An American Journey: My Life on the Field, in the Air, and on the Air

With six and a half decades on the national sports scene, Jerry Coleman's career has brought him acclaim and affection both on and off the baseball field. As a brilliant second baseman, Coleman played on eight New York Yankee pennant-winning teams--six of them World Series champions--in the decade following World War II, when baseball was king and the Yankees dominated the game. As a highly decorated Marine Corps dive-bomber and fighter-attack pilot, Coleman was the only major league baseball player to serve in combat during World War II and the Korean War. As a broadcaster on television and radio--first with the CBS Game of the Week, then with the Yankees, and now in his 36th year with the San Diego Padres, a franchise he once managed--he is a hugely popular figure and a member of the broadcasters' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Jerry Coleman achieved all this in the face of an emotionally searing childhood in Depression-era San Francisco. For the first time, he describes the poverty and family violence he endured, the shadow it left on his psyche, and the inner strength he mustered amid the pressures of aerial combat and playing at Yankee Stadium in the age of DiMaggio and Mantle.