(4 of 6)
He accepts as part of the job the autograph seekers who accost him in hotel lobbies and restaurants. He doesn't mind the kids so much, he says—it's the adults: "They always wait till you are about to put the steak in your mouth."
For his part, Joe looks with awe on Broadway footlights and the people who work behind them. In Manhattan, he lives in a 54th Street apartment hotel, not far from the theatrical swirl, and he sees as many plays as he can (some recent favorites: High Button Shoes, Show Boat, Annie Get Your Gun).
He never acquired the ballplayer's habit of chewing tobacco (he likes pistachio nuts) nor the ballplayer's trait for pinching a penny. As a result, he has hung on to only about a fifth of the $500,000 he has earned from baseball. (This year he will make about $67,000.) He owns a few blue chip stocks, a small annuity, and until recently a part interest with two of his brothers in DiMaggio's Famous Restaurant, a seafood place on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf.
"Baseball, What Is That?" San Francisco, where Joe grew up, is still the city he knows best. He comes from an old-fashioned Italian family, poor to begin with, but proud of each other and extremely close-knit. His parents, who had come from Isola delle Femmine, an islet off the coast of Sicily, had a ground-floor flat on Taylor Street, on the slope of Russian Hill. Joe was the eighth of nine children.
Papa DiMaggio, who ran a fishing boat from the wharf at the foot of Taylor Street, believed that his five sons should be fishermen too. All the boys—Tom, Michael, Vince, Joe and Dominic—worked on the boat at one time or another, but most of the time they preferred to play baseball. "Baseball, what is that?" Papa DiMaggio used to shout. "A bum's game! A no good game! Whoever makes a living at baseball?"
One of his objections to baseball was that it wore out shoes too fast. But when Joe's older brother Vince (who later played with National League teams) was hired as a professional ballplayer for the San Francisco Seals, Papa's objections melted. Joe was peeping through a knothole one afternoon, watching brother Vince play, when a Seals' scout, Spike Hennessey, clapped him on the back. How would he like to come inside for a tryout? Joe could think of nothing he wanted more. Five years later, little brother Dom was given his chance too, on the strength of being a DiMaggio.
Within the DiMaggio family circle, relative batting averages are a cause of pride, but bear no relationship to the affection the members feel for each other. Bespectacled Dom is the family pet. "Oh, you ought to see him run the bases," his sister Marie says. "He's like a little rabbit." The entire family, including Joe, has been extremely pleased by the couplet that Red Sox fans have been chanting this year to the tune of Maryland, My Maryland:
He's better than his brother Joe—Dom-in-ic DiMaggio!
When the boys send money home (Joe has bought his parents a new house, Mike a new fishing boat), Papa shows no favoritism. Says he of Joe: "Justa one of my boys."