .290, the first year he was below .300, and that October he had the disorienting experience of not being in the World Series. The Yankees had finished in third place, a startling 17 games behind Boston. Dominic had actually been the better ballplayer that pennant-winning year, with a .316 average, finishing in the top 10 in the MVP voting, well ahead of the brother routinely referred to as “the Great DiMaggio.”

  The Boston media had been promoting the festivities and the reunion of the DiMaggio brothers for a week. As he had been for close to a half-century, Vince still was compared unfavorably to his brothers. In one article, after describing Joe’s and Dom’s careers, the Boston Globe said of Vince that he “could hit the long ball but frequently struck out.”

  He probably hadn’t read it, though. Vince was not one to dwell on negative things. In the clubhouse before the game, he and the other players greeted each other warmly—even though some of them, especially the younger ones, didn’t even know that he had played ball. In his 10 years in the majors, Vince had toiled in the National League. His two years in Boston had been in the late 1930s, not with the Sox but on the roster of the Boston Bees, a team that only true aficionados of the game knew had ever existed.

  Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, once great rivals, shook hands in the clubhouse. It was an awkward moment for Joe. Several of the others present knew that Ted had been more of a brother to Dominic than Joe had been—and still was. Over the years, Joe had exiled himself from
the family. He hadn’t visited Vince at all or Dominic in his home for a long time. Grabbing an infrequent meal together at a restaurant, including DiMaggio’s Grotto on Fisherman’s Wharf, passed for a get-together. Otherwise, they saw each other at the funerals of their sisters and other brothers. Vince and Dominic never knew where Joe was—New York, San Francisco, somewhere else hawking Mr. Coffee machines—so it was hard to visit him. He rarely picked up the phone or returned messages. Dominic, especially, kept trying, but Joe drifted further away, allowing himself to forget how close they once were as boys, when they shared a bedroom in their Taylor Street home in San Francisco.

  Several years earlier, a frustrated Vince had told interviewer Ed Kiersh (who would later title his book on former ballplayers Where Have You Gone, Vince DiMaggio?), “Joe has always been a loner and he always will be. When the folks were alive, we were a lot closer. But I guess in the last four years I’ve seen him two or three times. What can I do? I’m Vince, he’s Joe. It’s only a shame we’ve gone different ways. That’s real sad. Family should stick together.”

  Joe had heard about those remarks. He took offense, and added Vince to the list of people he wouldn’t associate with—a list that had grown quite long after Joe left baseball in 1951. His sister Marie wasn’t on it—he shared a house with her in San Francisco. Neither was Dominic. Joe still spoke to him, because Dominic kept trying. He was the one who had convinced Joe to come to Boston, and to be with Vince again. Dominic didn’t know at the time what an act of kindness this was for both of his brothers, and for himself.

  So far, it had not been a warm reunion. Vince had traveled east alone and was staying with Dominic and his wife, Emily, at their home outside Boston. Joe checked into a hotel in the city. When Vince and Dominic had dinner together on Friday, Joe wasn’t there. When Joe and Dominic had breakfast on Saturday, Vince wasn’t there.

  In front of reporters that afternoon, Joe denied there was a rift among them. “It’s not true as far as I’m concerned” was his curt response to questions.

  Dominic knew telling the complete truth wouldn’t help the brothers’ relationship. So he implied that Vince was mad at him, not Joe. To do that he had to reach back to 1952, when he had been the American League player representative and it was decided that “any player who was on a major league roster in 1947 would be credited with all his previous activities,” thus eligible for a pension. Vince had missed out by a year.

  “Vince may still be bitter because he could not become a vested member of the players’ pension plan and was ineligible for any benefits,” Dominic explained. “His bitterness may be the reason why he made some harsh remarks to the press. If I were Vince, I wouldn’t be here for today’s Old-Timers’ Game.”

  But Vince was there, though not in the best mood. A reporter asked him about the time back in 1932 when, as an outfielder with the San Francisco Seals, he’d persuaded his manager to sign his younger brother Joe. Vince replied, “Maybe if I had kept my mouth shut, I’d be remembered as the greatest DiMaggio.”

  Finally, the time came for the main events, and the brothers were introduced to the crowd. Vince received polite applause. Joe was used to receiving the loudest cheers from fans at such special events, where he insisted he be announced as “the greatest living ballplayer.” But that wouldn’t happen at Fenway Park, not with Williams there. He wasn’t even the most popular DiMaggio on the field—the cheers for Dominic, dressed in his Red Sox uniform, easily outdistanced those for Joe. Arms around each other’s waists, the brothers smiled for photographers and the fans.

  They were becoming elderly men—Vince was 73, Joe was 71, and Dominic, the baby of the nine DiMaggio children, was 69—but those who had known the brothers long enough could still see in them the handsome, strapping young men who had come east from San Francisco in the 1930s to be major league baseball stars. Only Dominic would participate in the three-inning game featuring the former players, but it was good to see the DiMaggio brothers together on a baseball field. A handful of people knew it almost didn’t happen.

