Streak

by Seidel, Michael; Siegel, George ;

  In New York City, Memorial Day brought out the veterans of all stripes from most wars, including a dozen old gentlemen, 2 down from last year’s 14, willing and able to parade in their original Civil War uniforms. Amid the patriotic fervor of the day and continuing what amounted to a minipurge after the anti-Nazi sentiment in America fired by Roosevelt’s “unlimited emergency” speech, federal officials gave the go-ahead to local law enforcement agencies in New Jersey to bust up a German Bund rally in Andover and confiscate photos of Hitler plus an assortment of pamphlets, emblems, and maps. The government feared sabotage emanating from the Bund groups within the country and began beefing up the forces guarding defense plants, now contracted for $10 billion worth of war matériel.

  Japan picked this Memorial Day to reaffirm its bonds to the Axis alliance and to announce that it might find it necessary to end its peaceful policy in the Pacific. Japan’s peaceful policy in the spring of 1941 was something like Vichy France’s national honor. One would have had to look far and wide to find any traces of it. But eyes in the United States were for the most part turned away from the rattling sabers of Japan at this time in the year and in the war.

  The festive American mood of the day and season in New York took on more cheerful proportions when the owner of the Copacabana leased Madison Square Garden on May 30 for a hundred days at $1,000 a night for an enormous palm-grove-style nightclub. Benny Goodman, Larry Clinton, and Charlie Barnet opened. It cost 66 cents to get in on weeknights and 88 cents on weekends. Armed forces personnel could bring dates for free. One advantage of the arrangement for those who supported the President’s position on the war rather than Lindbergh’s: with the dance bands in the Garden, the America First Committee would be out of it.

  On Broadway this Memorial Day weekend, the longest-running play on the boards, Tobacco Road, closed after 3,180 performances. A tremendous, though steamy, popular success, the play earned its New York investors close to $2 million for its run in the city and nearly $2.5 million on the road. Out in Hollywood on May 30, Warner Brothers Studio found itself in a pitched battle with one of its stars, John Garfield. Garfield was placed on Warner’s idle list when he refused to take the lead in a movie called Nine Lives Are Not Enough. The studio threatened to give the lead to Ronald Reagan, as if that were supposed to intimidate Garfield. It didn’t, and Reagan ended up starring in this 1941 movie, whose title reflects something of the nature of his future political career.

  GAMES 17 and 18: June 1

  Saturday’s game in Cleveland was rained out, but with a day’s rest the Yankees beat the Indians in a doubleheader on June 1 and knocked them out of first place. The Chicago White Sox took over the league lead as the Yankees found themselves in third just 11/2 games back. DiMaggio extended his streak with a two-out single to left field in the third inning of the first game off Al Milnar and an eighth inning single off Mel Harder in the nightcap that nicked Keltner’s glove and shot by him down the third base line.

  An odd story is attached to this play. DiMaggio came to the plate hitless for the game in what was to be his last at bat of the long day. Harder was tough for DiMaggio and tough against the Yankees. He had collared DiMaggio back on May 14, the day before the streak began. DiMaggio settled in and drove a hard bouncer down the third base line. The ball kicked off the tip of Keltner’s extended glove hand; he chased it down in short left but had no throw. At the inning’s end DiMaggio passed Keltner as the teams exchanged positions on the field. Keltner heard DiMaggio say something, but the noise of the big crowd made it difficult for him to discern what. Perhaps DiMaggio mentioned his good fortune in sustaining the streak on a close play. This was the day the streak went public, as it were, and he would have been less than human if he hadn’t been gratified to have squeaked one past the league’s premier fielding third baseman. Keltner recalled the muffled hum of a comment he never quite picked up and later said the vague memory encouraged him to play DiMaggio deeper and closer to the line the next Yankee series in Cleveland. One of the games in that series was on the fabled night of July 17.

