Damn Yankees by Rob Fleder

Author:Rob Fleder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Sully and Mantle would soon show up in the same place once again, though neither would be obvious to the naked eye. After Sunday’s game, Tom Dowd, the Red Sox traveling secretary, arrived in the losing clubhouse with orders for Sullivan, his catcher, Sammy White, and Jackie Jensen: they were to report to an artist’s studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the next day. No one gave them a choice and it didn’t occur to them that they had one. Williams, whose presence had also been requested, was not about to drive halfway across the state to pose for anybody on his day off, in the middle of a race for the batting title, but he agreed to allow the artist, a guy named Norman Rockwell, to use his likeness.

“I didn’t know who the hell he was,” Frank says. “We were told by the Red Sox to take our uniforms and go. Jesus, it was a whole long way. There was no freeway in those days, three hours there and three hours back—and he served iced tea for lunch!”

Then he ushered them into his spartan studio, where a facsimile of the Red Sox spring training locker room in Sarasota, Florida, had been created. There were makeshift lockers with handwritten nameplates and a rudimentary bench constructed by Rockwell’s studio assistant, Louie Lamone. The artist littered the floor with matchbooks, crumpled paper cups, and dirty towels. He filled the lockers with liniments and towels and ball gloves. Frank hung his aloha shirt and sport jacket on a hook and put on his uniform and posed for Rockwell for an hour. He told the players where and how to sit, where and how to look. Then his photographer, Bill Scoville, began shooting.

“He just kept telling us to keep looking up,” Frank says. At what? He wasn’t sure. Rockwell didn’t explain the composition he envisioned or the assignment for the Saturday Evening Post, which had commissioned the piece for its cover. “He was a little meek, pipe-smoking guy, very polite,” Frank says. “He wanted me to sit there with my arm on Jensen’s shoulder,” affecting locker room intimacy. He stationed Sammy White on the bench to Sully’s right and the bare-chested studio assistant behind him. Rockwell called him “John J. Anonymous,” a stand-in for “all the forgettables who squeaked into the majors.”

Then he told Frank to stand at Williams’s locker and pretend he was the Splendid Splinter. He would put Ted’s head on Frank’s body later.

Ledgers at the Norman Rockwell Museum show that a check for $100 was issued to each of the players. “I never saw mine,” says Frank, who should have gotten paid twice.

A few weeks later, on October 20, Mickey Mantle’s twenty-fourth birthday, a high school senior from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, arrived at Rockwell’s studio to complete the composition. Sherman Safford, who actually preferred basketball to baseball, had been recruited to pose for Rockwell as the Rookie in his eponymous painting. “Picked me out of a chow line,” Safford recalls a half century later.

He was a tall, gangly, California-born boy.

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