"Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio?"

I remember sitting in school on warm early fall days, trying to hide the little transistor radio from the watchful eyes of my teacher. My friends would pass coded notes or silently mouth the score while pretending to yawn. After school we'd rush to the closest friend's house to try and watch a little bit of the fall classic World Series. I remember the angst created  way too early for an eight year old whose father had to go to New York City for a business meeting but he and my mother managed to see a game of the 1960 World Series between the Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates. I still have the faded and slightly tattered banner they brought me in a mostly successful attempt to buy me off and assuage their guilt of my not being able to be there; after school was school and was important.

I have shared this elsewhere but I wish we were blessed with more athletes today with the "power of silence" instead of the self-aggrandizing noise and hype of "look at me, listen to me, pay me more". I know the athletes of "back in the day" were far from perfect angels but I miss those days more than I enjoy the "business" of sports today. Oh indeed, to borrow from S & G, "where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?"

The following story and review is from NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. You can find it here: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/26/134858078/joe-dimaggio-a-star-with-the-power-of-silence


Joe DiMaggio, A Star With The Power of Silence
Weekend Edition Saturday [5 min 17 sec]



Enlarge Hulton Archive/ Getty Images

In a new biography of Joe DiMaggio, author Jerome Charyn writes that "there was a kind of heartbreak, as we worried that he might disappear in that enormous expanse of space ... that the leaping gazelle we saw was some aberration, a phantom put there by our own wish to create some creature more perfect than ourselves. No fellow human being could possibly look that good, but DiMaggio did."

For a couple of generations, Joe DiMaggio symbolized the word class. He was called the Yankee Clipper because he seemed to glide across the baseball field: stately, graceful and powerful. He set an untouchable baseball record of hits in 56 consecutive games, and he married Marilyn Monroe, who quickly jilted him even as he remained devoted to her through sickness, health and death.

'Joe really couldn't function away from baseball,' Charyn says. 'That was his language; that was his beauty; that was his grace.'

But DiMaggio never appeared to be anxious, troubled or unruffled; he didn't bare his soul on talk shows and refused millions to write his autobiography. As Paul Simon, who put his name into a song, once said, "Joe DiMaggio understood the power of silence."

Jerome Charyn tries to find the key to soft-spoken DiMaggio's inner life in a new book, Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil. In the book, Charyn uses the phrase "idiot savant" to describe DiMaggio on more than one occasion: His magic was born on the baseball field, and abandoned him once he left it.

"Joe really couldn't function away from baseball," Charyn says. "That was his language; that was his beauty; that was his grace."

When he stepped on the field, everybody fell silent; but Charyn refers to DiMaggio's inability to cope outside baseball as "the sadness of his life," as DiMaggio fell into a state of being as "a legend without a purpose."

Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil
By Jerome Charyn
Hardcover, 192 pages
Yale University Press
List Price: $24