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Growing Up:
Yogi starred in real-life “My Three Sons”
(This is a long-form piece I wrote a few years ago but seems fitting to share again today after Yogi Berra’s passing …)
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Yogi Berra, famous for his malapropisms, has often sounded like the “Absent-Minded Professor”, but the Fred MacMurray role that better suits him is as the TV father Steve Douglas in “My Three Sons.”
While Hollywood’s version was set in the Midwest and featured an aeronautical engineer and his sons Mike, Robbie and Chip, this real-life sitcom (and make no mistake, it was filled with laughs – like the “episode” where one of the Berra boys floods the bathroom!) took place in suburban New Jersey starring a major league baseball player and his sons Larry, Tim and Dale.
To be sure, Yogi Berra was never confused for a rocket scientist, but as a player he was out of this world. He was a New York Yankee, a superstar, a three-time American League MVP (1951, 1954, 1955) and fifteen-time All-Star. He would appear in a record fourteen World Series, win a record ten world championships, catch the only perfect game in Series history, and retire with more career home runs (358) at the time than any catcher in major league history. As a manager, he led the Yankees to the American League pennant in 1964 and the New York Mets to the National League pennant in 1973 – a year after he was inducted into the Hall of Fame as a player. In other words, Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra was an American icon.
Except in his own household.
“Dad was just Dad,” says Larry, the oldest son who is now 57. “I didn’t think of him as a celebrity.
“Our dad never acted like a celebrity,” Tim, 55, the middle son, wrote in the introduction of “The Yogi Book: I Didn’t Really Say Everything I Said” (Workman Publishing Company, 1999). “We have a famous father who prefers driving a Corvair to a Cadillac because it’s more practical. Who treats the man who pumps his gas or sells him his newspaper as a good friend.
Dale, 50, the youngest, agrees: “Growing up as Yogi Berra’s son just seemed normal. I had no perception of it being unusual. As a kid, I didn’t know it was not normal to go to spring training and meet different major league ballplayers. Only in retrospect can I see how special it was for Larry and Tim and me.”
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“Ninety percent of the game is half mental.”
– Yogi-ism
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Going to spring training for the Berra boys was one-hundred percent fun.
“One of my favorite times was when I was 11 years old and went on a road trip by train,” Larry recalls, the 1960 memory still warming his heart nearly a half-century later. “I went to Boston and Baltimore and Washington – just me, not my brothers. It was the first year Roger Maris came to the team and I sat next to him and talked with him for three hours all the way to Washington. It was pretty sharp.”
Another sharp memory from that priceless trip: “My father and I went to breakfast with Bob Cerv and he asked my dad, `What are you going to do with Larry today?’
“Dad asked me what I wanted to do,” Larry continues. “I said I wanted to see the Washington Monument. Well, my dad wasn’t a sightseer.”
That day he was.
“We got a taxicab and Dad told the driver to call his boss – we kept the taxi all day,” Larry recalls. “We saw the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Monument – everything in Washington I think we saw. It was sharp.”
While Yogi saw all those Capitol sights that day, something he almost always missed out on seeing were his three sons’ baseball games.
“Dad very rarely saw us play baseball,” notes Dale, a first-round draft pick and third baseman who played five seasons with the Pittsburgh Pirates (1977-1981). “His long baseball season made it next to impossible.”
“Dad only saw me play three organized ballgames my whole life,” says Larry, a catcher who starred at Montclair State University before having his professional career cut short by a severe knee injury his first season with the Mets organization in 1972.
“I was fielding a Baltimore chopper off the plate,” Larry remembers. “I ran out and yelled ‘I got it!’ I planted my foot but the pitcher slipped and collided into me. It blew my knee out.”
Reconstructive surgery couldn’t save his baseball career; he has a 14-inch scar on his knee as a reminder of what might have been. “My claim to fame was I was the first person to hit a professional home run off Ron Guidry,” says Larry, who today plays “tons” of softball on a knee his orthopedic surgeon says needs an artificial replacement. “I hit, hobble to first and get a (pinch) runner.”
The Guidry homer, however, ranks behind those rare times Yogi made it to Larry’s games.
