Though he had been businesslike in taking charge of the funeral arrangements, Joe’s death deeply hurt Dominic. “When he came home from the West Coast, he said, ‘I’ve buried all my siblings,’ ” Paul DiMaggio recalls. “And he had. He was there for every one of them, and he took care of Joe last. ‘The only one left is me,’ he said. It affected him a lot.”
But Dominic’s final years were not to be ones of unhappiness and grief. Quite the opposite—he savored the decade he had left to live not so much because he was a self-made man, the son of immigrants who had achieved what is thought of as the American Dream, but because in relishing his accomplishments he could try to share them with family and friends.
All three of Dominic’s children graduated from college. “He mentioned to me on more than one occasion that when he served on corporate and charitable boards of directors, he always felt a little self-conscious that he was not educated like his fellow board members were,” says Paul DiMaggio. “It seemed to bother him that he did not have that formal degree, not realizing that he had educated himself well beyond the basic requirements for a baccalaureate. My father was determined that his kids and his kids’ kids would never feel inadequate in the area of education. He set up trusts for each of his grandchildren to have the funds to go to college. An education is revered in this family, thanks to Dad. But he also imparted to each of us that a person who lacked an education should never be looked down upon. We all learned his lesson in humanity and humility.”
Paul and Peter went to work for the Delaware Valley Corporation, and eventually Dominic was able to turn over the running of the business to his sons. His daughter, Emily, went into the media field, working for various publications, living for a time in Manhattan. When old rival Bobby Brown was president of the American League, his office was in a building next to the one where Emily lived. “We would see each other often when he visited his daughter,” Brown remembers. “I enjoyed seeing Dominic because he was a great guy, and the pride he had in his daughter made it obvious how much family meant to him.”
With work responsibilities much diminished, and being able to afford to do what they wanted, Dominic and Emily divided their time between two homes, the house in Marion on the water near Cape Cod and the winter home in Ocean Ridge, near Palm Beach. He played golf every Wednesday with friends, and on many weekends with his wife. He stopped in at the office once a week to check up on things, and he had a home office where he managed his real estate holdings.
“There wasn’t a week that went by when Dom and I didn’t have lunch together,” says Dean Boylan Sr. He and Dominic met through their wives, who saw each other in the 1950s when their children attended the same school. Dominic and Boylan, whose son took over for him as owner of Boston Sand and Gravel, became very close friends. “We used to talk business, and Dom became a director in our company. He was a huge, huge help in guiding us through difficult times, making decisions. When I saw Dom during the week, not the director’s meeting, but during the week, he and I would talk about it. His advice was very valuable as well as generous.”
In both personal and professional relationships, people were drawn to Dominic. He could be a confidant, a pillar of support, or simply a sounding board. “He had a calmness under duress, and he was strong and intelligent, he could think things out, and he was loving,” Emily explains about her husband. “I think he developed the reputation as a wise counsel because he had these gifts, and he had a kindness and feeling for others when they were hurting.”
“He was a very sincere person,” Boylan says. “As you got to know him, you thought he was terrific. When you had something to talk about or were going through an experience, Dominic made you feel like you were the only person who counted. And when he told you something, that was his word and it was a 101 percent reliable. He would never waver from it.”
Baseball friends remained very important to Dominic—especially Ted Williams. Ted had about the same luck as Joe in marriage. He was divorced twice and had rocky relationships with his three children—a son, John Henry, from his second marriage, and daughters Bobby-Jo and Claudia, one from each marriage. After he resigned as skipper of the Washington Senators—which had become the Texas Rangers—he stayed in Florida. There would be the occasional trips north for Red Sox events and for Dominic and Emily’s charity efforts, and to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, where he had been inducted on the first ballot in 1965, with 93 percent of the vote. (Why not unanimous? Maybe there was still a bit of lingering press bias.)
He especially loved the Florida Keys, where he indulged his passion for fishing. As he aged, he became more content with life. He would always have rough edges, but much of the anger was gone and there was more warmth. “Ted actually became a happy individual, his happiest years were in his sixties and seventies,” Dick Flavin says. “He mellowed out and was more appreciative of what had happened to him in life and the affection people had for him, while Dominic’s brother became more eccentric. If someone had asked me many years ago who would be the crazy, unhappy old man, Ted or Joe, I would have said Ted because he’s crazy and unhappy now. But it turned out the other way around.” He even fell in love again, with Louise, a woman he had known as a friend before and during his second marriage.
In anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1941 season, Dominic collaborated with the sportswriter Bill Gilbert to write Real Grass, Real Heroes. Ted Williams wrote an especially warm and gracious introduction. And when the publisher and Dominic threw a book launch party at Tavern on the Green in Manhattan, Joe wasn’t there, but Ted flew up from Florida to attend.
Ted campaigned for Dominic to join him and Bobby Doerr in the Hall of Fame. Dominic had not been elected in the 15 years following his 1953 retirement. He was not one to speak up himself about it, but Ted was less reserved. “Ted was really passionate about Dom being included in the Hall of Fame,” remembers Yogi Berra, who also served on the Veterans Committee. “He was pretty persuasive. But others didn’t see it that way.”
Dominic’s Cooperstown credentials were viewed as borderline. Yet during the seasons he played, he was surely a Hall of Fame–caliber player. As a center fielder, he holds the American League record for most chances accepted per game (2.99), and he is one of only five outfielders in baseball history to record 500 or more putouts in a single season. On the offensive end, during his ten full seasons Dominic totaled more base hits than any other major leaguer. He was behind only Ted in runs scored. He averaged almost 105 runs scored per year; the only two other players to do so in the 20th century were his brother Joe and Lou Gehrig. He was a seven-time All-Star in ten seasons. And certainly Dominic’s character and integrity, and the time he volunteered to serve as the American League representative, merited strong consideration.
The Veterans Committee didn’t agree. There is no doubt Dominic suffered from being overshadowed by Joe. When the center fielder Richie Ashburn was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1995, Ted told whoever would listen that Dominic was not only a better ballplayer statistically, but “if the game was on the line and you needed a clean hit or a hard-hit ball, he was as good as anybody.”
Dominic didn’t lose sleep over it. In a 2007 appearance on the show Red Sox Stories, when he was asked about the possibility of still being voted in, he replied, “It’s too late. I’d rather see the spot go to a younger man who would enjoy it more. I had my chance.”
While Ted campaigned for Dominic’s entry into the Hall of Fame, Joe did not. Dominic was fine with that. “I know that when people used to ask him who was the best defensive center fielder he ever saw, he would say, ‘My brother Dom,’ ” Dominic told Sports Illustrated in 2001. “But he would never say, ‘Dom belongs in the Hall of Fame,’ because if he had said that and I had gotten in, he knew people would have said, ‘Dom’s only in because Joe pushed for him.’ We’re not that kind of people.” He also told the writer, “I’ve had a tremendously fulfilling life.”
He had no problem being elected to the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame in 1995. Among the others in that institution’s freshman class were Joe Cronin, Doerr, Ted, Johnny Pesky, Babe Ruth, Carl Yastrzemski, and Tom and Jean Yawkey. Teammates Jimmie Foxx and Mel Parnell made it in two years later, Boo Ferriss in 2002, Billy Goodman in 2004, and Ellis Kinder and Vern Stephens in 2006. Jimmy Piersall got the nod in 2010.
Ted was distraught when Louise suddenly died in 1993. But he had long-lasting friendships. Until age made travel more troublesome, he saw Pesky, Doerr, and Dominic as often as he could. When they were at their Florida home, Dominic and Emily visited with Ted. Otherwise, there were notes, cards, phone calls. As with his family members, Dominic was consistently in touch with friends by phone, including many former teammates, whether they had been stars like Doerr and Pesky or not.
“He was the best friend I ever had in baseball,” states Babe Martin. “Both of us old guys, we must have called each other every week, one called or the other one did. Once a week, we would call one another. If Emily answered, I sure enjoyed talking to her too, she’s a sweet lady. Dominic was a marvelous guy, the kind who could make you feel like a brother.”
Red Sox players of the 1940s and ’50s especially enjoyed the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park, where the special guests were players nominated by Major League Baseball to an All-Century team. As each of the 33 living nominees came out on the field, actor Kevin (Field of Dreams) Costner introduced them: Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, Yogi Berra. Dominic and Emily were there to see Ted, four months after Joe’s death, finally be recognized as “the greatest living ballplayer.” He threw the ceremonial first pitch, a strike to Carlton Fisk, and the crowd cheered at an ear-splitting level, giving Ted the adulation and love that had often been withheld during his career.
