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The Jimmy Fund Jimmy Survives, Gives Ted Williams a Thrill

Einar Gustafson was a 12-year-old cancer patient who launched the Jimmy Fund in 1948 and then quietly succumbed to the disease.

Or so most people thought.

Dr. Sidney Farber with a patient

Einar had been at the heart of a publicity stunt to raise money for cancer research. His doctor, pioneering cancer researcher Sidney Farber, had insisted he be called ‘Jimmy’ to protect his privacy. The publicity stunt was so successful the fund was named after “Jimmy.” And Dr. Farber emerged as a leader in the drive for government funding of cancer research.

Einar Gustafson returned home to New Sweden, Maine, and lived a full and vigorous life. At the age of 63, he emerged as the original Jimmy and had a memorable visit with Ted Williams, the godfather of the Jimmy Fund.

The Jimmy Fund

He was born Carl Einar Gustafson Aug. 18, 1935 on a New Sweden potato farm. At age 12 he felt a pain in his abdomen while walking to school. He had non-Hodgkins lymphoma of the small bowel and underwent surgery in Caribou. Then he had another surgery in Lewiston.

His doctor referred him to Children’s Hospital in Boston, where cure rates maybe reached 30 percent. There, Einar’s doctor, Sidney Farber, had begun raising money for cancer research with a group of charitable show business people called the Variety Club.

Einar Gustafson in his Braves uniform.

On May 22, 1948, radio star Ralph Edwards was to ask for donations on a broadcast of his radio show, Truth or Consequences, from Children’s Hospital.

For the coast-to-coast broadcast, Farber selected Einar, a cute, polite Boston Braves fan who longed to watch games on television.

During the broadcast from “Jimmy’s” bedside, Boston Braves players paid him a surprise visit. They marched into his room with hats, bats and a small Braves uniform. Edwards announced “Jimmy” would get a TV set if they raised $20,000. Before the Braves left Children’s Hospital, people had showed up at the door with dollars, quarters and dimes for Jimmy.

Dr. Farber suggested they name the fund drive the Jimmy Fund.

Within a year the Jimmy Fund raised $231,485.51, “Jimmy” got his television and the Braves won the pennant.

“Jimmy” (Einar Gustafson) gets his TV.

Sidney Farber

When the Braves left for Milwaukee in 1953, the Red Sox adopted the Jimmy Fund and slugger Ted Williams became its most fervent advocate. His brother Danny had died from leukemia at age 39, and Williams raised millions for the charity.

“Back in the 1950s, Dr. Farber told me, `Ted, we’re gonna find a way to save these kids’,” remembered Williams.

Sidney Farber was a Jewish doctor from Buffalo, N.Y. He had graduated from SUNY Buffalo in 1923, a time when Jewish students often couldn’t get into U.S. medical schools. So Farber went to Germany, where he did so well as a first-year student he qualified to enter Harvard Medical School. As the first pathologist at Children’s Hospital, he is considered the father of pediatric pathology as well as the father of modern chemotherapy.

Dr. Farber realized breakthroughs in the treatment of disease had to be promoted. He began advocating for cancer research funding, often appearing before Congress as a leader in the drive for government funding for cancer research.

That broadcast with “Jimmy” at Children’s Hospital had been a turning point in the history of cancer treatment, bringing it into the glare of publicity. No longer was it a silent shame.

The Real Jimmy

Ted Williams in 1939

Dr. Farber kept in touch with Einar Gustafson until he died of a heart attack in his office at age 69 in 1973. Almost everyone else assumed Jimmy had succumbed to the disease.

In 1997, Einar Gustafson’s sister Phyllis Clauson of Chelmsford, Mass., wrote to the Jimmy Fund to tell them her brother was still alive.

Jimmy Fund Director Mike Andrews dismissed the letter. They’d had a lot like it – like Elvis sightings, said Andrews, a former Red Sox second baseman.

Karen Cummings, a Jimmy Fund fund-raiser, took the letter seriously. She tried to find Einar. One day her phone rang.

“This is Jimmy,” he said. “Heard you were lookin’ for me.”