  Municipal Stadium in Cleveland packed in 52,081 fans on June 1, the largest baseball crowd of the year so far, to witness DiMaggio extend his streak and see the Yankees defeat the Indians for the fourth straight time this year in their home park. Only Bobby Feller had been able to hold things together for Cleveland in the last few days, and fortunately for the Yankees, Feller wasn’t out there this day—he would be on the morrow. Red Ruffing shut out the Indians 2–0 in the first game, with the Yankees scoring single runs in the second and third innings, enough to win. The 5–3 win in the nightcap proved tougher. Indian third baseman Ken Keltner put Cleveland ahead with a home run off Lefty Gomez in the first. The Yanks tied the game in the fifth, and it remained that way into the eighth, at which time Johnny Sturm hit his first major league home run with Crosetti on base. George Selkirk added another with Rolfe on base. The Indians rallied for two in the ninth but fell short against Marvin Breuer in relief of Ruffing.

  The two Yankee home runs in the second game of the day’s doubleheader began another sequence running parallel to DiMaggio’s hitting streak in which the Yankees would challenge a major league record. The challenge at issue was for at least one member of the team to hit a home run in the day’s ball game. The record was 17 straight games by the 1940 Detroit Tigers, the previous year’s pennant winners. As this sequence mounted, the possibility of a new Yankee home run record provided both a distraction from and a supplement to DiMaggio’s hitting streak. In a way, the entire team could take some of the strain upon its shoulders that otherwise DiMaggio would have taken alone. There were occasions, however, when it remained for DiMaggio to oblige himself with a hit and his team with a home run to keep both streaks alive.

  After DiMaggio’s two hits this day in the doubleheader, the New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times caught on to the hitting streak at the 18-game mark, as did the Cleveland Plain Dealer. These papers joined the New York World-Telegram and the New York Daily News, whose correspondents were a little quicker and a little more savvy. Now that a number of papers had the streak in their sights, no one ever lost it again. Ted Williams, playing with the Red Sox in a doubleheader against the Tigers, continued his brilliant hitting with four on the day to raise his league-leading average to a whopping .430. Williams kept one up on DiMaggio by now hitting in 19 straight, sustaining a .500 average (36 for 72) since the inception of both streaks. DiMaggio’s streak average was at .362 (25 for 69). Trailing Williams in hitting in the American League were Bill Dickey at .376, Joe Cronin at .375, and Roy Cullenbine at .363.

  In the National League, New York Giant Mel Ott reached a personal milestone this day by hitting the 400th home run of his career. Rookie Pete Reiser led the league in batting at .369, followed by Enos Slaughter of the Cards at .359 and Stan Hack of the Cubs at .357. Behind the pitching of Kirby Higbe, the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Cardinals 3–2. The two teams were in a dead heat, tied for the lead. Brooklyn had now won 9 straight, allowing them to creep up on the Cardinals, who had wilted a bit after their own recent surge of 11 straight. The National League pennant race couldn’t get any closer, nor were the two teams fated to get much farther apart.

  Babe Ruth was in Cleveland while the Yankees were in town, and the Plain Dealer gave him space for a visitor’s column. He told “long ball” stories, longer even than the longest he remembers hitting himself, a 550-foot blast in Tampa, Florida, during spring training a few years back. “As a big leaguer,” Ruth began with only slightly veiled modesty, “I hit quite a few home runs,” but nothing close to the one he saw while on a barnstorming tour with Bob Meusel “about 15 years ago.” Ruth hunkered down for the yarn.

  The two Yankees were up in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, for a pickup game with a local team in the chill of late October. It was pouring rain, but the promoter had filled his little park and wasn’t about to call it a day. Ruth played in the game, managed his team, and announced. Meusel complained so bitterly a
bout the rain and the chill that Ruth told him to go back to his room—he would find a pinch hitter. A big husky fellow came out of the stands at Ruth’s request and let Babe know he was willing enough to hit. “So I put him in,” writes Ruth, “and he hits one to left into the teeth of the wind and driving rain that disappears into a cloud bank.” There were no fences in the ball park, just empty grassland. Ruth remembers hollering at the big fellow to start running. “Nope,” says the local, “when I hit ’em that far I don’t run.” With that the man walked over and handed the promoter a dollar bill for the baseball. “Here, buy another. That one’s lost.” Ruth obviously relished this story.

