Free 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports by Kostya Kennedy Page A

presented the President with a golden card that granted him access to every major league stadium—as if Roosevelt wouldn’t have been let in without it!—and had given another to the First Lady, Eleanor. Roosevelt adored baseball, valued its intrinsic joys and believed in the importance of its wider societal reach, seeing the sport as a connective thread among American citizens even, or perhaps especially, in a time of troubling uncertainty.
    The red-white-and-blue Opening Day bunting was gone from Griffith Stadium now, as was the April chill. On this sun-filled afternoon, DiMaggio had his finest game in weeks: four hits, among them a three-run homer beyond the 402-foot sign in leftfield, in a 10–8 Yankees win. The game, though, slipped quickly from the thoughts of the fans making their way from the stadium and up to Georgia Avenue after the final out.
    One of President Roosevelt’s fireside chats, this one designed to make clear America’s policy of defense, was to air live that night at 9:30 p.m. Nearly 70 million people would tune in across the U.S.—about 75% of the population aged nine and above—and millions more would listen overseas. In Washington D.C., hardly a radio anywhere was turned off that night. Radios were certainly playing in the chandeliered lobby and in the polished rooms of the Shoreham Hotel on Calvert Street, where a day earlier the nation’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, had given a lecture on the danger of the Nazi threat, and where DiMaggio and the rest of the Yankees were now spending the night, two miles from Roosevelt’s broadcast microphone in the White House.
    The President had relied heavily and successfully on the increasing power of radio during his eight years in office and by now, in the first stages of his third term, his chats were deeply anticipated and cherished. Issues of pressing importance seemed to have shaped every moment of FDR’s Presidency and he addressed each with a firmness of content and a mastery of tone. He spoke with a fatherly eloquence, a confidence revealed subtly in his pauses and emphases. The language that he used was strong and unambiguous; Roosevelt’s talks inspired people, gave them faith. Some said that he sounded the way Moses must have. Newspapers sometimes referred to him as “the Voice.”
    At about 9:35 p.m., just a few moments into this night’s speech, Roosevelt went to the heart of the matter. “It is unmistakably apparent,” he said, “that unless the advance of Hitlerism is forcibly checked now, the Western Hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi weapons of destruction.” He spoke proudly of America’s expanding military and he reaffirmed that the Lend-Lease Act was not an act of generosity to the Allies but was “based on hardheaded concern for our own security.” Then Roosevelt lauded the way that “Britain still fights gallantly, on a far-flung battle line” and cheers went up in living rooms all over London. It was 3:40 in the morning there.
    They were listening too under the lights at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, delaying the start of the Cubs-Cardinals game. The public address system broadcast Roosevelt’s words as a crowd of nearly 16,000 sat quietly in the stands on the warm, moonless night. Inside the clubhouse, some of the Chicago players, among them outfielders Augie Galan and Bill Nicholson, and some of the Cardinals, including catcher Gus Mancuso and the old sidearming righthander Lon Warneke, mustered around a small radio that had been set up between the locker rooms.
    Roosevelt’s speech came over the loudspeakers at the Polo Grounds in New York as well, the gathering of 17,009 fans fairly fixed in their seats, the players in the dugouts, the 1–1 game between the hometown Giants and the Boston Braves halted after the seventh inning and set to resume when the President was finished.
    People listened in restaurants and nightspots in Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco. At the Stork Club and