We’ve all seen the classic roadside Christmas tree stand, pop-up sites hawking freshly-cut firs and pines during the holiday season. Here’s one that would entice any baseball fan to slam on the brakes.
During the offseason, Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola would team up in their St. Louis neighborhood of The Hill to sell Christmas trees, raising funds to benefit the St. Dominic’s Orphan Home -- a snapshot frozen in time from the late 1940s, and recently elevated to social media by the Yogi Berra Museum.
According to Lindsay Berra, the Hall of Fame catcher’s granddaughter, the venture began as an offseason job for the up-and-coming ballplayers before transitioning to charity.
“I know that Grampa and Joe had worked in that Christmas tree lot during the offseason selling trees as a job; you know, who wouldn’t like to make some more money?” she said. “But that particular photo was taken after they were a little bit famous, and they were doing it to help the orphanage.”
Berra and Garagiola grew up in a working-class Italian-American neighborhood in St. Louis, honing their sports skills in a vacant lot on Elizabeth Avenue, which has been renamed Hall of Fame Place. The Cardinals found Garagiola first, offering a $500 bonus to the catcher, who’d compile a solid nine-year career in the big leagues before going on to a lengthy broadcasting career.
Too proud to take a dollar less, Berra rejected a $250 proposal from the Cardinals. St. Louis’ loss would become the Yankees’ gain.
Long after Berra sold his last tree and his plaque was hanging in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., the doors of his New Jersey home would open to his 11 grandchildren early on Christmas afternoons -- a scene that Lindsay described as “chaos with wrapping paper all over.”
“We always did the meatballs the day before; the grandkids would come in and out of the house,” she said. “He made a million tiny little meatballs, and my grandmother [Carmen] made this big, giant pot that we would all eat the next day with toothpicks.
“A couple of weeks before Christmas, we would all go over there and decorate the tree with them. It was really my grandmother’s show, but Grampa picked the kids up and helped us reach the high spots.”
Just as he’d done decades earlier, donning thick leather gloves and hoisting those evergreens to assist the needy.