At a time when Americans are so sadly split between political divides, it’s nice to recall a well-known American who unified everyone: Lawrence Peter Barra, better known by his baseball name, “Yogi.”

The month of January was so tumultuous – with the inauguration of a new president, preceded by an unprecedented physical attack on the U.S. Capital, fomented by a departing one – that a positive piece of news got buried on January 16th. The U.S. Postal Service, itself under attack for being politicized under President Trump, announced that the great Italian American baseball hero would be honored with a U.S. postage stamp, to be released in mid-2021.

This makes Berra the third Italian American player so honored, after Joe DiMaggio and Roy Campanella (Italian father, African American mother). 

Nothing is considered more all-American than baseball – and, indeed, in its long history, with the first recorded game being noted in 1845, the sport has produced its share of Italian surnamed stars, going all the way back to “Ping Bodie” (real name: Francesco Pezzola) in the early 20th century. As Professor Larry Baldassaro of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee notes in his book, Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball, the sons of Italian immigrants used the sport as vehicles of assimilation, their athletic skills the fuel which moved them beyond neighborhoods into the American mainstream.

One of those neighborhoods was “The Hill” of St. Louis, MO, where thousands of Italians had emigrated in the late 1880s to work in the area’s coal mines and clay mines. Berra’s parents, Pietro and Paolina, came from Malvaglio and Robechetto, respectively, two small towns outside of Milan. One of his boyhood friends on The Hill was another local boy who would make good in baseball: Joe Garagiola. 

(Poetically, Yogi and Joe died within a year of each other, both 90 years old). 

Yogi and Joe became enamored with the sport at an early age, and their careers began in earnest after both completed their military duties during WWII.  It is somehow fitting that Yogi was a gunner’s mate for the Navy, where he shot rockets and machine guns during three of the most important battles of the war: Normandy, Omaha Beach, and D-Day. Standing back and calling the shots, trying to out-fox the enemy, was a skill he obviously transferred to his skills as a baseball catcher. It made him a legend to New York Yankee fans and earned him a record 10 World Series championships, including an historical role in catching the only perfect game in a World Series (pitched by Don Larson in 1956). He was selected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

He was given the nickname Yogi by a friend, Jack Maguire, who said that Yogi’s sitting stance in the dug-out reminded him of a maharishi. For someone who only had an eighth-grade education, Yogi was indeed a “wise man,” not only for his ability to read hitters but for developing what became to be known as “Yogi-isms” – pithy little witticism that were paradoxical in nature. He created so many of them that they became widely quoted. He eventually put them in a series of popular books, solidifying his popularity. Here are just a few among hundreds:

To a waitress who asked how many slices his wanted his pizza pie cut: “Four. I don’t think I could eat eight.” 

“No matter where you go, there you are.” 

“You can observe a lot by watching.” 

“A nickel isn’t worth a dime today.” 

“When you see a fork in the road, take it.”

And, of course, what has become a piece of American folk wisdom: “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

In 1998, Yogi founded the Berra Museum and Learning Center on the campus of Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, the state where he lived for much of his life. He died on September 22nd, 2015. Two months later, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. And if you visit St. Louis’s “Hill” neighborhood – which still remains one of the most well-preserved Little Italies in the U.S. – you will see a plaque honoring one of its most famous sons. 

The day after he died, President Obama called Berra “a Hall of Famer and humble veteran; a prolific jokester and a jovial prophet. He epitomized what it meant to be a sportsman and a citizen.” 

Yogi Berra had made it from “The Hill” to “Capital Hill.”  Or, as Yogi might have said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.” -BDC