Lefty, page 19
1 Two years later, at age twenty-six, Columbo died while visiting a friend in Hollywood who was fidgeting absentmindedly with an antique pistol that he kept on his desk as an ornament. Columbo was in an armchair, and when the pistol fired, the lead ball shot into his left eye and lodged in his brain.
19.
PITZY AND FUNG
On February 26, 1933, Vernon Gomez and June O’Dea were married. The ceremony took place at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament on West 71st Street in New York City. June wore a full-length pale blue dress and matching hat; Lefty wore a dark suit. Sunny was maid of honor and Frank Conville, Sunny’s partner in Conville & Dale, the best man.
Planning for every wedding has its challenges; for this one, some were unusual. “The priest came to me a couple of days before and told me he was having trouble. When I asked what the matter was, he said, ‘All the altar boys want to be part of the service. They’re all Yankee fans. If I pick two of them, the other six are sure to be mad at me.’ So I told him, ‘I have a bunch of baseballs over at my place autographed by the entire team. I’ll bring over six tomorrow and you can give them to the other kids. That should make everything okay.’ ”
After the priest distributed the balls, a different complication arose. “Now I don’t have any altar boys for the wedding,” he told Lefty. “When they heard what had happened they all wanted the baseballs instead.”
There would be no idyllic getaway to celebrate the nuptials. “We had a one-night honeymoon in Atlantic City,” June said. “The next morning Gomez said, ‘So long, sweetheart, I’m off to spring training.’ Of Thee I Sing had moved to Philadelphia, so I headed there. We didn’t lay eyes on each other for six weeks.”
Nellie and William Schwarz were present to see their daughter married, but Lizzie and Coyote Gomez were not. Both were by now over seventy, and attending the wedding meant ten days of cross-country travel to a freezing city in the midst of winter, a season with which Lizzie and Coyote had little experience. Worse, with Lefty and June leaving immediately after the ceremony, the two would have remained stranded in New York with not a single person they had ever previously met. So, after some discussion on each coast, everyone agreed that Lizzie and Coyote should send their blessings and congratulations from afar. They would not, in fact, meet their daughter-in-law for almost two years.
With the prospect of a new wife, Lefty wanted a new salary. Although the Yankees claimed Gomez was one of two players to be offered a raise that year—Babe was asked to take a $25,000 cut to $50,000, and Gehrig, who was pounding the ball everywhere, was asked to go from $27,500 to $20,000—whatever the club was offering, Lefty wasn’t accepting. It didn’t help the club’s bargaining position when McCarthy announced to the press that Lefty might win 30 games. At least ten other players resented having their salaries cut after winning the World’s Series and either held out or threatened to, but Ruppert and Barrow were equally insistent that, with plummeting gate receipts both home and away, the players were lucky to have jobs at all. After some dickering, Lefty finally signed for a reported $15,000, although it was likely to have actually been $13,500. Babe, after threatening to quit if he didn’t get $60,000, signed for $52,000; Gehrig signed for a reported $21,500.
Lefty drove into St. Pete three days late but threw hard in his first sessions. One by one, the other disgruntled Yankees straggled into the monastic Don CeSar. The players were adamant that their umbrage at tightfisted management would not carry over to the ball field, but without a doubt, the team went into the 1933 season with less élan than a Series winner should have.
After another dull stay watching the Gulf of Mexico ebb and flow, the team moved north. Lefty’s road roommate was Red Ruffing. If a bolt of lightning had hit their hotel room, the Yankees’ pennant chances would have been finished.
Lefty and June took an apartment on West End Avenue in the 70s, not far from Babe and Claire’s on Riverside Drive. The Ruths entertained an eclectic group, including writers, show people, other sports figures, and businessmen. Conversation was more likely to be of world events than of baseball. As with Lefty, Babe’s private persona was a far cry from what fans and sportswriters witnessed in public.
“It drives me up a wall when sportswriters write all these things about Babe secondhand,” Maye Lazzeri said years later. “Babe didn’t play ball for all those years and set records because he was a drunk. No alcoholic could play like Babe did. The sportswriters exaggerated everything. It just kills me when they write what a bum he was. Babe was anything but that. He and the whole Yankees club had too much respect for Ruppert and Barrow and what the Yankees meant to the fans.
