Free Republic

The long arm of the PC police has reached back to the ’30s and arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced the late singer Kate Smith. Smith, who popularized Irving Berlin’s song “God Bless America” and was a female pioneer in early television, recorded songs that today in hindsight are viewed as racist. An old friend, Harry Covert, writes to recall the early days of black-and-white TV when he (and I) watched Smith’s television program. Covert remembers one show interrupted by a news bulletin announcing the attempted assassination of Harry S. Truman by militant Puerto Rican activists. He notes that today’s Puerto Ricans...

It was 75 years ago today when New York Yankees center fielder Joe DiMaggio hit a single in a 13-1 drubbing to the Chicago White Sox. That hit was the first step in what became a hitting streak which hit 56 games. This record still stands 75 years later. As I write this, I am watching the Boston Red Sox-Houston Astros game. A short time ago, Red Sox center fielder Jackie Bradley, Jr. hit a single to extend his hitting streak to 21 games. It’s nothing to sneeze at as Bradley is rapidly emerging was one of the premier players...

Vincent Marotta, the mastermind behind the Mr. Coffee home coffeemaker machine, has died at age 91. The son of Italian immigrants, Marotta can be credited with changing the way Americans consume caffeine, conceiving of the automatic drip coffee maker in 1968, decades before Starbucks SBUX +0.72% starting cropping up on city corners.

Joe DiMaggio would have turned 100 on Tuesday, so it seems appropriate to remember him as I do — as the finest baseball player I ever saw play our delicate little game. Bobby Doerr, the Hall of Fame Red Sox second baseman, once told me his teammate Ted Williams was the best hitter of their time but that Joe was the best all-around player. I grew up rooting for the Yankees as a kid in New Haven and, much later, when I got to know Joe well, I never failed to feel as if I were in the presence of...

In March 1949, Joe DiMaggio posed in Yankee Stadium, smiling, with another famous Italian-American of his era — each in his professional uniform — but their friendship would not endure. On the evening of Nov. 5, 1954, the Yankee Clipper and Frank Sinatra hastily got up from dinner with friends at the Villa Capri in Hollywood and drove to a little apartment house at Kilkea Drive and Waring Avenue. DiMaggio was being divorced by Marilyn Monroe, his wife of less than a year. A private investigator, Barney Ruditsky, had called to report that she was there with another man. When...

Though ill with pneumonia, Dom DiMaggio was doing something he loved -- watching the Red Sox play, and play well -- when he died this morning in his Marion home. Son by his side, the former Red Sox center fielder was watching the replay of Thursday night's game, when his team scored 12 runs in the sixth inning en route to a 13-3 victory over the Cleveland Indians. "I was there and we were watching it together," said his son Dominic Paul DiMaggio Jr. of Atkinson, N.H. "It was peaceful." Mr. DiMaggio's children, gathered at their parents' home today, shared...

HE WAS only married to Marilyn Monroe for nine turbulent months, but Joe DiMaggio, the reclusive US baseball legend, vowed he would never forgive the Kennedys for her death. Now, four years after his own demise, the man immortalised by Simon and Garfunkel in the song Mrs Robinson appears to have his revenge. A new book, written by his long-time lawyer and close companion Morris Engelberg, reveals he really did believe the Kennedy clan killed Monroe. "They murdered the one person I loved," DiMaggio confided to Mr Engelberg. Officially, Monroe, who allegedly enjoyed affairs with both John Kennedy, the US...