1 Like all good stories about a prince, this one starts in a castle. Derek Sanderson Jeter spent his boyhood summers around the Tiedemann castle of Greenwood Lake, a home near the New York/ New Jersey border maintained by the Tiedemann family of Jersey City and defined by its medieval-looking tower and rooftop battlements. In the 1950s, the Tiedemanns started rebuilding the burned-out castle with the help of their adopted son, William "Sonny" Connors, who did his talking with a hammer the same way Charles "Sonny" Liston did his talking with his fists. More than a quarter century later, Connors, a maintenance worker at a Catholic church, would preach the virtues of an honest day''s work to his grandson, who was enlisted as Connors''s unpaid assistant when he wasn''t playing with the Tiedemann grandchildren around the lake. Derek Jeter was forever carrying his baseball glove, forever looking for a game. His grandfather was not an enthusiastic sports fan, but as much as anyone Connors showed the boy the necessity of running out every single one of life''s ground balls. Connors was a shy and earnest handyman who had lost his parents to illness when he was young, and who had honed his workshop skills under John Tiedemann''s careful watch. Tiedemann and his wife, Julia, raised Sonny along with twelve children of their own, sparing him a teenager''s life as a ward of the state.
Tiedemann was a worthy role model for Sonny. He had left school in the sixth grade to work in a Jersey City foundry and help his widowed mother pay the bills. At thirteen, Tiedemann already was operating a small electrical business of his own. In the wake of the Great Depression he landed a job inside St. Michael''s Church, where Tiedemann did everything for Monsignor LeRoy McWilliams, even built him a parish gym. When Msgr. McWilliams did not have the money to cover the scaffolding needed to paint St. Michael''s, Tiedemann invented a jeep-mounted boom that could elevate a man to the highest reaches of the ceiling.
He ultimately got into the business of painting and decorating church walls. Around the same time, in the mid-fifties, Tiedemann was overseeing work on a 2.7-acre Greenwood Lake, New York, lot he had purchased for $15,000. His main objective was the restoration of a German-style castle that had been gutted by fire more than a decade earlier. Tiedemann''s labor force amounted to his eleven sons, including his ace plumber, roofer, carpenter, and electrician from St. Michael''s - Sonny Connors. "Sonny was a Tiedemann," said one of the patriarch''s own, George. "We all counted him as one of our brothers.
" And every weekend, year after year after year, this band of Jersey City brothers gathered to breathe new life into the dark slate-tiled castle, an Old World hideaway originally built by a New York City dentist in 1903. The Tiedemann boys started by digging out the ashes and removing the trees that had grown inside the structure. They did this for their father, the self-made man the old St. Michael''s pastor liked to call "the Michelangelo of the tool chest." The castle was John Tiedemann''s dream house, and the boys helped him build additional homes on the property so some of his thirteen children and fifty-four grandchildren could live there. "We weren''t a huggy, kissy type of family," George said. "We weren''t the Waltons. But the love was there, and it didn''t have to manifest itself more than it did.
" John Tiedemann was a tough and simple man who liked to fish, watch boxing, and move the earth with his callused hands. Long before he poured himself into the Greenwood Lake project, Tiedemann was proud of being the first resident on his Jersey City block, 7th Street, to own a television set. He enjoyed having his friends over to take in the Friday night fights. He finally made some real money with his church improvement business and later bought himself a couple of Rolls-Royces to park outside his renovated castle. But Tiedemann was a laborer at heart, and he had taught his eleven sons all the necessary trades. As it turned out, none of the boys could match the father as a craftsman. None but Sonny, the one Tiedemann who did not share Tiedemann''s blood. For years Sonny was John''s most reliable aide, at least when he was not working his full-time job as head of maintenance at Queen of Peace in North Arlington, New Jersey, an hour''s commute from the castle.
