The Surprising Story of the DiMaggio Brothers

This is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. One of our favorite subjects is the subject of sports. More than three hundred and fifty sets of brothers have played in the Major Leagues since the eighteen seventies, and we’re talking about baseball. But few have had the skill, the charisma, or the success of the DiMaggio brothers: Joelton, Joe, Dom, and Vince. Here to tell the story is the four-time New York Times bestseller author, Tom Clavin. He’ll be sharing stories from his book, The DiMaggio’s Three Brothers: Their Passion for Baseball and Their Pursuit of the American Dream.

Here’s Clavin.

The DiMaggios is about family. That’s the reason why I wrote the book. It’s dedicated to my own family. I had actually turned down the opportunity to write The DiMaggios twice.

I was not interested.

I thought that Richard Ben Cramer had done the book on the DiMaggios because of his biography of Joe DiMaggio in A Hero’s Life. I’m not a big fan of that book, but I figured it would be pretty thorough, and what else could I do?

The third time that…

My agent suggested that I do a book on the DiMaggios.

All three brothers.

I agree to look into it, mostly just so I could get him off my back, and he could stop suggesting that. And I started to do some research. I mean, like most people, I maybe didn’t even know there were two other DiMaggio brothers, or I knew that there was Dominic in Boston, but I didn’t know about Vince at all.

And it is kind of remarkable.

that you had three brothers playing at the same time, not unheard of. I mean, we know about the Alou brothers, for example, and we had other brothers who have played at the same time with the DiMaggios. My first stop was, after doing some initial researches, I made an appointment with Dominic DiMaggio Junior and went up to see him. He had taken over his father’s factory manufacturing business in the Boston area, and I went up to see him and spent the day with him talking about his father. And I came away realizing that—and many writers would not want to say something like this—my agent was right. There was a terrific story here, and it went way beyond Joe DiMaggio, which I was very glad for because, even though I was born and raised a Yankees fan, my father’s favorite player was Joe DiMaggio. Again, a Joe DiMaggio biography didn’t interest me, so I wrote a book that really is from the viewpoint of family. Giuseppe and Rosalie, coming over from Italy, barely could speak English, becoming a fisherman in the San Francisco area, raising nine children.

The last three of whom were Vincent…

DiMaggio, Joe DiMaggio, and the baby, Dominic DiMaggio. And those are the three that became baseball players. They weren’t carbon copies of each other. They all three loved baseball. It’s interesting that Giuseppe and Rosalie had had six children, and then they had Vincent, and Vincent was passionate about baseball, and he was talented. And the father, Giuseppe, forbade his children to play baseball. And so when Joe was a teenager, he couldn’t play, or he had to play in secret. When Dominic was very young, he couldn’t play, or the mother would sometimes cover for them. But Vincent was very blatant about it. He wanted to play baseball. That’s what he wanted to do with his life, and when Giuseppe kept being oppotionate about it, but Vincent did as he ran away. Some kids run away and joined the circus. Vincent ran away to join a baseball team, and he started playing in leagues up and down the up and down California, up and down the West Coast, into Oregon and Washington. Eventually made it to the Pacific Coast League, which was almost a Major League-caliber. One of the enjoyments for me of writing the book, The DiMaggios, was that all three brothers played first the Pacific Coast League before going onto the Major Leagues.

Anyway.

Vincent went off to play baseball, and he was gone for about two years, and he came back to the family home in the San Francisco area, and his father basically had his arms crossed and said, ‘So, you come back? You probably have no money, and you’ve been a big failure, and now you’re ready to be a fisherman, just like your father, just like your brothers—or two of the brothers, anyway.’ And instead, Vincent reached into his pocket and put something like six thousand dollars cash on the table.

That’s why I earned playing baseball. And just set.

He took a look at that, and he went to Joe and he said, ‘What are you going to start playing baseball?’ Well, Joe is ready, willing, and able to jump right in. And he also started playing for local teams for the Pacific Coast League, and he quickly apt distance Vincent. Now, we should really give credit to Vincent here because he had the courage to follow his dream. And it was because of that the door got cracked open for Joe DiMaggio.

If it had not been for Vincent, we would never might never.

know Joe DiMaggio, a Hall of Fame player, winner of nine World Series titles. So, Joe started to play in the Pacific Coast League, and it was in the Pacific Coast League that he had a sixty-one-game hitting streak. I mean, we know about the longer, the long hitting streak he had Major League Baseball, but he had his longest one of his careers in the Pacific Coast League. Meanwhile, Vincent does get called up to…

the Major Leagues.

I believe his first team he played for was the Pittsburgh Pirates.