A Most Wonderful Man

Einar had returned to Boston regularly to get chemotherapy as a boy. He grew to 6’5″, graduated from Caribou High School, drove trucks, married his high school sweetheart and had three daughters. Eventually he moved to Buzzards Bay and started a building company. His wife died in 1986, and he remarried. When he emerged as the original Jimmy, he was running a trucking business out of New Sweden

He explained why he had kept his identity quiet: “We were taught when we were kids you didn’t talk about those things. You didn’t talk about sickness.”

Statue of Ted Williams outside Fenway Park.

Einar became a spokesman for the Jimmy Fund. He drove a truck emblazoned with the charity’s logo and slogan: “Because it takes more than courage to beat cancer.” He threw out the first pitch at a Red Sox-Yankee game at Fenway in 1998. In 1999, Maine held a Recognition Day for him, and he was named honorary chairman of the Jimmy Fund.

“He turned out to be the most wonderful man,” said Andrews. “If we had tried to create a Jimmy, we couldn’t have done better. And he was just thrilled to be part of it.”

Jimmy and Ted

In 1999, Ted Williams came to Boston for an All-Star event and he toured the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Williams said the Jimmy Fund was the softest spot in his heart about the New England people.

He heard “Jimmy” was at the clinic, too. “Where’s this Jimmy?” Williams yelled. “I want to meet this Jimmy guy!”

The two men sat in rocking chairs and chatted.

“This is the biggest thrill of my trip, right here,” Williams said.

Einar Gustafson died of a stroke on Jan. 21, 2001, at his home in Caribou. Ted Williams died a year and a half later.

Contribute to the Jimmy Fund on Aug. 14, 2024, and your donation will be doubled. To join the fight against cancer., click here.

Image: Einar Gustafson with TV By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64477481. Einar Gustafson in Braves uniform By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64477546. Ted Williams statue By Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK – Ted Williams, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64154662. Fenway Park By Cdv1014 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51854591. This story was updated in 2024.

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Louis Sockalexis, The Indian Athlete With the Tragic Flaw

Louis Sockalexis broke a different color barrier in baseball 50 years before Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

He was a red man. And unlike Jackie Robinson, he couldn’t handle the taunts and insults, the war whoops in the stands and the racial jeers.

Sockalexis had a sensational start to his Major League Baseball playing career, dubbed a ‘wonder’ and ‘the most talked about’ young player on his team.

But he would only play 97 games in the Major Leagues, spend time in jail and die young.

After his playing days ended, he was arrested for vagrancy in Holyoke, Mass. Unshaven, with toes protruding from his shoes, he explained his downfall:

They liked me on the baseball field, and I liked firewater.

Louis Sockalexis

On Oct. 24, 1871, Louis Francis Sockalexis was born a member of the Penobscot tribe in Old Town, Maine, where both money and jobs were scarce. He was the son of Francis Sockalexis, a logger who became governor, or chief, of the Penobscot tribe, and Frances Sockbeson Sockalexis. He grew to six feet tall and excelled at sports.

Sockalexis at Holy Cross

In the summer of 1894, Louis Sockalexis played outfield for a baseball team sponsored by the Poland Spring Resort. One of his teammates was Mike ‘Doc’ Powers, a summer visitor to Maine and captain of the baseball team at the College of the Holy Cross. He persuaded Louis, a Catholic, to enroll in the Jesuit school.

He tried out for Holy Cross’s baseball coach, Jesse Burkett, a future Hall of Famer who played for the Cleveland Spiders. Burkett offered the 24-year-old Sockalexis a full scholarship. He rewarded Burkett with outstanding play for two seasons, batting over .400. He once stole six bases in a game against Brown and is credited with setting a world’s record for the longest baseball throw – 138 yards.

Burkett moved to Notre Dame, and Louis Sockalexis followed him. In the spring of 1897, Burkett helped him get a contract with the Cleveland Spiders.

He made a splash.

Deerfoot of the Diamond

“I unhesitatingly pronounce him a wonder,” former New York Giants Manager John Ward told the Sporting Life.

His Indian heritage and outstanding play was catnip for sportswriters. They called him the ‘Deerfoot of the Diamond’ and ‘Chief of Sockem.’

When he hit a game-winning home run for the Spiders’ first victory of the season, a newspaper headline read, ‘Indians Hang One Little Scalp on Their Belts.’

The team went on a tear, led by Sockalexis’ hitting heroics. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported ‘a visibly larger percentage of women than usual’ came to the ballpark when he played. Fans also came to jeer at him with war whoops and war dances.

