[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 41 (Tuesday, March 16, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2783-S2785]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[[Page S2783]]
RECOGNIZING AND HONORING JOE DiMAGGIO
Mr. COCHRAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate
proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 63, introduced
earlier today by Senators Moynihan, Lott, and others.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The clerk
will report.
The bill clerk read as follows:.
A resolution (S. Res. 63) recognizing and honoring Joe
DiMaggio.
The Senate proceeded to consider the resolution.
Mr. MOYNIHAN. ``Joe, Joe DiMaggio, we want you on our side!'' Well,
he is on the other side now, but stays with us in our memories.
Mine are, well, special to me. It would be in 1938 or 1939 in
Manhattan. The Depression lingered. Life was, well, life. But there was
even so somebody who made a great difference and that was Lou Gehrig of
the New York Yankees. I admired him as no other man. Read of him each
day, or so it seemed, in the Daily News. And yet I had never seen him
play. One summer day my mother somehow found the needful sixty cents.
Fifty cents for a ticket at the Stadium, a nickel for the subway up and
back. Off I went in high expectation. But Gehrig, disease I must assume
was now in progress, got no hit. A young player I had scarce noticed
hit a home run. Joe DiMaggio. It began to drizzle, but they kept the
game going just long enough so there would be no raincheck. I went home
lifeless and lay on my bed desolate.
Clearly I was in pain, if that is the word. The next day my mother
somehow came up with yet another sixty cents. Up I went. And the exact
same sequence occurred.
I went home. But not lifeless. To the contrary, animated.
For I hated Joe DiMaggio. For life.
I knew this to be a sin, but it did not matter. Gehrig retired, then
died. My animus only grew more animated.
Thirty years and some went by. I was now the United States Permanent
Representative to the United Nations. One evening I was having dinner
at an Italian restaurant in midtown. As our company was about finished,
who walked in but DiMaggio himself, accompanied by a friend. They took
a table against the wall opposite. I watched. He looked over, smiled
and gave a sort of wave. Emboldened, as we were leaving, I went over to
shake hands. He rose wonderfully to the occasion.
I went out on 54th Street as I recall. And of a sudden was struck as
if by some Old Testament lightening. ``My God,'' I thought, ``he has
forgiven me!'' He must have known about me all those years, but he
returned hate with love. My soul had been in danger and he had rescued
me.
Still years later, just a little while ago the Yankees won another
pennant. Mayor Guiliani arranged a parade from the Battery to City
Hall. Joe was in the lead car; I was to follow. As we waited to get
started, I went up to him, introduced myself and told of having watched
him at the Stadium these many years ago. ``But I have to tell you,'' I
added, ``Lou Gehrig was my hero.''
``He was my hero, too,'' said Joe.
Well, Joe, too, was a hero to many people. Few have embodied the
American dream or created a more enduring legend than ``Joltin'' Joe
DiMaggio. And fewer have carried themselves, both on and off the field,
with the pride and courtliness of, as Hemingway said, ``the great
DiMaggio.''
Born the fourth son of an immigrant fisherman--two other brothers
also played in the majors--he joined the Yankees in 1936 after dropping
out of high school and grew into the game's most complete center
fielder. He wore No. 5 and became the heir to Babe Ruth (No. 3) and Lou
Gehrig (No. 4) in the team's pantheon. DiMaggio was the team's
superstar, on a team of superstars, for 13 seasons. By the time his
career ended in 1951, he had played in 11 All-Star games and 10 World
Series, nine of which the Yankees won.
The ``Yankee Clipper'' was acclaimed at baseball's centennial in 1969
as ``the greatest living ballplayer.'' Even his main rival Ted
Williams, admitted this: ``. . . he [DiMaggio] was the greatest
baseball player of our time. He could do it all.'' DiMaggio played
1,736 games with the Yankees. He had a career batting average of .325
and hit 361 home runs while striking out only 369 times. He could
indeed do it all.
But there is one statistic for which DiMaggio will be most
remembered: his 56-game hitting streak, possibly the most enduring
accomplishment in all of sports. The streak began on May 15, 1941, with
a single in four at-bats against the Chicago White Sox, and ended 56
games later on July 17 during a hot night in Cleveland. In 56 games,
DiMaggio had gone to bat 223 times and delivered 91 hits, including 15
home runs, for a .408 average. He drew 21 walks, twice was hit by
pitched balls, scored 56 runs, and knocked in 55. He hit in every game
for two months, striking out just seven times.