Ted had a keen interest in Joe’s health in the late 1990s. “[Dominic] had become closer and closer to Williams through the years, closer at the end than he was to his brother Joe,” wrote Leigh Montville in his biography of Ted. Joe was “the one man who knew the complications of Williams’s life better than any other man on the planet. Never close, friendly enough, but never friends, the two superstars had been forced to deal with the same adulation, the same attention, the same artificial sainthood. They were the two lead characters in the same myth. Could anyone else understand what that had been like? Joe and Ted, they understood best the demands of each other’s lives.”
The two had also shared difficulties with their only sons. But while Joe wrote off Joe Jr., Ted and John Henry kept trying. John Henry’s management of his father in the sports memorabilia business was a strong bond between them.
“This was not necessarily the healthiest thing—a young man who had a difficult time finding his own way, and who was the son of a singularly famous and iconic father, making a living directly off his father’s fame,” wrote David Halberstam in The Teammates. “The world of baseball appearances and memorabilia is not a particularly genteel one, but even so a number of serious people in the world deeply disliked dealing with John Henry Williams, and in time some of Ted’s oldest friends felt they were being kept away from Ted because they had been critical of what they felt was John Henry’s growing exploitation of his father.”
Maybe it was because he genuinely cared for his former rival’s well-being, or he felt a special kinship with him as the best players of their era, or he felt for Dominic losing the only brother he had left. Or maybe for all of these reasons, Ted kept calling Dominic asking for updates as his brother battled cancer. When Joe died, he felt the loss deeply.
Ted’s own health deteriorated rapidly. When he had quadruple bypass surgery in 2000, Dominic flew to San Diego to visit him and encourage him to get better. By the time he turned 83 in August 2001, Ted had suffered two strokes, a valve in his heart leaked and doctors couldn’t fix it, the once-robust Splendid Splinter was down to 130 pounds, and he was confined to a wheelchair. Dominic called him every day and then relayed their conversation to Doerr and Pesky. “Dommie, you’re the only one I have left,” Ted would say when his spirits were low.
“Ted realized what Joe did—that Dominic was a much more complete man than they were in terms of he had a successful family life, children, grandchildren around him,” says Flavin. “He had this whole business that he made. He didn’t trade on his name. He worked hard and made a go of it and became a captain of industry as well as a big donor to charity. He was a much more successful man than they were. The difference was, Ted honored and loved Dominic for it and Joe resented him for it.”
There was no avoiding the fact that Ted had only months to live. In October 2001, Dominic said to his wife and Flavin during dinner that he had to go down to see him. Because of 9/11 the month before, he preferred driving. Emily was aghast that at age 84 he was proposing to drive from Marion, Massachusetts, to Hernando, Florida.
“I was sipping my second—okay, maybe third—glass of wine when this came up,” recalls Flavin, who in addition to emceeing many Red Sox events—where he would often recite his composition “Teddy at the Bat”—was an Emmy-winning commentator on Channel 4 in Boston. “Suddenly, I found myself suggesting that I drive south with him. Emily felt better about that.”
They tried to enlist Doerr from Oregon, but his wife, Monica, still hadn’t recovered from two strokes of her own two years earlier. However, Pesky, a spry 82, agreed to go along. Flavin, only 64 then, would share the driving with Dominic, with Pesky in the backseat. They set off on October 20. There was a stop along I-95 so Dominic could be the guest at a Philadelphia Athletics Historical Society event, then it was back on the road.
Ted rallied when he saw his three friends and enjoyed reminiscing about the Red Sox days one more time. He laughed, with the old twinkle in his half-blind eyes. But at one point he became despondent and began to weep. Only Dominic could get him out of it. “You’re having a bad time, but you’ve got to play the hand that’s dealt you,” he told Ted. “All the other hands you’ve been played, you played them so well. You made yourself a hero, and you’re an American hero in two wars.” Ted calmed, and the visit that day turned fun again.
On the second day of the visit Dominic, channeling his brother Vince, sang an Italian love song, which Ted so enjoyed that he asked Dominic to sing it again. He did, then Flavin sang, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” There could be no encores, as Ted was tiring.
