The story of Lindbergh’s meanderings back and forth across the country at the same time when at least one famous ballplayer got his picture in the paper almost every day provides a subtext or counterplot to DiMaggio’s 56 games of glory. The ballplayer, in the midst of building a legend, crisscrossed in more ways than one with the aviator, who was already a legend, in the midst of compromising a reputation. No other individual during DiMaggio’s streak days penetrated America’s consciousness with such “surgical” (Lindbergh’s word) precision, and no other individual predicted a worse fate for the patient.
For the 2 years since his return home after a hiatus in Europe, Lindbergh had grown feistier and more desperate in opposition to any American involvement in the European war. By May 1941 he had placed himself at seeming odds with much that he had inspired, America’s confidence in air power. He had just joined Senator Burton Wheeler’s isolationist crusade, America First. Wheeler wanted to keep America off European turf; Lindbergh wanted to keep America and all her planes out of European skies. In 1940 he had preached that England was finished, that Göring’s Luftwaffe would annihilate what remained of the RAF. The great American aviator, the courageous Lone Eagle, the daring aerial pioneer, took his stand against the most heroic achievement of the war, England’s struggle for aerial supremacy over her own skies in the Battle of Britain. England’s victory in the summer of 1940 became the salient rallying point for the western democracies, the impetus for the American lend-lease program, and the inauguration of the greatest spurt of airplane production in the history of the world. And now, in the spring of 1941, Lindbergh was traversing the country saying that neither England nor America, if we were to ally ourselves with the English, would stand a chance against German aerial and ground forces more powerful and efficient than ever.
Lindbergh’s detour from the remarkable flight of 1927 through the ’30s and early ’40s was a disheartening odyssey from euphoria to catastrophe. The brutal kidnapping and murder of his young son in 1932 changed the man and changed the times for the man. His bitterness toward America made him a captive of his own agony. The Lindbergh family had moved after their horrible tragedy to an estate in Englewood, New Jersey, where hidden arms caches and camouflaged pillboxes dotted the grounds. This was no way to live. In 1933 the San Francisco Chronicle ran a huge spread in its Sunday magazine section on the Lindbergh estate, diagramming the fortifications and guessing at the distribution of ammo. The sports section of that day’s paper bannered a different story: the extraordinary hitting streak of a young star playing for the 1933 San Francisco Seals by the name of Joe DiMaggio.
As the San Francisco headlines recorded the young Joe DiMaggio’s assault on the Pacific Coast League streak record in 3-inch boldface, a new heroic aviator, Wiley Post, flew solo around the world. He made it just as DiMaggio set the record at 61 straight. It took Post 7 days and 18 hours, despite a journey that was almost halted twice, first in Russia when his monoplane went down in a storm and then in Alaska when he crashed it all by himself. Both times Post fixed his craft with a few tools from his cockpit kit, a hands-on approach that helped give early long-distance flying its panache. Post landed to the cheers of 55,000 screaming aficionados in Bennett Field, New York.
For a despondent Lindbergh the glory and raw excitement of such adventures were mere memories. It was time for him and his family to leave, and his absence from the country for several years during the ’30s gave him an opportunity to reflect on what he considered the imperfect decorum and undisciplined moral hysteria of America, the voyeuristic obsession of its masses, the public necrophilia of its press, and, almost as an afterthought, the demagoguery of its President.
Lindbergh returned to America only when the European war broke out and when his ties to Germany—Field Marshal Göring had awarded him Germany’s highest aviation medal—made him persona non grata in England. Back home he became a cause célèbre because of his opposition to lend-lease, his despairing assessments of England’s chances against the Nazis, and his insistent notion that the German people had legitimate geopolitical rights in all of Europe. In a piece for Reader’s Digest, “Aviation, Geography, and Race,” Lindbergh wrote that “our civilization depends on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood.” Thus it was no coincidence that the Nazis translated the American flier’s writings and speeches and distributed them to a German audience sympathetic to their content.
