Yogi Berra Reveals that 90% of Wokeness is Half Mental
The white privilege of Yogi Berra, Joe Garagiola, and my forebears on Dago Hill in St. Louis.
The following book is an excellent biography of baseball great Yogi Berra: Yogi: A Life Behind the Mask, by Jon Pessah, 2020, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 566 pages.
The first several chapters describe Yogi’s boyhood in the Italian section of St. Louis and his break into the big leagues. The second chapter is titled “Dago Hill,” which was the common name given to the community.
The book inadvertently exposes the speciousness of the core premise of wokeness and reveals the appalling ignorance of those who fall for it. The premise is that the hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups force-fitted into the “White” have the same skin shade, the same socioeconomic and institutional advantages, the same racist attitudes, and the same ancestral history of oppressing and discriminating against so-called people of color.
Italians are one of those stereotyped groups, and Yogi Berra’s story reveals how unwarranted the stereotype is. Even if the reader isn’t Italian, the story should be of interest, not only because Yogi was such an interesting character but also because stories like his shake the foundation of not only wokeness but also of the diversity and inclusion movement.
Yogi’s boyhood home was across the street from the boyhood home of another baseball great, Joe Garagiola. My dad and his siblings grew up in the same hood at the same time and knew both of them and their families.
Yogi and his immigrant parents were hardly privileged. The book quotes a newspaper ad for labor that ran at about the same time that Yogi’s parents arrived in America at the beginning of the 20th century:
Common labor, White $1.30─$1.50 a day
Common labor, Colored $1.25─$1.40 a day
Common labor, Italian $1.15─$1.25 a day
Maybe Yogi’s parents oppressed people of color back in Italy. It’s hard to see how they would’ve done this, however, considering that they were peasants from a small village about 25 miles east of Milan. But, hey, if wokes say it was true, it must’ve been true. After all, just about every major American institution, including media, academia, government and corporations, have bought into the tenets of wokeness.
Granted, there was a nexus between Italians and racial injustice, as the following passage from the book attests:
On March 14, 1891, an angry mob had stormed a jail in New Orleans, pulled out nine Italian men accused of murdering the chief of police, grabbed two more off the street, and hanged them all, the largest mass lynching in American history. Another five Italians were lynched in New Orleans eight years later. Between 1880 and 1920, at least 50 Italians were lynched, and during his Memorial Day speech in St. Louis in 1917, former President Teddy Roosevelt insisted that all immigrants must speak English and become “Americans”, not people with hyphenated identities like Italian-Americans.
It’s strange that wokes missed this history, given that they are intellectually superior and such superb students of history, especially those from the Ivy League, where—sarcasm alert!—there is very deep diversity of thought about diversity.
As described in the book, and as can be seen today on the Hill—which has become a tourist attraction—most of the homes had tiny front yards and were shotgun houses, meaning that they were about 15 feet wide and three rooms long. They could be bought for about $2,500 in 1930, which in today’s money would be about $40,000.
There’s a lesson in here on how to make homes more affordable today, but that would require Americans to read history instead of tweets.
Despite the low incomes and low home prices on the Hill, it was not a slum. The book is correct in saying that the homes were “fastidiously kept,” that most homes had vegetable gardens in back, and that wine was made in the cellars of most of them. I would add that the 52 square blocks of the Hill were also fastidiously kept, even to the extent of homeowners sweeping the alleys behind their homes.
This was true for my fraternal grandparents. They lived in the upstairs unit of a one-bath, two-bedroom two-flat, and my aunt and uncle and their five kids lived in the downstairs unit, which consisted of one bath and one bedroom. A vegetable garden and arbor took up every foot of the tiny backyard, and grandpa made wine in the cellar and hung small homemade salamis from the cellar’s ceiling to cure. My cousins and I would snatch one, peel off the moldy skin, and eat it along with a chunk of Italian bread.
Privilege for sure.
Yogi’s older brothers Tony and Mike were also excellent baseball players as teens. They were so good that both were asked by major league teams to try out for their roster. But their father Pietro Berra squelched the idea, saying that a man’s job was to provide for his family, not to play a little boy’s game. Tony went to work at one of the Hill’s many bakeries, and Mike at a shoe factory. Another brother, John, waited tables at Ruggeri’s, one of the best restaurants on the Hill, and, for that matter, in all of St. Louis.