He cheerfully shrugged off their taunts — he claimed.

Wild Bird

Off the field, Sockalexis liked to drink and carouse at night. A teammate called him a ‘wild bird.’ In early July, a foot injury hampered his play. How he got it is unclear. According to some accounts, he jumped or fell from the second-story window of a brothel. According to others, he injured his foot while running the base paths.

His drinking caught up with him, his play clearly suffered and his boosters in the sporting press turned on him. Suddenly Louis Sockalexis fit all the stereotypes of the drunken Indian. When he made a fielding error, he was called ‘a wooden Indian.’ In late July, the Plain Dealer reported, management couldn’t control him anymore.

Sockalexis’ demeanor changed; he grew angry and sullen. He spent the end of the 1897 season on the bench.

And then he spent most of the 1898 season on the bench.

The 1899 Spiders, worst team ever in baseball. Sockalexis wasn’t good enough for them.

In 1899, most of the Spiders were sold to St. Louis, except Sockalexis. He stayed behind with the Spiders, who won only 20 games that year with a team made up of rejects, prospects and semipro players.

Early in the season, the Plain Dealer reported, ‘the big Indian seems to have come to his senses.’ But then his play quickly deteriorated. On May 13, he twice fell down drunk in the outfield.

The once promising star wasn’t even good enough to play for the worst team in baseball, and the Spiders released him.

Last Years of Sockalexis

Louis Sockalexis played minor league ball for a few months, then dropped out of the game. Over the next two years he was arrested and jailed for drunkenness, public disturbance and vagrancy. He returned to baseball in 1902, playing for a Lowell, Mass., team, and in 1903, playing for Bangor.

He returned to the reservation in Old Town, where he coached teams and piloted a ferryboat. In 1913, he joined a logging team. He died of a heart attack on Dec. 24, 1913, only 42 years old.

The Indians

The evolution of Chief Wahoo

Back then, baseball teams changed their names frequently. The leagues had merged, and Cleveland’s American League team was known as the Naps, after their best player, Nap Lajoie. But Lajoie had been traded, and the team needed a new name. In 1915, the team’s owner asked local sportswriters to come up with one.

They settled on the Indians. Perhaps they remembered that brief period of excitement when Louis Sockalexis made his major league debut nearly 20 years earlier. Perhaps they were thinking of Boston’s miracle Braves, who won the World Series the year before. At any rate, the Indians adopted the image of Chief Wahoo as their logo.

The grinning, dark red caricature has come under criticism recently, much like the name of the Washington Redskins. The team tried to deflect its critics by saying the team was named in honor of Louis Sockalexis.

Louis Sockalexis was voted into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame in 2000. And in 2021, the Indians changed their name to the Guardians.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Frederick Small Commits the Imperfect Murder of 1916

Frederick Small, an awful little man, thought of himself as an astute businessman. He wasn’t.

An abusive husband, he thought he committed the perfect murder when he killed his third wife in a remote lakeside cottage.

He didn’t.

Florence Small, 3rd wife of Frederick Small

His sister-in-law was afraid of him. She said he used to stretch out his hand and say, “There is a hand capable of anything.”

Except getting away with murder.

Frederick Small, Serial Husband

Frederick Small

He was born in 1869 in Portland, Maine, and attended local schools.

At 20, he married Nettie Davis of Minot, Maine, and set up a grocery business. Nettie died in childbirth and his business failed, so he moved to Boston to try his luck there.

The Boston Globe later described Frederick Small as undersized, crippled in one leg and altogether inconspicuous — but also noted he had figured prominently in the newspapers over a score of years.

Throughout his checkered career, Frederick Small had filed a sensational divorce case and fallen victim to three mysterious fires.

When he first came to Boston he took a series of lowly jobs — as a hotel clerk, a waiter and a chef. In 1893 he finally found his calling and began to dabble in real estate. After he made some commissions, he opened an office and played the stock market with some success.

On July 31, 1899, he married Laura Patterson of Everett, Mass., and moved to the Boston suburb of Somerville.

The next year a farm he leased in Hudson, Mass., burned down after two fires mysteriously started on the premises in one day. Small had insured the property heavily, but investigations found nothing.