By May 1941 Roosevelt and Lindbergh were at each other’s throats. A few weeks before the beginning of DiMaggio’s streak, Roosevelt publicly called Lindbergh a “copperhead,” a reference to those northerners during the Civil War who despaired of defeating the south. Lindbergh, in cold fury, quit his commission as a colonel in the Army, which caused Roosevelt’s point man, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, to refer to “Ex-Colonel” Lindbergh as the “Knight of the German Eagle,” a barbed reference to Lindbergh’s quitting his honorary commission in America while refusing to return the medal given to him by Göring and the Nazi government in 1938.
The President poured it on. He considered Lindbergh’s radio speeches the most disturbing, shameless, and demoralizing apology for Nazism the war effort in this country had to face at a time when the land was trying to build the spirit necessary to oppose a German juggernaut that was overrunning the Greek peninsula, looking toward Crete and the Mediterranean, massing for an invasion of Russia, and readying itself to annihilate the populations of eastern Europe.
Given the predictable mixture of preparation and trepidation in Maytime America and in the world just before DiMaggio’s streak, it is not surprising that two of the land’s greatest, and perhaps two of its last, true heroes should capture, whether for good or ill, the national imagination. For several months, though for different reasons, the names and actions of DiMaggio and Lindbergh would dominate the news and stir much of the country. Joe DiMaggio would silently hit a baseball; Charles Lindbergh would loudly deride the weaknesses of the western democracies. DiMaggio would set a record; Lindbergh’s embittered volubility against Roosevelt, Churchill, and certain unknown and unlocatable Jewish warmongers would besmirch an aviator’s heroic countenance almost beyond the cleansing powers of memory and time.
Such were the days of May.
IV. Streak Week
A month into the 1941 baseball season, the Chicago White Sox arrived by train in New York City, registered as they always did at the New Yorker Hotel, and prepared to open a three-game set against the Yankees. DiMaggio was slumping badly this second week of May as the Yankees, in none too good shape themselves, had just gotten buried by Cleveland and were still muttering about Bobby Feller’s pitching on May 13. DiMaggio took the collar that day, 0 for 4, and said of Feller: “He’s the best pitcher living. I don’t think anybody’s ever going to throw a ball faster than he does. And his curve? It ain’t human.”
That week’s Life magazine profiled Feller, who repeated the story of the test devised by Lew Fonseca to measure the speed of Feller’s fastball by racing it against a cop on a motorcycle. A former big league utility player and a pioneer of sports filming, Fonseca explained to Feller what he expected him to do: “Just throw the ball at the exact moment the cop goes by.” Sure thing! Feller still recalls the circumstances. “I started winding up in the middle of a road, and a motorcycle is revving over my right shoulder. You ever tried this? Jeez, the bike starts coming at me while I hurry to get my delivery in sync. The cop roars by before I even release the ball. But I let it go, and the ball catches up and beats the bike to the plate! Who knows how fast I threw it? Fonseca clocked the cop at 86.2 mph.”
DiMaggio was happy enough to see Feller and the Indians depart on May 14, 1941. He hadn’t done much better that day either, taking the collar again against a tough righty, Mel Harder. Then, if he listened to the radio at home, he had to deal with Feller yet again on Eddie Cantor’s nationally broadcast nighttime show. Cantor had Feller read advertising copy for
a sponsor so that he could technically qualify him as a member of the cast for an invented “on-the-air” game later in the season between the Eddie Cantor Show and the Jack Benny Show. Benny protested in his comically forlorn way, but it did him no good.
DiMaggio’s troubles before the May 15 Thursday game with the White Sox had actually begun prior to the Indian series and Feller’s high jinks on the field or off. Back on April 22 in Philadelphia at Shibe Park the Yanks blew a five-run lead and lost 6–5 to the A’s Lester McCrabb. McCrabb was a journeyman junk ball artist, and though DiMaggio usually had little difficulty with him, he failed this day to drive the ball out of the infield. He recalled the game as the beginning of his skid. “I felt uncomfortable against McCrabb. You hit the ball on the handle a few times, you swing at a few bad pitches here and there, and then you start pressing.”
Pressing indeed. For the next 20 games DiMaggio hit .194. It would have been worse except for a three-game sequence, dotted by rainouts, May 8, 11, 12, when he went 7 for 13. Without that spurt his average from April 22 to May 15 would have been .119. Madonn’. DiMaggio reacted to the slump with simple baseball wisdom: “There is always a remedy. Time and confidence.” He put the pinstripes on, one leg at a time, and took the field with the Yanks for an afternoon game against the White Sox. That day at the Stadium would turn into a debacle, more of which later in the Streak Journal.