“Tony and I and June and Lefty were always up to Babe and Claire’s for his birthday parties on February 7. He’d sit there in his smoking jacket and slacks sipping one or two drinks all night long. He was really a very pleasant man to be around. Good conversationalist. The Lazzeris and the Gomezes went on family picnics with Babe and Claire. My son David idolized him. Babe kidded around with him, played catch or tag. What a lovable guy. Never a braggart or a show-off. I never did hear him talk about himself in nine years. And when we went on family picnics, he’d have two or three beers, but we never saw Babe drunk. June and I didn’t see him every day, but we saw him a lot more than the sportswriters did.”
Certainly Maye’s portrait is as incomplete as the reporters’, but it does indicate the sort of complexities that newspapermen of that era, and perhaps every era, chose to overlook.
The Ruths were totally hospitable. “As a new bride,” June noted, “I could only boil water. When the telephone rang in our apartment and it was Claire inviting us to ‘drop everything and c’mon over for crab cakes,’ Lefty was out the door in two seconds flat.”
As close as they were, Lefty wasn’t dependent on Babe for social introductions. Sometimes, in fact, it worked the other way, once through the unlikely catalyst of a barely five-foot-tall, wisecracking, cigar-chomping ex-vaudevillian named Irving “Pitzy” Katz.
Pitzy Katz was one of Lou Gehrig’s closest friends. Katz could make Lou guffaw at jokes in dialect or with general antics. Katz had purchased a janitorial service with his vaudeville earnings, and Lefty remembered Lou asking, “Pitzy, when you contract out to clean these office buildings, how do you give them an estimate for the work to be done?” Pitzy replied, “With my nose, Lou. I walk in, take a big whiff, and say, ‘This will cost you four hundred a month.’ ” It must have worked, because Katz’s janitors cleaned, among other skyscrapers, the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building.1
Katz played in a weekly poker game held at the apartment of cartoonist Paul Fung, who lived in the same Riverside Drive complex as Babe, although they had never met. Lou introduced Pitzy to Lefty, and Pitzy invited Lefty to the game. Weekly poker games weren’t Lou’s style; his passion was bridge.
Like Pitzy Katz, Paul Fung was another of the fascinating, off-center characters Lefty was drawn to. At one point, Pitzy gave Fung’s son, ten-year-old Paul junior, a baby alligator, which he named, of course, Snapper, and kept in a back bathtub. Father and son fed Snapper either mice they’d trapped for the alligator or fed it raw eggs and chopped meat.
“I’d lift him out of the bathtub,” Junior recounted, “and Snapper would waddle around the apartment. I could keep his mouth closed with a clothespin on his nose, but I didn’t need to. He didn’t bite, because he didn’t know any other alligators, only people. If I turned him over on his back and rubbed his belly, he’d go to sleep. I used to play with him. When guests came to the door, Snapper opened his mouth wide and gargled a big toothy greeting.” When Snapper got to be four feet long, however, the Fungs gave him to the Bronx Zoo.
The Fung family also liked tropical fish. More than two thousand of them were housed in various locales about the apartment. Paul’s wife, Mae, spent a good deal of time maintaining fish tanks.
Paul Fung himself was born in Seattle in 1897, son of a Baptist missionary, at a time when discrimination against Chinese Americans was virtually as intense as that foisted on blacks. He attended school in China where he studied orthodox Chinese art, decorating dainty fans with cherry blossoms and following the designs prescribed by Chinese master painting textbooks. He excelled, but became fascinated by the Sunday cartoon supplements sent to him from Portland by his sister. When he returned to Seattle to attend high school, he took a correspondence course in cartooning. Around that time, his father died and, forced to fend for himself in hostile white society, Fung got his start designing posters for theater lobbies. That brought him to the attention of the editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Fung thereafter attended high school in the mornings and worked at the paper in the afternoon. By the time he was twenty, he had gained national recognition for his patriotic depictions of World War I, and he eventually moved to New York with the King Features Syndicate where he drew a series of comic strips, the most famous being Dumb Dora, which featured a ditz based on Gracie Allen.
