by Madden, Bill
Steinbrenner grew up in Bay Village, Ohio, a suburb west of Cleveland along Lake Erie. His father, Henry, was by George’s own account “one tough German”—a strict disciplinarian and unyielding perfectionist. Henry Steinbrenner’s great-grandfather Philip J. Minch was a German immigrant who in the mid-1800s had settled in Lorain, Ohio, some 30 miles west of Cleveland along the shores of the lake, and founded Minch Transit, a shipping company. Minch’s daughter, Sophia, was college-educated at Oberlin. She became president of the company, expanding it and renaming it Kinsman Marine Transit, and relocated it as the first tenant in the John D. Rockefeller Building in downtown Cleveland. When Sophia died, the presidency of the company passed to her son George Steinbrenner II and then to his son, Henry.
Henry Steinbrenner had been a marine engineering honors scholar, a naval architect, and a world-class intercollegiate low hurdles champion at MIT who introduced his son to the hurdles at age 12. (Thomas Evans, George’s Williams College classmate and early general counsel with the Yankees, recalled a visit to the Steinbrenner horse farm in Ocala, Florida, in the early ’70s, where he saw the lonely figure of Steinbrenner’s oldest son, Hank, who was not yet a teenager, practicing hurdles on a track off in the distance.)
George Steinbrenner was intimidated by his father, a fact he never denied, but he credited the old man with instilling in him the perfectionist, will-to-win competitiveness that would come to define his management style as president of American Shipbuilding Co. and, later, as owner of the Yankees. “Always work as hard, or harder, than anyone who works for you,” Henry counseled him. Another lesson George took to heart: “It is always better to be the hammer than the nail.” The fact that George was so dismissive of and often even abusive toward his employees can probably be directly attributed to his failure ever to win his father’s approval. He once said: “I never really appreciated my dad or liked him growing up, but I appreciated him more as every day of my life went on, and now I can’t give enough credit to my dad. Anything I ever accomplished I owe to him. Whatever’s good in me is through him. Whatever’s bad is me.”
A close friend of Steinbrenner’s said, “George was permanently scarred by his father’s rigidity and lack of affection, and I have no doubt he’d have given up all his championship rings just to have gotten a hug and an ‘I love you, son’ from the old man. The sad part is he treated his own kids the same way.”
In his mother, Rita, Steinbrenner could at least find sympathy and understanding, if not outward displays of affection. “It was my mom,” he said, “who gave me compassion for the underdog and for people in need.”
As a successful businessman and sports entrepreneur, Steinbrenner’s acts of charity and philanthropy—the antithesis of the bully and tyrant that so characterized his public side—were far less publicized, most notably the hundreds of anonymous kids he put through college and the tens of millions of dollars he raised through his Silver Shield Foundation for the widows and families of New York City police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty. In Cleveland, he ran the March of Dimes program and was director of Cleveland Now and chairman of the Junior Olympic Games, taking it upon himself to fund the trip to California for Ohio’s participants in the Special Olympics. When the Call & Post, a newspaper that served the black community in Cleveland, sought sponsorship for its dinner honoring young black athletes in the city, George picked up the tab. Another time, he footed the bill to send a group of kids from Bay Village High to New York, putting them up at the Carlyle Hotel and arranging for tickets for them to a Broadway musical and the NIT basketball tournament.
The Steinbrenners were Christian Scientists, which meant they didn’t believe in medical science or, for the most part, doctors. (It was because of this, friends surmised, that Steinbrenner refused to get an operation on his knee in his later years when his doctors warned him that the torn cartilage causing him so much pain would eventually lead to arthritis. Others said, however, that he was merely fearful of anesthesia. In any case, the arthritic knee finally rendered him wheelchair-bound in 2008.) Steinbrenner’s childhood was one of grim regimentation—school, work, hurdles practice, piano lessons and precious little time left over for just plain recreation or social life. He often said the greatest pleasure of his youth was reading James Fenimore Cooper novels.