It might have been better to spend the afternoon in New York of May 15 at a matinee. Six bits purchased the best loge seat in the house for a string of first-run movies in the city: Disney’s Fantasia, Gary Cooper in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Hope and Crosby in The Road to Zanzibar, Abbott and Costello in Buck Privates, Spencer Tracy in The Men of Boys Town, Joan Crawford in A Woman’s Face, Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, and Marlene Dietrich in René Clair’s The Flame of New Orleans.
Better yet, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane played at the RKO Palace, where it had premiered two weeks earlier on May 1. Welles and his producers had just triumphed in a struggle with Louis B. Mayer, then of Loews Theatres, who tried to purchase the film and scrap it after hearing rumors of its savage portrayal of his friend William Randolph Hearst. Having prevailed over Mayer, Welles preferred to tell a more humbling premiere story. He was mobbed by autograph seekers, including one young fellow who surged forward several times with pen and paper in hand. Each time Welles signed dutifully. Finally, the lad turned away and Welles heard him say to a pal, “Okay, here’s my seven Welleses, give me your one Clark Gable.”
If the rout of the Yankees that afternoon at the Stadium, 13–1, had been particularly trying, a relaxing springtime dinner and an evening at a Broadway play might provide recompense: a dollar for a seat in the balcony or $3.50 tops for the orchestra and a veritable history of the theater played out before one’s eyes. The following were in extended runs on May 15: The Man Who Came to Dinner, Life with Father, Arsenic and Old Lace, My Sister Eileen, and Tobacco Road. Newly mounted that season were William Saroyan’s The Beautiful People, Orson Welles’s production of Richard Wright’s powerful Native Son, Dorothy McGuire’s nubile stage debut in Claudia, Raymond Massey and Katharine Cornell in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, Ethel Merman in Panama Hattie, Gene Kelly in Pal Joey, Ethel Barrymore in The Corn Is Green, and Gertrude Lawrence in Lady in the Dark, where the young Danny Kaye originated his famous show-stopping mad Russian number by reeling off 57 Russian names in 39 seconds.
The Critics Circle Award—winning drama for 1941, Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, had opened in April, and Miss Hellman was still living in town this third week of May during the run of the play. In an interview she was less sensitive about the average American wage earner than she had been in her play about those serene older orders of Europe oppressed by a grotesque yet largely unperceived wave of the future. She told a theatrical beat reporter that it was absurd to rent an apartment in New York when you could live at the Plaza.
Perhaps a Yankee fan wished to do nothing on the afternoon of May 15 but tune in to the 3 P.M. start of the game on the radio. If so, the fan would continue doing nothing. There were no broadcasts during the season from Yankee Stadium in 1941 that day or any other. Only the Brooklyn Dodger games, with Red Barber at the microphone, were carried locally. Neither the Yankees nor the New York Giants were able to garner sponsors for the $75,000 they asked for the rights to air their games. Without full broadcasts, Yankee and Giant fans had to rely on brief radio re-creations from 7:15 to 7:30 each night on station WINS by a young announcer, Don Dunphy. Dunphy was soon to win national acclaim for his brilliant call of the Louis-Conn fight on June 18, but his baseball re-creations on radio were at best hit-or-miss affairs. For analysis and commentary, another radio name, Paul Douglas, who later gained prominence for his acting in Hollywood, broadcast Paul Douglas’s Sports Column nationally from New York. Douglas that year won the Sporting News award as the best baseball commentator in the country.