Sensational Divorce

In 1909, Frederick Small’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. His real estate debts caught up with him, and to make up for his deficits he sued his wife. Laura Patterson Small had carried on an affair with Arthur Soden, president of the Boston Braves, railway magnate and ex-president of the Boston City Club.

Boston City Club

Frederick Small sued Soden, and after a three-year trial he got his divorce and a $10,000 settlement. The judge excoriated the Smalls from the bench.

The judge said Laura Small needed “no great inducement to be led astray.” He called Frederick Small “an indifferent husband” who knew his wife was cheating on him but didn’t care because he could profit by it.

Smooth, Suave, Agreeable

In 1913, Frederick Small took a rest cure at a farm in Southboro, Mass. Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Curry and her two daughters ran the big old place.

Mrs. Curry called him “smooth, suave and agreeable,” and he won the heart of her daughter Florence.

Two weeks after he arrived in Southboro, Frederick Small married Florence Curry. He quickly seized control of the family’s property, turned Mrs. Curry and her other daughter out of the house and took Florence to a lonely cottage in Ossipee, N.H.

The day they left Massachusetts, his Southboro property went up in flames. He was accused of leaving a delayed-action incendiary device behind, but no one ever proved it. Small collected $10,000 in insurance money.

Ossipee

The Small cottage before the fire

In Ossipee, Frederick Small presented himself as a successful retired stockbroker. He spent much of his time tinkering in his workshop, trying to come up with an invention that would make him a fortune.

Florence led a lonely and miserable existence. Her husband cut her off from her family and her religion. Her sister visited once and said she feared him so much she slept with a paper knife under her pillow. Florence told her Frederick Small drugged her.

He once beat her with a bootjack and threatened the doctor who came to tend her wounds. Their neighbors grew accustomed to hearing her screams across the lake.

Ossipee Lake

Florence Small was 12 years younger, three inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than her husband. Still she put up with his abuse.

Once, while boating on Lake Ossipee, Florence fell into the water. She felt certain her husband would let her drown until another boater came along. Frederick Small then made a great show of rescuing her. To top it off, he tried to get a Carnegie medal for saving her life.

On Sept. 28, 1916, Frederick Small summoned a coachman, George Kennett, to pick him up at 3:30 pm and take him to the railroad station. Frederick Small said he had to go to Boston to check on his investments. He waited outside for the coach. When Kennett arrived, Frederick Small yelled goodbye to his wife and climbed into the coach.

At the station, Small joined Edwin Conner, a local schoolteacher and insurance agent who had sold him a $20,000 life insurance policy on him and his wife. Conner had insisted that both Florence and Frederick Small sign the policy. He also sold Small a $3,000 policy on the cottage.

Fire

The two men checked into a Boston hotel and Frederick Small mailed Florence a postcard at 8:40 pm. Then he and Conner saw a movie. At midnight they returned to the hotel. The desk clerk told him his cottage was on fire and he should call right away.

Small and Conner raced back to Ossipee in a hired car. When he reached the smoldering ruins of the cottage, Small broke down, apparently inconsolable.

A search party found Florence Small’s head and torso in the basement. The flames had spared them because she fell through the burning floor into several inches of lake water in the basement.

When told, Frederick Small responded, “You mean there’s enough to be buried?”

A Person of Interest

People from Ossipee heading to Small’s hearing

Someone had made sure Florence Small died. The murderer strangled her, shot her in the head and bludgeoned her face into a bloody pulp.

The medical examiner, George P. Magrath, noticed a strange substance on her body that ultimately explained the unusual intensity of the fire. It was slag left by thermite, a welding compound used by railroads. When investigators searching through the burned cottage found a Colt .32 that belonged to Frederick Small, he became a person of interest in the murder.

Arrest and Trial

Small protested he’d been a hundred miles away when the fire broke out. But further investigation produced an alarm clock with wires and spark plugs attached, and the grocer reported he’d delivered five gallons of kerosene to Small’s cottage just before the fire.

Small, hoping the power of suggestion would work on George Kennett, insisted the coachman had seen him kiss his wife goodbye. Kennett firmly maintained he had only seen Small shout goodbye into the house.

Examination of Florence Small found her lunch in her stomach, which indicated she died hours before the fire.

Small was arrested and tried at the brand-new Carroll County Courthouse in Ossipee. On Jan. 8, 1917, a jury found Frederick Small guilty of murder.