Sonny would drive through heavy snowstorms in the middle of the night to clean the Queen of Peace parking lots by 4:00 a.m. He would vacuum the rugs around the altar, paint the priests'' living quarters, and repair the parishioners'' sputtering cars for no charge. Sonny never once called in sick and never once forgot the family that gave him a chance. Every Friday, payday, Sonny would stop at a bakery and buy a large strawberry shortcake so all the Tiedemanns could enjoy dessert. "Sonny was the spark that kept us going," George said, "because he never took a break." Sonny idolized Julia Tiedemann, and he liked to make her husband proud. If John Tiedemann wanted a room painted, Sonny made sure that room got painted while John was away on business so he would be pleasantly surprised on his return.
Sonny married a Tiedemann; of course he did. Dorothy was a niece of John and Julia''s, a devoted Yankees fan who loved hearing the crack of Joe D.''s bat on the radio, and who hated seeing Babe Ruth''s lifeless body when she passed his open casket inside Yankee Stadium in 1948. Sonny and Dorothy, or Dot, would raise fourteen children, including another Dorothy, or Dot. The Connors family spent some time in the castle before moving to nearby West Milford, New Jersey, where Sonny served as the same working-class hero for his kids that John Tiedemann was for him. Sonny and his wife took in troubled or orphaned children and made them their own, and it never mattered that money was tight. "Sonny went back to his own experience as a boy," said Monsignor Thomas Madden, the pastor at Queen of Peace. "The Tiedemanns took care of Sonny, so it was in his nature to take care of others.
And Dorothy had just as big a heart as he did." One of their flesh-and-blood daughters, Dot, ended up in the army and was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, where in 1972 she met a black soldier named Sanderson Charles Jeter, raised by a single mother in Montgomery, Alabama. They married the following year, at a time in America when the notion of a biracial president was more absurd than that of a human colony on Mars. Naturally, Sonny did not approve of the marriage. He worried over the way the children would be treated, worried they would be teased and taunted by black and white. "Sonny was very concerned about that," Msgr. Madden said. "He would ask, ''Will they be accepted? Will they have to fight battles?'' " His questions would start to be answered on June 26, 1974, when Derek Sanderson Jeter was born at Chilton Memorial Hospital in the Pompton Plains section of Pequannock, New Jersey.
If Sonny initially did not have a relationship with his daughter''s husband, that did not stop him from pursuing one with his daughter''s son. Derek was four when his parents moved with him from Jersey to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Charles enrolled in Western Michigan University to pursue a master''s and doctorate in social work. But every summer, Derek stayed with the Connors clan in West Milford and made almost daily visits to the castle in Greenwood Lake. The Tiedemanns put down sand near the water to give the boys and girls the feel of a beachfront, and Derek''s grandmother brought him over to play with the Tiedemann grandchildren and escape the heat. Derek was not looking for a chance to swim as much as he was looking for a partner in a game of catch. "He was always talking about baseball," said Michael Tiedemann, one of John''s grandchildren. They played Wiffle ball games and threw footballs and tennis balls around the lake. "And no matter what we played," Michael said, "Derek was by leaps and bounds the best athlete.
He kept his eye on the ball and moved a lot faster than the rest of us did." Despite the fact he was reed thin, Derek surely claimed some of his physicality from Sonny, a roundish but powerfully built man who stood five foot eleven and projected the body language of a dockworker - in other words, someone to be avoided in a bar fight. But it was Derek''s father, Charles, who passed down the genetic coding of a ballplayer. Charles Jeter was a shortstop in the late sixties when he arrived at Fisk University, a small, historically black school in Nashville. He was a shortstop until the coach, James Smith, told him he was a second baseman. Smith had a pro prospect with a throwing arm to die for, name of Victor Lesley. Lesley was the reason the tall and rangy Jeter was moved to a less taxing infield spot. Jeter was hardly thrilled with the demotion and yet never mentioned it to his coach.
Though he did not have a male figure in his household while growing up - Jeter never met his father - he knew how to conduct himself as a perfect gentl.