Snippets from the life of George Steinbrenner

George Michael Steinbrenner III, named for a grandfather, was born on July 4, 1930.

The oldest of three children, he was reared in the Cleveland suburb of Bay Village. His father, Henry Steinbrenner, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in naval architecture and engineering and starred as a collegiate hurdler before taking over the family's maritime shipping business.

Young George tried to please his father by taking up hurdling and running a home-based business that raised chickens and sold their eggs.

"He was a tough taskmaster," Steinbrenner once said of his father. "You know, if I ran four races in track, won three and lost one, he'd say, 'Now go sit down and study that one race and see why you lost it.' "

"It was my mom (Rita) who gave me compassion for the underdog and for people in need," Steinbrenner was quoted as saying by Bill Madden in Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball.

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Steinbrenner attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana in the mid 1940s. His father, who idolized the Yankees' Joe DiMaggio and Bill Dickey, took him to Cleveland to watch Indians games, especially when the Yankees came to town.

"We were in awe of the Yankees," Steinbrenner said. He didn't have the grades to follow his father to MIT. But he was admitted to Williams College in Massachusetts where he excelled at hurdles and played football, as a halfback.

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After graduation, Steinbrenner served as an Air Force officer. At Lockbourne Air Force base near Columbus, Ohio, he set up a coffee cart franchise that served 16,000 soldiers and office workers. After his discharge, he stayed in Columbus to coach football and basketball at St. Thomas Aquinas High School.

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He enrolled at Ohio State to pursue a master's degree in physical education. It was there that he met a local student, Joan (pronounced Jo-ann) Zieg, whom he later married in 1956. They had four children.

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In 1955, Steinbrenner was hired as an assistant football coach at Northwestern. In 1956 and 1957 he served as backfield coach at Purdue. He was part of the group that bought the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League in the 1960s, and he entered six horses in the Kentucky Derby,

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Steinbrenner was lampooned, with his permission, by a caricature in the sitcom Seinfeld, portrayed by the actor Lee Bear, who was always photographed from behind at the Boss's desk, flailing his arms and suitably imperious, while Larry David, the show's co-creator, provided the voice. George Costanza's (Jason Alexander) duties included fetching calzones for Steinbrenner.

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He always was partial to the military, and at Yankee Stadium, men and women in uniform were admitted free. He continued to have God Bless America played during the seventh-inning stretch when other teams had dropped such touches.

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Always fastidious about his own grooming, he insisted that his players shun unruly hair and beards, displaying something of the disciplinarian he had been at home, with his children. His daughter Jennifer said in 2004 that her brothers had absorbed the brunt. "Let's put it this way: he had very high expectations of us," she said.

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At upper East Side hotspot Elaine's, he would order a post-game meal of roast chicken while greeting a steady parade of Yankees fans.

"He'd talk to them all," owner Elaine Kaufman told the New York Daily News. "He was very nice."

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He moved the Yankees into the new $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium. He appeared there just four times: the April 2009 opener, the first two games of last year's World Series and this year's home opener, when he received his seventh World Series ring.

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Steinbrenner's heirs inherit a business with revenue flowing from the new stadium and the YES (Yankees Entertainment and Sports) Network, of which the Yankees own 34 percent, and which some think is worth at least $3 billion on the open market. Forbes magazine ranks the Yankees as the third-most valuable sports franchise globally, worth $1.6 billion. Manchester United is first at $1.83 billion; Dallas Cowboys are second at $1.65 billion. Forbes estimates Steinbrenner's net worth to be $1.1 billion, and there's no estate tax this year because of a quirk in the tax cuts passed in 2001. That could save his heirs $600 million.

Information from the New York Times, Associated Press, MSN Money and the New York Daily News was used in this report.