Insisting on his innocence, Small sought a new trial. New Hampshire’s attorney general reported, “the facts were too plain and abhorrent to be misunderstood.”

Frederick Small was hanged on Jan. 15, 1918 in Concord Prison.

***

Photos courtesy Tamworth and Ossipee Historical Societies except for Ossipee Lake, By Ken Gallager at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17976952.. This story was updated in 2025.

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Yogi Berra Hits His Way Through New England (Under a Fake Name)

Yogi Berra might never have starred for the New York Yankees had he not talked his way onto the Navy team based at the Groton submarine base in 1945.

Yogi Berra in his unflattering uniform

He had to beg the manager to let him try out. He was a short, squat, awkward gunner’s mate who’d seen action on D-Day. Now, as World War II wound down, he’d returned to the States and longed to play baseball.

“If I didn’t make it in baseball, I won’t have made it workin’,” he said. “I didn’t like to work.”

Yogi Berra

The base’s ball club was run by James Gleeson, a former Major League outfielder nicknamed “Gee-Gee.” Gleeson didn’t think Berra looked anything like a ballplayer. “So I’m ugly,” Yogi later said. “I never saw anyone hit with his face.”

Gleeson didn’t believe Yogi was the property of the New York Yankees, either.

James “Gee-Gee” Gleeson

Yogi finally convinced him, and he went on to become a Hall of Famer and a beloved cultural figure. His unwittingly witty comments were known as Yogi-isms. “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded,” was one of his many classic lines. So was, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

Yogi tried to distance himself from his Yogi-isms. “I never said most of the things I said,” he said.

Lawrence Peter Berra

Berra was born Lawrence Peter Berra on May 12, 1925 in St. Louis to a family of Italian immigrants. He dropped out of school after eighth grade because all he wanted to do was to play baseball.

“Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets,” he said.

After his best friend Joe Garagiola signed with the St. Louis Cardinals for a $500 bonus, Yogi Berra decided he had to have a $500 bonus too. The Yankees gave him one, along with $90 a month to play for their Norfolk, Va., minor league team, the Tars.

As a Tar in 1943, Yogi Berra hit seven home runs and 56 RBIs – including 23 in one double header. At the end of the season Berra enlisted in the Navy. He became a gunner’s mate and saw action on D-Day aboard a rocket boat, a 36-foot landing craft that sprayed rockets on the beach before the troops landed. Berra spent 10 days on the boat before he finally returned to his ship.

About the invasion, he said, ‘we were closer than the hitter is to the Green Monster at Fenway Park.’ At 18, he didn’t think anything could kill him.

I didn’t know enough to be scared. I had my head up over the side of the boat all the time, looking around like it was the Fourth of July in Forest Park and after the fireworks we were going to go over and get some hot dog and cokes.

New England Baseball (Not the Red Sox)

Before he was mustered out, Yogi Berra was stationed at the submarine base at Groton, Conn., where he finally convinced James Gleeson to let him play.

New England was a good place to hone one’s baseball skills as World War II wound down. Thousands of young men who played baseball, some in the Major Leagues, were stationed at military installations throughout the region. They could play for service teams like the Groton Raiders. Or they could play for for teams in the New England League like the Nashua Dodgers and the Pawtucket Slaters. They could even play for both. The League didn’t allow players signed with professional teams to play semi-pro games as ringers, and the military discouraged the practice. But on the semipro teams they could make $50 a game – half a month’s pay. So the professionals played under assumed names on their days off.

As a Yankee in 1953

Yogi Berra played under an assumed name for the Cranston Chiefs (later the Providence Grays) of the New England League.

His record is murky, as local sportswriters protected the identity of the players. “The New England is a league of aliases and fictitious names. No scribe desires to prevent any young man from earning a dollar by using his right name,” the Lynn Evening Item wrote.

Cusano?

The Italian-American Writer blog shared a memory of Yogi Berra as a Chiefs player:

At Cranston Stadium, for example, a guy named Cusano kept hitting home runs for the Cranston Chiefs and few people knew that his real name was Yogi Berra, a top Yankee prospect.
The city updated the field and raised the fence 30 ft because one day Berra… uhhh Cusano… hit a ball 500 feet off the roof of the Cranston Bible Chapel in centerfield.