But DiMaggio's game was so complete and elegant that statistics
cannot do it justice. The New York Times said in an editorial when he
retired, ``The combination of proficiency and exquisite grace which Joe
DiMaggio brought to the art of playing center field was something no
baseball averages can measure and that must be seen to be believed and
appreciated.''
Today, I join the Majority Leader and Senators Charles Schumer (D-
NY), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Jim H. Bunning
(R-KY) in introducing a resolution that honors Joe DiMaggio for his
storied baseball career and for all that he has done off the field. As
we reflect on his life and mourn his death, I ask that we consider
ourselves extremely lucky for knowing such a man, particularly in this
age of pampered sports heroes, when ego and self-importance often
overshadow what is occurring on the field. Even I, who resented
DiMaggio for displacing my hero Gehrig, have come to realize that there
will never be another like Joseph Paul DiMaggio.
I ask unanimous consent that the March 9, 1999, New York Times
editorial and George F. Will's op-ed in the Washington Post on Joe
DiMaggio be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, Mar. 9, 1999]
The DiMaggio Mystique
It has been almost half a century since Joe DiMaggio turned
his center-field kingdom in Yankee Stadium over to a
strapping youngster named Mickey Mantle, but even now, in
death, Joe DiMaggio still owns that green acreage. He roamed
the great open spaces there with a grace and grandeur that
redefined the art of fielding. Even more than the prolific
hitting that earned him enduring fame, his silky, seemingly
effortless motion across the outfield grass was the signature
of his game.
DiMaggio was one of those rare sports stars, like Babe
Ruth, Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan, who not only set new
standards of athletic excellence but also became a
distinctive part of American culture. As stylish off the
field as on, DiMaggio was an icon of elegance and success, a
name as recognizable on Broadway and in Hollywood as at the
ball park. Millions of baby boomers who never saw DiMaggio
play instantly understood the reference in the Paul Simon
song of the 1960's--``Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A
nation turns its lonely eyes to you.''
Other men have hit the ball farther and run the bases
faster, but few have excelled at so many elements of the
sport. DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak in 1941 remains
untouched, one of the great benchmarks of consistency and
productivity in all of sports. In 13 seasons with the
Yankees, DiMaggio produced a career batting average of .325,
hit 361 home runs and knocked in more than 100 runs in a
season nine times. He played in 10 World Series, 9 of which
the Yankees won. He possessed one of the sweetest swings
baseball has ever seen, a hitting stroke of such precision
that he struck out only 369 times in his major league career.
But the numbers alone do not explain the DiMaggio mystique.
Part of it was his brief, turbulent marriage to Marilyn
Monroe and his taste for nightclubs and tony hotels. Part of
it was his $100,000-a-year salary, a small fortune in his
days as a Yankee. For younger fans, there was also an almost
mystical link to the past--DiMaggio joined the Yankees in
1936, just two years after Babe Ruth left and before Lou
Gehrig retired. His appearance on ceremonial occasions at
Yankee Stadium in recent years was thrilling for fans of all
ages.
His fame also flowed from the aura of quiet dignity that
DiMaggio carefully preserved throughout his career and
retirement. With the notable exception of his service as a
pitchman for the Bowery Savings Bank and Mr. Coffee brewing
appliances, he dodged the celebrity limelight. The mystery
only added to his allure.
DiMaggio, who was 84, died with opening day a month away.
Though he will no longer return to Yankee Stadium to deliver
the ceremonial first pitch, his singular record of
[[Page S2784]]
athletic achievement and classy conduct will be long revered.
____
(From the Washington Post, Mar. 9, 1999]
DiMaggio's Elegant Career
(By George F. Will)
There is peculiar pathos to the lives of most great
athletes because their careers compress life's trajectory of
aspiration, accomplishment and decline. Then what? For most,
the rest of life, which is most of life, is anticlimax, like
that of
Runners whom renown outran,
And the name died before the man,
But there was seamlessness to Joe DiMaggio's life in and
after the game. The patina of age did not dull the luster of
his name. Baseball, sport of the long season and much
history, has an unusually rich statistical geology--a
sediment of numbers. Some numbers are so talismanic that
simply citing them suffices to identify the achievement and
achiever.
