Ironically, a Saturday Evening Post profile on Rizzuto and Priddy, in preparation before their troubles, raved about the Yankee rookies, the “two kids who in four years have never hit under .300, played on any club but a pennant winner, or failed to be named on the All-Star team of whatever league they happened to be in. Paste that in your hat.” McCarthy pasted it in, all right, and found a nice warm spot on the bench for his rookies to read their press clippings. Never one to mince words, McCarthy told the writers covering the game, “They could learn a lot looking on from the bench.” Earlier in the day McCarthy had simply looked at Johnny Sturm and motioned him out to first. At the same time, Sturm recalls, McCarthy tossed a first baseman’s glove at Tommy Henrich, a pantomime quiz to which Sturm guessed the right answer immediately: If I don’t hit, I sit. Sturm’s bat spoke eloquently for the next couple of weeks; his glove spoke eloquently all year. Unfortunately, an injury later during the war made 1941 not only his best year in the majors but his last.
The just demoted Yankee double play combination was not the Saturday Evening Post’s only interest. Extremely influential and previously isolationist, the magazine cartwheeled on May 16 and announced its support for Roosevelt’s policies in regard to the war effort. This was a key move in the hastening march toward war of spring and summer. The Post’s editorial explained: “We are like a man who has jumped off a springboard and has not yet touched the water. He isn’t wet, but he hasn’t a chance of getting back on the board.” Changing circumstances and new dramatic realities made the shift necessary for the magazine. The will of the western democracies to confront the Nazis was now in its words a “national crusade.” The crusade at this point was more a supply line. In a recent poll, only one state in the union had favored open declaration of war against Germany in May 1941, Florida, a state stirred by the impassioned anti-Nazi tirades of its New Deal senator, Claude Pepper, whose golden vocal cords still ring in today’s House of Representatives in support of the land’s elderly and poor.
At the Stadium on May 16 the Yankees loosened a couple of buttons on their flannels in garnering their first win that week. In the opening inning Charlie Keller took one of Lee’s pitches 440 feet to left center, and by the time anyone ran it down Keller was crawling up the back of Red Rolfe, who had just rounded third in front of him. Keller beat the throw for an inside-the-park homer. Stay tuned. This was neither the first nor the last of its kind, and Keller would in the next few weeks set some unusual standards in a category that if it had a name would be called power running.
When DiMaggio came up in the third inning, Thornton Lee didn’t figure he could hit it any farther than Keller had in the first. But DiMaggio did. He launched a fastball beyond the bull pen in left and deep into the cheap bleacher seats. Only one other American Leaguer besides DiMaggio had ever hit one so far to left at Yankee Stadium, Hank Greenberg of the Tigers. But Hank wasn’t likely to get the chance to try it again this year, at least not from Camp Custer, where he was in his second week of basic training as an Army private. Detroit fans had organized letter-writing campaigns to members of Congress to get Greenberg back, even arguing that the size of his $50,000 a year salary, the highest in baseball, qualified him for exemption under essential employee status. No luck. Greenberg would serve until an Army doctor, possibly a Tiger fan, discharged him just before Pearl Harbor for bilateral pes planum, or flat feet. A week later Hank reenlisted.
Abroad on May 16, Hitler’s propaganda ministry had gotten its hands on the Hess affair and began releasing stories that the deputy führer was entirely mad, was woefully under the influence of astrologers, and believed underwater streams were coursing in different directions under his bed. Göring was personally delegated to detain Willy Messerschmitt, the famous plane designer who reportedly had helped Hess fit out his escape plane. When the irate Göring asked Messerschmitt how he could assist such a lunatic, Messerschmitt reportedly replied, “How could such a lunatic be deputy führer of Germany?”
In regard to the Hess flight, the day’s wire services out of Europe carried a story that in retrospect provided the clue to the entire affair. It was reported that the Gestapo had arrested a man by the name of Albrecht Haushofer in Germany for questioning. It turned out that 2 years before, in 1939, Hitler had indeed agreed to a Hess scheme to sound out England about an alliance through the offices of Haushofer, an Anglophile and a friend of the Duke of Hamilton. The duke and Haushofer were supposed to meet in Portugal. Nothing came of the plan, but Hess obviously brooded about it after falling out of favor with Hitler’s new men, Goebbels, Göring, and Himmler.
