First Day of Issue 

The great Joe DiMaggio. Joltin' Joe.  Where have all the Lou Gehrigs and Joe DiMaggios gone?  He was good.  Good on the field, good at the plate, and good at being a good man.  Heads of state wanted to meet him, stars and the rich felt better and bigger when with him, and he graced the outfield like a beautiful ship on the ocean, hence, the nickname, "The Yankee Clipper."  Joe never took his goodness for granted, and he didn't allow himself to take the high road, Yogi Berra saying of his teammate, that he had never seen Joe walk off the field.

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“I was born in Martinez, but my earliest recollection was of the smell of fish at Fisherman’s Wharf, where I was brought up.  Our main support was a fishing boat, with which my father went  crabbing.  If you didn’t help in the fishing, you had to help in cleaning the boat.  Baseball didn’t have much appeal to me as a kid, but it was better than helping Pop when he was fishing, or helping clean the boat.  I was always giving him excuses, principally that I had a weak stomach, but he insisted I was ‘lagnuso’ (lazy) and to tell you the truth, I don’t know which he thought was the greater disgrace to the family, that a DiMaggio should be lazy or that a DiMaggio should have a weak stomach.”  His father came from Sicily, where the DiMaggios had been fishermen for generations.  He migrated to the town of Martinez, 25 miles northeast of the Golden Gate.  In 1915, hearing of the lucky waters of San Francisco, he packed his family on his fishing boat and docked at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.  Joe was one of nine children—second to last.  His father was a proud man who had hopes for his children’s future.  He wanted two of the boys to help him in the fish business, one to be a great opera singer, one to be a lawyer because “he wore glasses,”  and one to be a bookkeeper, “because you can sit down.” Instead, three of the sons went on to play baseball, making them the greatest baseball playing family in the history of the game, and of them was the immortal Joe DiMaggio.  His Pop didn’t like baseball in those early days.  “Too many shoes, too many pants,” Is how he described the sport.  The DiMaggios were too poor to wear out their shoes and pants for such a silly game.  Now bocci, the Italian version of lawn bowling, that was Pop’s game. 

Read the article in its entirety in the October  2015 Bevil newsletter, which accompanies the cover.