Word: joltin
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Fifty years ago, when baseball was king, Tatis' feat would have been news, 36-point headline news. About similar baseball feats, songs have been written (Joltin' Joe DiMaggio), legends born (the shot heard 'round the world), adjectives coined (Ruthian). Ballplayers once had candy bars named after them. Today evening newscasts don't even bother to give the scores...
...sure is that the ice cream is melted, the tent is up in Tercentenary Theater and Joltin' Joe has left and gone away. Welcome to the Big Leagues...
Back in the mid-'60s, my dad took me to Joe's restaurant in San Francisco. Somehow Dad sneaked away and asked DiMaggio if he'd come talk to me. I will never forget that moment when Joltin' Joe sat down with a 10-year-old ballplayer to talk about baseball and give me his autograph. This middle-aged man is still deeply touched that the great Joe DiMaggio would take that time with me, and no doubt thousands of other young men. To me, that will always be the measure of his greatness. GARY DEWITT Tahoe Vista, Calif...
...successful rookie season confirmed and enhanced the DiMaggio mystique. The next year, a radio broadcaster called him "the Yankee Clipper," a tribute to the way he sailed so majestically while pursuing fly balls across the green expanses of center field. His batting skill won him the sobriquet "Joltin' Joe." Meanwhile, the young man from Fisherman's Wharf was acquiring a Manhattan polish. He took up tailored suits and the high life at Toots Shor's nightclub, where the habitues treated him like a god who had inexplicably deigned to join their mortal company. He dated beautiful women, including actress Dorothy...
Julius Miller, a former Manhattan Borough President, was mentioned in passing last week because Mayor Rudolph Giuliani--living proof that not all American boys absorbed Joe DiMaggio's example of doing whatever you do with grace and dignity--took the occasion of Joltin' Joe's death to push the idea of naming the West Side Highway the Joe DiMaggio Highway, and Governor George Pataki resisted that in favor of a freeway in the Bronx. The agendas reflected in the argument were theirs, of course, rather than DiMaggio's; Pataki wants the Bronx Bombers to stay where they are, and Giuliani...