The real Crash Davis (Kevin Costner played the fictional Crash Davis in Bull Durham)

Crash Davis had played professional ball for the Philadelphia Athletics before being drafted by the Navy. As the war wound down, he managed the Lawrence Millionaires of the New England League.

I remember one game when we were playing in Providence, Rhode Island, and all those players were using assumed names. Jimmy Gleeson, who had been with the Cubs and the Reds, was playing in the league and first base was open so I elected to walk him. I didn’t know that little guy that was hitting next but I knew Gleeson. That short little guy looked about 18 or 19 years old, and it turned out he hit a home run with the bases loaded. His real name was Lawrence ‘Yogi’ Berra.

The Legend of Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra in 1956

On June 25, 1945, the Yogi Berra legend was born. The New York Giants, returning from a series with the Boston Braves, played against the Groton team. Berra went 3-for-4. One of his hits came off a wild pitch. Giants manager Mel Ott decided he had to have the odd little catcher. He offered the Yankees $50,000 for Berra. Yankees general manager Larry MacPhail refused without knowing who Yogi Berra was – but decided to find out.

MacPhail summoned Berra to New York for an interview. Yogi walked in wearing the sailor’s outfit so unflattering to his short, squat physique. “You want to see me, Mister?” he said to MacPhail. MacPhail was stunned. He later recollected that Yogi ‘looked like the bottom man on an unemployed acrobatic team.’

But Yogi managed to convince MacPhail he was a professional ball player — by asking who he should see about his expenses for the trip.

MacPhail promoted him to the Newark Bears, just one rung down from the New York Yankees, for the 1946 season.

The Yankees

On Sept. 22, 1946, Yogi Berra was called up to the Yankees. As a Yankee he would appear in 14 World Series and on 18 All Star teams, and he would win the American League’s Most Valuable Player honor three times. In 1972, he was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

On a night the Yankees chose to honor him, he expressed his appreciation: “I’m a lucky guy and I’m happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.”

James Gleeson in 1964 became Yankees’ manager Yogi Berra’s first base coach.

Yogi Berra died on Sept. 22, 2015, at the age of 90. His advice to mourners: “You should always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise, they won’t come to yours.”

With thanks to The New England League: A Baseball History, 1885-1949 By Charlie Bevis and Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee By Allen Barra. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Newark Bears By buba69 – https://www.flickr.com/photos/buba69/1297630664/sizes/o/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31323851.

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In Springfield, Leo Durocher Learned How Not To Be Nice

Leo Durocher ranks 10^th in career wins by a Major League baseball manager and fourth in ejections by umpires.

Leo Durocher

His brash outspokenness earned him the nickname ‘Leo the Lip.’ In the non-baseball world, he is most famous for saying, “Nice guys finish last.” He was a notorious bench jockey who ordered his pitchers to hit batters and fought with authority. As manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers he championed Jackie Robinson and threatened to trade anyone who didn’t want him on the team.

“Nice guys finish last” did not mean you couldn’t be a decent person and succeed, he later said.

West Springfield

Leo Durocher was born July 27, 1905 on a kitchen table on the third floor of a triple decker in West Springfield, Mass. Two days after he was born, his mother went back to work as a maid in a Springfield hotel.

His father was a railroad engineer who had a heart attack shortly after Leo was born.

Both his parents were French Catholic; so was the neighborhood. His parents and his three older brothers spoke nothing but French in the house while he was growing up. He entered public school without knowing a word of English.

He lived two blocks from Hall of Famer Rabbit Maranville, the Boston Braves shortstop who gave him a glove and tips on how to play the position.

The Big Leagues

He was a good all-around athlete in high school and was offered a scholarship to Holy Cross – but he hit a science teacher before he graduated. He was suspended and didn’t return to high school.

Instead, he went to work for local employers and played on the company teams. At 17 he tried out with the minor league Hartford Senators and made the team.

In 1928 he was called up to play shortstop for the Yankees for two years (Babe Ruth called him ‘The All-American Out’). He played with the Cincinnati Reds, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers as player-manager. He also managed the New York Giants, the Chicago Cubs and the Houston Astros, ending his Major League career in 1973.

