by Marty Appel
The story Munson didn’t tell is how his childhood had in fact prepared him for the Bronx Zoo. I see him now walking through the tensions of the Munson home and saying, in his own way, “I’m just happy to be here.”
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Thurman Lee Munson was born on June 7, 1947, in Akron, Ohio, the tire and rubber capital of the United States.
He was the youngest of four children. Darla, the oldest, was born in 1941, and Janice came along eleven months later. Duane, the oldest son, was born fourteen months after Janice. After those three children in twenty-five months, there was a four-year gap between Duane and Thurman.
When Thurman was four, the Munsons moved as tenants to a farm in Randolph, a half hour east. When he was eight, they moved to the city of Canton, a half hour south. When Thurman was in second grade, the family moved to 2015 Frazer Avenue NW, between Nineteenth and Twenty-first streets. Canton, the state’s eighth largest city, would always remain Thurman’s hometown, even after fame and fortune would come his way. He was comfortable and well respected there, partly from his Yankee fame but also from his schoolboy fame, when he was one of the best athletes the town would ever see.
The Frazer Avenue home was a modest two-story home (plus an attic) with a gable roof and bevel siding, and a homey, brick-bordered front porch. There was a side entrance, and about thirty feet of front lawn along the modestly trafficked street. The houses on the block were set close to one another, and represented a comfortable standard of living for a working-class family.
“We moved around quite a bit,” Duane Munson recalls. “Thurm was probably too young to remember much of those years, and sometimes they’re pretty vague on me too. We were very active kids and got into our share of trouble, but nothing very serious. When Dad did find out that we were bad, he let us know it with his leather belt.
“We lived on Ido Avenue in Akron, and that would have been where Thurm was born. I vaguely remember my grandfather and my mother having polio or having had polio, but beyond that, Akron is a blur.”
“When I finished my chores, I’d play ball mostly,” said Thurman. “I loved to play and I’d come home at night where my collie, Fritzy, was waiting for me.
“I started playing as a kid and I was ‘littler’ than most. This may sound corny, but I remember seeing a lot of horses back in Ohio and baseball reminded me of a stallion just running free. There was a freedom to the game. No matter what your problems were and what you had on your mind, when you played baseball you forgot about it.”
Denton T. “Cy” Young had gotten his nickname in Canton, when his warm-up throws against a fence (location long lost to history) prompted onlookers to think he was throwing like “a cyclone.”
William McKinley, the nation’s twenty-fifth president, was considered to be from Canton. He was certainly the most illustrious historical figure from that town (unless you count rocker Marilyn Manson), and as he was victim of an assassin’s bullet, his memorial service was the biggest event the city had ever hosted. He was actually born in Niles, sixty-five miles northeast, and moved to Canton when he was twenty-six but, like Munson, he is associated with the town, birthplace notwithstanding. Like Munson, he is buried there.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame is located there, with the town coming alive each summer for the annual induction ceremony and Hall of Fame game. The American Professional Football Association, a forerunner of the NFL, was founded there in 1920. The Canton Bulldogs were an early powerhouse, and the great Jim Thorpe played for them.
There aren’t many major league baseball players from Akron or Canton, but if you were raised in that northern Ohio region, sixty miles south of Cleveland, you had a bond, a commonality, an understanding of the sort of working-class, “tough it out” attitude that the people shared. It was a place where you had to speak up to correct an injustice or you’d be left behind.
Bill White, the former player, broadcaster, and National League president, although born in Florida, considered himself an Ohio guy. He lived in Warren and went to Warren Harding High School and then to Hiram College near Cleveland. Although older than Munson, and African-American, he and Munson understood the culture and understood each other. White was a Yankee broadcaster throughout Munson’s career, and the two had a strong mutual respect.
“I think there is something about growing up in that industrial valley between, say, Steubenville and Cleveland, that just toughens you,” White says. “We were all kids from the wrong side of the tracks, or at least no better than the middle. You had to fight for what you wanted; it made you tougher, maybe matured you a little quicker.
“If you were an athlete, you probably played all three sports, and that kept you disciplined and in training almost all year. And you played without an ego. You wouldn’t find kids from this area developing ‘style’ on the field or on the court. You went out and played hard, and you could handle things when they went wrong. When the game was over, you shook hands, and you had a ‘we’ll get you next year’ attitude. And you moved on. And that was the background Thurman and I came from.
“I once said on the air that he was the best clutch hitter in the game,” White continues. “Later on he heard about it and called me over to his locker and thanked me. I told him he didn’t have to thank me, it was true. If he was horseshit I would have said that too! He laughed, because we understood each other. We were both Buckeyes. There is an honesty to life there.”
Thurman’s father, Darrell Vernon Munson, a tough World War II veteran who said he was “in heavy equipment with the Marines in the Pacific,” was a long-distance truck driver who spoke his mind and wound up in a lot of arguments with his employers over the years. He’d sometimes quit, sometimes get fired, but he knew the drill, and knew how to get another job right away. Sometimes the same people would hire him back.
