Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (9 page)

He would later lobby Gabe Paul to have a Ron Blomberg Day at Yankee Stadium (it didn’t happen), and he negotiated Blomberg’s contract for him before free agency, arguing that he should be paid on his future contributions and his gate appeal, rather than on his past season. It was an argument that would be ahead of its time.

The bar mitzvah for his son Mark in 1973, held on the grounds of his estate in Purchase, New York, was one of the great social events of the year in Westchester County, complete with Lionel Hampton and his orchestra performing. I was there (yes, I got my share of eight-tracks along the way), as were the Blombergs and the Munsons, along with Roy White, Bill White, Phil Rizzuto, Elston Howard, Gabe Paul, and Broadway producer Jimmy Nederlander (who owned part of the Yankees).

“Thurman’s nickname for me was Roman because my hair style reminded him of Roman Gabriel of the Rams,” says Mark, a Dallas attorney today. “Thurman was about as big-time an athlete as there was in New York at the time, and he was willing to devote a ton of personal time to a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old kid, plus my brother and sister. When he took us to see
Jaws
, a throng of people circled him at the theater for his autograph. He handled every request as politely as he could, but the crowd never dissipated. Eventually he signed all of the autographs and we barely made it into the movie on time. He hated the idea that he could not go to a public place without being surrounded. What many people thought was surliness we always took as a defense mechanism intended to create boundaries and retain some level of privacy.

“We spent a lot of time with Thurman. We hung out by the pool, played tennis, basketball, Wiffle ball, and he’d take us out to eat. In the years when the Yankees played at Shea, he’d drive us to the game, and we’d hang out in the clubhouse for a short time afterward until he would drive us home with him.

“He went to my awards banquets in high school but never got in the way of the guest speaker, usually another pro athlete. It was never like the world revolved around him.”

Since Nat drove a Rolls, perhaps it didn’t seem like such a big deal to him when he gave Blomberg a Mercedes 450 SL as a flat-out present, while out buying one for himself in Westchester. And it wasn’t long after that he gave Munson one too. All three would arrive at the stadium parking lot in their 450 SLs, which was a big kick to Nat.

The Munson friendship even grew to the point where, when Nat and his family moved to a larger house in Purchase (almost hard to imagine), the Munsons stayed at their old house one summer while it was up for sale. Thurman became part of the “family” at this point, becoming friends with Nat’s friends, and enjoying the life of a
wealthy man, even if his salary was well under $100,000. In the evenings, Nat and Thurman would relax, listen to Neil Diamond
(Hot August Night)
, Sinatra, or Louis Armstrong records, “get mellow,” talk about life, talk about families.

“Nat used to yell, ‘Let’s go, Einstein,’ at Thurman from his seat near the dugout, a little inside joke relating to those evenings,” says Paul Tarnopol, Nat’s other son. He’d make Thurman laugh even during a game.

Nat’s friend Bob Solomon, a physician, was especially taken with Thurman.

“You see this among athletes more than others,” he said. “There is a maturity there that is advanced for their years. Munson had it. He didn’t really behave like someone under twenty-five. The way he presented himself—the total package—was very much ahead of the maturity curve. You could see that while he was just a kid by standards we are familiar with, he could become a real estate investor, be a husband and a father, converse with businessmen, and probably could have been a player-manager at any point of his career.”

Paul Tarnopol says, “While Thurman was living with us in Westchester, a lot of times Dad would be too tired to go to the ball games at night, so Mark and I would just drive in with Thurman and then meet him outside of the clubhouse after the game to go home. He would take us to a pizza restaurant in Rye. Since Mark and I were out of school during the summer, Thurman would swim, play basketball, and ride our Honda dirt bikes with us through the woods behind the Pepsi complex in Purchase. He was the closest thing we had to an uncle.

“They were building their house in Norwood, New Jersey, and I remember Thurman complaining about the type of wood they were using on the house. He said they were using a poor grade of wood and if the house were being built in Canton, this would never have happened. Diana really missed Canton, though, and they moved back there year-round because of that.

