Tribute to the Yankee Clipper

- Simon and Garunkel, 1968

When I was a little kid, I heard this song on the radio and often wondered what it meant. Hey, DiMag was still alive, I would say to myself. But as I grew older, and learned more about the generation that immediately preceded mine, I came to understand what Simon and Garfunkel were talking about. While the 1950s was an era dominated by American culture and heroism, the 1960s was very different.

I didn't have the luxury of experiencing the 1950s and the post-World War II generation of American's that lived in it. Tom Brokaw rightly characterizes this generation of Americans (those who liberated Europe from Nazism and brought peace to the Pacific) as "The Greatest Generation."

But as great as these Americans were, their successors have failed to live up to their standard. Today, America is a nation without heroes and I often question whether we could ever muster enough national character to win a war like World War II again. Nowhere today is there an American hero like Joe DiMaggio. There is no one like that in today's sports, or the business world, or in Congress. And there sure as hell aren't any in the White House.

Indeed, while the World War II generation bravely defeated Nazism and Japanese nationalism, and then laid the ideological, political and economic foundations for the eventual defeat of communism, the generation that followed these great Americans is leaving a much different legacy. Whether it was Vietnam, the civil unrest in America's cities, the public displays of hatred between blacks and whites, free love, the drug culture, Timothy Leary, or any of the many 1960s upheavals that caused America to lose its innocence, Simon and Garfunkel saw quite clearly that America had changed...DiMag had left and gone away.

To understand the real impact of this man on America culture cannot be summed up here.

"He was, to people all over the world, what a baseball player was supposed to be like. If you said to God, 'Create someone who was what a baseball player should be,' God would have created Joe DiMaggio."

Tommy Lasorda

"In these days of presidential transgression and apologies and prime-time interviews about private sexual matters, we grieve for Joe DiMaggio and mourn the loss of his grace and dignity, his fierce sense of privacy, his fidelity to the memory of his wife and the power of his silence."

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