The bulk of the radio day on May 15 filled the hours with soaps (The Guiding Light), news (H. V. Kaltenborn, Lowell Thomas), gossip (Walter Winchell), and chitchat and song (Kate Smith). Evening programs included Fred Waring’s orchestra and the Fanny Brice, Bing Crosby, and Rudy Vallee shows on WEAF and Amos ’n’ Andy, Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour, and Glenn Miller’s orchestra on WABC. Doing the news each weeknight on station WEAF in New York was a young man by the name of George Putnam, who later had a flashy career as a television commentator in Los Angeles but whose major contribution to American culture came when he served as the model for the profile-mongering, jaw-strutting, dim-witted anchor man Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Passive and active listeners on May 15 heard on the radio or simply in the air the strains of Billboard’s best: Jimmy Dorsey’s “Amapola” (“Amapola, my pretty little poppy . . . ”), Bing Crosby’s “Dolores,” and the Andrews Sisters’ “Apple Blossom Time.” Jimmy Dorsey had two more songs in the top 10: “Maria Elena” and “Green Eyes.” Brother Tommy chimed in that week with “Oh Look at Me Now” and “Let’s Get Away from It All,” and so did Guy Lombardo with “The Band Played On.” A new song was in its way creeping up the charts, Xavier Cugat’s “La Cucaracha.” Soon Lawrence Welk’s “Henny Penny” (“My black hen/She lays eggs for gentlemen”) would take its rightful place among Billboard’s best, followed by the blockbuster of spring and summer, the “Hut Sut Song,” whose lyrics sounded like the curses of a herniated Swedish cheerleader: “Hut sut rawlson on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla, soo-it.”
For those who sought their pleasure from syllables that made sense, local bookstores on May 15 carried two current best-sellers slated to become American classics: Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Bud Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run. A fascinating new book had just appeared, The Long Weekend: 1918–1939, by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, about the nature of British life between the wars. America’s deep concern with English culture of this period, even elite English culture, had a distinctly elegiac ring to it, including two novels about England on the verge of attack at the very top of the best-seller lists: James Hilton’s Random Harvest and Eric Knight’s This Above All. On top of the nonfiction charts were two books about England beyond the verge of attack: Churchill’s Blood, Sweat, and Tears and Edward R. Murrow’s This Is London, soon to be joined by William Shirer’s Berlin Diaries. The subject matter of these books touched the same raw nerves that had proved too much for one of the century’s geniuses a few months before. Virginia Woolf drowned herself in March, leaving a note about the Nazi bombing raids over England: “I cannot go on any longer in these terrible times.”
Too heavy? Then try the comic strips. The trials, traumas, and tribulations of besieged democracy could be gleaned from the week’s fare. Daddy Warbucks, Orphan Annie’s padrone, was at death’s door after getting shoved by saboteurs and spies into the machine works of a factory manufacturing bomb sights. Superman confronted “th
e oncoming juggernaut” of a deadly armored car on the streets of Metropolis. Brenda Starr read the patriotic riot act to a young gentleman sleaze trying to use his influence in Washington, D.C., to gain an exemption from the military draft. Dick Tracy, who so often shot from the hip, had just been shot in the back. He lay in a coma in need of a massive blood transfusion, rather like America before the war. Joe Palooka was better off. As a draftee he had just participated in war games. A ranking general asked those in Palooka’s company whether anyone thought it would really be like this in combat on the front lines. “General,” answered Palooka. “You wouldn’t be here if this was really the front lines.”
As for the sporting life on May 15, some notables were active, some between engagements. Joe Louis was fine-tuning at Pompton Lakes for his upcoming fight with Buddy Baer, but the fight world also had its eye on a flashy speedster rising through the lightweight ranks who could move like a hummingbird and hit like a woodpecker, Ray Robinson. During a preliminary bout Robinson touched gloves with his opponent, Maxie Shapiro, at the beginning of the second round. “Hey, Ray,” Maxie complained, “you’re only supposed to touch gloves in the last round.” “That’s right,” said Robinson.
In golf the major European tournaments were of course suspended, but Byron Nelson currently led the rankings in America, though challenged by Ben Hogan, who would surpass him, and by Craig Wood, winner that year of both the U.S. Open and the Masters. Sam Snead and Lloyd Mangrum were the best of the younger golfers in the land, and Gene Sarazen at 39 was still very much in the money. Bobby Riggs, Frank Parker, Ted Schroeder, Frankie Kovacs, and Jack Kramer led the ranks of amateur tennis in America (again, no European tournaments), though the most exciting new name among the top players belonged to a delightful little bow-legged Ecuadorian, 19-year-old Pancho Segura. Jimmy Evert, Chris Evert’s father, reigned as the junior indoor champ in 1941. Don Budge, an aging Bill Tilden, and Alice Marble played the 1941 pro circuit.
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