Examples are 116 (victories in a season, 1906 Cubs); 511
(career victories, Cy Young); 1.12 (season earned run
average, Bob Gibson, 1968); 130 (stolen bases in a season,
Rickey Henderson, 1982); 755 (home runs, career, Hank Aaron);
60, then 61 and now 70 (home runs by Babe Ruth in 1927, Roger
Maris in 1961 and Mark McGwire in 1998); .406 (most recent
.400 season, Ted Williams, 1941). And baseball's most
instantly recognized number, 56--Joe DiMaggio's consecutive
game hitting streak in 1941.
The Streak, as it is still known, was stunning, even if a
sympathetic official scorer at Yankee Stadium may have turned
an error or two into hits. It took two sensational plays by
Indians third baseman Ken Keltner to stop The Streak, and the
next day DiMaggio started a 16-game streak. His 56 has not
been seriously challenged in 57 seasons. His 1993 minor
league streak of 61 has not been matched since then.
Because of baseball's grinding everydayness, professionals
place a premium on consistency. DiMaggio brought his best,
which was baseball's best, to the ballpark every day. What he
epitomized to a mesmerized nation in 1941--steely will,
understated style, heroism for the long haul--the nation
would need after Dec. 7.
However, the unrivaled elegance of his career is defined by
two numbers even more impressive than his 56. They are 8 and
0.
Eight is the astonishingly small difference between his 13-
year career totals for home runs (361) and strikeouts (369).
(In the 1986 and 1987 season, Jose Canseco hit 64 home runs
and struck out 332 times.) Zero is the number of times
DiMaggio was thrown out going from first to third.
On the field, the man made few mistakes. Off the field, he
made a big one in his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. But even it
enlarged his mythic status. As when they were in Japan, and
she visited U.S. troops in Korea. Upon her return to Tokyo,
she said to him, ingenuously: You've never heard cheering
like that--there must have been fifty or sixty thousand. He
said, dryly: Oh, yes I have.
They had gone to Japan at the recommendation of a friend
(Lefty O'Doul, manager of the San Francisco Seals), who said
that in a foreign country they could wander around without
drawing crowds. The friend did not know that Japan was then
obsessed with things American, especially baseball stars and
movie stars. When the most famous of each category landed, it
took their car six hours to creep to their hotel through more
than a million people.
As a Californian, he represented baseball's future--he and
San Diego's Ted Williams, a 21-year-old rookie in 1939, when
DiMaggio was 24. DiMaggio, son of a San Francisco fisherman,
was proud, reserved and as private as possible for the
bearer--the second generation--of America's premium athletic
tradition, the Yankee greatness established by Babe Ruth and
Lou Gehrig. DiMaggio felt violated by the sight of Marilyn
filming the famous scene in ``The Seven Year Itch'' when a
gust of wind from a Manhattan subway grate blows her skirt up
above her waist.
Pride, supposedly one of the seven deadly sins, is often a
virtue and the source of others. DiMaggio was pride
incarnate, and he and Hank Greenberg did much to stir ethnic
pride among Italian Americans and Jews. When as a player
DiMaggio had nothing left to prove, he was asked why he still
played so hard, every day. Because, he said, every day there
is apt to be some child in the stand who has never before
seen me play.
An entire ethic, the code of craftsmanship, can be tickled
from that admirable thought. Not that DiMaggio practiced the
full range of his craft. When one of his managers was asked
if DiMaggio could bunt, he said he did not know and ``I'll
never find out, either.''
DiMaggio, one of Jefferson's ``natural aristocrats,''
proved that a healthy democracy knows and honors nobility
when it sees it.
Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, as a Senator from Joe DiMaggio's home
state, I am pleased to be an original co-sponsor of the resolution
honoring ``the Yankee Clipper.'' Joe DiMaggio holds a unique place in
the hearts of every baseball fan and every Californian.
Joe DiMaggio was born in 1914 in Martinez, California, near San
Francisco Bay. Like many Californians then and now, Joe was the child
of immigrants. His parents came from Sicily to California, where his
father found work as a fisherman.
At age 18, Joe began his professional baseball career with the San
Francisco Seals, where he set a Pacific Coast League record that still
stands by hitting in 61 straight games. Three years later, he joined
the New York Yankees and immediately became one of baseball's brightest
stars. In 1941, his 56-game hitting streak set a major league record
that most baseball fans consider the game's greatest achievement.
DiMaggio played 13 seasons for the Yankees, winning three Most
Valuable Player awards and playing on nine World Series championship
teams. He was selected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955 and voted
Major League Baseball's greatest living player in 1969.
Joe DiMaggio was a great ballplayer, but he was far more than that.
