Sometimes They Were Happy
When last the nation saw Alex Rodriguez, he had a front-row seat to the Inauguration of Joe Biden while his paramour Jennifer Lopez turned the double play of “This Land Is Your Land” and “America the Beautiful”—she pretty much crushed it, actually. Then they both crushed us three months later when they announced that they were breaking up.
Once upon a time, some 60 years ago, there was another All-Star third baseman whose affair with a chanteuse enlivened the gossip pages. The player was Don Hoak of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the singer was Jill Corey, and their storybook romance led to a marriage that ended all too soon when Hoak died at the age of 41.
Their love story was recounted a few weeks ago when Corey herself passed away at the age of 85. In The New York Times obituary for her, Penelope Green wrote, “A stirring contralto with a pixie haircut, wide expressive mouth and enormous eyes, she drew comparisons to Judy Garland and had quite an origin story.”
That she did. Born Norma Jean Speranza, she was a coal miner’s daughter from Avonmore. Pa., who was discovered when she was only 17 by Mitch Miller, the bandleader who was also renowned as a starmaker for Columbia Records. That’s how she ended up on the cover of Life magazine next to the billing, “Small Town Girl Gets New Name And A New Career,” in November of 1953.
Jill Corey literally made a name for herself at 17.
That was the same year that Marilyn Monroe, nee Norma Jeane Mortensen, steamed up the silver screen in Niagara. And the same year that a Brooklyn Dodgers farmhand named Donald Alan Hoak and born in Roulette, Pa., asked to be traded after spending seven years in the minors. Fortunately for him, his skipper with the Montreal Royals, Walter Alston, was named the Brooklyn manager, and he liked Hoak, calling him “a fine team player with plenty of determination.”
Here’s the excellent SABR biography of Hoak
The Dodgers already had a third baseman, though, in Billy Cox, so Hoak rode the pine in ’54, and again in ’55 when the Brooklyn third baseman was none other than Jackie Robinson. But then Robinson hurt his knee at the beginning of July, and Hoak temporarily took his place. Having led the Dodgers to the NL pennant, Alston had to choose between the two when it came time to play the New York Yankees for the fifth time in the last nine World Series.
Alston went with Robinson in the first six games, but Jackie was clearly hobbled by an Achilles tendon injury, so Hoak got the start in Game 7 and went 1-for-3 with a walk as Johnny Podres pitched an eight-hitter to beat the Yankees 2-0 and give Brooklyn its first—and last—world championship. In this iconic photo of Podres embracing Roy Campanella after the last out, that’s Hoak coming in to join them.
Hoak joined the party with Campy and Podres after Game 7.
As it turns out, it was his last hurrah with the Dodgers. He was traded to the Cubs… and was a total bust, batting .215, the lowest batting average in the majors for a regular. They shipped him off to Cincinnati, where the manager, Birdie Tebbetts, rescued his career by getting him to stop swinging for the fences. The result was a .293 average with 19 homers, 89 RBIs and a selection to the All-Star team. Because Kentucky was Reds territory, governor Happy Chandler, the former baseball commissioner, made Hoak a Kentucky Colonel in gratitude.
Reds general manager Gabe Paul, who made a shrewd trade to get Hoak, made a dumb one after Hoak had a disappointing season in 1958, shipping him, pitcher Harvey Haddix and catcher Smokey Burgess to Pittsburgh for slugging third baseman Frank Thomas and three inconsequential pawns. Now playing closer to his wife and two kids in Roulette, Hoak responded with a fine season (.294, 65 RBIs) that was marred only by the error he made to ruin a perfect game by Haddix against the Braves in the bottom of the 13th on May 26.
Then came the magical 1960 season for the Pirates—and Hoak. They won the National League pennant and then beat the Yankees, 10-9, in Game 7 of the World Series on Bill Mazeroski’s walkoff homer. It was their first world championship since 1925. When it came to vote for the NL MVP after the season, Hoak, who hit .282 with 79 RBIs, finished second to the Pirate shortstop Dick Groat, who hit .325 with just 2 home runs, 50 RBIs and 0 stolen bases—he might’ve picked up a few votes because he was once an All-American basketball player at Duke. (The guy who really got screwed in the voting, though, was rightfielder Roberto Clemente, who finished only 7th despite a team-leading 94 RBIs, 16 homers and a .314 average.)