  “At the very last minute I got a call from Vince in San Francisco,” recalls Larry Cancro, now a senior vice president with the Boston Red Sox, who had invited the three brothers in the spring of 1986. “He said he wasn’t feeling well, didn’t think he should come. Dom, worried about his brother’s health, said, ‘I want him to come because I want to take him to a doctor myself.’ Between the two of us, we convinced Vince to make the trip.”

  Dominic, like everyone else at the ballpark that day, did not know that Vince was already in an advanced stage of stomach cancer. Every day it became more obvious to him, his wife, and his doctors that he would not survive. Vince had two daughters, and they didn’t know his condition either.

  “Dad didn’t want to worry us, so he kept it to himself,” says Joanne DiMaggio Webber, the older of his two daughters. “I found out because of that Old-Timers’ Day. There was a photograph of the three of them in the newspapers, and when I saw my father in it, I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what exactly, but I knew. When he got back from Boston, I went up to see him. And he told me.”

  It was worse than anyone knew—Vince had less than five months to live.

  After the Old-Timers’ exhibition innings, Vince stayed at the ballpark to watch the Rangers–Red Sox game with Dominic. Joe didn’t. He gave reporters the slip, a skill he had perfected as well as he had judged deep fly balls hit to center at Yankee Stadium. He was being driven back to New York, where he would have dinner at one of his favorite restaurants, alone.

  When he felt tired before the game ended—an 8–2 Red Sox victory—Vince asked to leave. Dominic complied immediately, and they returned to his home in Marion, Massachusetts. He wanted his brother to get as much rest as he could, because he had scheduled a doctor’s appointment for early the next morning. Whatever Vince needed, Dominic would take care of it.

  That was what Dominic did. For him, it was all about family.

  PART I

  “I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing,” the old man said. “They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.”

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

  ONE

  Giuseppe and Rosalie DiMaggio believed in America. Like millions of other immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, they discovered that by working hard they could have a piece of the American Dream. More important, that dream would be available to their nine children—especially their three sons who would play baseball, the national pastime.

  The couple had been born and raised in an area of Sicily that had the odd name Isola delle Femmine, Sicilian for “the Island of Women.” It is not in fact an island, but a town of rocky hills facing the Tyrrhenian Sea. By one account, the town was originally populated by adulterous wives of Roman soldiers who had been banished. A more mundane and reliable account of how it got its name is that in the 19th century, when a plague broke out in nearby Palermo, some of the city’s women and children were sent to Isola delle Femmine to wait it out. As the town grew in subsequent decades, it consisted mostly of fishing families.

  Giuseppe was the son of a fisherman, and inevitably he became one too. Rosalie was the daughter of a fisherman, and her future was to become the wife of a fisherman and raise his children in Isola delle Femmine. Surely, in the 1890s, anyone who told her that she would live most of her life on the other side of the world and that her son would be one of the most famous athletes of all time would have been considered mad.

  It was Rosalie, however, who started the DiMaggios down the path to America. A member of her family had managed to escape the relentless routine of Isola delle Femmine and emigrate to the United States, settling in Collinsville, California, a rural community east of San Francisco in the Sacramento River delta area. This relative wrote Rosalie in 1898 describing the wonders of America, the trains, the electricity. A hardworking man
like her husband, the relative suggested, could make a better living there.

  After his wife read the letter to him—Rosalie had spent some time as a schoolteacher—Giuseppe thought hard about such an adventure. He could not speak English. He could not read. His wife was pregnant. Who knew how long he would be gone before he could send for his wife and child, or if he could indeed make a living at all? As harsh as the life on the storm-battered Sicilian coast was, it was familiar. A young man knew what to expect.

  Whether or not Rosalie encouraged him to seek a better life for them is unclear, but in any case Giuseppe set off on the journey. He wound up in Martinez, 35 miles northeast of San Francisco. There he acquired a boat (later, he could afford an engine too) that he named the Rosalie D. With the exception of Sundays, he rose at 4:00 A.M. every day and went out to fish. He sold his catch and saved his money. After four years, he had a house and sent some of that saved money back to Isola delle Femmine for his wife and child’s passage to America.

  The Bay Area that Rosalie was sailing to in 1902 would not have been totally alien territory. In 1870, 2.2 percent of the population of San Francisco was Italian, and overall 29 percent of the city’s residents were immigrants from Europe. By 1900, the Italian population had tripled and was larger than the Chinese and Japanese communities. The acceleration of Italian immigration during the DiMaggios’ early years in the Bay Area is demonstrated in the 1930 census, which found that the population had almost tripled again, to over 16 percent. Most of the immigrants lived in San Francisco itself, while others headed inland, to the Alhambra Valley.