And, in fact, his work took up almost as much time as his schooling. Instead of an allowance, his father gave him chickens and told him to start his own business. “Earn your money through them,” Henry instructed. George established a thriving little neighborhood poultry business, in which he would rise early, clean the coops, feed the chickens, and then go about selling the eggs door-to-door. He called it the George Company, and when he went away to school, he sold it for $50 to his two sisters, Susan and Judy, who renamed it the S&J Company. The two girls had an equally suppressed childhood under the strict rule of their father. Only in their adult years could they look back on it with a sense of humor, recalling how Henry would stiffly greet their gentlemen callers in a suit and tie at the front door before retiring to his reading room, only to make himself pointedly heard 15 minutes later, calling out, “Rita, is that goddamned kid still here?”
When George was 14, he was sent to Culver Military Academy, in Culver, Indiana, which had been established in 1894 “for the purpose of preparing young men for the best colleges, scientific schools and businesses of America.” Culver’s alumni include Jack Eckerd, founder of the pharmaceutical firm; actors Hal Holbrook and Adolphe Menjou; film director Joshua Logan; U.S. senator Lowell Weicker; comedian Jonathan Winters; yachtsman and businessman Bill Koch; Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley; playwright Luther Davis; and Alexander, the Crown Prince of Yugoslavia. Through the years, Culver became the Steinbrenner family school as all of George’s four children—Hank, Hal, Jessica and Jennifer (a separate women’s academy was established in 1971)—attended, as have their children. Because of George’s donations, two buildings—the Steinbrenner Recreation Center and the Steinbrenner Center for Performing Arts—now bear the family name.
At Culver, Steinbrenner wasn’t the honor student his father had been at MIT, although he was always proud to point out the A+ he earned in military science. Considering his passion for the military—he often extolled General George Patton as the one person he admired most in life, and also professed to be a student of Attila the Hun—it is clear that Culver had a profound impact on him.
Steinbrenner ran hurdles for the Culver track team and played football and basketball, but not baseball. When asked about that after he bought the Yankees, Steinbrenner replied: “Baseball was always my favorite sport as a kid, growing up as I did with the Cleveland Indians and all those great teams they had with Bob Feller, Early Wynn, Larry Doby and Bob Lemon in the ’40s and ’50s. I only wish I was better at playing it, but I wasn’t. So I stuck to track, something I was good at, and football.”
Upon graduation from Culver in 1948, Steinbrenner matriculated to Williams College in Massachusetts. It wasn’t MIT—as Henry never failed to remind him—but in terms of educational prestige, it was regarded to be just a notch below the Ivy League schools.
At Williams, Steinbrenner majored in English, continued to run the hurdles and became fully engaged in the arts. In addition to playing in the college band for one year, he spent four years in the glee club and, with a classmate named George Kellogg, collaborated on a “dual pianos” act that they would perform before concerts and glee club recitals. Classmate Tom Evans recalls that “they were really quite good and were well received by the audiences.”
Jack Horner, who sang in the glee club with Steinbrenner, said of him: “He was a tenor and he was distinguished. The one remarkable thing I remember was when he was able to obtain for Williams the original Brahms Requiem for the four-hands piano from Baldwin-Wallace College. Something like that was priceless, and I don’t know how he was able to get it.”
What Horner, who was close enough with Steinbrenner to have double-da
ted with him a few times, remembered most about him was the fear George had for his father.
“He had to call his father after every track meet,” Horner recalled, “and inevitably every time his father would be ticked off because he didn’t do better. I thought his father was a nasty guy.”
In 1978, MIT built the $300,000 Henry G. Steinbrenner Stadium, a varsity game oval that serves as the venue for football, men’s lacrosse, soccer and track and field. It was a gift to the school from George in honor of his father.
