56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports by Kostya Kennedy Read Free Book Online

late 1940 and early ’41. The invading Italian troops were summarily beaten back and tied down, helpless until the Nazi war machine arrived to save them. Earlier Italy had taken over powerless Ethiopia in ’35—causing riots in Harlem, to the south of Yankee Stadium, where African-Americans and Italians lived cheek by jowl—and had declared war against a badly weakened France in the summer of ’40.
    For many Italians in America, whatever their thoughts on Mussolini, however virulently they might oppose Il Duce and the fascist ideal, there was still this: Someone back home was fighting on the Italian side. A brother or a cousin or a friend, or the brother of a friend, or someone else whose life could not be subsumed in a statistic—530,000 Italian troops trudging through Albania—but was valued and precious. Back home in Italy the men had to fight for Il Duce whether they believed in him or not. Soldiers died. For an Italian in America, the knowledge that on any day a letter might arrive, bearing news of a loved one’s peril or injury or death, complicated the allegiance to the United States even at the very moment the Italian immigrant planted an American flag in his front yard. When you prayed, what exactly did you pray for?
    Little Gay Talese, nine years old and the son of an Italian-born and antifascist tailor in Ocean City, N.J., had uncles and cousins in Mussolini’s army. Whenever Talese, conspicuously olive-skinned in a schoolyard of fair classmates, saw pictures of the southern land where his father was from, or heard of some fine accomplishment by a famous Italian, he felt his own vicarious pride. Too many times, though, the news that filtered down through the papers and adult conversations to his young awareness was of Italian gangsters in America like Al Capone or the New York crime boss Frank Costello, men whom his parents reviled. The more palatable stories came from the boxing rings and the ballparks where Italians were staking a claim, and where now, above all else, lorded DiMaggio.
    His father was no baseball fan, but Gay was falling in love with the game, and with a ballplayer, that spring. Though the Taleses lived just a short afternoon’s drive from the heart of Philadelphia where both Connie Mack’s Athletics and the woebegone Phillies played at Shibe Park, and though it was the Dodgers, alone among the New York teams, whose live-game broadcasts would sometimes float out over the radio waves and into the center of Ocean City, there was only one baseball team, the Yankees who played some 150 miles away, that Gay cared for and followed.
    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