Where Are They Buried? (20 page)

SEPTEMBER 10, 1934 – DECEMBER 14, 1985

In 1953, fresh out of high school, Roger Maris signed with the Cleveland Indians farm team, and he finally made his Major League debut on opening day in 1957. Roger went 3-for-5 that day, and on the next, he hit his first big league home run, a grand slam that won the game. In 1960 he was traded to the Yankees and in his first game with them hit two home runs. With Mickey Mantle off the injured list, the team now had two solid sluggers in the lineup and the stage was set for the Yankees’ return to dominance.

During the 1961 season, Roger and Mickey played out a drama for frenzied fans as they each swung for the heavens to claim the American League home run title. By mid-season it became obvious that they were both on pace to threaten Babe Ruth’s “impossible to beat” record of 60 dingers in a season and their friendly competition took on a new intensity. Sports pages were filled with daily updates of the sluggers’ duel and rabid fans argued over the possibility of either slugger breaking the record. (Babe had set his record when the season consisted of just 154 games, and the season had since then been expanded to 162 games.)

Mickey fell off the pace after suffering an injury in September but Roger pressed on and tied the home run record during the 159th game of the season. Finally, in the season’s last game, Roger hit his 61st home run, breaking the Babe’s 34-year-old record, establishing a new benchmark that would itself stand for the next 37 years.

Of course, not everyone was delighted with Roger’s accomplishment. Many of baseball’s old guard scoffed at his feat because Roger’s record was established after 162 games. Besides, they said, nobody could be a better ballplayer than the legendary Babe Ruth. Roger felt the hostility and he later commented, “They acted as if I poisoned their record books or something. As a ballplayer, I would be delighted to do it again but as an individual, I doubt if I possibly could.”

The Yankees capped that magical 1961 season with a world championship but the season also proved to be Roger’s last great one. The next year he hit “only” 33 home runs and by 1966 he was traded away to the Cardinals. Two seasons later he retired to run a beer distributorship and, at 51, Roger died of lymphatic cancer. He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fargo, North Dakota.

Despite his accomplishments, Roger is not a member of baseball’s Hall of Fame.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Follow University Street north from town, turn left onto the dirt road of 32nd Avenue, and the cemetery is the third one on the left, near the end of the road.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter Holy Cross at the driveway after the metal garage, go down the hill, and Roger’s black, diamond-shaped stone is on the left just before the road bends.

MAY 16, 1928 – DECEMBER 25, 1989

Alfred Manuel Billy Martin grew up in Berkeley, California, a rough street kid who found an outlet for his aggression in baseball. After a couple seasons in the minors, Billy became a steady Yankee second baseman and got used to winning; in his seven seasons there, the Yankees won five World Series. Though Billy played with a scrappy ferocity, he really distinguished himself off the field, and his nefarious late-night carousing culminated at the infamous 1957 Copacabana melée, after which the Yankees, having had had enough of his drinking blowouts, traded him to Kansas City.

Billy bounced around among six teams in the next four seasons and retired from playing in 1961. Over the next dozen years he developed a reputation as a boy-wonder genius, a manager who could turn any team into a winner. In 1975, the despotic George Steinbrenner tapped Billy to pilot his ailing Yankee team.

Thus began an infamous Bronx psychodrama, the clash of outsized egos that pitted Billy the firecracker manager against the meddling owner Steinbrenner. Over the next ten years, Billy gained and lost his job managing the “Bronx Zoo” on five separate occasions. Though Billy’s departures from the helm were the result of everything from vicious fistfights with marshmallow vendors, and even his own pitchers, to televised shouting altercations with Steinbrenner, Billy was always rehired because he really was a heck of a manager, perfecting a swashbuckling brand of baseball that came to be known as Billyball. Under his on-again, off-again tenure, the Yankees won two pennants and a World Series.

In 1986, Billy’s beloved number 1 jersey was retired by the Yankees, and when Billy addressed the audience he told them, “I may not have been the greatest Yankee to put on the uniform, but I was the proudest.”

In an interview, he once said, “As a manager, I demand only one thing of a player, hustle. It doesn’t take any ability to hustle.” Hustling home as a passenger in a pickup truck on a snowy road, Billy was killed on Christmas Day 1989, in a single-car crash in upstate Fenton, New York.

At 61, Billy was buried near Babe Ruth at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn right and follow the main road up the hill. Turn right immediately after Section 25 and the Martin plot is 120 feet on the right.

JUNE 7, 1947 – AUGUST 2, 1979

After 99 minor-league games, Thurman Munson was called up to the Yankees, and as their starting catcher was named the 1970 Rookie of the Year. Despite a well-deserved reputation as a surly and irritable curmudgeon, Thurman was named Yankee team captain in 1976—its first since Lou Gehrig—and he was a key element of the Yankees 1977 and 1978 World Series championships.

But on August 2, 1979, Thurman lost his life at the Akron-Canton airfield after crashing his Cessna Citation airplane 1,000 feet short of the runway while practicing touch-and-go landings. Upon hitting the ground, his plane burst into flames and, though his two passengers managed to extricate themselves, Thurman was paralyzed from the impact and died of asphyxiation. He was 32.

Following his death, the Yankees retired his number 15 uniform and dedicated a plaque to his memory on Yankee stadium’s center-field wall. To this day, as a tribute, Thurman’s locker remains unused.

He was buried at Sunset Hills Burial Park in Canton, Ohio.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-77, take exit 109 and follow Everhard Road west for one mile. You’ll then see the cemetery on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery at the last driveway, next to the office, and follow that drive to its end at a turnaround. On the left you’ll see Thurman’s grave marked with a grand memorial.