He eventually played for the Philadelphia…

Phillies, but it was with the Pirates that he had a couple of All-Star seasons. He was a very good defensive outfielder, probably during his years in the National League, the…

best center fielder in the National League.

And he was pretty decent hitter, and he made the All-Star team in a couple of years. Joe came up with the Yankees in nineteen thirty-six was his rookie season, and he and DiMaggio were on great Yankee teams that won the pennant in thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine. You know, four straight pennants, four straight World Series. As it turned out, too. So, Joe right away got used to winning, and he was an All-Star every year. And then what about Dominic DiMaggio, the youngest one? He was also nicknamed The Professor. He had these stick glasses. Nobody thought of him as a baseball player. He had to really go against a lot of stereotypes to eventually work his way through the Pacific Coast League and then into Major League Baseball. He was signed by the—The Yankees had a chance to sign him when they passed. I didn’t think he was, you know, anything like his brother, and he was not Joe DiMaggio, but he was Dominic DiMaggio, and he was a darn good ballplayer, and I happened to think should have been given more consideration for the Hall of Fame. But he was taken by the Boston Red Sox. And he had had nine All-Star seasons. He played thirteen seasons, played from about nineteen forty to fifty-three, fifty-two, I think, and he made the All-Star Team nine seven times.

Excuse me.

Joe had made the All-Star Team thirteen times and Vincent twice, so he had the three brothers. Between the three of them made twenty-two All-Star teams. That’s a remarkable level of achievement for any family, and…

Their careers took different paths.

Now, in Vincent’s case, by the time World War Two ended, he was done with baseball.

He still played.

He just kept playing in less accomplished than smaller leagues and eventually ended up back on the West Coast.

And he had a troubled post…

baseball career: alcoholism, was having a hard time holding a job. So, he’s also kind of like a story of the American Dream, like the DiMaggio family was, that his dream was to play baseball, accomplished it. It was outside of baseball that he had trouble, you know, dealing with life. Joe, as we know, was a great leader of the Yankees. He did miss three seasons because of World War Two. I discussed in the books some of the controversy about that because he get to be sort of dragged, kicking and screaming, into the military service. But he is a guy who was about to make one hundred thousand dollars and studies making two hundred and forty dollars a month being in the Army when he got out.

of the service.

When World War Two ended, the Yankees again won the pennant in forty-seven, forty-nine, fifty to fifty-one. Joe, with diminishing skills, and then he retired after the fifty-one season. But by this time, Mickey Mantle was on the Yankees, and a new era began for the Yankees. Joe had a pretty famous post-baseball career. He was always introduced as the greatest living ballplayer, much of the detriment and of amusement of Ted Williams. When you look at their respective statistics, Ted Williams far outdistanced Joe DiMaggio.

He just didn’t have nine World Series titles.

And you’re listening to Tom Clavin, and he’s sharing stories from his book, The DiMaggio’s Three Brothers: Their Passion for Baseball and Their Pursuit of the American Dream. When we come back, more of the story of the DiMaggio brothers here on Our American Stories. And we continue with the story of the DiMaggio brothers here on Our American Stories.

Let’s return to Tom Clavin.

Joe and Dominic were very close brothers. They really loved each other. They were also very fierce competitors, and it didn’t help that they were both considered the best set of outfielders in the American League. In the case of how they loved each other, I think one example is the nineteen forty-one season. It also shows that Ted Williams cared so much for Dominic and for Joe, too, even though they were very much rivals. But in nineteen forty-one season, Joe was doing his fifty-six-game hitting streak, and out in the outfield when they were at Fenway Park, you had Ted Williams and left and Dominic in center. And usually in those days, games were played in the daytime, and it was hard for finding out what was going on in the game that was being played at the exact same time. So, Ted basically bribed the scorekeeper who was behind the green wall in Fenway Park to listen to radio or some kind of way to get information from the New York game. And whenever Joe got a hit, he would yell it out to Ted, who in turn would yell it over to Dominic in center field. And Dominic paid attention very fiercely to every moment that he could get his hands on of the Joe…

DiMaggio hitting streak.

I think one way that they were competitors is that one illustration of this, in nineteen forty-eight, the Yankees, the Indians, and the Red Sox are all competing for the American League pennant Yankee. The Red Sox had won it in forty-six, the Yankees had won it in forty-seven, and now you had these upstart Indie Cleveland Indians. And as it happened, Dominic had been dating a woman named Emily, and they had made plans to marry, and they planned to get married in October nineteen forty-eight. And Joe DiMaggio calls his mother, and his mother is expressing some concern that what happens if the Red Sox win the pennant and Dominic won’t be able to get married when he’s supposed to. And Joe says, ‘Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll personally take care of it, make sure Dominic’s available for his wedding.’ And sure enough, on the last weekend of the season, Joe demolishes the Red Sox, and the Cleveland Indians win the pennant, and the Dominic is sent home in time to get married. Well, of course, Joe as best man. I think another good example of their competitiveness is that in nineteen forty-nine, Dominic had a hitting streak of his own going on. I mean, he ended up. Of all the people in all of baseball, Joe’s own brother is the one coming the closest to his fifty-six-game hitting streak. And it’s up to thirty-seven games, so Dominic only has another nineteen games to go.

