It might have been hard to tell from Williams’s .401 average, but he was actually right in terms of his performance during the earlier part of DiMaggio’s streak in contrast to its summer segment. DiMaggio would continue to blister the ball into and through July and raise his average as the thermometer rose. The two halves of DiMaggio’s streak tell the story. In springtime, from May 15 through June 17, he hit .364 and Williams hit .466. As the weather heated up, from June 18 through July 17, DiMaggio hit .444 and Williams hit .324.
The Yankees’ sixth win in a row put them three up over Cleveland. Lefty Gomez helped his cause in the wild fifth inning, when the Yanks scored six runs to go ahead 8–0, by singling in two after an embarrassing sequence of Red Sox errors and passed balls. DiMaggio almost lost his streak cap this day. A fan lunged for the cap and tore off in the direction of the exit, but Boston pitcher Mike Ryba and a security guard cornered the thief and returned the Yankee cap. Meanwhile, a friend of DiMaggio’s from Newark, Joe Ceres, heard talk in local taverns about a fan boasting that he had DiMaggio’s streak bat. With the instincts of a bloodhound, Ceres went to work.
Two preludes of a sort took place on July 2, one in Texas and another in New York. Franklin Roosevelt sent a congratulatory telegram to a gangling, drawling New Dealer, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had just won, so he thought, a special runoff election to the United States Senate. But the plurality young Lyndon had accumulated a few days before dwindled away as the experienced incumbent, Governor Pappy O’Daniel, garnered the recounted rural vote and edged ahead in the total count by 1,113. Roosevelt told his raw friend from Texas that “real” politicians do not lose by such slippery counts, leaving Johnson to draw what conclusions he would. The next time he ran for the Senate, in 1948, Johnson won an election in which over 1 million ballots were cast by a mere 87-vote margin. Either Johnson was extremely lucky or he took more than careful heed of Roosevelt’s counsel from early July 1941.
The other prelude, eventually more colorful than even Lyndon Baines Johnson, appeared as a note in the entertainment section of The New York Times: Commercial television would begin its first broadcast in the metropolitan area on July 2. Transmitters atop the Empire State Building were set to broadcast sponsored programs to 3,000 or 4,000 private receivers within a radius of 50 miles. Allen Du Mont Labs was rapidly manufacturing television sets to retail for $300 to $400 each. The sets came with a choice of three screen sizes. 8-, 10-, or 12-inch. Of course, World War II pulled the plug on home front television, and the medium that would change the cultural face of the nation had to wait a decade for its true commercial renaissance.
The Columbia Broadcasting System planned to begin with 15 hours of still shots of masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The National Broadcasting Company hoped to get into the picture more ambitiously with Bulova Watch paying $4 at 2:30 P.M. and $8 at 8 P.M. on July 2 to broadcast an on-screen video image of a clock. Sunoco Oil paid somewhat more for a Lowell Thomas evening news broadcast, and Lever Brothers and Procter & Gamble sponsored two evening shows, Uncle Jim’s Question Bee and Truth or Consequences. NBC later planned to televise a Philly-Dodger game from Ebbets Field, an undertaking that would prove pretty much a disaster, with reception murky and the stationary cameras unable to follow the ball, the fielders, or the runners.
Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane closed its immensely successful first run at the RKO Palace in New York on July 2, and Frank Buck’s Jungle Cavalcade moved into the theater. Two other movies opened in New York and around the country on July 2: Clark Gable and Rosalind Russell’s They Met in Bombay, and the more subtle and moving Howard Hawks film, Sergeant York, with Gary Cooper. The advertising blitz for Sergeant York was extraordinary. Earlier in the spring the distributors of That Hamilton Lady, with Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh, had displayed an original Gainsborough portrait of Lady Hamilton in the lobby of Radio City Music Hall, shipping it all the way from England and insuring it for half a million dollars. But Sergeant York produced for its ad campaign a portrait that dwarfed Gainsborough’s Lady Hamilton. The largest sign ever constructed for a movie went up on Broadway, fully four stories high with nearly 15,000 neon bulbs and half a million feet of wiring, depicting Cooper as the Tennessee hillbilly topped off by the huge letters “Y-O-R-K.”