Fung’s social circle included fellow cartoonists Chic Young of Blondie fame and Billy DeBeck of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith; Robert LeRoy Ripley of Believe It or Not! and writers Damon Runyon and Grantland Rice. Another poker regular was insurance executive Morris Silverman, whose four-year-old daughter Beverly was about to begin a professional singing career. Beverly would later shorten her name to Sills and become one of America’s best-known sopranos. Paul junior would follow in his father’s footsteps at King Features and also become an award-winning cartoonist.
Lefty and Paul senior became fast friends. Whenever Paul drew a car in a panel, he used Lefty’s license plate. (By that time, Lefty had traded the LaSalle for a Pierce-Arrow.) “Lefty surrounded himself with entertaining and knowledgeable people,” Junior said. “He liked being in the flow of their conversation. He was a terrific listener and he asked a lot of questions. My father and Lefty got along famously because they were quick-witted and constantly challenging each other. It was the Depression, so politics and what FDR and Congress were doing to ease the financial pain took up a good share of the conversation. Lefty sought out friends who could verbally challenge him, fashion the unexpected phrase.”
At one point, Lefty suggested that those assembled at the Fungs go over to the Ruths’. The Fungs were precisely the sort of quirky folk that Babe enjoyed as much as Lefty did. “On any given night during the week, a bunch of us, June and Lefty, Paul and Mae, June’s sister Sunny if she was back from the road and playing a New York theater, would go to Babe and Claire’s,” Junior recalled. “At Babe’s, if he served you a drink, you got six ounces of scotch or rye, one ice cube, and a thimbleful of soda. Most times Babe was in his pajamas, or slacks and a smoking jacket. The Ruths came to our apartment, but not too often, because Babe didn’t like dressing up and going to someone else’s place. He wanted to relax at home among friends. Babe’s fame was suffocating. If he put his nose out the door, people grabbed at him.”
“In the early thirties,” June added, “only movie houses had air-conditioning. On a blistering summer night, the heat in a New York City apartment would melt lead. To catch a breeze off the Hudson, Babe and Lefty carried the dining room table and chairs up the back stairs to the roof of Babe’s apartment house. Most of the roof was filled with clotheslines and tenants’ laundry strung up to dry, but Babe and Lefty made a space and set up the table and chairs. After we ate, Lefty put a record on his portable crank‑up phonograph and we danced the night away under the stars. Dancing with Babe was a delight. He was light as a feather on his feet. I’m here to tell you that Babe Ruth was one of the best dancers I ever danced with. Sometimes, though, he would stop, look across the river at Palisades Amusement Park, and sigh, ‘Oh, how I wish I could go there.’ ”
The players always tried to top each other. One night at dinner, a bunch of them were discussing the odd occurrences that seemed so prevalent in the minor leagues. After Babe had finished waxing on about all the outrageous conduct he had witnessed, other than his own, Lefty told this tale: “When I was in the Coast League, Los Angeles had a pitcher named Harry Child who had a glass eye. He’d have to turn all the way around to hold a guy on second base. So Child is pitching against us at Old Rec Park, and in the fourth inning he suddenly calls time. Then he’s down in the dirt fishing all around the mound. Fred Haney, the L.A. third baseman, runs over and asks, ‘What are you looking for?’
“ ‘My eye popped out,’ says Child. ‘What do you think I ought to do?’
“ ‘Go get your spare,’ Haney says. So Child runs into the locker room, gets his spare, puts it in his eye socket, and continues pitching.
“In the eighth inning, after a couple of pitches, Childs calls time again and bends over and brushes his hands in the dirt. Haney rushes over to the mound again. ‘Whatsa matter now?’
“ ‘I just found my other eye,’ Child says. ‘What d’ya think I ought to do with it?’
“Haney says, ‘Stick it up your ass so the guy on second can’t get a lead for third.’ ”
Babe didn’t question Lefty as to whether or not the story was true. (It almost certainly wasn’t.) He just laughed and said, “Goddamn, I can’t beat that.”
“Lefty made Babe laugh,” June said. “Zinged him with wisecracks. He treated him like any other teammate and that’s what Babe wanted. To be one of the boys, not an icon that other players couldn’t relate to. So if Lefty let off a crack, Babe just laughed and waited for his chance to slap Lefty with one of his own. But Lefty didn’t say unkind things. He took baseball seriously but not himself.”