APRIL 8, 1946 – SEPTEMBER 9, 1999

Jim “Catfish” Hunter was a centerpiece of pitching staffs, first with the Oakland A’s and then with the New York Yankees. In a fifteen-year career, he was the foundation of five World Series champion teams, including three straight in 1972–74 with the A’s. He strung together five straight 20-victory seasons, and retired with 224 wins, one of which was a perfect game. Not surprisingly, Catfish landed in the Hall of Fame.

Catfish came up to the majors in 1965 with the A’s and he was given his colorful nickname by the A’s owner after he told him, in his inimitable country drawl, that he enjoyed “huntin’” and “fishin’.” Catfish went along with the moniker and later even grew distinctive whiskers, completing the “Catfish” look.

But in 1974, after winning a third straight World Series with Oakland, Catfish was ready to become a baseball trailblazer. When the A’s were late in paying a particular annuity clause in his contract, Catfish argued that he was no longer bound to the team and, after arbitration, he was declared a free agent. George Steinbrenner stepped to the plate with a landmark $3.75 million, five-year contract, and Catfish became a Yankee. In today’s baseball economics, the contract was a small-change deal, but in 1974 it made him the highest-paid player in baseball history, and set the stage for full-scale free agency.

After signing on with the Yankees, Catfish became the team’s workhorse. By 1977 they won the World Series championship for the first time since 1962 and the following year they won again. By 1979, though, after recurring arm trouble, Catfish finished his baseball career with the Yankees at just 33 and returned to his hometown farm.

In September 1998 Catfish learned he had, of all things, a disease most commonly known by the name of a fellow Yankee Hall of Famer, whom it had killed almost 60 years before: Lou Gehrig’s disease. The disease, for which a cure is unknown, attacks nerves in the spinal cord and brain that control muscle movement, causing progressive paralysis leading to death.

While battling the disease, Catfish reflected on his days as an ace pitcher. “I would trade all of that for good health,” he said. “I’d be a groundskeeper and have nobody know me.”

On September 9, 1999, Catfish died of the disease at 53 and was buried at Cedarwood Cemetery in Hertford, North Carolina, just a few hundred yards behind the high school he attended and where he learned to play the game.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Follow Route 17 south from Elizabeth City and after about sixteen miles, turn right onto Business Route 17. Two miles later, after you’ve gone over the “S” Bridge, you’ll be delivered into Hertford. Stay on Business 17 and, as you leave the other side of town, you’ll see the high school on the left. Turn left immediately after the high school onto Jimmy Hunter Drive and follow the road into the cemetery.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
You won’t miss Catfish’s grave on the right of the drive, opposite the flagpole.

On the way back from the cemetery, it’s worth a stop in Hertford’s tiny center; Catfish was a native son and the town is damn proud of him. On the lawn of the courthouse is a monument dedicated to his memory and, across the street, the Hertford Café displays Catfish memorabilia.

JULY 4, 1930 – JULY 13, 2010

During his tumultuous thirty-seven-year reign as owner of the New York Yankees, while the team won eleven pennants and seven World Championships, George Steinbrenner won from both players and fans equal amounts of admiration and contempt for his impulsive personnel moves and win-at-all-costs mentality—and also won two suspensions from Major League Baseball.

Son of a Great Lakes shipping tycoon, he entered the family business and was soon president of the American Ship Building Company. But from his early years, Steinbrenner longed to own a professional sports team and in 1960 he bought the Cleveland Pipers of the short-lived American Basketball League. After they went belly-up, he moved to acquire his hometown
Cleveland Indians but his bid in that move was dead-ended. In 1973, though, Steinbrenner got the last laugh when he and a group of investors bought the Yankees from CBS for $10 million. By the time of his death the franchise would be worth some $1.6 billion.

When Steinbrenner took the reins of the club they were wilting, having been without a pennant since 1964 and enduring sagging attendance while the upstart cross-town Mets thrived. “I won’t be active in the day-to-day operations of the club at all,” he declared, “I’ll stick to building ships.” But just a few months later, one of the minority owners of the investment syndicate remarked that “nothing is as limited as being a limited partner of George’s.”

An overbearing perfectionist and disciplinarian, Steinbrenner quickly became immersed in every decision concerning almost anything about the team, even though, by most accounts, he knew nothing about baseball. With an obsessive dedication to detail, he meddled in everything from the brand of grass seed used in the outfield to the shade of paint that covered the walls of box seat suites. Fastidious about his own grooming, he insisted that his players shun unruly hair and beards. When he thought the club’s parking lot was too crowded, Steinbrenner stood out of sight and watched a guard who checked every driver’s credentials. Personnel were sent spinning through his revolving door at a dizzying pace; during his tenure, he had switched managers twenty-three times. Meanwhile, George ran into trouble far beyond the ball field.

In 1974 he was implicated in a campaign finance scandal involving President Nixon and, after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice, he was handed a two-year suspension from baseball. In 1990 his reputation worsened when it was learned that he had paid for damaging information on slugger Dave Winfield, in the hopes of blackmailing the former Yankees star into dropping a lawsuit against the team. For this offense, Steinbrenner was banned from baseball for life, although he managed to gain reinstatement in 1993.

In spite of all the negative publicity, the turmoil, and the bombast, under Steinbrenner—who came to be known as the Boss—the Yankees thrived. Once again they became America’s marquee sporting franchise, largely because, in the opinion of many, once the wave of high spending for players in free agency arrived George doubled down on salaries again and again, essentially “buying” World Series Championships. Of this competitive streak, he noted: “Winning is the most important thing in my life, after breathing. Breathing first, winning next.”