  The fervor in America stirred by Roosevelt’s great “unlimited emergency” speech played itself out in a flurry of activity on the floor of Congress before the Memorial Day weekend. A new bill was hastily rammed through authorizing the President to seize whatever foreign ships he wanted and forgo the usual ruse of protecting Axis-registered vessels from sabotage. This upped the ante in what might be called the undeclared war of the Atlantic sea-lanes. Sabotage, however, may well have been more than a ruse on May 31 in Jersey City. From across the Hudson in Manhattan, it seemed as if the entire horizon were aflame. Over $25 million worth of matériel intended for shipment to war-ravaged England burned in an inferno along the New Jersey docks, and hundreds of cattle were incinerated in the adjacent stockyards. Local and federal officials spent most of June 1 trying to deny, with little effect, that sabotage was involved.

  Two other stories that began during the largely unnoticed phase of DiMaggio’s streak came to conclusions of a sort on Saturday. News reached the United States that most of the Americans aboard the ill-fated freighter Zamzam, sunk by a Nazi gunship, had crossed safely into neutral Portugal after their release by the Germans. The Nazis were still detaining the American ambulance corps members taken off the freighter. Also, the final numbing casualty figures arrived from Crete. In just over a week of brutal and intense fighting, the British had suffered 1,742 dead, 1,737 wounded, and 5,000 taken prisoner. At sea, the British Navy had lost 1,828 men and dozens of ships during the evacuation. The Germans had suffered over 4,000 dead and 2,000 wounded, the first infantry battle in the war in which they purchased victory at so dear a price. With Cretan resistance never entirely abating, the Germans held on to the island until after VE Day and gave it up only on May 15, 1945, the fourth anniversary of the beginning of DiMaggio’s streak.

  GAME 19: June 2

  The game in Cleveland on June 2, played before a meager crowd of 6,000, seemed an afterthought to the celebratory weekend in which the visiting Yankees had attracted over 85,000 fans and had another 25,000 turned away. Surely the holiday mood evaporated entirely when after the game the Yankees arrived in Detroit by train from Cleveland. They were told by club officials the devastating news that Lou Gehrig had died early on the evening of June 2. He was almost 38 years old. Despite his severe amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Gehrig had been serving faithfully on the New York City Parole Commission and continued to do so until 2 weeks before his death. That evening the Yankees were a shaken ball club.

  Before the bad news and still in Cleveland, Bobby Feller went against the Yankees that afternoon. He was the only pitcher to have won for the Indians in their last 10 games, and he won this day 7–5 to help his club move back into first place past the White Sox. Feller pitched sloppily against the Yankees, but until New York scored in the second inning, he had pitched 30 scoreless innings in a row. He already had 11 wins in the young season. DiMaggio singled and doubled against Feller to continue the streak, and for the first time a staff writer on the San Francisco Chronicle, DiMaggio’s hometown newspaper, took a look at the “DiMag-o-Log,” a Chronicle feature that charted the day-by-day doings of the DiMaggio brothers, and noticed that the log had recorded a hit for 19 straight games. DiMaggio’s single in the second began a Yankee rally that resulted in two runs, but Feller ran into most of his trouble against Tommy Henrich, who crashed a home run off him in the fourth and another in the eighth to drive in DiMaggio, who was on second after doubling 415 feet away off the left field bleacher wall. The Indians moved out in front to stay in the fifth when Marius Russo walked both Feller and Lou Boudreau with the bases loaded. In the sixth, Cleveland right fielder Jeff Heath hit his tenth home run of the year with Ken Keltner on third.

  Now that the White Sox were contesting Cleveland for the American League lead, it came as bitter news to manager Jimmy Dykes that his ace pitcher, John Rigney, faced induction into the armed services on June 20. The draft lottery had been kind to the major leagues so far in 1941, but what the call-up lacked in numbers it made up for in quality. The players the Army selected were top of the heap. Unlike the Tigers’ Hank Greenberg, however, Johnny Rigney tried everything in his power to finagle his way out of the service while the season was still in session. His saga for the next few weeks proved at once intense and comic. Bobby Feller had also recently received notice that his draft number indicated a possible late-August call-up, but Feller, pennant race or not, intended to honor it.

