No Doubt, DiMaggio Left His Heart in San Francisco Too

New Yorkers may claim Yankees great Joe DiMaggio as one of their own, but as it turns out, we’ve only been flattering ourselves all these years. DiMaggio may have played 13 seasons for the Yankees and married movie stars and held forth at Table One at Toots Shor’s once upon a time. He lived a big-screen life. But as the funeral bells pealed for DiMaggio Thursday at his old church, Sts. Peter and Paul of San Francisco, and he made his final trip home to his old North Beach neighborhood, something suddenly seemed clearer about him. Maybe you had to be here to feel it.

In the week since DiMaggio died, the deep thinkers who’ve strained to explain DiMaggio’s place in American society have been making it too complex. Or, worse, they had it all wrong. All the answers about DiMaggio’s pull on people seem to lay back here, in both the tenor of the private funeral he insisted upon, and this city and the people, which he regarded as his personal touchstones. To folks here, DiMaggio was not a melancholy or enigmatic figure. He was a humble man who lived a life of quiet conviction. He was one of their own.

Proud as he was of his baseball handiwork, DiMaggio never seemed to agree it should’ve made him some exalted demi-god or hero. (A favorite story among the locals who stood outside the church Thursday was the time DiMaggio refused an invitation to cut in line to get his electrical power restored after the earthquake of ’89.) DiMaggio had magnificent athletic talent, to be sure, but he never forgot he was the son of an immigrant Italian fisherman who labored like hell to support his nine kids, and the ethos Joe brought to the game was decidedly working class. Similarly, Thursday’s funeral was not a grandiose affair fit for a statesman or a king. It was more like a small-town wake attended by the family and friends of a neighborhood kid made good.

When the seven-limo funeral cortege arrived, the undertakers pulled one large spray of exotic flowers from atop DiMaggio’s polished wood casket as it emerged from the hearse. There were a few more baskets flanking the church altar once inside. But that was all. American League President Gene Budig and Commissioner Bud Selig attended but, excepting them, there was no head-turning procession of baseball titans come to pay homage. None was invited.

Hewing strictly to DiMaggio’s wishes, only 50 or so chosen family and friends filed into the striking Romanesque church, though it can easily seat 1,000. The funeral mass was conducted by a childhood friend, 79-year-old Armand Oliveri, now a priest at a nearby parish. DiMaggio’s brother Dominick, who had been at Joe’s bedside the night he died, gave a eulogy peppered with stories about their childhood in the nearby streets. And that was it.

There was no traffic jam. No dignitaries were imported to deliver high-minded summations about Joe the Cultural Icon, Joe the Baseball Legend. The church’s longtime organist played “Ave Maria,” and the church’s longtime secretary, another neighborhood lifer who waited outside 60 years ago when DiMaggio married his first wife, actress Dorothy Arnold, did her best to help reporters with an anecdote or two.

Perhaps the best testimony about the sort of man DiMaggio was came from those people--his former neighbors in North Beach or the nearby Marina district, where he lived in the same modest two-story rowhouse he bought for his parents with his first baseball bonus check.

If you ventured inside the old-fashioned Italian espresso shops, there were plenty of older Italian-American men Thursday who amiably told stories of meeting Joe, or playing sandlot ball with Joe, or at least knowing someone who had. Even younger residents said DiMaggio wasn’t a hard man to see or meet. He was often out walking or in the local corner stores or restaurants. While the rest of the world found him enigmatic, his neighbors scoff at the notion that DiMaggio was a melancholy figure or aloof loner.

San Francisco wasn’t just where he was from. People here seemed to understand him and were content to treat him like a regular Joe. No doubt that was part of the pull to him. No matter where his travels took him, he still returned to his Marina District home at least once a month, sure as the fog always rolled back into the nearby bay. And the affection ran both ways. When his funeral was through yesterday a remarkable thing happened outside the church: the motorcyle cops in his police escort kickstar ted their growling engines in near-unison, the bells began pealing again for DiMaggio, and--lo and behold--the respectful crowd of 400 or so people spontaneously began to applaud as DiMaggio’s hearse took him through the old neighborhood one last time.

The clapping began slowly, almost uncertainly, as if no one was quite sure it was proper. But very quickly the applause crescendoed and one felicitious whistle even went up--two sharp blasts that felt like a happy grace note in this impromptu celebration of a life well-lived. Then the cortege hung a right on Columbus Avenue after that, and rolled past Bimbo’s 365, a famous local club. The marquee out front read: “Goodbye Joe.”