Joe DiMaggio
It poured on June 4, in Detroit—the day New York City held services for the great Lou Gehrig.
Bill Dickey, Joe McCarthy and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson were among his pallbearers.
It almost felt appropriate that the game with Detroit was rained out, but hanging around the hotel rather than playing was torture.
Reading the paper didn’t help, either.
More than 17,000 British soldiers were captured during the German invasion of Crete. Paratrooper Max Schmeling, the magnificent boxer who had two electrically charged fights with Joe Louis in the 1930s, was reported dead in the skirmish.
(Schmeling did not die in the Crete invasion, however. He had become sick and was hospitalized on the island. But he was no Nazi sympathizer, the world found out years later. Schmeling hid two escaping Jewish children in 1938 and, after the war, he and Louis became best friends. Schmeling, who introduced Coca-Cola to Germany in 1946, lived to be 99.)
But in early June, 1941, Kaiser Wilhelm II died in exile in—of all places—Doom, The Netherlands.
Allied forces had overrun Baghdad, Iraq, further strangling Hitler’s fuel pipeline. By week’s end, there would be a new government in Iraq—one sympathetic to the allies.
A couple of supply ships—one American—had been sunk in the Atlantic.
“We’re in this thing,” Frankie Crosetti said at the time.
Forty-eight years later, the Yankee infielder told a reporter: “Every day you would hear on the radio or read in the papers that the United States is gearing up to help England. The British were in it by themselves at that point. Ballplayers on every team knew they’d eventually get the call.”
The evening of June 4, 1941, some players went out to eat. Most just stayed put. Card games would get them through the night. It looked like it was clearing, so other players, including Joe DiMaggio, slept. Road trips were a grind. Any rest was a bonus.
The next day, June 5, the Yankees and Tigers played. DiMaggio tripled in the sixth and Tommy Henrich homered in the ninth to send the game into extra innings. New York lost, 5-4, in the 10th.
With losses by Chicago and Cleveland, the AL had become a jumble. The fifth-place Tigers were only four games out of first, a half-game behind the stricken Yankees.
But medicine was on the way. New York had an off day on June 6 before a three-game series in St. Louis. Bring on those woeful Browns!
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