Celebrity Graveland

November 25, 1914 – March 8, 1999

In 1924, on a playground in San Francisco, a baseball team made up of neighborhood kids paid $2 to entice a rival player to join their team. Little did anyone on that lot know that player would go on to be one of the greatest baseball players of all time. $2 for Joe DiMaggio? Even by 1920s standards, an absolute steal.

Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio was born in California to an Italian immigrant fisherman. He was one of nine kids in the family (two of his brothers also played baseball) and his father had hopes he would carry on the family business. Some time after the $2 trade, DiMaggio began playing minor league baseball and got pretty good, pretty quick. He set a Pacific Coast League record hitting safely in 61 straight games and was named the league MVP in his final season…a preamble of what was to come.

DiMaggio signed with the New York Yankees and made his major league debut in 1936. Over his 13-year major league career (all with the Yankees) he won 10 American League pennants and 9 World Series titles. He was voted MVP of the league 3 times and was an All-Star every single year of his career. He led the league twice each in home runs, runs batted in (RBI) and batting average. In 1941, he set the MLB record for consecutive games with a hit (56), a record which most consider unbreakable to this day. He retired in 1951 with 2,214 hits, 361 homeruns, 1,537 RBIs and a batting average of .325. He was (obviously) elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955.

And he did all of this while taking 3 years off to serve in World War II.

In his personal life, DiMaggio had a medium-profile marriage to actress, Dorothy Arnold. He also had a meteoric and supernova-profile marriage to actress, Marilyn Monroe. While his time with Monroe was tumultuous – they were together for less than 3 years, and only married for 9 months – and there were definitely issues on Joe’s part with jealousy and controlling behavior, they remained close friends for the remainder of her life. After Monroe died in 1962, DiMaggio had red roses delivered to her grave every week for 20 years.

Joe DiMaggio is about as much of an American icon as one could ask for. He has been immortalized in sports, of course, but also in song, in film, in paintings, on stamps, on hospitals, highways and ballfields. As Simon and Garfunkel mused for all of us, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

Burial

Holy Cross Cemetery – Colma, CA

Specific Location

Section I, Row 11, Area 6; Directly west of the central “Last Supper” roundabout. There’s a little parking pull-out to the right of the MOYNIHAN mausoleum that points right at Joe.

This entry was posted on August 31, 2026 at 9:11 am and is filed under Holy Cross Cemetery (Colma) with tags Baseball, Holy Cross Cemetery (Colma), New York Yankees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.