Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (3 page)

Surely, the children were looking for more after a week’s absence.

Duane joined the Air Force as Thurman was starting high school, leaving Thurm with no real family cheering section during his high school games, and removing his big brother from the household. His sisters had long ago left, as soon as they were of age. So in high school, it was pretty much just Thurman and his mom during the week.

“Thurm and I spent a lot of time playing Wiffle ball and we were both pretty good at it,” adds Duane, who would go on to a career in government service, first with the National Security Agency and later with the Treasury Department as a sky marshal. He’d get a master’s degree from the University of Maryland after the Air Force.

“I was a Yankee fan then as I am still today, and I always played as the Yankee lineup and Thurm played as the Indians’ lineup. I remember him doing Rocky Colavito’s famous stretches before he hit, and then pointing the bat at the pitcher. We had all the batting stances down pat and we could both switch-hit to make it authentic. We could imitate the pitching motions too. I was a huge Yankee fan starting in the mid-fifties, and Thurm was an Indians fan like our dad was. I think Thurm followed his lead on that.

“We saved baseball cards, but Mom threw them out, like all mothers eventually did.

“He always played baseball, basketball, and football, and we always
played with kids my age or older, but rarely with any kids as young as Thurm, who was four years younger than me. I think that’s where he got his skill from. He’d play with older kids and get knocked around in the process. He wasn’t given any slack because he was younger or because he was my brother. By the time he got to high school, he was toughened up more than most kids his age.

“And what an athlete he was! Never mind that he was the youngest. He just made everything look so easy. He was a great pool player in college. He was a great golfer—that may have been his best sport. And he had such gifts for baseball that I think he may actually have underachieved in that game. Sometimes I think he didn’t take it as seriously as people thought he did. I think he may have just done enough to make his money and get by.

“With Dad being a long-distance trucker, he wanted us to be at home a lot when he was off, especially during the weekends. But we got to play a lot and he liked the kids we played with, so it wasn’t all that hard getting permission to go out and play. We always had to ask, though. We even took turns asking because we didn’t know what the response was going to be. Dad could be mean. When he had a long-distance run, he would leave on a Sunday, a lot of the time in midmorning, so he could make Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or some other place the next morning. We couldn’t wait for him to leave so we could go play. And we knew Mom was a softie, so she would say yes most every time.

“Dad had a very, very strict eleven p.m. curfew, and would lock the door at 11:01. I can still hear Mom inside yelling, ‘Let him in, let him in!’ but he would have none of it. There were nights when Thurman or I would sleep under newspapers in the car.

“During the summers, we’d spend most days playing baseball and softball or going to Stadium Park to get crawfish. Stadium Park is adjacent to where the Pro Football Hall of Fame is now. We rode our bikes everywhere. We had them stripped down to the bare frame
and I was always surprised that Dad didn’t say something about it and whip up on us in the process, but he didn’t.

“Thurm was a star in high school in three sports and that probably helped to dilute the strictness and irrational behavior that Dad exhibited sometimes. I’m not sure what Thurm thought of Dad after he left home. He never wanted to talk about it but he knew I was the only family member that kept in touch with Dad, and I was really the only one of us kids that Dad kept in touch with.”

By “us kids,” Duane includes his sisters Janice and Darla, both of whom had their issues with family life in the Munson household.

“I try to get over things, but it hasn’t been easy,” says Darla. “I don’t remember anything good about my childhood.”

In 1987, Diana Munson told
Sports Illustrated
’s Armen Keteyian, “Thurman was basically an insecure person. It stems from his childhood. He had a tough one. His dad … was a real tough cookie. He was real hard. So Thurman had some real problems growing up, and I think he kept a lot of his insecurities inside. He had the kind of personality that he never wanted to talk about them, never wanted to show the hurt. He developed an exterior that was gruff, or whatever people wanted to call it.”

“I used to take all my kids home from practice at one time or another,” recalled Thurman’s high school baseball coach, Don Eddins. “All except Thurman. It was almost as if he was ashamed of his house. And I guess Thurman was a very proud person and that house certainly wasn’t much of a home. And by that I don’t mean what the outside of the house looked like.”

Thurman was the baby, so he had it easier than the older three. Both Duane and Darla agree on that much.