Citizen Kane, among many other things, had touched on the power of the media in America to shape attitudes toward national events and, more important, toward international events in regard to war—the Spanish-American War of 1898 served to make the general point. Sergeant York reversed one of the perspectives of the Orson Welles masterpiece and showed the way opinion formed as a matter of conscience from the inside out. The time was World War I, and the story involved a backwoods dirt farmer, Alvin C. York, a conscientious objector from Three Forks of the Wolf near the Cumberland River in Tennessee. A growing sense of obligation worked on a pacifist conscience, en route to York’s winning the Congressional Medal of Honor for an exploit in France on October 6, 1918, in which he killed a score of Germans and arrested over a hundred others single-handedly.
The interventionist theme of Sergeant York was not lost on the summertime audience of 1941. York himself, now district director of the Selective Service System in his home area, was on hand for the opening of the film, along with one of the stronger voices in support of Roosevelt’s prewar policies, Wendell Willkie, the very man the President had run against in 1940. Cooper was also on hand for the premiere, quietly negotiating at the time for the role of Lou Gehrig in the upcoming Pride of the Yankees. Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent Cooper a congratulatory telegram on his performance in Sergeant York, and when the film opened the next week in Washington, D.C., Roosevelt himself was at the premiere. The quiet, dignified, and finally devastating image of American heroism on the screen, a role that won Cooper the Academy Award, was too pertinent for the President to resist.
A festive and seemingly minor story that had begun a few days before took a sour turn this day, symptomatic of a strain in this country from its origins. The National Barber Shop Quartet finals were held on July 2 in St. Louis, but officials disallowed the winning entry from the state of New York, the Grand Central Red Caps, because the four crooners were black. Al Smith, former governor of New York and the most famous member of the National Barber Shop Quartet Organization, resigned his membership in protest over this mean-spirited incident. The commissioner of city parks, Robert Moses, under whose auspices New York City’s winners had traveled to St. Louis, fumed that New York would never again participate in such a travesty. In a still heavily segregated land, the problem had less to do with crooners in St. Louis than with racial inequality on a national scale.
With all the activity in the area of national defense in 1941, whether in the draft army or in the armament industries, Roosevelt began to worry seriously about America’s discriminatory racial customs and practices. During the days of DiMaggio’s streak he issued a series of policy proclamations to counter the more obvious and more telling civil rights violations that could hamper the productive and defensive capacities of the country. There were instances of defense workers refusing to share shifts with black employees. Roosevelt oiled the machinery in the Justice Department to handle such matters.
Though none of Roosevelt’s concerns had to do with integrating baseball in 1941, some of the shrewder major league executives, sensing a change down the line, if not in the deeper veins of the land’s racial prejudices at least in the legal ramifications of barring black talent, began to think about shaping custom into new opportunity. One executive in particular, Branch Rickey, then of the Cardinals and later of the Dodgers, thought harder than anyone else. Rickey, who by adjusting his travel schedule earlier in the spring had set a personal (and perhaps world) record of viewing 11 complete ball games within a 2-day span, was always on the lookout for new talent. He would be the first to draw on the black athlete as a baseball resource after the war.
GAME 46: July 5
As DiMaggio surged be
yond Keeler’s record, the hitting streak entered a less intense though no less wondrous phase. Awe replaced anticipation, and the issue was no longer whether DiMaggio would challenge a preexisting record each day but how often he would set a new one. The continuing ballyhoo, inspired by lead stories in newspapers, familiar radio bulletins, and hyperactive public relations employees throughout the American League corridor, made the streak into a truly national resource. The Yankees had a couple of more games at home before heading west, and the franchises fortunate enough to be en route intended to put fans in their seats and money in their purses on the strength of the DiMaggio phenomenon and the great drawing power of the Yankees. In New York, only rain and the postponement of a big July 4 doubleheader at the Stadium honoring the memory of Lou Gehrig put a damper on the streak’s newest phase.
