GeoCities.us
» Colosseum » Track|
GeoCities.us
» Colosseum » Track |
Get your FREE home page! |
 |
|
My name is Salvatore Benedetto. Everybody calls me Sal. I am 79 years old. My grandson Michael is
typing this for me on his computer while I talk, so if there are mistakes they are his. (Grandpa
that's not fair. — M.)
I was born in 1920 in North Beach, in San Francisco, on the hill above the wharf. My father fished for crab out of Fisherman's Wharf, same as Joe's father. There were a lot of us like that. Joe was six years older than me, so he was one of the big boys. I never knew him. I want to say that right away, because a lot of old men in North Beach say they knew Joe DiMaggio. I didn't. I saw him. That's all. But I saw him. |
|
1933. The Seals.
When I was thirteen, Joe was eighteen and playing for the San Francisco Seals in the Pacific Coast League. That summer he got a hit in sixty-one games in a row. Sixty-one! The whole city went crazy. My uncle Carmine took me and my brother to Seals Stadium on the streetcar, and we sat way up, and Joe came up and hit a line drive so hard I heard it from where I was sitting. I remember that sound better than I remember my own wedding. (Don't tell your grandmother. — S.B.) In 1936 he went to the Yankees in New York. We all followed him in the papers after that like he was our cousin. |
|
1941. The Streak.
I was twenty-one and working at the cannery. It started on May 15, against the White Sox, a single, nothing special. Then he got a hit the next day, and the next day, and by June the whole country was watching the box scores. Every morning the fellows at the cannery would ask, did he get one? And he always did. Fifty-six games in a row. Nobody has come close since, and I will tell you something, nobody will. It ended July 17 in Cleveland. Their third baseman, Ken Keltner, made two beautiful plays behind the bag, backhanded, and threw him out both times. I heard it on the radio. I was sorry, but it was fair. The next day Joe started a new streak and hit in sixteen more. That December came Pearl Harbor. In 1942 I went into the Navy. Joe went into the Army Air Forces the year after, and gave up three seasons, 1943, 1944 and 1945, in the prime of his life. People forget that. |
| HIS NUMBERS | |
| Seasons with the Yankees | 13 (1936–1951) |
| World Series won | 9 |
| All-Star Games | 13 (every year he played) |
| Most Valuable Player | 3 (1939, 1941, 1947) |
| Batting average | .325 |
| Home runs | 361 |
| Runs batted in | 1,537 |
| Strikeouts | 369 (only eight more than his home runs) |
| Hall of Fame | 1955 |
| Number | 5, retired by the Yankees |
|
The way he played
Young people ask me, Grandpa, was he the best? I tell them I don't know about the best. There were great hitters and there were great fielders. But I never saw a man who made it look so easy. He never dove. He never had to. He was already there when the ball came down. He ran the bases like he was walking to church. He didn't yell, he didn't show anybody up, he didn't make excuses. He did his job every day, and he did it beautifully, and then he went home. Two of his brothers played in the big leagues too, Vince and Dom. Dom played for the Red Sox, which we forgave him for. All three of them played center field. Think of that, three brothers from one fisherman's house on the hill. |
|
After baseball
He married Marilyn Monroe in January 1954 at City Hall here in San Francisco. Half of North Beach went down there to look. It did not last the year. But when she died in 1962, he sent roses to her grave, three times a week, for twenty years, and he never said one word about her to the newspapers for the rest of his life. You can say what you want about a man. That is a gentleman. My daughter's generation knew him as the man in the coffee-maker commercials on TV. Michael's generation knows him from the Simon and Garfunkel song that asks where he went. Everybody had their own Joe. In his later years he raised money for a children's hospital in Florida, and they named it after him. |
|
March 1999
He had been sick since the fall. He died at his home in Hollywood, Florida, on March 8, a Monday, early in the morning. He was 84. They brought him home to North Beach. The funeral was on Thursday, March 11, at Saints Peter and Paul, on Washington Square, the same church where he married his first wife in 1939. It was private, family only, which is how he wanted it. So the rest of us stood outside, across the street in the square, hundreds of us, old men mostly, with our hats off. Nobody pushed. Nobody made noise. When the hearse pulled away for Colma, an old fellow next to me that I went to grammar school with started to clap, very slowly, and then we all did, all the way down the block. In April the Yankees dedicated a monument to him at the Stadium. Michael printed out the story from the Internet for me and I have it on the refrigerator. |
|
That's all I have to say. I'm an old barber. I cut hair on Columbus Avenue for forty-one years,
and I talked about Joe DiMaggio for most of them. My customers can tell you. Now Michael says
people all over the world can read it. Madonna mia. What a thing.
Riposa in pace, Joe. You made the boys on the hill proud. — Sal Benedetto |