It now seemed as if Hess had put the plan into action by eliminating Haushofer as middleman. Or had he? When Hess was arrested by the Scottish Home Guard, he carried fake identification as Luftwaffe Lieutenant Alfred Horn, and when he met the Duke of Hamilton, he gave him Albrecht Haushofer’s greeting card. Even the fake name, Alfred Horn, bore Haushofer’s initials. For different reasons, Hitler too put poor Haushofer, by then seemingly out of Hess’s mad plan, back into it. Haushofer’s father, by the way, was the founder of a branch of study called geopolitics that formed the basis of Charles Lindbergh’s views on the rights of Germany in Europe. With all these tangential connections, including the one with the air pioneer Hamilton, it’s understandable why Roosevelt was convinced, though incorrectly, that Lindbergh had something to do with the Hess affair.
In Vichy France on May 16, Marshall Pétain was beside himself over Roosevelt’s impounding of the Île de Normandie (it later caught fire in the New Jersey docks in 1942 but was refitted as an American troopship). Pétain insisted that his nation’s interest and now its honor dictated a firmer relationship with Nazi Germany, as if the choice were his. Pétain then threatened the United States and Britain regarding actions he deemed naval piracy, as if Vichy France were in a position to do much. The British responded to Pétain by sending bombers to blast Axis planes into oblivion near the Damascus airport in Vichy-mandated Syria. This was the second major humiliation of the week in a series of disasters for the Vichy regime through spring and summer. Free French General Charles de Gaulle was ecstatic, cabling Churchill on May 16: “We shall win the war.”
Whatever Vichy France’s national interest by this point in 1941, its national honor had much to answer for. A story on the back pages of The New York Times for this second day of DiMaggio’s streak noted that the Vichy government had just roused 5,000 Jews in the middle of the night for deportation to labor camps under something called the Statut des Juifs. This strange legislation authenticated Jewish inferiority under Vichy law, determining in precise degree what sort of grandparental bonds produce a predominance of Jewish blood. Oddly enough, the degree could rise or fall depending on whether one’s grandparents attended synagogue.
GAME 3: May 17
In the Saturday afternoon rubber game of the series with the White Sox, the Yankees could only manage five hits while losing 3–2. The game was delayed by a passing rainstorm, and McCarthy might have hoped for a lingering one. The Yankees got what hits they could muster off Chicago ace John Rigney, soon to have an intricate and complex set of troubles with the officials of the military draft, who wanted him much more that spring than he wanted to be wanted. DiMaggio managed a harmless second inning single, enough to chalk up the game for the streak but not enough to help his mates.
Saturday was the first week’s anniversary of the Bavarian beginnings of the Rudolf Hess flight, with its vertical conclusion having taken place on the previous Sunday. Hess had been demanding all week long, with little luck, to speak to King George VI. Only the Duke of Hamilton so far had talked with him at length. With Hitler now deriding him, Churchill ignoring him, and British agents pumping him, Hess clammed up. For nearly a half a century he said little, right through the Nuremberg trials and his long imprisonment in Spandau. In fact, the real story of the Hess escapade was supposedly part of the new material in the Hitler diaries that were forged a few years back. But on this weekend of May 17, all
Hess said was that his flight deserved to be written up in aeronautical journals the world over for its planning and daring. He boasted to British intelligence on Saturday that the mission’s conception and the precision of its execution were the equivalent of Lindbergh’s transatlantic crossing in 1927.
Before the game at the Stadium that same Saturday, McCarthy held a team meeting to explain to his men the shake-up of his infield. When he came out of the clubhouse, he told reporters: “Something had to be done, and relieving Rizzuto and Priddy of the strain was the obvious recipe. Maybe we expected too much of them.” With Bill Dickey back at catcher after a couple of days’ rest, McCarthy’s infield had everyone in it from the late ’30s but Lou Gehrig. It must have looked like old times to New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who showed up at the Stadium for the game. La Guardia would soon get as caught up as any Yankee fan in his compare Giuseppe DiMaggio’s streak, especially its key games near the Wee Willie Keeler record of 44. Giuseppe, by the way, is what Dan Daniel called DiMaggio in his 1941 World-Telegram columns. Around the league it was an oddly respectful “the Big Dago,” which DiMaggio rather liked and sometimes used when referring to himself.