“He was my pet,” Ruth Myrna Smylie Munson told the
Canton Repository
from her room in the senior citizens complex in Canton where she lived out her later years. This was Thurman’s mother. She had suffered a stroke while in her fifties (she would eventually suffer
five strokes). Thurman’s father, Darrell, took her to Florida after the first, but then had had enough of caring for her and put her alone on a bus back to Canton, telling his children, “I’m done, you deal with her.” The children placed her in a nursing home. Darrell Munson then took off for Arizona and a new life, seldom to be heard from again.

“Mom’s mother died at eighteen,” Darla says. “Her father, Howard, had trucks that Darrell drove for him. That’s how he met Ruth. Howard remarried a woman named Mary. They despised my father; hence there was not much of a relationship with our only living grandparent, who died when I was about nine.”

In 1977 Ruth was transferred to the senior citizens home by Janice, who furnished her room with a queen-size bed, a TV, portable shelving, a table, and three chairs. Among her possessions was a copy of Thurman’s autobiography, published in 1978, signed “To my mother, with much love forever, Thurman Munson.”

After Thurman’s death, the
Repository
wrote, “Many in Munson’s position have bought their parents castles.”

“Sadly,” says Darla, “Thurman rarely went to see her—maybe two or three times a year.”

But Ruth said, “I’m happy with this place. All I ever wanted from my children was the chance to see them and the chance to see them turn out well. Anyway, I wouldn’t know what to do with a big place.”

Ruth “never missed a television game involving the Yankees,” wrote the
Repository
. “Sometimes after the games her son would telephone her. ‘I can hear him saying how much he loved me when he called,’ said Mrs. Munson. ‘He always said, “Mom, I love you.”’”

“She was so giving, such a matriarch,” says Thurman’s childhood friend Jerome Pruett of Ruth Munson. “Everyone admired her. But his father, oh he was tough. I remember there was this school dance
and you had to have a sports jacket to go, but Thurman didn’t have one. And his father wouldn’t get one for him. Thurman was hurting from that.”

In truth, Darrell Munson had a challenging upbringing himself, which may account partially for the spartan—almost merciless—attitude he would exhibit toward Thurman even later in life. Sometimes you have to go back a generation to understand what makes us who we are. People drew conclusions about Darrell being difficult without knowledge of his own troubled childhood. It began with his being moved into foster care at a young age. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother, Leola, ran off with another man. Soon after, she was dead. She might have been murdered or might have committed suicide; no one in the family is sure.

Darrell’s father died when Darla, the eldest child, was two months old.

Still, the relationship between Darrell and Thurman was always, at best, strained.

Corky Simpson, writing for the
Tucson Citizen
, caught up with Darrell two months after Thurman’s death, when he was working as a parking lot attendant in the Arizona town. He was sixty-four then, no longer driving trucks, far removed from his family, and he gave what turned out to be a startling interview:

Simpson later said it was the only time in his career that he was tempted just to close his reporter’s notebook and walk away.

Thurman’s interest in baseball—as a fan—was what you would expect from a lot of future professional players: minimal. They spend too much time playing to follow the big leagues the way most of us in my neighborhood did. He did tell me a story about getting Cleveland Indians pitcher Mike Garcia to sign a ball for him at Municipal Stadium one day in the fifties. It wasn’t a moment that stayed with him and made him any more accommodating to fans once he became a Yankee. He was always a tough autograph.

“I can’t even remember the Indians winning the pennant in 1954,” he told me, “even though I was seven, and old enough to remember. It was really football, football, football in Ohio. I was a big Cleveland Browns fan, and I remember them winning year after year in the old American Conference.”

Thurman went to elementary school at the Worley School on Twenty-third Street NW, and he and Duane got certificates of recognition in the sports programs.

Classmate Lenny May remembers Thurman in fourth grade,
climbing the fence after a baseball got loose, and then getting his leg caught climbing back in.

“Somehow in one of the few unathletic moves I ever saw from him, he caught his leg coming back over and landed on his arm. Because of the grotesque position of his arm we knew he was seriously hurt, but the thing I remember was that he shed no tears even though he was in terrible pain, as we later found out, from a compound fracture.”

“We met in eighth grade,” says Jerome Pruett, who was his high school battery mate and would go on to play pro baseball too. “I was playing tetherball in the playground and this guy comes peddling up on his bike, really cocky, like he could beat anybody there. Within a few minutes, he was playing the game as a blood sport. He was so talented at everything, and so egotistical—which is what you want to see in a competitive athlete.”