Enter Jill Corey. In the middle of the 1960 season, she sang the National Anthem before a Pirates game at Forbes Field, and Hoak, who had separated from his wife, became smitten. With the same determination he showed on the field, Don began to court her. Corey, who had once dated Frank Sinatra and was then engaged to a Brazilian diplomat, rebuffed Hoak’s advances at first. But he was relentless, and a World Series hero, to boot. At one of her shows, he talked her backup band into letting him sit in at the trumpet—he had played the instrument in high school. At another show, he walked onstage with a magnum of Champagne and two glasses.
Hoak had another strong season in ’61 (.298) and on December 27, 1961, the two were married. “We loved each other very much,” she told an interviewer in 2018, and she subsequently gave up her career to become a baseball wife. But Hoak began to show his age (34) on the field, and at the end of the ’62 season, the Pirates traded him to the Phillies. He got off to a slow start in ’63, and the Philadelphia writers—who never minced their words—came down hard on him. He ended up hitting only .231, and when he showed up for spring training in ’64, the writing was on the wall, and on manager Gene Mauch’s lineup card: Richie Allen 3B.
Corey gave up her career to wait for Hoak at home.
The Phillies released Hoak on May 18, 1964 but kept him on the payroll as a special assignment scout. When the Phillies blew a 6½-game lead late in the season, Hoak was busy scouting their possible World Series opponents. It couldn’t have been easy watching his teammates collapse.
One of Jill Corey’s signature songs was “Sometimes I’m Happy,” and though she recorded it in 1957, the lyrics spoke to her love affair with Don:
“Sometimes I’m happy/Sometimes I’m blue.” They were very happy in 1965 when Jill gave birth to a daughter, Clare, and Don was working in the Pirates broadcast booth alongside Bob Prince.
In 1967 he got back in uniform to coach third base for the Phillies to further his managerial ambitions, but that didn’t work out, and the Hoaks spent the summer of ’68 in the Class A Carolina League, where Don managed the Salem (Va.) Rebels to a pennant and groomed players like Dave Cash and Frank Tavares for the majors. The next year, he went up to Triple-A to manage the Columbus Jets. At the end of the ’69 season, he was on the short list to succeed Larry Shepard as the manager in Pittsburgh and confident he would get the post. He even proclaimed in a television interview, “I’m the man for the job.”
Alas, his old manager, Danny Murtaugh, decided to return, and when Hoak got the news, he was devastated. Here’s how Jill recalled that day, October 9, 1969, for Joel Samburg of Pittsburgh Magazine in 2018:
“He went to the front door to look out, to get a different perspective, I guess. He saw my brother-in-law’s car being stolen. Don was impulsive and did whatever he thought was right. He just ran out the door and got in his car.”
While in pursuit of the stolen car, he suffered a heart attack and was found slumped over the wheel of his car. He was pronounced dead upon arrival at Pittsburgh’s Shadyside Hospital.
“I never swore my whole life,” Jill told Samburg. “For the first two hours after he died, I did nothing but swear.”
More than 600 people came to pay their respects before Houk’s body was transported to Roulette, 172 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, where he was buried at Fishing Creek Cemetery.
Jill returned to work, performing in regional productions of musicals while raising Clare, who became an actress herself. As recently as the late 1980s, Jill was doing well-received shows at New York nightclubs like the Algonquin.
“Mostly she’s happy,” Samburg observed in 2018.
Just as ARod and JLo, Don Hoak and Jill Corey did have their moments. Here’s Don in the Pirates clubhouse after Mazeroski’s homer in Game 7, being interviewed by Bob Prince at the 1:07 mark:
And while Jill didn’t sing for a President, here she is singing about all of them in 1959:
They meant it when they vowed, “‘Til death do us part.”
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