In the three outings with the Yankees this first series of DiMaggio’s streak, Chicago White Sox pitchers tossed three complete games. Among managers, Jimmy Dykes was hardly a man of patience, yet the four men in his rotation—Smith, Lee, Rigney, and the veteran Ted Lyons—plus a few fill-ins tossed a remarkable 106 complete games in the 1941 season. No staff in the American League had proved that durable since the record set back in 1904 by the Boston Red Sox pitchers, led by Cy Young, of 148 complete games in a 154-game season.
About a hundred miles southwest of New York City—a $5.26 train ride in 1941—the Philadelphia Athletics on Saturday honored their 79-year-old owner-manager Connie Mack’s fifty-fifth year in major league baseball. The A’s Shibe Park became Connie Mack Stadium, that is, until Mr. Mack spotted the new sign and made his ground crew take it down immediately. Connie Mack had been with the Athletics since the origin of the American League in 1901, and he would stick with them until 1950, at which time the Connie Mack Stadium sign went up for good. Mr. Mack took a different attitude in 1941 toward the threat of the lottery draft than had Ed Barrow of the Yanks and Larry MacPhail of the Dodgers. The old veteran, born during the Civil War and in his mid-30s by the time of the Spanish-American War, froze his austere face and said, “If they draft them, they draft them.”
Elsewhere in the majors on May 17, Ted Williams heated up the action. He pummeled Bobby Feller for two doubles and a single during the Red Sox game against the Indians, though Feller weathered the storm 12–9. Williams had singled off the Indians’ Jim Bagby the day before. His average was up to .353, and he was keeping what at so early a stage seemed an inconsequential pace with DiMaggio’s streak. Cleveland was now 81/2 games in front of the Yankees. In the National League, the Dodgers still played nip to the Cardinals’ tuck.
Before the White Sox left town and the St. Louis Browns arrived, New Yorkers could catch three fine movies that had just opened. With production booming, 1941 was a banner year for Hollywood, and some of its best moments occurred during DiMaggio’s streak. At week’s end The Devil and Miss Jones premiered at Radio City Music Hall, a touchingly funny depression film about a tycoon (Charles Coburn) who takes a job in his own department store and finds himself befriended by union supporters Bob Cummings and Jean Arthur. The movie bears no resemblance to a much later film, somewhat different in intent, that borrowed most of its title. For the choral set, Paul Robeson’s Proud Valley, about an unlikely collection of singing Welsh miners, opened on Thursday. Best of all, Major Barbara, adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s witty play about salvation, greed, and love, opened at the Astor. Filmed during the previous year’s aerial blitz of London, Major Barbara starred British actors Rex Harrison, Robert Morley, and Wendy Hiller, and its ad campaign featured cartoons of Shaw himself carrying a placard: “YOU SENT US 50 DESTROYERS . . . I SEND YOU MAJOR BARBARA.” This referred to the obvious end run around the Neutrality Act earlier in the year whereby the United States simply decommissioned 50 destroyers and sent them to England in return for access to British naval bases. It was hard for Shaw or anyone else to imagine conditions under which the English would not provide us access at this time in the war.
W. Somerset Maugham arrived in New York on the weekend from his home in France. He planned to remain for the duration of the war. At the inaugural dinner of European PEN, an organization for exiled writers, Maugham delivered the keynote address. After dinner he told friends about a conversation in Paris several years before the war with the composer Maurice Ravel, of Bolero fame. Ravel wanted to set to music Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address because he thought it was the best speech he had ever heard. “But I have forgotten it completely,” he said to Maugham. “Perhaps you could recite it for me.”
