By JOHN EBY
Niles Daily Star

Former Dowagiac resident Dillon “Matt” Dalton and his brother, Dusty, knew another softer side of mercurial New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.

So might Dowagiac, had his father, former major league pitcher Tom Dalton, persuaded Steinbrenner to attend a Rotary Club luncheon.

Steinbrenner died Tuesday at 80, nine days after his July 4 birthday.

Sure, the Dalton brothers knew Steinbrenner’s status in the sports stratosphere – the biggest fin in the biggest fish bowl – but the shipbuilder from Cleveland who became a “Seinfeld” character to them was the humble father of their Culver Military Academy baseball teammate.

Hal, youngest of “The Boss’s” two sons and two daughters, is now Yankees president.
Dalton, 41, contacted in Chicago, is in his 19th year with Bank of America, for which he runs a commercial lending group downtown.

He is married and has two daughters.

He said he emerged from two hours of meetings earlier July 13 to find his BlackBerry “exploding” with messages.

“Here I am, a kid from Dowagiac,” Dalton said, “and I’m interacting with the Yankees owner like he was just someone else’s parent.

“He was never condescending and always kind to people working on the field. He never put anyone off who wanted an autograph or surrounded himself with security. I think Culver was his refuge. He was extremely generous to Culver, very humble personally and not standoffish. He sat in the bleachers. He was a great athlete in his day, a helluva football player.”

As an eighth-grader and a member of Culver’s Black Horse Troop, Dillon attended Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.

He attended Culver from 1983-1987, when he and Hal graduated. For their senior concert they had the Temptations.

Dillon pitched for Culver and captained the baseball team.

Dillon said Steinbrenner, who won seven World Series with a team he acquired for a $10 million song, would fly in for Culver games.

In fact, on the basis of watching a South Bend LaSalle shortstop going nine for 11, the Yankees drafted the player.

Similarly good fortune befell a catcher from Bremen who later died in a tragic accident.

But Dillon’s most amazing story is that junior year, between games of a doubleheader, in days before cell phones and other immediate communication devices, Steinbrenner yanked oft-fired Billy Martin from a pay phone.

“What set him off in the middle of our game?” Dalton still wonders.

He remembers Steinbrenner sitting with his dad, who pitched for the San Francisco Giants, and reminiscing about people they knew in common.

Dalton said it was odd when Steinbrenner passed as he had just run across the letter Tom received declining his invitation to a Dowagiac Rotary Club luncheon due to his busy schedule.

As a Culver benefactor, Dalton indicated the team looked forward to The Boss’s visits.
For one thing, it meant meals at Ponderosa instead of McDonald’s.

For another, he replaced the team’s “pukey blue” jerseys with classier pinstripes reminiscent of the Bronx Bombers.

Dillon had never been to Manhattan or Brooklyn, so he and his parents went to a game in the old Yankee Stadium in September 2007.

They not only watched from Steinbrenner’s personal skybox, they sat with Yogi Berra. Steinbrenner was already in declining health and was not there.

He said the attendant Steinbrenner hired to take care of the suite was a young man whose health was destroyed by whatever he inhaled battling the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Dalton’s parents, Tom and Lynn, were recently in Chicago from Florida and attended a White Sox game with him.

His dad, who also did movie stunt work, wanted to name him “Matt Dillon” after the “Gunsmoke” lawman, but his mother was having none of that, so flipped the names.

But that’s why he was called Matt in Dowagiac.

Cheetahs on the Run, unveiled on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 in 2009, is a memorial to Matt’s grandmother, Helen Rudolphi Tremble.