The Originator? of: "Get off my lawn!''

Remembering Joe Mooney, a Fenway original, and other thoughts
By Dan Shaughnessy Globe Columnist,Updated December 12, 2020, 9:01 a.m

Picked-up pieces while waiting to say goodbye to a horrible year in which we lost so many favorite people . . .

Another Fenway legend passed away at the end of November when longtime groundskeeper Joe Mooney died in Wakefield at the age of 90. For three decades starting in 1970, Mooney had control of the Fenway grounds. Total control. Nobody stepped foot on Fenway’s sacred sod without an OK from Joe Mooney. Woe was any nitwit sportswriter who popped out of the dugout and walked on the grass without Mooney’s permission. That went for ballplayers, too. I can’t prove it, but I believe Mooney was first to utter the now ubiquitous, “Get off my lawn!".

Mooney was born in Scranton, Pa., where the Red Sox had a minor league affiliate in the Single A Eastern League. He went to work at the Scranton ballpark when he got out of high school and never stopped. He went from Scranton to Louisville to San Francisco and to Minnesota, where in 1960 he threw batting practice daily to a young Sox prospect named Carl Yastrzemski. In 1961, Mooney became groundskeeper for the expansion Washington Senators in the stadium now known as RFK.

In the days before there were seats atop the Great Wall, Mooney would find items on the left field grass on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

“Kids from those nightclubs on Lansdowne Street will throw anything over the wall,’’ Mooney said. “We get bottles, nails, car keys. You’d be surprised how many keys you find. Arguments, I guess. People come in here the next day looking for them.’’

Mooney’s cluttered office under the third base grandstand at Fenway was marked by a shamrock on its wooden door. Filled with rakes, clippers, fertilizer, and bags of dirt, the ceiling of his little room was sculpted in the inverted slope of the grandstand above. If the Yankees were in town, Mooney would have the Daily Racing Form for Joe Torre and Don Zimmer.

“My grandfather was a longtime American League umpire,’’ Ed Hurley of North Attleborough recalled. “I would always stop by his office when I went to visit the umpires and he was so gracious to me. He was a special human being and did a lot of things for people that no one ever knew about. He would even drive the umpires to Logan.’’

Mooney’s wife died in 1993. He sent his daughter off to Notre Dame and followed Irish football until his last breath.

Joe Mooney. A Fenway original. RIP.

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