"Baseball provides a recreation which does not last over two and a half hours...
and which can be got for very little cost."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1942

THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT AT YANKEE STADIUM

Baseball was hit the hardest, as 4,000 of the 5,700 players in the Major and Minor Leagues enlisted in the military, following the United States entry into World War II. Among those players who traded their caps for a helmet were Ted Williams, Bob Feller, and Dominic, Vincent and Joe DiMaggio, the three sons of Italian immigrant, Gieuseppe DiMaggio.

For the next three years, Staff Sargent Joe did much to raise the morale of servicemen preparing for unknown destinations and uncertain destiny's. A game of baseball on a makeshift field with "DiMag" lifted the spirits of many young men, who only months before were boys playing ball on a corner sandlot. While Bob Hope, an Ellis Island immigrant at age four, was touching soldiers hearts with laughter and "Thanks for the Memories," Joe DiMaggio, an immigrants son, was touching their spirits with his graceful swing to the words, "It's going...going...it's gone!" Both Joe DiMaggio and Bob Hope were rekindling the American Spirit, and re-lighting the lamp of hope with the same humility that was characteristic of their ancestors. However, for Joe's family and thousands of Italian Americans living in America, their hearts were broken and their spirits were destroyed as many lost their jobs, homes, and the freedom that had brought them to America.

Although many players were serving their country during World War II, baseball continued to cheer for yet another son of an immigrant, a one-armed player named Pete Gray. "A Winner Never Quits," the story of Pete Gray, brilliantly portrayed by Keith Carradine, displays Gray's commitment and will to succeed in spite of having only one arm. Rising from the coal mines of Pennsylvania, Pete's determination to make it to the Major Leagues is the American spirit. In keeping with that spirit, The Ellis Island Congressional Medal of Honor was awarded to Keith Carradine, Bob Hope and Joe DiMaggio, for being outstanding citizens of the United States who have contributed to our national identity while preserving the distinct values and heritage of their ancestors.

As teams contributed their proceeds to buy baseball equipment for the soldiers, games were being broadcast by short wave radio to the troops in the field. Complying with blackout orders, the lights went out at Yankee Stadium as "The Great American Pastime" was played in the afternoons until the war ended in 1945.

While the DiMaggio brothers and an estimated 1.2 million Americans of Italian descent were fighting to preserve America's freedom, more than half a million Italians, including the DiMaggio family, were losing many of those same freedoms. It would become known as "Una Storia Segreta," or the "Secret Story."