Ted weakened that winter. It was a surprise that he was still alive at all when the 2002 season began. Dominic called him every morning that spring to describe the previous day’s Red Sox game, “and it was hard for Dominic to tell whether he was still there at the end of the line, because sometimes he would slip out of consciousness in the middle of a call,” Halberstam writes. “There had been one final call when Dominic had called in and sensed a silence at the other end and he had asked, ‘Teddy, are you still there,’ and Josh, Ted’s attendant, had said, ‘No, he’s fallen asleep.’ ‘Well, please tell him I called,’ Dominic said, and the next day Ted died.”
Dominic had one more funeral to attend in July 2002.
As Dominic approached 90, he was reasonably healthy—though there were still pains from the Paget’s disease—and he remained active in charity work, sometimes in collaboration with his aging former teammates. In May 2004, he and Doerr and Pesky were honored by the North End Community Health Center and the North End/West End Neighborhood Service Center with a new award named for Dominic. The following year the three were honored again, this time for their 50 years of support (and Emily’s) for the Dana-Farber Institute, which treats and seeks a cure for pediatric cancers.
In between, there had been a long-awaited triumph—a Boston Red Sox world championship, the first since 1918. In the 2004 World Series, the Sox swept the St. Louis Cardinals. “That first time the Red Sox won the World Series, President Bush invited all the players to the White House, and Dominic and I went with them,” Jimmy Piersall recalls. “And the president said, ‘I’m really glad to see DiMaggio and Piersall here.’ Dominic was thrilled by that. And I was thrilled to be sitting next to him. He was a wonderful man, and he had a tremendous wife.”
He and his tremendous wife were “absolutely inseparable,” says Flavin.
“It was rare for my parents to not go somewhere or do something together,” agrees Paul. “They were pretty much inseparable.”
Dominic turned 90 in February 2007 and received birthday wishes not only from his three children and six grandchildren but from what had become a widely extended DiMaggio family. “I’m the last one of the 11 DiMaggios of Taylor Street,” he said in a radio interview. “We all must go. I luckily survived. I’ve had a truly fabulous life. I have no complaints.” He said that he played bridge, followed the stock market, and managed money for his grandchildren. “I’m having a problem moving around, and I’m trying to stay as close as I can to home. I have good days and bad days. After all, at 90 you can’t expect to feel good every day. After being so active, you feel it. You start slowing down. You’ve got to give in a little bit.”
When asked if he was still contacted by people wanting information about Joe DiMaggio, Dominic replied, “Every once in a while.” He continued: “If I had to be the brother of somebody, I couldn’t think of a person I would like to be the brother of other than Joe.” Asked if he had any goals, Dominic said, “Reach 91.”
Later that year the Red Sox won another world championship. Dominic did not get to Fenway Park much anymore, preferring to watch games on television from home. When he and Emily were in Florida, he went to spring training games when he felt up to it. The last one he attended was with his friend Dean Boylan in February 2009, when he turned 92.
Later that month, his health faltered. He developed pneumonia. It was decided that he and Emily should head up to Marion to be near their children and his doctors in Boston. He couldn’t shake the congestion and felt weaker and weaker. Eventually, as with Joe, the doctors decided Dominic would be most comfortable at home, where he wanted to be. Emily was always there, as were nurses when he became too weak to get out of bed. Children and grandchildren visited, always bringing a smile to his face.
On the night of May 7, 2009, a Thursday, Paul had just conducted a business seminar. Before heading home across the border in New Hampshire, he called his wife, who was with his parents at the house in Marion. She asked him to come down and stay the night there. Dominic was in and out of consciousness, watching the Red Sox against the Cleveland Indians at Fenway Park.
“I said, ‘Sure, I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ ” Paul remembers. “I wasn’t that tired, and I wanted to see all of them anyway.”
When Paul arrived, Dominic was propped up in the bed in the den, with a view of Buzzards Bay. The game was over, a 13–3 thrashing by the home team, but a replay had just begun. Paul sat down to watch it with his father. He could hear Dominic acknowledge every Boston tally on their way to victory. As the game was drawing to a close, the nurse on duty that night checked on Dominic and said, “I think he stopped breathing.”
“I went upstairs and got Mom,” Paul says. “We bent over and kissed him. He was gone.”
The last of the DiMaggio brothers had died peacefully at home, with family.