“One time was against Rutgers and I went for 4-for-6 in a double header,” Larry beams. “Another game he saw, I hit a home run. I guess I played pretty good when Dad was watching.”
Make no mistake, Yogi watched a lot of his three sons’ games – just not baseball. “Dad followed all our other sports and made it to those games,” Larry points out.
“Our football and hockey games he’d always come watch,” echoes Dale, noting that Yogi encouraged the Berra boys “to play every sport – whatever was in season.”
That thinking resulted in Tim playing wide receiver at the University of Massachusetts and then being a late-round draft pick by the Baltimore Colts in 1974. He played one NFL season, returning 16 punts and 13 kickoffs – including one for 54 yards.
Dale shares a story that tells you how important the boys’ games were to Yogi. “Dad was always concerned about what we were doing. When he was managing the Mets in the (1973) World Series, my brother was playing college football. He wanted to know the score of the U-Mass game while the World Series game was in progress.”
The reverse was also true: the Berra boys missed most of their dad’s games.
“Dad didn’t want us around ballpark to watch him,” explains Dale. “He wanted us to go play our own games. `Get out and play,’ that was his message to us. You would NEVER miss your own game to see him play.”
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“If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark,
nobody’s going to stop them.”
– Yogi-ism
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Make no mistake, Yogi didn’t always stop the Berra boys from coming out to the ballpark.
“It’s certainly easy to recall the lineup of memorable events that most kids wouldn’t have had the opportunity to experience,” Tim said in The Yogi Book. “The times we played catch with Elston Howard in front of the dugout of Yankee Stadium; or got dunked in the clubhouse whirlpool by Mickey Mantle; or got patted on the head by Casey Stengel as if we were favorite pets.”
Or catching Nolan Ryan fastballs. That’s a dear memory Larry cherishes from 1971. Then a high school senior, Larry accompanied the Mets on a West Coast trip as a bat boy. “I warmed up Tom Seaver, Jon Matlack and Nolan Ryan,” he says. “That’s something I’ll always remember. That was pretty special.”
Making it all the more special was the uniform he was wearing: it had No. 8 on it, just like his manager dad. “The team had to get permission from the commissioner,” Larry points out. “So that was pretty sharp.”
Another special memory of Larry’s is from a 1959 road trip to Boston. “I was in the press box at Fenway and caught a foul ball,” he begins.
Not just any foul ball – one off the bat of “The Splendid Splinter.”
“Ted Williams was my favorite player,” Larry shares. “Him and Harmon Killebrew. I idolized those guys. I was a closet Red Sox fan. The Yankees were always around the house – they were no big deal to me, but Ted Williams was Ted Williams!”
So where is that souvenir baseball today?
“It’s long gone,” Larry replies, laughing instead of crying. “My brothers used it – played with it and ruined it!”
The ball is long gone, but the memories are preserved like many of Yogi’s words in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
“Mother would take us out of school and we’d have two months of school in Florida,” Larry further reminisces. “The Yankees of old were one big happy family. I mean it. It was a blast. The players were a lot more friendly to each other. On Saturdays (after the spring training game) we’d always be at someone’s house for a barbecue. You’d see Mickey Mantle punting a football to us.”
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“You can observe a lot by watching.”
– Yogi-ism
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Yogi Berra enjoyed observing lots of things with his three sons during baseball’s off-season.
“When we were younger my father took us to Madison Square Garden almost every Friday and Saturday,” shares Larry. “Whatever was there — basketball doubleheaders, hockey, boxing – we’d go see. That was terrific. We used to meet some of the players. I remember running around and chasing Oscar Robertson. It was sharp.”
Chasing “The Big O”, chatting with Roger Maris, catching punts from Mickey Mantle, it all was just part of being a Berra boy.
“When we tell people about growing up as Yogi’s sons, we always make it clear that to us everything seemed normal, even trips to the ballpark,” Tim said in The Yogi Book. “That normalcy was a reflection of Dad.”
Here is a telling reflection: Yogi never felt compelled to move the family into bigger and bigger homes in fancier and fancier neighborhoods. Indeed, he and Carmen – who have been married for 58 years and now have eleven grandchildren – lived in the same house they raised the boys in long after the nest grew empty.