Suzyn Waldman, the Yankees’ radio announcer, who grew up in Boston, recalled a Yankee road trip to the city in the early ’90s. She and Steinbrenner were walking around the MIT campus, taking in the sights. Waldman had wanted to show Steinbrenner the Kresge Auditorium, where she had performed in shows as a youngster, and the Yankees owner asked her if she had ever seen the athletic facility. As the two of them approached the stadium, Steinbrenner told Waldman how he had brought his father to the dedication, which he’d planned as a surprise for the old man.
“How thrilled and proud he must have been,” Waldman said.
“Actually,” said Steinbrenner, “all he said was, ‘That’s the only way you’d ever get in this school.’ ”
After college, Horner settled in Bay Village, where he couldn’t help but notice that the Steinbrenner family influence in the arts was everywhere—most notably the Huntington Playhouse. which George helped rebuild in 1970 after a fire with a $10,000 gift and a community fund-raiser in which the 240 seats were sold for $100 apiece. George bought the whole first row of 16. “My son played in the high school band,” Horner said, “in which all the tubas had been purchased by George.”
George Steinbrenner a real-life Professor Harold Hill! Who knew?
For whatever reason, Steinbrenner never made much of his musical prowess, even though his friends and family said playing the organ at home was one of his favorite forms of leisure. For the most part, his Yankees employees were unaware of this side of him. Eddie Layton, the longtime Yankee Stadium organist, was practicing in the solitude of an empty stadium on the day before the Yankees were to open a season when suddenly he felt a shove.
“Move over!” Steinbrenner ordered.
The startled Layton got up and made way for Steinbrenner to slip behind the organ.
“What’s this, George?” Layton said.
“This,” said Steinbrenner, “is how you play the organ! You go walk around the stadium and see how the sound is and then come back here.”
Layton began to walk around the stadium, first along the loge level and then to the upper deck, all the while listening in amazement to the Yankees owner’s riffs. Layton remembered being particularly taken aback when Steinbrenner launched into one of his own signature Yankee “rally” songs, Chopin’s “Tarentelle.” It was as if Steinbrenner was letting him know that, even at the organ, he was the Boss.
When Layton returned to the organ booth, Steinbrenner was grinning.
“Well, Eddie, what did you think?”
“You’re fired, George,” Layton shot back, and they both burst into laughter.
In addition to his studies, the glee club, the dual piano act with Kellogg and running the hurdles in both the indoor and outdoor track programs, Steinbrenner’s real passion, as he would later take pleasure in telling the media covering the Yankees, was sportswriting. He joined the Williams Record during his freshman year, and by the time he was a junior, he was co–sports editor, with his own column, Right from the Record.
Like Steinbrenner the bloviating baseball owner, Steinbrenner the neophyte sports columnist was not afraid to express his opinions or take swipes at his perceived enemies. He sprinkled his columns with phrases like “a strictly untitanic Colby team”; writing about rival Amherst’s top-30 football ranking in the Associated Press, he said it was “as much out of place as Dolly Madison at a Sunday milk punch party.”
Steinbrenner aimed the most brutal of his journalistic barbs at Amherst. In November 1951, he chided Amherst football coach John McLaughry for not allowing the varsity soccer team to participate in the Amherst football pep rallies. “I must admit, I find your arguments highly amusing, almost as I found your rating within the ‘Top 30’ teams in the Nation way back in early October,” Steinbrenner wrote under the headline AN OPEN LETTER TO COACH MCLAUGHRY AT AMHERST. He continued, “I must admit that I do not believe that any coach should ever speak out openly against the supporting at rallies of any other team but his own. . . . And as for your assertion that, ‘if we were over in England we would have to take a backseat to soccer’ I have only this to say: You might have found the going a little better in England than you did ‘here’ this season.”
But in what most surely was a precedent never repeated by Steinbrenner, three weeks later he penned an apology to McLaughry.
“Several matters on the agenda today,” Steinbrenner began his December 8 Right from the Record column, “but first an apology that is long overdue on my part. Several weeks ago, I published a letter to Coach John McLaughry of Amherst. Since that time, there have been many compliments and many criticisms on that particular piece of journalism. Though it violates the gospel of a newspaper writer to abandon his convictions after they are in ‘black and white’ I am afraid I must cast my lot with those who have criticized my letter as ‘cheesy’ and ‘totally unwarranted’ journalism.”