In his autobiography, Nice Guys Finish Last, he explained how the phrase, “Nice guys finish last’ came about while he was talking to a sportswriter. It wasn’t completely accurate, but it makes the point:

… the Giants, led by Mel Ott, began to come out of their dugout to take their warm-up. Without missing a beat, I said, “Take a look at that Number Four there. A nicer guy never drew breath than that man there.” I called off his players’ names as they came marching up the steps behind him, “Walker Cooper, Mize, Marshall, Kerr, Gordon, Thomson. Take a look at them. All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last.” I said, “They lose a ball game, they go home, they have a nice dinner, they put their heads down on the pillow and go to sleep. …. Give me some scratching, diving, hungry ballplayers who come to kill you. Now, Stanky’s the nicest gentleman who ever drew breath, but when the bell rings you’re his mortal enemy. That’s the kind of a guy I want playing for me.

Leo Durocher died in 1991 in Palm Springs, Calif., at the age of 86.

With thanks to Nice Guys Finish Last by Leo Durocher. The Leo Durocher Goudey baseball card is card by Goudey. Licensed under public domain via Wikimedia Commons. This story was updated in 2022.

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Babe Ruth Ends His Career in Boston — On the Worst Team in Baseball History

In August 1934, 48,000 fans came to see 39-year-old Babe Ruth play for the Yankees at Fenway Park because they thought it would be his last appearance in Boston.

Babe Ruth and two players who were not Babe Ruth. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Boston loved the Babe — possibly more than New York did.

At that last game at Fenway in 1934, the fans cheered everything he did. When he grounded out in his last at-bat, they gave him a thunderous ovation.

“Do you know that some of them cried when I left the field?” Ruth said afterwards. “And if you wanna know the truth, I cried too.”

Little did they know he would return the next spring as a Boston Brave.

Babe Ruth

Ruth began his baseball career in 1914 as a dominant left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox – until that long-lamented day five years later when he was traded to the New York Yankees. After 20 years in baseball, he had seven World Series ring and, a batting title. He had twice won 20 games as a pitcher and set every home run record in the book.

But after two decades, it was clear to all that the Babe’s skills were deteriorating. Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert made a secret deal with the Boston Braves’ owner, Emil Fuchs, to unload Babe Ruth.

The Babe desperately wanted to manage a team, so Fuchs offered him a contract that gave him two titles: “assistant manager” and “vice president.” But Fuchs had no intention of letting Ruth manage. The Braves were struggling, both financially and on the field, and Fuchs wanted Ruth to boost the gate receipts.

Worst team in baseball history. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

On Feb. 26, 1935, Yankee Babe Ruth was handed a piece of paper. It said,

You are hereby notified as follows: 1. That you are unconditionally released.

The Boston Braves

Babe Ruth got off to a great start as a Brave. He crushed a home run off Giants’ ace Carl Hubbell before an opening day crowd of 25,000 fans, including five of the six New England governors.

Ruth went seriously downhill after that. He still hit the ball occasionally, but he could barely get around the bases and his defense was so poor pitches threatened not to pitch if he was in the lineup. He gradually realized he would not manage the Braves.

Worse, the Braves that year were a terrible team — the worst in baseball history. They finished the season with a 38–115 record.

Babe Ruth, 1918

After a month, the Babe desperately wanted to retire.

“All ballplayers should quit when it starts to feel as if all the baselines run uphill,” he said.

The Braves were about to go on a long road trip, and opposing teams had plans to honor the Babe Ruth. He was persuaded to play until Memorial Day.

In a game against Pittsburgh on May 25, Babe Ruth hit three home runs, including his 714^th, driving the ball out of Forbes Field. It was the longest home run ever hit at Forbes Field. “I swing big, with everything I’ve got,” he said. “I hit big or I miss big.”

And, he added, “I like to live as big as I can.” On May 30, 1935, he played his last game against the Philadelphia Phillies. In his last at-bat during the first inning, he grounded out softly to the first basemen. Then in left field he misplayed a fly ball. Then he went back to the dugout for the last time.

The day after he retired, Emil Fuchs put the Braves up for sale.

He never got the manager’s job he coveted. In retirement, he fished, played golf and made personal appearances. He died of cancer on Aug. 16, 1948, 53 years old.

After his death, sportswriter Tommy Holmes said he gave up talking about him.

I realized that those who had never seen him didn’t believe me.

This story last updated in 2022.

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