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Jo Lasorda, the widow of longtime Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, died Monday at her home in Fullerton, Calif., The team announced. She was 91 years old.
Jo’s death comes nine months after her husband died of cardiac arrest at the age of 93 after years of heart problems. The couple had been married for 70 years.
Tommy and Jo met in 1949 when he was a minor league player for the Single-A Greenville Spinners in South Carolina. He married Jo, originally from Greenville, a year later.
From the Greenville News:
“I robbed a young woman from this city 64 years ago,” Lasorda said. “I played there in 1949 and married a young woman in 1950.”
As Jo would later tell the Los Angeles Times in 2011, Tommy had to borrow $ 500 for the wedding.
Over the following decades, Jo would build a life of her own in the West with her husband, who was well known for his bombastic personality on the pitch and at the clubhouse, but apparently not so much at home. Jo told The Times that Tommy never swore to her.
She was also not interested in hearing his tirades on tape, including his infuriatingly angry analysis of Dave Kingman’s three-homer night against the Dodgers:
“You couldn’t pay me to listen to it,” she said. “It’s ridiculous that someone doesn’t have enough adjectives to have to use the same stupid word.”
Recalling that it was her husband who left, she said: “I told her you must have more words in your vocabulary than that.
While Tommy led the Dodgers, Jo, a resident of Southern California, was an active member of the community and led fundraising for the Thomas Lasorda Jr. Field House in Yorba Linda, named in honor of the couple’s son who died of AIDS in 1991. She is a breast cancer survivor and has also had back surgery and two knee replacements, according to the Times.
After all these decades together, The Times asked her if she had ever considered divorce:
“Divorce, no,” she repeats. “Murder, yes.”
Lasorda is reportedly survived by daughter Laura, granddaughter Emily and sister Gladys Reeves.
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