GAME 4: May 18
Sunday, May 18, 1941, was “I Am an American Day” all over the country. While 30,109 headed to the ball park for the Yankees’ game against the St. Louis Browns, over 700,000 gathered in New York City’s Central Park for a rally presided over by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Eddie Cantor, and the immensely popular black entertainer Bill Robinson, who personally guaranteed the crowd that he would stop Hitler at Yankee Stadium if the crazed führer ever marched on Harlem. La Guardia cast his nets wider and informed “Adolf, Benito, and Joe” that “we are not afraid to defend our democratic institutions.” “Joe” was Stalin, who took it on the chin this day not only from La Guardia but from Arthur Koestler’s just published novel, Darkness at Noon, a brilliant account of the Soviet purge trials of the 1930s.
Under less dire circumstances at the Stadium, Lefty Gomez, DiMaggio’s road roommate, pitched the Yankees to a 12–2 romp over the American League’s patsies. Every American in the lineup hit well for the Yankees on “I Am an American Day,” including Gomez, who was notoriously poor at the plate. Gomez was married to June O’Dea, of the musical comedy stage and a good friend of DiMaggio’s actress wife, Dorothy Arnold. It was not unusual for the two ballplayers and two wives to step out for a full evening on the town in New York, except on nights preceding games in which Gomez pitched. Johnny Sturm remembers the solicitous Gomez, whose concern for DiMaggio’s energy level bore a direct relation to the pitching rotation: “Lefty took DiMaggio under his wing the nights before he pitched. And Joe was rested and ready—he hit pretty good when Lefty was on the mound. You have to remember, Lefty was getting towards the end of his career and DiMaggio put out a little extra for him. We had a lot of rookies on our staff waiting to take over.” DiMaggio confirmed as much in an interview a few years after: “When El Goofy pitched, I usually came through.” Of course, Sturm also remembers other times when DiMaggio would wander into the clubhouse, perhaps on days when the rookies were pitching, muttering about the previous night’s action and the range of his wife’s interests. “I don’t suppose it would do any harm to mention it now,” said Sturm, with an early ’40s sense of what constitutes harm, “but Joe used to complain sometimes that he had to change clothes three different times in a night for three different parties.” Harm or no, DiMaggio had the wardrobe to do it.
In the middle of the Yankee rout of the Browns, DiMaggio recorded a perfect 3 for 3 day, though the perfection had a more elegant cut to it in the box score than it did on the field. The New York Herald Tribune quibbled that “DiMaggio was credited with three hits on drives manhandled by fielders. Twice he handcuffed the third baseman and the other time Laabs [the Browns’ right fielder] must have been worrying about backing into the railing when he let the ball jump out of his glove.” Matters were even more complicated than the Tribune reported. In the fourth, DiMaggio popped to Clift at third for an apparent easy out. But on his swing the bat nicked Grube’s glove for a catcher’s interference call and, according to the vagaries of the rule book, an automatic single. DiMaggio trotted to first.
There was only one other game dur
ing the streak in which DiMaggio had a perfect day at the plate, a 3 for 3 game against the White Sox on June 19, and in that game he hit the ball with considerably more authority than he did in this one. Everything seemed slightly jaundiced. His grounder to third in the first just squirted off Harland Clift’s glove. Dan Daniel, the official scorer, claimed quite rightly that Clift would have had no throw on DiMaggio even if he had fielded the ball cleanly: hence, a hit. The next time up, in the second, DiMaggio sliced a high, drifting fly down the right field line. Chet Laabs, playing over toward center, got on what served for his horse and headed straight for the angle of the short foul pole and the low right field railing. He ran a long way, coasted underneath the fly, speared it on the way down, and, having so far done everything right, did one last thing wrong: He dropped the ball. Dan Daniel rewarded Laabs for his long run by not penalizing him with an error for the muffed fly. DiMaggio coasted into second with a cheap double.
Joe DiMaggio’s charmed hits for the day brought his streak average to an even .500 (7 for 14), edging him ahead of Williams, who had matched the fledgling four-game streak so far at .375 (6 for 16). The hottest Yankee at the moment was a rejuvenated Bill Dickey, at .375 for the season and moving in on Cronin and Travis for tops in the league. Dickey had also hit in 19 straight of the games in which he had an at bat (there were a few in which he played but didn’t get up). Arky Vaughan of the Pirates still led in the National League at .384, followed by Enos “Country” Slaughter of the Cardinals at .365.
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