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

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