DiMaggio earned a brief holiday respite from the pressure as President Roosevelt took over the spotlight on Independence Day, July 4, 1941. With the Germans temporarily bogged down at Berezina near the Dnieper River in their push toward Smolensk about 300 miles from Moscow, and with the British mopping up in Syria and Lebanon in the other major theater of World War II, Roosevelt addressed millions via radio and urged all citizens of all nations to work for human freedom everywhere. The President insisted that appeasement of the Nazis represented a greater threat than arming to face them down, a “deeper sabotage,” as he put it. His remarks were clearly aimed at figures such as Lindbergh, now parading through the country hinting at the possible virtues of a German peace alignment. For Roosevelt, the famous aviator had become more than a nuisance during the weeks of DiMaggio’s streak—he had become the bane of a forming western alliance. And before DiMaggio’s streak ran its course the President would unleash his personal hound dog, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, on Lindbergh. Ickes’s acid tongue could take anyone’s measure, and in 2 weeks he would have Lindbergh writhing.
The holiday deluge brought relief from the relentless heat wave in New York and the rest of the east, not only forcing postponement of the memorial doubleheader planned for Gehrig but also forcing the Dodgers to scratch a big doubleheader at Ebbets Field. The Dodgers had reason to celebrate anyway when the Cubs took two from the Cardinals on Independence Day. Brooklyn moved a full game in front simply by watching Chicago’s fireworks from afar.
During the lull in New York and with all the recent fuss over Joe DiMaggio, it occurred to a reporter for Baseball magazine to ask a San Francisco Sicilian immigrant fisherman, Giuseppe DiMaggio of North Beach, which of his sons was the best ballplayer. The elder Mr. DiMaggio did not hesitate. “Joe.” “Why is that?” the reporter asked. “Because he makes the most money.” If Joe DiMaggio’s father judged the cause by the effect, the Hillerich and Bradsby Company judged the effect by the cause. They took out a full-page ad in the current edition of the Sporting News that week complimenting DiMaggio on breaking Sisler’s record with a Louisville Slugger. The company would take out another the next week complimenting him again on breaking Keeler’s record.
With the Yankees, DiMaggio, and the streak postponed by rain, the Cleveland Indians edged back into the thick of things with a doubleheader win over the Browns. Their first game win was marked by an unusual play. In the ninth inning Jeff Heath, heavily muscled but fleet on the bases, was standing on third with two out. The Browns’ third baseman, Harland Clift, told pitcher Jack Kramer to get the hitter, Hal Trosky, and forget about Heath. Clift then moved away off the line at third for the left-handed-hitting Trosky. Kramer looked at Heath’s long lead and appealed to Clift almost plaintively to hold him a little closer. “Don’t worry,” said Clift, “he ain’t goin’ nowhere.” As Kramer began to wind up, Heath faked a dash for home, and Clift calmed Kramer on the next pitch: “Just forget him, get Trosky.” Kramer looked back at the plate, wound up slowly, and Heath, already about 30 feet down the line, broke for home. The big fellow slid across the plate an instant before Kramer’s hurried toss arrived. It must have been a pleasure for Clift and Kramer to chat about their mutual interests in the clubhouse after the game.
When the Yankees retook the home field on July 5, they mauled the visiting Philadelphia A’s 10–5. Before the day at the Stadium was over, the Yankees had blasted five home runs. Connie Mack of the A’s began managing in the days when the quick hook for starting pitchers didn’t exist, and in a nostalgic mood he left poor right-hander Phil Marchildon on the mound the entire game to take whatever the Yankees dished out. DiMaggio served up the hors d’oeuvres with a mighty first-inning home run to extend the hitting streak to 46; Sturm and Rolfe followed with solo home runs, and Charlie Keller hit two. Only Dick Siebert’s two home runs for the A’s made the day respectable. The Yankees had now won 7 in a row, 11 of their last 12, and 21 of 25 to sustain a building lead in the American League pennant race.
Prior to the game DiMaggio got a fine surprise. His acquaintance and admirer James Ceres had been doing some sleuthing for the past several days in Newark and managed to coax the bat out of the hands of its pilferer with the lure of reward money. A courier showed up at the Stadium with the package. DiMaggio’s relief was such that he donated the bat he used to break Wee Willie Keeler’s record to a USO support raffle at a San Francisco Seals ball game in his hometown. At a quarter a shot, the bat collected $1,678, DiMaggio’s first direct contribution to the war effort. Former Yankee Tony Lazzeri, who had driven Joe DiMaggio to his first major league spring training back in 1936, was then playing for the Seals in the twilight of his long career. On the day DiMaggio’s bat was raffled, Lazzeri hit one out of the park for San Francisco. Time seemed to be going backward in this small generational tribute.
