1st perfect game in World Series, but mom missed it

’47) On pitched Oct. 8, the 1956, first Don perfect Larsen game (Point in World Loma Series High history class to of give the New York Yankees a 2-0 victory over the Brooklyn

Dodgers in Yankee Stadium.

Larsen died earlier this year. No other pitcher has yet matched his feat.

On the day after the big game, the front page of the Union featured an interview with Don’s mother, Charlotte Larsen, who “just couldn’t bear to watch” the game at home in San Diego.

From The San Diego Union, Tuesday, Oct. 9, 1956:

27 DODGERS IN A ROW EVERYBODY HERE SAW IT EXCEPT DON LARSEN’S MOM

By Millions Jack Murphy, of Americans The San watched Diego Union’s San Diego’s Sports Don Editor Larsen pitch the first perfect game in World Series history yesterday, but the one person he most wanted to see his masterpiece wasn’t even a television spectator.

That was Mrs. Charlotte Larsen, 61, mother of the sixfoot, four-inch New York Yankee pitcher who retired 27 consecutive Brooklyn Dodgers in the fifth game of the World Series.

“I just couldn’t bear to watch,” Mrs. Larsen admitted at the La Jolla rest home for the aged where she is employed as a housekeeper. “If I had, I’m afraid I probably would have torn out my hair and everthing else.”

SECOND HAND REPORTS

Mrs. Larsen nervously followed her son’s progress through second-hand reports from friends. But she had no inkling that he was pitching a perfect game and no-hitter until the contest was over.

“Every couple of minutes somebody would come and tell me how Don was getting along,” related the distinguishedappearing, gray-haired woman who made headlines of her own two years ago when she was lost four days in the Santa

Rosa mountains. “But I had no inkling of the no-hitter. For some reason, that was never mentioned.”

Though Mrs. Larsen refused to watch her son’s historic performance because of a superstition (“he loses when I

BASKETBALL PLAYER

The mother, however, had no great expectations for the son who yesterday pitched the first perfect game in the major leagues since 1922.

“To tell the truth,” she said, “I though more of him as a basketball player than as a baseball player. In high school, basketball was his principal sport and he played awfully well.”

The Larsen family moved to San Diego from Michigan

City, Ind., just in time for Don to enter Point Loma High

School as a sophomore. He was graduated in 1947. HISTORICAL PHOTOS AND ARTICLES FROM THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE ARCHIVES ARE COMPILED BY MERRIE MONTEAGUDO. SEARCH THE U-T HISTORIC ARCHIVES AT

watch”), she is a baseball fan of long standing and was often in the stands when Don pitched at Point Loma High in the mid-forties. When Larsen, now 27, signed his first professional baseball contract with the old St. Louis Browns in 1947 his mother travelled to Aberdeen, S.D., where he was assigned, and stayed with him for three weeks.