Wow, that does suck…was afraid of that when I saw your subject line (haven’t looked at the news the past hour or so)…
Certainly a one-of-a-kind guy.
A sad day for all baseball fans, in NY and elsewhere.
I got to shake his hand once in Kennedy Airport…all I did was walk by him, nod, and say, “How are you Mr. Rizzuto?” He stopped, immediately stuck his hand out and replied with an energetic, firm shake, “How are YOU?” To this day I swear he really meant it - he in no way was brushing me off. I’m rarely impressed - by anyone - but he seemed like a genuinely nice man.
Nice article in the NY Times already…http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/sports/baseball/14cnd-rizzuto.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
"A major league career was not foreordained. One of five children of Rose and Philip Rizzuto Sr., a construction foreman and trolley motorman, Fiero Francis Rizzuto was born and grew up in Brooklyn and later in the Glendale neighborhood of Queens, where the family moved when he was 12.
While attending Richmond Hill High School, he tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but the team’s manager, Casey Stengel, told him he was too small. The New York Giants told him to get lost. But Stengel’s rejection — “Go get a shoeshine box,” the manager told him — was the most vivid.
Rizzuto was shocked when the Yankees released him in 1956 to sign the outfielder Enos Slaughter. But he soon accepted a job in the Yankee radio and TV booth with Mel Allen and Red Barber, two towering figures in sportscasting. “You’ll never last,” Howard Cosell, then a radio sportscaster, told him. “You look like George Burns and you sound like Groucho Marx.”
Not too shabby a life and career…considering…