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DIMAGGIO Joe Jr

 

Joseph Paul DiMaggio Junior.

Date of birth : October 23, 1941, New York.

Date of death : August 6, 1999, Antioch, California.

 

Son of Joe DiMaggio and Dorothy Arnolds.

 

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Christmas 1941 ,,,

 

February 22, 1944 ,

His parents divorced when he was 3 (divorce on May 12, 1944), and he spent much of his earlier years in summer camps and military schools, including the now-defunct Black Foxe Military Institute in Hollywood.
This school was known as the school of choice for the sons of Hollywood celebrities.

January 11, 1953

1953  

With his father, after the World Series, October 9, 1953 .

During his teens, he spent his time between her mother who pursued her acting career in Hollywod, and his father who started to date with Marilyn. He was close from her, and often accompanied the couples on dates.

At the end of the 50's, he attended a prep school in New Jersey, the Lawrenceville School, where he shunned base-ball to play football. He was a brilliant student. However, his father, who lived in New York, had little time for him and never saw his games.
He enrolled at Yale University in 1960 but quit after a year because he hated the Eastern winters. 

He returned to Los Angeles and worked at odd jobs before deciding to join the Marines Corps.

Despite the divorce between Marilyn and his father, he remained close to the actress.

March 31, 1961, at the Yankees training camp St Petersburg, Florida ,.

April 2, 1962, he joined the Marines Corps in San Diego ,.

July 10, 1962 : he received the American Spirit Honor medal from the Marines Corps in San Diego .

The day of her death, he had called Marilyn, from his base in San Diego.

He didn't manage to reach her : he was told or that Marilyn wasn't home either she wasn't available (calls at 2.00 PM and 4.30 PM).

Between 7.00 PM and 7.15 PM : Joe DiMaggio Jr called again and this time reached Marilyn. They had a brief but pleasant conversation during which he told her that he had broken up his engagment with Pamela Ries 

() his fiancée that Marilyn didn't much appreciate.

Marilyn sounded to him happy and in a good mood (confirmed by Eunice Murray and Dr Greenson). They talked during about 10 minutes.

DiMaggio Jr could gave the exact time of his call because at that moment, he was watching a base-ball game.

Indeed, he stated that at the moment he was talking with Marilyn, he was watching on TV the 7th inning of a base-ball game : the Baltimore Orioles versus the Anaheim Angels, which played in Baltimore this evening. The game began shortly after 7.30 PM (time on the East Coast), which placed the 7th inning at about 10.00 PM.

He attended her funeral on August 8, 1962 

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After Marilyn's death, he finished his enlistment in the Marines, and married Veronica Dawn Kelley (born 

in 1946), a 17-year-old girl from San Diego (). The wedding took place on May 18, 1963 in

Imperial, California () but only lasted 13 months and it ended with a divorce on August 12, 1964 

().

Returning to civilian life, he took a series of odd jobs and eventually moved to the East Coast, where he worked for his uncle Dom DiMaggio, who owned a polyurethane foam company near Boston.

That is where he met and wed in 1968 Susan Adams, a widow who had two daughters, Katherine Marie (born in Februrary 1961) and Paula Sue (born May 18, 1963).

He eventually moved back to California to run a polyurethane foam business for his father and two business partners.
His father Joe DiMaggio grew attached to the girls and doted over then as grandfather; he put them in his will.
Working for his father proved problematic for the younger DiMaggio, who felt that no matter how hard he worked he could never do anything right in his father's eyes.
That led to bouts of drinking and fights with his wife. Drugs came next. The business was lost and the couple divorced in 1974.
In 1976, DiMaggio Jr. was seriously injured in an automobile accident, and a piece of his brain had to be removed. That surgery seemed to make him even quicker to anger and to have less control of his actions.
His father tried to help him recover, buying him a $75,000 Peterbilt truck cab, but he wrecked the truck; by the late 1980s was working odd jobs and living in a trailer near Martinez, California, his father's hometown.
Estranged from him, they hadn't seen a lot during the last years, he was however one of six pallbearers of his

father's casket (,,,,), on March 11, 1999. 
He didn't see him before his death, but his two daughters were at their grand-father's bedside while he was fighting against cancer, in Florida.
DiMaggio Sr. left his only child a $20,000 annual trust fund in his will, signed in 1996, the year the two reportedly last saw each other. He also bequeathed his son 45% from the sale of his firm, Yankee Clipper Enterprises.
He left the two girls, Kathie and Paula, he considered his grandchildren considerably more.
In August 1999, he was found unconscious, taken to the Antioch Sutter Delta Medical Center, California, and died, apparently of natural causes. 

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