As the 1933 season approached, Lefty decided the team needed a mascot, and Paul Fung Jr. was just perfect to fill the bill. The duties were hardly arduous.
“When the Yankees were home, Lefty arranged a pickup time with my dad, usually around 10:00 a.m., and he swung by in his convertible,” Junior recalled. “Lefty gave me a Yankee baseball cap, one of his, with ‘V. Gomez’ sewn in script inside the visor. I still have it. There were always two or three Yankee ballplayers sitting in the backseat.
“After Lefty parked his car, we walked through the players’ entrance and then into the clubhouse. The ballplayers yelled, ‘Hiya, Paul,’ or ‘Hey, Junior.’ I sat on a bench, watching the players get rubdowns, their ankles taped, listening to them talk amongst themselves and to me. Then they’d leave the clubhouse for batting practice and I’d go with them, down a flight of stairs, through a dark passageway, and up into the dugout and out onto the field. This was before the ruling that strangers couldn’t be on the field. Later on, as a teenager, I pitched for my high-school team. I was a left-hander. I had great teachers … Lefty, Spud Chandler, and Red Ruffing. They showed me how to throw a slider and helped me with my curveball and my changeup. Then they’d tell me to practice what they preached, and called over Bill Dickey or Joe Glenn to go behind the plate and catch me. Because so many of the Yankee players were part of our family life, it seemed very natural to me. I just grew up having fun with the Yankee ballplayers out on the field.”
For the games themselves, Junior repaired to the stands. “I sat with June, my parents, a bunch of cartoonist friends, and baseball wives … Claire Ruth, Maye Lazzeri, Violet Dickey, and, later, Dottie DiMaggio. Fans in the stands dressed to the nines in those days. It wasn’t the vogue to appear in public looking rumpled or sloppy. It didn’t matter if you were sitting ringside at Madison Square Garden, down center at a Broadway theater, or grabbing a sandwich at the corner deli. Guys wore suits or sport jackets, slacks, shirts, and ties. In the summer they wore straw hats and, come the fall, fedoras. No slacks for the gals. They wore dresses and stacked heels, or skirt suits, gloves, jewelry, and hats adorned with silk flowers and veils.”
“June was lucky,” Maye Lazzeri added. “Her mother, Nellie, not only designed hats, she made them from scratch, so June wore a new hat to die for at every ball game.” But Nellie was good with another kind of needle as well. “Lefty’s trials with his mother-in-law were priceless,” Maye added. “Nellie never shut up.”
The wives had different levels of knowledge of the game and different reactions to the play on the field. Pauline Ruffing, Charley’s wife, cried through all the games he pitched, whether he won or lost. One day June asked her, “Pauline, how can you be weeping? Charley’s winning,” and Pauline sobbed, “I’m crying because I’m so happy.”
After the game, Junior got to tag along with the adults. “We all went out for dinner. Beer and charcoal-broiled steaks at the Dutchman’s, Paul Darby’s steakhouse in the Bronx, or to Chinatown for cocktails and fantail shrimp at Shavey Lee’s at 32 Mulberry Street or Lum Fong’s at 220 Canal. Shavey Lee was the mayor of Chinatown, jolly and fat like a Buddha … a character. He was also a bookie. He loved to play the horses and he placed bets for my father.” Babe couldn’t join the crew at a restaurant, of course, but had to content himself with holding court on Riverside Drive.
The season itself began with optimism. The A’s, with Jimmy Dykes, Mule Haas, and Al Simmons sold to the White Sox, were fading quickly. To make matters worse for Connie Mack’s team, Mickey Cochrane would have a dreadful year. Little impediment seemed to exist between the Yankees and the 1933 pennant and they began like champions, opening 5–0 and finishing April in first place with an 11–4 record.
Lefty might have had a moment of immortality just afterward if only he had listened more closely to June’s instructions on how to pitch to Charley Gehringer. On May 4, in Detroit, he took a no-hitter into the ninth, only to have Gehringer lead off the inning by parking a low fastball in the right-field bleachers. Lefty later claimed to have been under the impression that he had already given up a couple of hits before Gehringer’s shot and that all he cared about was winning the game, but soon afterward he gave up a double and uncorked a wild pitch to let a second run come home.