Joe was a role model for young people and a model citizen. At the
height of his career, he left baseball to volunteer for the Army Air
Corps and served three years in World War II. In his later years he
worked tirelessly to support the Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital in
Hollywood, Florida.
I will never forget a televised image of Joe DiMaggio from a decade
ago. In October 1989, as the Oakland A's and San Francisco Giants were
about to start a World Series game, a mammoth earthquake struck the Bay
Area. Fire swept through San Francisco's Marina district, where
DiMaggio lived at the time. That night, as residents struggled to deal
with the earthquake and its aftermath, they saw a man who--despite his
advanced age--showed the strength and dignity to walk calmly through
the rubble and reassure his neighbors. At this moment, as always,
DiMaggio was an inspiration to us all.
From his early days with the San Francisco Seals to his service as
baseball's greatest ambassador, Joe DiMaggio was the epitome of
elegance, grace, and good sportsmanship.
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I am pleased to join Senators Moynihan,
Lott, and Boxer in cosponsoring this resolution to honor Mr. Joe
DiMaggio. On March 8, 1999, Joe DiMaggio, one of the greatest baseball
players of all-time, died in Tampa, Florida. The Yankee Clipper led his
life with class and dignity. A true hero and the quintessential
American, Mr. DiMaggio gave people something to believe in.
Playing 13 seasons in the major leagues, all for the New York
Yankees, Number 5 not only took left field in Yankee Stadium, but also
took over New York and baseball showing us his talent day in and day
out. When one looks at the numbers accumulated by Mr. DiMaggio, it is
hard to think of anyone who did it better and in such a genuine
fashion. As a baseball player, few have approached DiMaggio. With a
.325 batting average, nine World Series rings, a 56 consecutive game
hitting streak in 1941 (a major league record that has never been
seriously challenged for more than 5 decades), 361 home runs with only
369 strike-outs, Joe DiMaggio transcended the game of baseball and will
remain a symbol for the ages of talent, commitment, and grace. As Simon
and Garfunkel sang in their hit song Mrs. Robinson, ``where have you
gone Joe DiMaggio. . ..'', the answer is, into our hearts, which will
stay with us forever.
But Joe DiMaggio was more than a great baseball player, he
transcended the game and will remain a symbol for the ages--a symbol of
talent, commitment, and grace. With so few true heroes today, we are
lucky that millions of New Yorkers and baseball fans everywhere could
live their lives touched by a hero like Joe DiMaggio.
Mr. COCHRAN. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution and preamble
be agreed to, en bloc, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table,
and that any statements relating to the resolution be placed at the
appropriate place in the Record.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The resolution (S. Res. 63) was agreed to.
The preamble was agreed to.
The resolution, with its preamble, reads as follows:
S.Res. 63
Joseph Paul ``Joe'' DiMaggio was born in Martinez,
California, on November 25, 1914;
Whereas Joe DiMaggio was the son of Sicilian immigrants,
Joseph Paul and Rosalia DiMaggio, and was the 2d of 3
brothers to play Major League Baseball;
[[Page S2785]]
Whereas Joe DiMaggio played 13 seasons in the major
leagues, all for the New York Yankees;
Whereas Joe DiMaggio, who wore number 5 in Yankee
pinstripes, became a baseball icon in the 1941 season by
hitting safely in 56 consecutive games, a major league record
that has stood for more than 5 decades and has never been
seriously challenged;
Whereas Joe DiMaggio compiled a .325 batting average during
his storied career and played on 9 World Series championship
teams;
Whereas Joe DiMaggio hit 361 home runs during his career,
while striking out only 369 times;
Whereas Joe DiMaggio was selected to the Baseball Hall of
Fame in 1955, 4 years after his retirement;
Whereas Joe DiMaggio in 1969 was voted Major League
Baseball's greatest living player;
Whereas Joe DiMaggio served the Nation in World War II as a
member of the Army Air Corps;
Whereas Joe DiMaggio was tireless in helping others and was
devoted to the ``Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital'' in
Hollywood, Florida;
Whereas Joe DiMaggio will be remembered as a role model for
generations of young people; and
Whereas Joe DiMaggio transcended baseball and will remain a
symbol for the ages of talent, commitment, and achievement:
Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the Senate recognizes and honors Joe
DiMaggio--
(1) for his storied baseball career;
(2) for his many contributions to the Nation throughout his
lifetime; and
(3) for transcending baseball and becoming a symbol for the
ages of talent, commitment, and achievement.
____________________