“He couldn’t get along with people,” says Thurman’s oldest sister, Darla. “He was always getting fired or laid off.” He was good at what he did, temper aside. Driving trucks was perhaps the best career for him, because it didn’t require a lot of human contact and thus minimized his chances of conflict during the week.
“He wasn’t a drinker,” his children agree. He could have a temper, and it wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t fueled by alcohol. He’d have an occasional beer; that was all.
“He was friendly enough in the sense of inviting our friends in,” recalls Duane. “Sometimes.”
In the autobiography, Thurman said, “When Dad was around, everyone in the house, including Mom, was intimidated. It seemed as though her chief responsibility was to keep us out of trouble so that Dad wouldn’t get mad at us.”
That understated the issue.
“I hate to say it, but Mom was a bit of a snitch,” sighs Darla, a soft smile poking fun at the childhood word. “She’d go and pick up Dad wherever he’d parked the truck. And on the drive home, she’d be like, ‘This one didn’t do his chores, this one didn’t make her bed, this one didn’t do this, didn’t do that,’ and so he’d come home after a week away and just start hitting us. A fist across the head. Scary. He’d throw things too, if that was convenient. And I remember Mom off to the side crying and saying, ‘Stop! Enough!’”
Surely, the children were looking for more after a week’s absence.
Duane joined the Air Force as Thurman was starting high school, leaving Thurm with no real family cheering section during his high school games, and removing his big brother from the household. His sisters had long ago left, as soon as they were of age. So in high school, it was pretty much just Thurman and his mom during the week.
“Thurm and I spent a lot of time playing Wiffle ball and we were both pretty good at it,” adds Duane, who would go on to a career in government service, first with the National Security Agency and later with the Treasury Department as a sky marshal. He’d get a master’s degree from the University of Maryland after the Air Force.
“I was a Yankee fan then as I am still today, and I always played as the Yankee lineup and Thurm pl
ayed as the Indians’ lineup. I remember him doing Rocky Colavito’s famous stretches before he hit, and then pointing the bat at the pitcher. We had all the batting stances down pat and we could both switch-hit to make it authentic. We could imitate the pitching motions too. I was a huge Yankee fan starting in the mid-fifties, and Thurm was an Indians fan like our dad was. I think Thurm followed his lead on that.
“We saved baseball cards, but Mom threw them out, like all mothers eventually did.
“He always played baseball, basketball, and football, and we always played with kids my age or older, but rarely with any kids as young as Thurm, who was four years younger than me. I think that’s where he got his skill from. He’d play with older kids and get knocked around in the process. He wasn’t given any slack because he was younger or because he was my brother. By the time he got to high school, he was toughened up more than most kids his age.
“And what an athlete he was! Never mind that he was the youngest. He just made everything look so easy. He was a great pool player in college. He was a great golfer—that may have been his best sport. And he had such gifts for baseball that I think he may actually have underachieved in that game. Sometimes I think he didn’t take it as seriously as people thought he did. I think he may have just done enough to make his money and get by.
“With Dad being a long-distance trucker, he wanted us to be at home a lot when he was off, especially during the weekends. But we got to play a lot and he liked the kids we played with, so it wasn’t all that hard getting permission to go out and play. We always had to ask, though. We even took turns asking because we didn’t know what the response was going to be. Dad could be mean. When he had a long-distance run, he would leave on a Sunday, a lot of the time in midmorning, so he could make Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or some other place the next morning. We couldn’t wait for him to leave so we could go play. And we knew Mom was a softie, so she would say yes most every time.
“Dad had a very, very strict eleven p.m. curfew, and would lock the door at 11:01. I can still hear Mom inside yelling, ‘Let him in, let him in!’ but he would have none of it. There were nights when Thurman or I would sleep under newspapers in the car.
“During the summers, we’d spend most days playing baseball and softball or going to Stadium Park to get crawfish. Stadium Park is adjacent to where the Pro Football Hall of Fame is now. We rode our bikes everywhere. We had them stripped down to the bare frame and I was always surprised that Dad didn’t say something about it and whip up on us in the process, but he didn’t.
“Thurm was a star in high school in three sports and that probably helped to dilute the strictness and irrational behavior that Dad exhibited sometimes. I’m not sure what Thurm thought of Dad after he left home. He never wanted to talk about it but he knew I was the only family member that kept in touch with Dad, and I was really the only one of us kids that Dad kept in touch with.”
By “us kids,” Duane includes his sisters Janice and Darla, both of whom had their issues with family life in the Munson household.
“I try to get over things, but it hasn’t been easy,” says Darla. “I don’t remember anything good about my childhood.”
In 1987, Diana Munson told Sports Illustrated’s Armen Keteyian, “Thurman was basically an insecure person. It stems from his childhood. He had a tough one. His dad … was a real tough cookie. He was real hard. So Thurman had some real problems growing up, and I think he kept a lot of his insecurities inside. He had the kind of personality that he never wanted to talk about them, never wanted to show the hurt. He developed an exterior that was gruff, or whatever people wanted to call it.”