Chicago White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes, whose playing days had come to an end on the first game of DiMaggio’s streak, reappeared in the baseball news with a flourish on July 5. He protested to umpire Steve Basil that Cleveland’s bull pen corps had interfered with right fielder Taffy Wright’s attempt to pick off a foul fly during his team’s 5–3 loss to the Indians. Dykes’s tantrum was so severe that even he marveled at his resourceful and colorful use of the English tongue: “All I called him was a liar and he threw me out for that. Of course after he had given me the bounce I really opened up with some choice language.” The tirade not only appalled the umps, but according to the league office, Dykes’s foul language in fair territory upset some of the fairer fans sitting in foul territory. Dykes was suspended indefinitely, with American League president William Harridge’s explanation striking the decorous, slightly paternal tone characteristic of life in the ’40s and baseball in particular: “Dykes’s tactics in delaying our games, attempting to bulldoze and browbeat the umpires while filing protests, which have no basis in fact nor justification in the rules, have become very offensive not only to the spectators in other cities throughout the circuit but to our entire organization.”
Another story that touched on the decorum of the early ’40s hit the national news this day. Just before the Fourth of July holiday, the U.S. Army completed an extensive series of war games near a military complex in Memphis, Tennessee. Relaxing from the effects of several grueling days, a company of soldiers from the 110th Quartermaster Regiment at Camp Robinson spotted two young women in golfing shorts playing with two more mature gentlemen on a Memphis course abutting the Army campgrounds on the Tennessee-Arkansas border. They greeted the ladies with good-natured but clearly libidinous glee: “Yoo-hoo” was the witticism of choice. What the soldiers didn’t know was that one of the older gentlemen, wearing civvies on the golf course, was their commanding officer, Lieutenant General Ben Lear. Lear was a tough old nut, and when he heard the appreciative chorus for the young ladies, he bagged his mashie and ordered a 15-mile march in full battle regalia for the offenders. They could run up and down Highway 70 to cool their spirits.
Lear suspected what was probably true: It wasn’t so much the soldiers’ libido that was at issue as the mockery directed at the older men, an irrepressible comic situation going all the way back to a
ncient Greece. The come-hither cheers to ladies Lear could bear; the insult to him was actionable. If ever there was a hoot and a holler that the 110th wished it could have back, “yoo-hoo” was it. There would be hell to pay for the soldiers, but after the story got out, several members of the United States Congress, prodded by the mother of one of the disciplined lads, were furious at Lear’s reaction and let him know about it. The “yoo-hoo” incident shortly came to symbolize the spirit of the entire draft army, and there were many in a land readying for war who were prepared to capitalize on that spirit.
The holiday accident toll included nearly 600 fatalities, mostly on the nation’s highways, but there was a near accident in San Diego, California, that involved two famous Hollywood names. Pat O’Brien invited his good friend Ronald Reagan for a family picnic at his beachside home in San Diego, and the two actors were swimming in the Pacific when O’Brien’s small children, 6-year-old Mavoureen and 5-year-old Shawn, got caught in the pull of an ocean current caused by a recess in the sea floor. O’Brien and a lifeguard swam out immediately to the flailing kids for the rescue, while former lifeguard Ronald Reagan surged in from farther beyond the breakwaters, arriving too late to help but just in time to console. There’s a lesson here somewhere.
During the Fourth of July holiday festivities Billy Conn snuck off to marry his young sweetheart, Mary Louise Smith, a love affair that had caused some consternation before the brilliant Joe Louis fight a few weeks earlier. Mary Louise’s father, a former major league ballplayer, at last report had threatened to punch Conn out if he refused to leave his daughter alone. Reporters tracked the newly weds down as Billy and wife were about to skip to Hollywood, where the fighter had a bit part in a movie, The Pittsburgh Kid. When asked whether he had told Mr. Smith about the marriage, Billy gave the questioner his new father-in-law’s phone number and said, “Here, you tell him.”
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