  The international news was hot on the wire services this June 2. A good deal happened, not all of it clear at the time. Another piece of the Hess puzzle fell into place when a news bulletin was picked up from Berlin: The Gestapo had arrested Professor Karl Haushofer, father of Hess’s friend Albrecht, for questioning in the deputy führer’s escapade. Why the Germans should suspect this revered old man, a Hitler “brain truster” and originator of the Lebensraum policy so crucial to the Nazis, seemed odd. The Hess mission in effect had been an attempt to put Haushofer’s theories of a natural Anglo-German alliance into practice. Hitler had figured out the theory—one to which he had once adhered and to which others, like Lindbergh in America, probably still did—and now he wanted if possible to round up its practitioners. Meanwhile, Hess still brooded as a prisoner at Mytchett Palace, where the British had bugged the walls in case he talked in his sleep.

  Hitler had other fish to fry this day, June 2, 1941. Germany’s führer and Italy’s duce met in the Alps at the Brenner Pass, a fitting summit for a summit. Hitler and Mussolini conferred for 5 hours, and Hitler raised every issue but the one of most interest to Mussolini, the possible expansion of the war eastward into Russia. Instead, Hitler fulminated about Hess, boasted about Crete, dismissed the sinking of the Bismarck, and belittled Roosevelt’s “unlimited emergency” speech. Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, tried to pry the Russian invasion plans out of the usually loose lipped Nazi minister, von Ribbentrop, but to no avail. Mussolini reportedly said to Ciano after the meeting, somewhat miffed at Hitler’s withholding of information, “I wouldn’t be at all sorry if Germany in her war with Russia got her feathers plucked.” The secret invasion plan was not all that secret among the Axis allies. Nor was it to the British, who already knew the plan’s intricate details from their Enigma decoding operation.

  On June 2 the British, having just put down a nagging rebellion in their mandate of Iraq, began to mass troops around Vichy-mandated Syria. Vichy’s territorial holdings were clearly the Achilles heel of the Axis-influenced operation throughout the world in 1941, and now that Crete and Iraq were settled for worse or better, crack British divisions in the middle east got ready to humiliate the troops of Vichy France. Since the British intelligence operations at Bletchley Park knew of Hitler’s invasion plan for Russia, they knew as well that the Vichy regime could count on no help from the Germans. Meanwhile, in London, Parliament derided Churchill about the Cretan fiasco. Fighting wars in a democracy posed accountability problems for a nation’s leaders then as now. Where were the island’s fortifications? Where was the vaunted British Air Force? Why weren’t the airstrips destroyed since the British seemed to be flying no planes of their own? Churchill remained mum but now realized that his command in the area, headed by General Archibald Wavell, had sandbagged him. The prime minister had plans for Wavell.

  The big news in America on June 2 was the announced retireme
nt of the Chief Justice of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes, the last “bewhiskered” judge, as a New York Herald Tribune article so thoughtfully pointed out. Another retirement of sorts took place on June 2 at the Bronx Zoo when the veteran favorite, Alice the elephant, fell to her knees and required a derrick, block, and tackle to lift her to her feet. Alice was now 44 years old. Over 30 years before, in 1909, she had entertained the folks by answering an old-fashioned crank telephone with her trunk, trumpeting her greetings into the receiver. Officials at the Bronx Zoo decided to test the fabled memory of elephants and set up the same stunt in Alice’s pen before the old girl rang off for good. But Alice just looked at the phone and lazily lifted a floppy ear. While Alice was on her last legs, so to speak, the Bronx Zoo turned toward youth by opening for the first time in its history a children’s zoo. Attendance was so great that the zoo had to bar adults from some of the special contraptions in the children’s section.

  In news from the entertainment world on June 2, the lovely Hollywood starlet with one of the sexiest overbites in the world, Gene Tierney, eloped with Italian aristocrat and bon vivant, Oleg Cassini. Gene’s father, an insurance broker in New York, was furious. Family squabbles of this sort had a way in the ’30s and early ’40s of titillating depression-era readers of the local society pages, a facet of American cultural life capitalized on in movies like It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story. In this instance Gene’s dad neither liked nor trusted Cassini, but there wasn’t much he could do about it except vent his spleen to the newspapers. After the war, the lovely Gene, adrift from Oleg, met a young Boston politician by the name of Jack Kennedy and the two had a brief though flaming liaison that was to launch the dashing member of Congress on what would be a lifelong attraction to the community of starlets.