Torre hosts annual Safe At Home fundraiser

SCARBOROUGH, N.Y. -- Former Yankees manager Joe Torre and his friends had fun playing golf and tennis at the Sleepy Hollow Country Club on Thursday afternoon. It was all for a good cause as they were raising money for Torre’s Safe at Home Foundation.

Approximately 200 people played the two sports, including several of Torre’s former players such as Tino Martinez, Lee Mazzilli and Jim Leyritz. The event promoted children’s safety and well-being, as well as hope for their future by providing healing services and education to end the cycle of violence and save lives.

More than 20 years ago, Torre and his wife, Ali, founded Safe At Home to save children’s lives and end the cycle of violence and abuse through education. Today, their vision is realized through the signature program, Margaret’s Place -- which offers safe spaces in schools.

The Safe At Home Foundation helps children afflicted by violence and abuse in their homes, schools and communities. The foundation has reached a lot of students through individual and group counseling, school-wide campaigns, peer leadership and educational opportunities.

“First of all, [going for] over 20 years means [Safe at Home] is working. We know our program works,” said the 84-year-old Torre. “It was my wife, Ali, who really started the ball rolling on doing it through education, as opposed to opening up a shelter or something like that. If we are going to try to do our best to end the cycle of domestic violence, you need education.

"We started this 22 years ago. It doesn’t seem that long. It has been a big portion of my life. More important than anything else, we have helped these kids. We have 30,000 kids a year coming through our program.”

Safe At Home's signature program is a school-based safe room called Margaret's Place -- named in honor of Torre's mother. Torre has seen his share of abuse as a kid. His father, Joe Sr., would often abuse his wife, and the cruelty made Joe Jr. a shy and nervous person.

It took Torre a while to get over his father's cruelty. In fact, when he was a Major League player in the 1960s and ‘70s, Joe Sr.’s negative influence was never far behind. For example, Joe Jr. would often blame himself after a team loss.

It wasn’t until Torre was in his mid-50s when he went to a self-help seminar which helped him get over his father’s cruelty. During the third day of the seminar, there was a speaker who connected the dots for Torre’s problems.

“I ended up standing up in front of perfect strangers, and I’m crying my eyes out,” Torre recalled. “He let me know at that point and time that I wasn’t born as a nervous kid and I wasn’t born with low self-esteem -- [it was] because of what my dad was doing. It affected me a little differently than my older siblings.

"That was brought about by being afraid of my father and it made me want to talk about it. Before that, I was embarrassed to talk about it. All I knew was, ‘We are the only family that happens to deal with this.’ I never told anyone about this until then.”

If Margaret Torre were alive today, how would she react to the good things Joe has done for children?

“She would have a problem because she never wanted to talk about it. She never complained about it,” Torre said. “She was born in Italy and I asked my mom, ‘Where in Italy were you born?’ My dad had gotten in her head so deeply that she said, ‘You’re American.’ He made her ashamed that she was born, as they say, 'on the other side.' He made her ashamed for something she should be proud of.”

The Safe At Home Foundation is expected to raise $450,000 during Thursday's event. All proceeds from the event will benefit Safe At Home’s groundbreaking Margaret’s Place initiative.

Safe At Home currently has 20 Margaret’s Place sites that operate in New York City and Westchester, NY; Los Angeles; Cincinnati; and Tahiti, French Polynesia. This school year, Margaret’s Place programs have reached 21,394 students, and since its inception, Safe At Home has served more than 181,000 youth, their families and communities.