He’ll at least tie his brother.

And they’re actually—the Yankees are playing the Red Sox, of all places, of all teams—and Dominic is zero for three, and he gets up again. It’s going to be his last unless there’s an amazing comeback. It’s going to be his last at bat of the game, and he sends a screamer to the left-center field gap, and in a brilliant play, who chases it down but Joe DiMaggio, robbing his brother of a base hit and breaking his brother’s fifty thirty-seven-game hitting streak. They used to keep score, too. I should mention this: how many times one robbed a hit from the other. And by the end of their careers, Dominic actually, by an easy margin, had outscored his brother Joe and who stole a hit from the other one by their play in center field. So, they loved each other very much, and they did. It was a lifelong thing. The biggest claim to fame for Joe after his career as a baseball player was marrying Marilyn Monroe. That marriage lasted only nine months. And there’s, I think, information in my book about the Joe-Marilyn relationship that you won’t find other places.

And a big reason for that is because I had access…

to members of the DiMaggio family that quite a few of them did not participate. And then Richard Ben Cramer Joe DiMaggio biography, I think, because they got a sense from him that I was going to be rather critical. My book is not pro-DiMaggio, anti-DiMaggio. It’s the story about the family, even to the point where Dominic and Emily, as well, they really liked Marilyn Monroe.

They thought she was a wonderful girl.

They thought she and Joe were wrong for each other, but they could see that they were in love, and they were fully supportive of Joe getting married to Marilyn if that’s what he wanted. Now, we know that the marriage lasted only nine months, I think, in nineteen fifty-four, and they broke up and went their separate ways. But apparently, they still had a strong attraction to each other. Because what most people don’t know—and I learned this from Emily DiMaggio, who again is the only one of that generation still alive. She’s in her nineties now, that Marilyn and Joe used to have these secret rendezvous up at Dominic and Emily’s place up in the Boston area in Massachusetts. This was in the nineteen fifties, and every so often somebody would—somebody from the press would wonder was it a DiMaggio sighting—and they would stake out the Dominic Emily house in the Boston area. So, sometimes they would have to Dominic would get into disguise as Joe, would get into Joe’s car and drive it around a little while. Meanwhile, Emily would and would get a cab for Joe and Marilyn to take them to the train stations to they get head back to New York. That went on until Marilyn met Arthur Miller, and then all a hanky-panky with Joe ended.

As far as we know.

So, Joe had already a failed marriage, and as his life went on, he became more and more disenchanted with his fame, at sea, with life in general. He had a very difficult relationship with his only child, Joe DiMaggio Junior. You can imagine what that was like for him, being Joe DiMaggio Junior and always being compared to his father. He tried and did not become a baseball player. He did become join the Marine Corps, but he also drifted a lot. He was more like his brother, Vince. Couldn’t quite get traction on the rest of his life. And when Joe died, it was in national headlines all over the place, of course, because he was an icon. You know, ‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?’ He was in songs; he was lionized in the press. He always got good press, even though in a lot of ways he couldn’t stand the press. But what about Dominic? Now, in a case of Dominic DiMaggio, I believe it’s fair for me to say that I did not start this book with the idea that he would become really more the central character or coming out of the book as my sort of hero. But what happened was, I think, is I got to know Dominic from talking to his children, and thankfully, his widow…

was still alive. She was ninety…

ish, but I was able to visit with her several times, have many conversations with her. She was the keeper of the DiMaggio family history. She was the only one of the nine DiMaggio children and their spouses. She was the only one of that generation still alive. She had married Dominic in nineteen forty-eight, so she was there while Dominic was still at the prime of his career. Dominic joined the Red Sox in nineteen forty. He also missed three seasons because he was in the Navy, and after World War Two, he came back and he was just getting into his prime. Like his brothers Joe and Vincent, who were starting to get past their prime after the war, he was just getting into his prime as a ballplayer. I mean, the Red Sox had great teams in the mid-to-late forties. You know, you had Dominic DiMaggio, who was considered a better center fielder than his brother.

He was not a power hitter like his brother.

He was usually batting in the first or second spot, followed by people like Johnny Pesky and Bobby Doerr, Vern Stephens, Jimmy Foxx. There were a lot of really g