In his January 12, 1952, column, Steinbrenner criticized the selection of Princeton running back Dick Kazmaier as Male Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press. Though Kazmaier had won the Heisman Trophy in 1951 as the college football player of the year, Steinbrenner disparaged the AP sportswriters for overlooking pole vaulter Bob Richards, who’d become the second man in history to vault over 15 feet four times; Ben Hogan, who won his third Masters golf tournament that year; and Bob Feller, who won 21 games and pitched his third no-hitter for the Cleveland Indians. “I accuse the writers of the Associated Press of letting heavy publicizing and a degree of absurdity in building up of athletes to sweep them along to a decision of mediocrity,” he wrote. Then, once again invoking his pet metaphor, he concluded: “These gentlemen are way wrong—their choice as much out of place as Dolly Madison at a Sunday milk punch party.”
It’s just as well that Steinbrenner’s readership didn’t extend much beyond the Williams campus. As a principal booster with the National Football Foundation, Steinbrenner would see Kazmaier at the College Football Hall of Fame induction dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York every December. In a 2007 interview, Kazmaier told me he couldn’t remember ever talking to Steinbrenner at the dinner. Nor was he aware that the Yankees owner had dissed him many years ago in the pages of the Williams paper.
“I’m frankly a little surprised he would have written that,” Kazmaier said. “He hardly ever saw me play. I played against Williams only once, in 1950, and then I was only in about half the game, so George wouldn’t have had a whole lot to judge me on.”
I asked why he hadn’t played much in the game, and Kazmaier replied: “Well, we beat them 66–0, and I only played in the first half. I believe it was the worst beating ever given a Williams football team, which, come to think of it, might have been George’s motivation for writing what he did.”
In January 1952, Steinbrenner’s sportswriting career came to an end. In his final column he bade a fond adieu to his readers:
Now that it’s all about to come to an end, I’m finding it hard to decide just what to say to you readers—be you many or few. I know there are some among you who would just as soon I said nothing. To this group I can only say that even though you have criticized my writing, I still consider you among my more rabid readers. To those of you who have found my columns of any interest at all, I extend my sincere gratitude for your support—to both of you!
“That’s it,” he concluded, “and now with due respect to my most faithful critic Philsy Gregware—good luck to all good sports and ‘orchids to y’all.’ ”
No doubt Stein
brenner would have loved to defy ole Philsy and the rest of his critics, but he knew his father had not sent him off to Culver and then to Williams to be a sportswriter. The deal was to get a thorough, top-notch education and then come home to Cleveland and help Henry run Kinsman Marine. Henry had been preparing him for that during the summer months. In a 1981 interview with Marie Brenner of New York magazine, Steinbrenner recounted how he’d spent hours of his summer vacations crawling through the underdecks of ships, counting rivets and checking out what needed replacing in the filthy, close-quartered, stifling crannies.
Still, working full-time for the old man would wait a few more years. He graduated from Williams in June 1952—in the college yearbook he placed fifth in the voting for “Done Most for Williams” and second in “Shovels It Fastest”—and then, as the Korean conflict was coming to an end, he joined the Air Force and was assigned to Lockbourne Air Force Base in Columbus, Ohio, a two-hour drive from Cleveland. At Lockbourne, Steinbrenner was appointed aide to the commanding general and was assigned to oversee the base’s struggling athletic program. According to articles in the Columbus Citizen, Steinbrenner succeeded in revitalizing all the athletic teams at Lockbourne, in the process reducing what had been a growing number of AWOLs due to low morale. Even though he admittedly knew nothing about baseball—years later he would tell Harry Reasoner on 60 Minutes, “I just bought a good book and stayed one page ahead of the team”—Steinbrenner decided to coach the Lockbourne team, which played a pretty formidable schedule.