Venerable, lovable, quotable Yogi Berra rose to baseball greatness from the humblest of beginnings.
He was born Lawrence Peter Berra in St. Louis in 1925, and grew up with three brothers and a sister in the city’s poor, mostly Italian “Hill” section during the thick of the Depression.
Parents Pietro and Paolina were immigrants from Malvaglio, near Milan. His father came over “ready to work,” and was a laborer in a brickyard, Berra said in a 2005 interview for the Baseball Hall of Fame. “And he didn’t know what baseball was.”
His mother couldn’t pronounce little Lawrence’s American name, calling him “Lawdie” instead of Larry — a nickname that stuck around only into his mid-teens.
His friends then replaced it with the iconic “Yogi,” laughing at how their short but powerful pal would sit crosslegged and deep in thought, like a Hindu yogi, as he waited on the bench to bat for local American Legion games.
“It don’t bother me,” he said of his nickname.
Growing up in The Hill, “We played ball all the time,” Berra told the Baseball Hall of Fame.
As a barefoot child, he and his buddies would swing a broomstick at bottle caps.
“I played every sport there was in St. Louis. Not basketball. I was too short. I played a lot of soccer. I played football. I played softball . . . We’d play with bottle caps, with broomsticks.
“I actually didn’t know I liked to play baseball until I was 14.”
It was also at age 14 that Berra quit eighth grade and went to work at a shoe factory to help support his family. He hadn’t been a strong student anyway.
“No. Not too good,” he told the Hall of Fame. “You see, I break up the English a little bit. I don’t mean to do it, but it just comes out that way.”
Berra grew up right across the street from boyhood pal and fellow Catholic school classmate Joe Garagiola.
When the venerable home team, the St. Louis Cardinals, plucked a teenage protégé off Elizabeth Street for one of its farm teams in 1942, it was Joe, not Yogi.
The Cardinals offered Berra only $250 to sign, half what they’d given Garagiola, and Berra refused. But the slight had been intentional. The team’s president, Branch Rickey, intentionally dissuaded Berra from signing because he was about to take over the Dodgers, and wanted the powerhouse young hitter to come with him to Brooklyn.
Rickey was outmaneuvered by the Yankees, who swooped in and signed Berra to their Class B team in Norfolk, Va.
“I would have signed with anybody because I loved to play the game,” Berra told the Hall of Fame.
But then baseball was outmaneuvered by World War II.
Drafted into the Navy, and tired of “sitting around” at a base in Norfolk, Berra volunteered “to go in the amphibs,” he recalled to the Hall of Fame.
“They didn’t tell us what kind of boat, just ‘in the amphibs.’ So I joined in. I said, ‘Well I want to join the amphibs.’ There, being 18 years old. And then they said I was on a rocket boat.”
It was aboard such a rocket- and machine-gun-studded boat — “only 36 feet, made out of wood and a little metal” — that Berra, a gunner’s mate, helped the Allies storm the beaches of Normandy in June 1944.
“I was looking up and it looked like the Fourth of July,” he recalled to The New York Times in 2010.
After the war, Berra resumed his minor- league career with the Newark Bears before getting called up to the big leagues in 1946, playing his first game for the Yankees on Sept. 22 — exactly 69 years before the day he died.
His marriage to Carmen Short on Jan. 26, 1949, would span 65 years. He and Carmen, who died in 2014, had three sons, including future major-leaguer Dale, and were longtime residents of Montclair, NJ.
“Yogi transformed himself from barefoot sandlotter into one of the greatest catchers and clutch hitters in the history of the game,” the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center says in its biography of him.
“He anchored the New York Yankees’ dynasty from the late 1940s to the early ’60s, becoming a 15-time All-Star, winner of 10 world champions (most in baseball history) and three-time Most Valuable Player along the way.”
Berra said his greatest moment was catching the only perfect game in World Series history, thrown by Don Larsen against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956.
“I was pulling for him. He had the good stuff that day,” Berra told the Hall of Fame. “He only threw 96 pitches. And anything I put down, he got over. Never shook me off once.”
After the final pitch, Berra famously leaped into Larsen’s arms.
“He was pretty heavy!” Larsen, 87, recalled Wednesday.
“With all that equipment on, he was 190 pounds. He almost knocked me over! It was all right. We had all winter to rest up,” Larsen told Baseball America.
Of why he didn’t shake off any of his catcher’s signals, Larsen said, “Why screw it up?”
Still, Berra’s greatest love was slamming baseballs into the sky, especially in the clutch — even if the pitch was less than perfect.
“I just like to hit, and the fun of the game is hitting,” he told the Hall of Fame.
Berra was the only man to manage both the Yankees (1964) and the Mets (1973) to the World Series. In 1976, he returned to the Yanks as a coach, and was with the team through its 1977 and ’78 World Series wins.
Promoted to manager before the start of the 1984 season, Berra was double-crossed by owner George Steinbrenner, who, after promising his job was secure, sent an underling to fire him just 16 games into the 1985 campaign. His feud with the Boss would last for years.
Berra retired from the game in 1989, but would go on to become a fixture at opening days and old-timers games. Still, his lasting legacy may well be his trove of beloved malapropisms, such as:
“It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
“It’s deja vu all over again.”
Few poets, and certainly no other sports figure, is quoted so often.
Queried once about the inside-out brilliance of his famous Yogi-isms, his denial became the perfect affirmation: “I really didn’t say everything I said.”
His folksy persona won him numerous endorsement gigs, from his playing career to his twilight years: Yoo-hoo, beer, cat food, cigarettes, athlete’s foot spray, insurance, nothing was beneath him.
“What a profound concept,” he said in a 1987 ad for Miller Lite. “And it’s less filling than it woulda been if it was more filling than they’d a wanted it to be.”
“I’ll believe it when I believe it,” he told would-be Pringles potato-chip purchasers.
“And they give you cash — which is just as good as money,” he said in an Aflac insurance commercial.
He was also said to be the inspiration for the cartoon character Yogi Bear. (The original Associated Press bulletin on his death, in fact, called him Yogi Bear.)
With his own museum and a folk-hero legacy, Berra had no regrets, he told the Hall of Fame.
“What I like about baseball, I made a lot of good friends,” he said. “You can meet some bad ones too, don’t get me wrong. But I think I met mostly good ones.”
He added, “If I had to come back to life again, I’d like to be a ballplayer.”
