We Didn't Start The Fire ~ 1949 ~ Joe DiMaggio

We Didn't Start The Fire

sung by: Billy Joel

 

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray,
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio,
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe.

Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, "The King and I" and "The Catcher in the Rye,"

Eisenhower, vaccine, England's got a new queen,

 Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye!

 

Chorus:

We didn't start the fire,
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning.
We didn't start the fire,
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it.

 

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc,
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron,
Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock"
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team,
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland,
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev,
Princess Grace, "Peyton Place", trouble in the Suez.

Chorus

 

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac,
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai"
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball,
Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide, Oh-oh-oh.

Buddy Holly, "Ben Hur", space monkey, Mafia,
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go,
U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy,
Chubby Checker, "Psycho", Belgians in the Congo.

Chorus

 

Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion,
"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania,
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson,
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex,
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say?

Chorus

 

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again,
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock,
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline,
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan,
"Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide,
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz, Hypodermics on the shore,

 China's under martial law, Rock and roller cola wars, I can't take it anymore.

 

We didn't start the fire,
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning.
We didn't start the fire,
But when we are gone
Will it still burn on, and on, and on, and on.

We didn't start the fire,
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning.
We didn't start the fire,
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it.

We didn't start the fire,
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning.
We didn't start the fire...

 

 

1949

Joe DiMaggio

 

 

     Thanks to his seasickness Joe DiMaggio never became the fisherman that his Italian immigrant wanted him to be.  Instead he turned out to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame and ranked #11 in the Sporting News baseball top favorites. 

     Joe was born Guiseppe Paolo DiMaggio in 1914 in California.  He has 7 older siblings and one younger sibling.  Fishing has been in the family for generations and his dad was also hoping to continue to pass it down to his sons.  Joe, however, couldn't stomach the sea and tried as hard as he could to stay away from his dad's fishing boats.  He would play ball with neighborhood children instead of cleaning out his dad's boats.  His horsing around paid off. 

     DiMaggio worked his way up from a local league to play for the San Francisco Seals.   In 1936 he started to play centerfield for the New York Yankees.  The first four years of him playing for the Yankees they made it to the World Series and they won.  He was the first person in North American professional sports to ever win a championship in the first four years of playing professionally.  He was voted the leagues most valuable player in 1939.  He was famous for a 56 game hitting streak that started in 1941. 

     WWII was in full swing.  DiMaggio wanted to do his part in the war and he signed up for the Air Force in 1943.  He wanted to serve in combat but wasn't allowed.  So instead he served stateside as a physical education instructor.  He got a medical discharge in 1945 due to ulcers.  His parents, being of Italian background were not treated too kindly.  They couldn't leave 5 miles from their house without proper identification.  No matter where they went they had to have some sort of ID on them.  His father's fishing boats were taken from him by the government and he was forbidden to fish in the waters.

     Joe went back to baseball.  He helped the Yankees win 3 more World Series titles in 1949, 1950 and 1951.  The 1949 World Series was against the Brooklyn Dodgers.  It made history by being the
first World Series game to be playing under electronic lights.  Regular night games didn't start until the 1070's. 

Joe in the 1949 World Series game
against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

     Joe retired from baseball in 1951.  He is quoted saying, "When baseball is no longer fun, it's no longer a game, and so, I've played my last game."
     Joe DiMaggio was married twice.  The first time was in 1939 and ended in 1944.  They had one son.  Most know of his second wife, Marilyn Monroe.  He met her after his baseball career and he fell madly in love with her.  They were married in 1954.  Before the year was up they would divorce.  Rumors about how she acts in public, (like the infamous dress raising scene) caused him to get upset and she didn't want to change her ways. So they divorced.  But he never stopped loving her.   In 1961 he resurfaced in her life after she was going through another divorce.  They began rekindling their relationship.  On August 1 he told a friend that he was getting ready to ask for her hand in marriage again.  On August 5 she had died.  He ever married another person.  He arranged for her funeral and three times a week for the next 20 years he would arrange to have flowers be brought to her grave.  In 1999, on his deathbed his last words were, "I'll finally get to see Marilyn."
     Over his baseball career he achieved 13 All Star awards, 9 World Series, and 3 Most Valuable Player awards.  Joe DiMaggio is synonymous with baseball.  His name has been used throughout recent time in art, literature, comics, movies, televisions and theater.  The music "South Pacific" even mentions DiMaggio's name.  Many songs contain his name such as Madonna's "Vogue" and Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson".

    

 Sources: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_DiMaggio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1949_World_Series
http://www.biography.com/people/joe-dimaggio-9274899?page=3