“I even remember when Thurman was trying to decide whether to name their third child Mark Anthony or Michael Anthony when he was born. He was so excited about having a boy. I never saw him so happy.

“By 1976, Diana had taken the kids back to Canton and Thurman spent the entire 1976 season in our upstairs guest room in our new house on Lincoln Avenue in Purchase. And later, when he was learning to fly, he’d start to fly back and forth to Canton from Westchester Airport, which was very near where our house was. Whenever he tried talking Dad into flying with him, Dad would laugh and say, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ Thurman got a kick out of flying over our house when he was taking off or landing in Westchester.

“Dad thought it was a really bad idea for Thurman to fly and would tell him so every time Thurman brought up the subject.”

Michael Grossbardt had taken up photography as a hobby. His family owned the landmark Colony Music Store in Times Square. He loved baseball and used to go to Yankee Stadium, when the average crowd was about 17,000, and take photos of the players in the mid-1960s. One day he brought a sampling of his pictures and worked up the courage to walk over to team president Michael Burke, who was seated near the Yankee dugout in the old Yankee Stadium. (A seat never once occupied by George Steinbrenner after he bought the team.)

“Mr. Burke, I thought you might like to see some pictures I’ve taken here,” he said.

Burke was impressed. Color photography was not yet done much at baseball games, simply because there was little market for it. Printing costs and logistics still made black-and-white the photography of choice. Michael’s photos captured the excitement of baseball, even with a lot of empty seats in the background. They also captured the grandeur of the original ballpark.

Burke, running the team for entertainment giant CBS, decided to hire Michael as the team’s first ever full-time photographer. He would go to spring training and all home games and shoot away. Previously, the team had just used local freelancers like Bob Olen or Louis Requena, or purchased newspaper photos as needed. Michael was given the run of the place.

Some players liked him because he had an innocent charm. Some players didn’t warm up to him because he looked and dressed so antibaseball, with more of a hippie style than a jock look. He was in fact a unique presence at the ballpark, especially when accompanied by his likable, flirty, and sexy blond wife, which made the players notch up their respect for him a bit more.

Grossbardt would produce some of the most memorable pictures of the late 1960s and ’70s—Mickey Mantle Day, the Old-Timers’ Day photos of Mantle and DiMaggio during the national anthem, Casey Stengel’s uniform retirement, where he looked like the Old Man in the Mountain (a New Hampshire landmark), and most of Munson’s career, beginning with the day he played for Binghamton in that Yankee Stadium debut game.

No player was photographed by Michael more than Munson was, since he trained his camera on home plate whenever there was a possible play at the plate. An action shot of Thurman making a tag became the first action photo used on a Topps card when they began to move from headshots and “posed action” in the early 1970s.

As team photographer, Michael also had the responsibility of asking Munson to pose from time to time, no easy task given his frequent grumpy moods and his ability to intimidate someone even if only kidding around.

“He could have a lot of different personalities,” says Grossbardt, now in his early sixties, still Kramer-like, and still running the family business at Colony Music. He gave up photography long ago, but
enjoys communicating with obscure old Yankees like Ken Johnson or Rich Hinton or Wade Blasingame, getting them to sign their rare color photos in Yankee uniforms.

“Munson was really very friendly when he first came up. You know how he used to say, ‘I’m just happy to be here,’ when he wanted to move on and ignore questions? Well, in those early days, he really
was
happy to be here.

“I
think
he liked me, although he never actually said so. But his way of showing it was that every time I needed a favor from him—well, not really a favor, but say a photo of him for the front office—he developed a ritual where he had to punch me in the ribs before I could take it. And he hit me hard! It was fun for him. It was a burden for me. To get the picture, I had to take a punch. Maybe it was his way of just being a jock around something artistic like photography. I suppose on some level it was a sign of affection.

“True to his reputation as a great family man, though, he was just terrific with family photos, which we did for the
Yankee Yearbook
until Peterson and Kekich swapped wives. That was the end of Family Day, and that was the end of family photos.”

