Page 248 - 1975 BoSox

’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL 241
Tom’s second wife was Jean Hiller, herself divorced and working in New York as a clothing model. is was a great match — Jean loved the same things Tom loved, including privacy and quiet evenings, and grew to love baseball and the Red Sox as much as he did. e two divided their summers between New York, where his company was headquartered, and Boston, at a private suite at the Ritz Carlton, with winters in South Carolina. Yawkey’s 20,000 acres were really a private preserve where he hunted and shed with his select friends. e couple rarely missed a Red Sox summer home game for the rest of their lives, sitting in their private box on the third-base side of the press box above the crowd at Fenway Park.
e Yawkeys also became immersed in charitable causes. In 1953 the Red Sox began a long association with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, with its Jimmy Fund becoming the team’s o cial charity. ( e Boston Braves had been a founding co-sponsor of the fund in 1948 but moved to Milwaukee in 1953.) Yawkey was a longtime supporter of Georgetown Memorial Hospital in Georgetown, South Carolina, near his winter home. After the tragic death of young Red Sox star Harry Agganis in 1955, Yawkey established the Agganis Foundation, which has given over one million dollars in scholarships for student athletes in the Boston area. In 1968 Tom and Jean purchased property in Georgetown and built the Tara Hall Home, a place for troubled or abused boys.
Yawkey rst visited the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956, when Joe Cronin was inducted — he was so impressed with the facility that he became one of its largest benefactors and eventually a member of its board of directors. Yawkey was inducted posthu- mously in 1980.
e writer Al Hirshberg, in his 1972 team history, wrote that there was no nicer man in baseball than Yawkey, “no more loyal friend and no one with a more sincere feeling of good will toward his fellow man.”5 e problem, thought Hirshberg, was that Yawkey hired people he liked, and was more concerned with keeping them happy than he was in their performance. Cronin was the general manager for 11 years while the
team slowly declined. Mike Higgins was hired to manage in 1955 and spent 11 years as either the manager or general manager. Yawkey liked both men, but kept them long after it was clear that the organization needed a change. e main quali cation for employ- ment by the Red Sox, it was charged, was friendship with Yawkey or Cronin. Yawkey apparently liked to drink, and he enjoyed the congenial camaraderie of those who would drink with him.
One of the more unfortunate legacies of the 1950s Red Sox was their failure to eld a black player until 1959, the last major-league team to do so. Many of the recent histories of the team have tried to assign blame for this shortcoming to one person or another, and Yawkey (as the man in charge) certainly should have demanded that the problem be recti ed. Although the team did make a few attempts to acquire black stars from other teams (notably Larry Doby from the Indians and Charlie Neal from the Dodgers), the club ultimately waited for Pumpsie Green and Earl Wilson, signed in 1953, to work their way through the farm system. Red Sox inaction in this area cost them dearly on the eld — as so many black stars entered the game in this period –and the taint of their delay haunted them for decades after.
In 1960 Yawkey named longtime scout Neil Mahoney as farm director, and Dick O’Connell as vice president of the business — in charge of everything aside from major-league personnel. ese two promotions might have been the rst of Yawkey’s regime that were based solely on the men’s job performance and not on their relationships with their bosses. e organization slowly began to recover, especially after O’Connell became general manager in 1965. Two years later, the famous “Impossible Dream” club won Yawkey’s second pennant, before falling in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals. e Red Sox have contended almost every year since, and the club has become a beloved institu- tion in the city.
Yawkey was always very popular with his players. In his early years, he hunted and shed with many of them — especially Lefty Grove and Jimmie Foxx. ese men were his peers, and he loved being around