“We were fortunate we happened to grow up and live in one town,” Dale explains. “If Dad had moved us to a different town or been traded like a lot of superstars, I think then we would have been seen and treated differently. But that didn’t happen. I went all through school with the same guys for fifteen years. I played Little League baseball and high school ball with the same kids.”
As a result, the boys were treated as Larry, Timmy and Dale, not as “The Famous Yogi Berra’s Sons.”
It is easy picture Yogi giving baseball clinics to his three boys in the backyard, but such a “My Three Sons”-like scene was rarely the case.
“Dad tossed the ball a little bit,” says Larry, “but not a lot.”
Adds Dale, with a laugh: “I remember I’d ask him to play catch and his answer was, `That’s what you’ve got bothers for!’ ”
As you can imagine, the three brothers could be a handful.
“Mom was the disciplinarian because she was always around,” Larry shares. “The thing was, with Dad you knew right away — he’d give you that look. He only spanked me once – I was six or seven – and I flooded the bathroom.”
Adds Dale: “We had a healthy respect for Dad. He’d tell us how Grandpa was tough on him. As a boy Dad had to work and the money he made as a kid he had to give to the family. So we had to earn what we wanted; it wasn’t just given to us.”
What was given to Larry, Tim and Dale was heckles from fans.
“Believe me, I heard things,” Dale recalls. “I heard people yell from the stands, `You’ll never be as good as your dad!’ Or, `You’re not half as good as your dad.’
“My answer was, `Who is?’ It honestly didn’t bother me. I just did the best I could.”
Larry agrees: “When people yelled at you, it just made you play a little harder. I didn’t feel pressure being Yogi Berra’s son.”
“I know many sons who felt pressure,” Dale adds to the subject. “I’ve talked to the sons of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and others, and they said they felt pressure being a superstar’s son. I honestly never felt that pressure. I don’t know why that is – I guess the credit for that goes to Dad.”
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“When you come to a fork in the road . . . take it.”
– Yogi-ism
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Less than two miles of road separates Yogi and his three sons today. Dale, like his father, lives in Montclair; Tim resides in West Caldwell; and Larry is Verona.
Tim and Dale actively run LTD Enterprises (Yogiberra.com) which sells memorabilia, while Larry – “I’m just the L in LTD,” he laughs – works for a flooring company.
“I see Dad all the time,” Larry happily shares. “We talk and fool around. Go to ballgames. We laugh a lot. He still says bizarre things, but he does it spontaneously – he doesn’t try to. He’s just a funny guy.”
Dale insists he doesn’t have a favorite Yogi-ism. “There are so many of them,” he says. “How can you pick just one? As many of them that people have heard and know, there are lots more that only we know about. At home we’d hear them. When we were little, of course, we had no idea he was saying them – he still has no idea he’s saying them!”
“I think my favorite Yogism,” says Larry, “is `When you come to a fork in the road … take it.’ I like it because it means you don’t stop; you keep going. I’ve tried to emulate that – just as I’ve tried to emulate everything about my dad.”
It is clear all three sons idolize their father. And each is proud to claim having inherited the “Yogi-ism” gene.
“I once was asked to compare myself to my dad,” Dale shares, “and I said, `Our similarities are different.’ ”
Larry, meanwhile, was once quoted: “You can’t lose if you win.” And Tim is famous in Berra lore for saying, “I knew exactly where it was, I just couldn’t find it.”
While they love him for being a character, more importantly the three sons admire their famous father’s character.
“What’s endearing about him is that what you see is what you get,” says Dale. “He couldn’t care less if you’re the guy at the laundrymat or the CEO of a corporation – he’s going to be nice to you. I think that’s the most important thing he taught me, and he taught it by example.”
Asked the key life lesson his father instilled in him, and Larry replies: “To be a good human being. He feels nobody is better than anyone else. My dad will call the President by his first name and he’ll call the garbage man by his first name. To Dad, people are people, and he treats them all the same, with respect. He leads the way by still following that.”
Yogi couldn’t have said it better himself.
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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.
Check out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”
My favorite Wooden-ism, as I call John Wooden’s maxims, is “Make each day your masterpiece.”