(In spring training of 1973, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich announced to a startled press corps and an equally startled front office and team that they had decided they loved each other’s spouses, and would be trading wives, children, pets, homes, etc. For Fritz and Susan Kekich, the arrangement “took,” and they remain together more than thirty years later. For Mike and Marilyn Peterson, it didn’t really last out the month. As Yankee scandals went, this one was at the top of the list.)

“Thurman was always very cooperative with these family photo opportunities,” adds Grossbardt. “He loved to help set up the shot. At the bar mitzvah for Nat Tarnopol’s son, Thurman brought his whole family, and was a totally different person. He asked for certain shots to be set up with Diane and the kids, and couldn’t have been
more cooperative. I didn’t get punched in the ribs that day. He wouldn’t do that in front of Diane.

“The children of his teammates loved him. He was great fun with them, like a teddy bear. Jack Aker’s little girls called him ‘Uncle Dum Dum,’ which he probably told them to do. He played around with the Alomar boys and the Bonds boys, let them try on his catching gear, showed them where the really unhealthy clubhouse snacks were. The kids all loved him. Plus, he was great with the Getty Good Kids promotion that the Yankees did. Getty Gas was a sponsor, they had some contest with lucky kids winning a visit to the field, and he was very cooperative with these kids. And if for some reason he couldn’t go out, he’d always sign a baseball for them. Those balls would be valuable today because he wasn’t a big signer.

“The other thing I remember is how interested he was in the photos. I’d show him pictures I was especially proud of. He liked the action shots; he liked the portraits, he always wanted to see more. I just wish he didn’t have to punch me in the ribs.”

Louis Requena, many years senior to Grossbardt and a fixture at Yankee home games, found Munson to be a polite and cooperative subject.

“Punched in the ribs? Never happened to me!” says Requena.

Jack Danzis ran a trophy and gift business in New Jersey and provided the Yankees’ Old-Timers’ Day gifts for years.

“I first met Thurman on Old-Timers’ Day in the clubhouse at the old Yankee Stadium in 1970, the year we gave all the old-timers Longines watches,” he recalls. “I was supposed to get Bobby Murcer to pose for a promotional picture for Longines. For this he was supposed to receive a gold watch with some diamonds. While waiting for Bobby I met this little round young guy—Thurman—and we started talking about Canton, Ohio, where I would sometimes travel
for business. He had been a golf caddie at the Brookside Country Club, where I went for lunch with my client.

“When I told him what I was doing at the stadium he told me he could really use a new watch. After an hour of waiting for Murcer to take the picture I got a message that he could not do it as he was running late. The only one around was Munson so I said I would let him pose for the picture and gave him the watch. I figured the watch company would probably make me pay for the watch personally because the picture was of this lesser-known player rather than Murcer. After taking the picture Thurman said, ‘Thanks for the watch! I’ll be your best friend till I die.’

“The watch company used that picture after Thurman became well known in lots of their ads. Thurman told me that they got him cheap. He was right.”

Off the field, Thurman was beginning to test the waters of real estate investment, and Diana was pregnant with their second daughter (Kelly would be born just before Christmas of 1971). The pregnancy was not an easy one.

“Diana and Thurman lived at the Holiday Inn in Paramus with Ronnie and me,” says Mara Young, at the time Mara Blomberg. “She was so nice; quiet and easy to be with. But you could always tell that she was happiest back in Canton, where her family lived.”

Toward the end of the summer, Ruth Munson, Thurman’s mother, suffered her first stroke, which led to the ultimate departure of his father from the family.

While that was obviously on Thurman’s mind, he had by this point “adopted” Diana’s family as his own. He grew closer to her warm, giving Italian family and effectively turned away from the Munsons and became a Dominick.

Big Tony “Tote” Dominick, Diana’s father, was a cigar-smoking,
card-playing bull of a man, and he was frequently with Thurman, even on Yankee road trips. A lot of people assumed he was Thurman’s father, because of his hefty build. He owned a little two-table pool hall in Canton. No one was ever quite sure whether this was his means of income, because frankly, the place wasn’t that busy. Plus, of course, Tote seemed to have plenty of time to visit Yankee Stadium a lot and to make the occasional road trip. Put it this way: Big Tony Dominick didn’t look like the sort of a guy you would question about his abundance of free time.