“I used to take all my kids home from practice at one time or another,” recalled Thurman’s high school baseball coach, Don Eddins. “All except Thurman. It was almost as if he was ashamed of his house. And I guess Thurman was a very proud person and that house certainly wasn’t much of a home. And by that I don’t mean what the outside of the house looked like.”
Thurman was the baby, so he had it easier than the older three. Both Duane and Darla agree on that much.
“He was my pet,” Ruth Myrna Smylie Munson told the Canton Repository from her room in the senior citizens complex in Canton where she lived out her later years. This was Thurman’s mother. She had suffered a stroke while in her fifties (she would eventually suffer five strokes). Thurman’s father, Darrell, took her to Florida after the first, but then had had enough of caring for her and put her alone on a bus back to Canton, telling his children, “I’m done, you deal with her.” The children placed her in a nursing home. Darrell Munson then took off for Arizona and a new life, seldom to be heard from again.
“Mom’s mother died at eighteen,” Darla says. “Her father, Howard, had trucks that Darrell drove for him. That’s how he met Ruth. Howard remarried a woman named Mary. They despised my father; hence there was not much of a relationship with our only living grandparent, who died when I was about nine.”
In 1977 Ruth was transferred to the senior citizens home by Janice, who furnished her room with a queen-size bed, a TV, portable shelving, a table, and three chairs. Among her possessions was a copy of Thurman’s autobiography, published in 1978, signed “To my mother, with much love forever, Thurman Munson.”
After Thurman’s death, the Repository wrote, “Many in Munson’s position have bought their parents castles.”
“Sadly,” says Darla, “Thurman rarely went to see her—maybe two or three times a year.”
But Ruth said, “I’m happy with this place. All I ever wanted from my children was the chance to see them and the chance to see them turn out well. Anyway, I wouldn’t know what to do with a big place.”
Ruth “never missed a television game involving the Yankees,” wrote the Repository. “Sometimes after the games her son would telephone her. ‘I can hear him saying how much he loved me when he called,’ said Mrs. Munson. ‘He always said, “Mom, I love you.”’”
“She was so giving, such a matriarch,” says Thurman’s childhood friend Jerome Pruett of Ruth Munson. “Everyone admired her. But his father, oh he was tough. I remember there was this school dance and you had to have a sports jacket to go, but Thurman didn’t have one. And his father wouldn’t get one for him. Thurman was hurting from that.”
In truth, Darrell Munson had a challenging upbringing himself, which may account partially for the spartan—almost merciless—attitude he would exhibit toward Thurman even later in life. Sometimes you have to go back a generation to understand what makes us who we are. People drew conclusions about Darrell being difficult without knowledge of his own troubled childhood. It began with his being moved into foster care at a young age. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother, Leola, ran off with another man. Soon after, she was dead. She might have been murdered or might have committed suicide; no one in the family is sure.
Darrell’s father died when Darla, the eldest child, was two months old.
Still, the relationship between Darrell and Thurman was always, at best, strained.
Corky Simpson, writing for the Tucson Citizen, caught up with Darrell two months after Thurman’s death, when he was working as a parking lot attendant in the Arizona town. He was sixty-four then, no longer driving trucks, far removed from his family, and he gave what turned out to be a startling interview:
“Thurman was a tremendous athlete, could do anything he tried,” recalled Darrell. “But he was not the best catcher I ever saw. He had two very pronounced weaknesses. I must have worked with him a thousand hours, but he’d invariably throw the ball wild to second base.
“He could throw a hundred in a row perfectly, then—all of a sudden—one would go sailing on him. The other weakness was that he couldn’t field a short bounce in front of him. I worked on that too, but he never overcame it.
“One time, when he was with Binghamton, before he went up to the Yanks, I went to see him play against Elmira. Thurman had two home runs and went 5-for-5 that day and after the game
I walked up to him and said, ‘Thurman, you were shitty.’ It made him mad.
“I told him that because he made two wild throws and his team got beat. It made me furious. I figured this was an unpardonable mistake.
“You can do everything great on offense but if you lose a game on defense, well, that’s something I can’t tolerate.
“And you couldn’t tell Thurman anything. He was pampered and babied ’til the cows came home by his mother. He thought he was so great he didn’t need anybody.
“He figured he had a market on brains, too, but he didn’t. Not outside sports.
“We were alienated a long time. He had nothing to do with me, his brother and one sister (Darla Jean). His other sister (Janice Marie) was sort of in the movement with Thurman and his wife, Diane.
“Thurman’s trouble was he had too much natural ability. Some people, like myself, have to struggle to be good at something. It came natural to Thurman.
“He was a tremendous athlete—shot in the low 70s as a golfer, won a state handball championship in Ohio, was an all-city, all-county and all-state football player. Thirty-one football coaches came to our house recruiting him before he took a baseball scholarship to Kent State.
“I wanted him to play football, but he wouldn’t do it. He went to Kent State on a baseball scholarship and the whole reason was to be near his sweetheart… not to be near his family.
“Thurman was an All-American baseball player and a varsity basketball player at Kent State. He never finished; he signed with the Yankees. And he wasn’t going to sign if I had anything to do with it, but Gene Woodling and Lee MacPhail [of the Yankees] told him I had to be involved.