Once he made it through eighth grade, Yogi wanted to quit school and pursue a baseball career. His father called a family meeting to discuss it, inviting the parish priest from St. Ambrose Church to attend—a church where a statue still stands of an immigrant Italian family carrying everything they owned in a valise. The father’s answer was same as the answer for Yogi’s older brothers: It was okay to quit school but only to go to work, not to play baseball.
That’s what working-class Italian men did. Yogi’s dad worked with Joe Garagiola’s dad at the local clay products factory, where they had steady jobs but not much pay. When Prohibition ended in 1933, their sons, like other sons, were expected to greet their dads at the end of their shift with a bucket of cold beer. They would grab 15 cents and an ice bucket from home and rush down “to Fassi’s Tavern to fill the buckets with ice and bottles of beer,” so that the beer was waiting for their fathers when they walked through the door of the house.
If parents tried that today, they’d be arrested for child abuse.
In addition to beer, wine, and sports, other mainstays on the Hill were church and food. As the book explains, “Saturday was the day for a bath and Confession at St. Ambrose Church. They all attended Sunday Mass at 9 a.m. with their fathers, then Sunday school with Father Charles Koester—everyone’s favorite priest—while their mothers prepared the family’s Sunday feast.”
The cuisine was predominately Northern Italian, and so was the dialect. Both were quite different from the cuisine and dialect of the Southern Italians and Sicilians who settled in New York City and other parts of the East Coast. Common dishes were risotto, ravioli, tortellini in broth, and stufato. (My grandfather would pick mushrooms to go with the dishes in the woods of nearby Forest Park, one of the grandest city parks in the nation and the site of the 1904 World’s Fair.)
Yogi’s dad finally gave in and let his son pursue baseball, as long as he worked when his baseball schedule allowed. After bouncing around in club ball for a few years, he was offered a contract in 1942 by the Yankees to play for their minor league team in Norfolk, Virginia. The contract was for $90 a month and a $500 bonus. Because he was just 17, Yogi wasn’t eligible at the time to serve in the Second World War.
The Yankees had a history of signing Italian players. Second baseman Tony Lazzeri and Frankie Crosetti were known as the Big Dago and Little Dago, respectively, while Joe DiMaggio was just the Dago.
Many residents of Norfolk and environs considered Italians to be non-white, with the same social standing as Jews and only a small step up from blacks. Yogi endured the racial slurs of wop, dago, and guinea from fans and the opposing team.
Meanwhile, Joe DiMaggio would enlist in the Army and serve three years while in the prime of his baseball career. The book describes how his parents were treated:
Life is worse for DiMaggio’s parents, Rosalia and Giuseppe—two of the 600,000 Italians in America who are not US citizens—back home in San Francisco. They’re classified as “enemy aliens” and have to register with the government, which means being fingerprinted and receive a photo identification card. They cannot travel outside a five-mile radius from home without their ID cards. They live under an 8 p.m. – 6 a.m. curfew, and can no longer own a shortwave radio, camera, or gun. Unbeknownst to Giuseppe, the FBI considers arresting him just to prove that parents of a celebrity won’t get special treatment, then decide against it.
Giuseppe’s fishing boat is confiscated—like those of his fellow Italian fishermen—and San Francisco Bay, where they’ve all fished for a living for decades is off-limits. . . . Still, the DiMaggios are thankful they’re not among the 10,000 Italians deemed security risks and forced from their homes on the California coast to housing inland.
They were fortunate not to have been arrested, given that by June 1942, 1,500 Italians had been arrested as enemy aliens by the FBI.
When old enough, Yogi joined the Navy and saw action on a landing craft during the D-Day invasion. After the war, he returned to baseball.
The rest of the book details his baseball career.
For an example of how small the world is, fast-forward to 2010. My wife and I were thinking of moving to a different part of Scottsdale and were looking at houses for sale. One of them turned out to be the home of Joe Garagiola, who had moved to a nursing home after being a part-time announcer for the Diamondbacks. Two guys with roots on Dago Hill ended up living in the same town and, if my wife and I had bought the house, would have lived in the same house.
This is what white privilege can buy.
Fast-forward a few years to 2017, when my wife and I had moved to our current home in Tucson. In visiting the local Pima Air and Space Museum, I ran across a display that featured Hispanic fighter pilots. There was no display for Italian pilots or any other ethnic group—only Hispanics were singled out.
No doubt, the curator saw this condescension as exhibiting wokeness.
Yogi said, “Ninety percent of the game is half mental.” To paraphrase him, Ninety percent of wokeness is half mental.
