Her name was Carmen Short. She was 19, working at Biggie's steakhouse in St. Louis, and she had no idea who he was.
When he finally worked up the nerve to ask her out, she turned him down — she thought he was a married ballplayer named Terry Moore. He told her he wasn't married. "I'm Lawrence Berra," he said. "OK," she answered. "I'll go out with you."
That was Yogi Berra. Just back from his rookie season with the New York Yankees, he'd left school after the eighth grade to help support his family and spent two years in the Navy before that. At 18, he'd served as a gunner's mate on the USS Bayfield during the D-Day invasion, manning a machine gun on a rocket boat off the coast of Normandy.
None of it made him smooth. He described himself as "bashful, nervous, not good-looking." He kept coming back to the diner anyway, and the courtship ran mostly through the mail — letters passed back and forth while he was on the road with the Yankees. On January 26, 1949, in St. Louis, they got married.
Over the next two decades, Berra became arguably the greatest catcher the sport has ever seen: ten World Series championships — more than any player in history — three American League MVP awards, an 18-time All-Star, and, in 1972, a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Carmen ran the house in New Jersey while he traveled, raising their three sons — Larry, Tim, and Dale. She wouldn't let him near a hammer; his hands were how he made a living, and she wasn't taking chances. He listened to her about almost everything else, too. Asked once why he was standing in a long line for Metropolitan Opera tickets, he answered with a single word: "Carmen."
Years later, someone asked Yogi which of his accomplishments made him proudest. He looked at his wife, who'd just walked into the room, and said, "Getting her to marry me."
In 1998, they opened the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center together in Little Falls, New Jersey. They made it to 65 years of marriage. In January 2014, they celebrated their anniversary. Two months later, on March 6, Carmen died at 85, from complications of a stroke.
And here's the part that's almost hard to sit with. Yogi Berra died on September 22, 2015, at 90. That date wasn't random. It was exactly 69 years to the day since his major league debut — September 22, 1946.
A kid who'd once been too poor to afford much more than water spent his whole life proving that the best trade he ever made cost him nothing but nerve.

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