Early Life
Born Emil Joseph Bavasi in Manhattan, New York City, New York, his sister Iola ("Lolly") nicknamed him Buzzie because his mother said he was "always buzzing around." Bavasi was raised in Scarsdale, New York by Joseph and Sue Bavasi. Joseph, his immigrant father, was a newspaper distributor. He went to high school at Fordham Preparatory School, in the Bronx, with Fred Frick, the son of Ford Frick, president of the National League.
He attended DePauw University, in Greencastle, Indiana, where he was a catcher. At DePauw he roomed with Fred Frick, and Ford Frick recommended Bavasi for office boy position for the Dodgers to Larry MacPhail.
Bavasi was hired by Larry MacPhail in 1938, for $35 a week, to become a front office assistant with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and after one year was named the business manager of the Dodgers' Class D minor league team in Americus, Georgia, were he spent three seasons. In 1941 he moved to Durham, North Carolina Class B team of the Dodgers and married his wife, Evit.
After being drafted, he won a Bronze Star Medal in the Italian Campaign of World War II as machine-gunner in the United States Army.
In late 1945, after serving 18 months, Staff Sargent Bavasi returned to Georgia to rest with his family. While there, Dodgers president Branch Rickey telephoned and asked Bavasi to become business manager of a new minor-league baseball team in the New England League, and to find a suitable city in which to place the club.
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