Me, Johnny, and The Babe
By Mark Wirtshafter
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1
Here I sit in the bedroom where I grew up, staring at a weathered old newspaper, and a small wooden pocket comb. As I flick the teeth of the comb with the tip of my finger, I carefully ponder the question. Should I tell her the story or keep it hidden inside as I have for the past thirty years?
Growing up in Kensington in the 1920’s was both hard and glorious. Life revolved around four major facets: family, friends, the Church, and especially baseball. Kensington was a lower working class section of Philadelphia and all the folks I knew labored very hard. Looking back, it might have been the poorest section of the city, but we never felt disadvantaged in any way. There was always food on the table, and I learned quickly not to want for anything that would have to be store bought.
I was an only child, born just months after my parents graduated from high school. They were both eighteen when they married and told me it was the happiest day of their lives when I was born. My dad had a job at Rumsey Electric Company where they sold parts for radios and other electrical supplies. He worked incredibly long hours. My mom stayed at home with me and took care of our house. Occasionally she would get some extra work cleaning other people’s homes, which would keep her out of the house for almost the entire day.
My mother was very patient; and would spend hours sitting on the floor playing with me when I was young. When Dad would get home from work he always seemed genuinely happy to see me, but after a few minutes, his attention would always drift elsewhere. He liked to read the newspaper and listen to the radio to relax.
The neighborhood where I lived was home to hordes of children. Most of the families on our block had five or more kids. The Garrity family who lived next door to us had ten children. The youngest was my best friend Johnny Garrity.
In a neighborhood surrounded by kids, somehow there was a sense of loneliness that dominated my childhood. For some reason Johnny was the only friend I had who I felt comfortable talking to, and the only person I truly enjoyed.
Being the youngest, everyone else in his family constantly picked on Johnny, so he loved to come over my house and pick on me. He was a few inches taller and weighed ten pounds more, and he used his physical dominance over me at every opportunity. It did not bother me since I knew he would never hurt me, and was the truest friend I had in the world.
I always helped Johnny get through his schoolwork and he defended me against any kids in the neighborhood who ever gave me trouble. I would put an extra thirty minutes aside each evening just to do Johnny’s homework. In our relationship, I was the brains and he was certainly the brawn. My friendship with Johnny formed the foundation of everything that I accomplished in my life and I will never forget him.
Johnny had five sisters and four brothers, so they were divided up evenly. His father would joke that they would stop when they got to an even dozen; Johnny’s mom never seemed to laugh at the joke.
“Never forget that you and Johnny met in the hospital when you were born,” Johnny’s mom would say.
“After all you were only born three days apart, in the very same hospital, and you got to lie next to each other for two days before we brought you home,” my mom would add.
“I guess you two will be the only real lifelong friends, since you met on the very first day of your life,” added Johnny’s mom.
Sometimes it seemed that Johnny and I were the only two kids in the world, even when there were gangs of kids running the streets all around us.
Johnny and I were content to play with each other and only looked for the other kids when we wanted to try to get a baseball game going. Incredibly, it did not take much effort to get eighteen kids together for a game of baseball. If someone had to go home early for dinner, it was no problem to recruit a substitute and keep the game going.
We lacked a real field to play on, so we played in the still empty section of the cemetery two blocks from where we lived. Filled with tombstones and crosses, the cemetery had a flat open clearing in the rear. We used a bare dirt spot for the pitcher’s mound and another one directly in front of it for home plate. The grass was green but when you looked at it closely, you realized that it really wasn’t grass at all. It was a collection of a wide variety of weeds. The sheer assortment of weeds was staggering. It seemed that no two spots looked the same. When you looked down the only thing you were sure of was that none of what you were seeing was real grass.
There was plenty of room to play except in right field. Any ball hit hard to right ended up going into the tombstones and the outfielder would have trouble running around the markers trying to find the ball. Some thought it should only be a double when the ball went into the tombstones, but I always thought it was funny watching the fielders try to jump over the low markers in time to get the batter out before he ran home.
The equipment we used was another story. We had sticks for bats, usually a remnant of a broom or some other item that had broken. Sometimes we had real baseballs, but other times we used any round object we could find. Gloves were a luxury; some kids had real gloves while others used worn out work gloves from their father’s jobs. Sometimes I wore a glove that Johnny was able to sneak out of his house. These were the same gloves that his sister would use to keep her hands warm on cold winter days. They were often colorful, and did not look much like anything that should be worn on the baseball field. The other kids would laugh at them, but they took some of the sting out when the ball hit your hand.
Johnny had a real glove handed down to him from one of his older brothers. It was torn and had quite a few ripped spots, but it was the best glove of anyone who played with us. If we were on different teams, he would always let me use it when his team was up at bat. When I wore it, it made me feel like I was a real baseball player. As real as you could feel while you were standing in the middle of a cemetery, holding a broken stick and swinging at a large round rock.
Baseball was everything to us. Our lives certainly lacked variety when it came to entertainment. For the adults there was radio and newspapers, but for us baseball was the common denominator. There was the local parish team, Ascension of Our Lord, whose games we got to watch. There were two Philadelphia teams, the Phillies and the Athletics. On my street, everyone was an Athletics fan, but only a few lucky kids had actually seen them play a regular season game. There was a family down the street named Carrigan, who had just moved here from New York. They were big New York Yankee fans and this did not sit well with the kids in the neighborhood. It was hard for us to admit but the Yankees had something we all wished we had. They had “The Babe”.
2
George Herman Ruth, a name for the ages. By April of
1923, even a couple of twelve-year-old boys in Kensington knew that Babe Ruth was someone very special. There was not a kid on our block who did not know his stats. After he was traded from the Boston Red Sox to the Yankees in 1919, he helped the Yanks win the American League Pennant in 1921 and 1922. Between 1918 and 1922, he led the American league in home runs four straight years. In 1918, he tied for the league lead with Tily Walker of the Athletics with eleven, but then his home run totals exploded in the following years. In 1919, he had 29 home runs, in 1920, he hit 54, and by the end of the 1921 season, he amassed an amazing 59.
However, there was so much more to watching the Babe. Johnny and I would talk about him endlessly.
“The Babe is the greatest player ever to play baseball,” Johnny said.
“Yea, I bet he’ll hit sixty homers next season,” I responded. “You can tell that he really loves playing the game and I bet he would play even if they didn’t pay him.”
“Did you know he grew up in an orphanage in Baltimore?”
“Yea, I can’t believe he grew up all alone in an orphanage and became so great,” I replied. “Everyone that knows him says that he loves kids and he would do anything to help a kid in trouble.”
“A lot of the other players talk about the game like it’s a job, but not The Babe, he just loves playing the game,” Johnny added. “Can you imagine, he gets paid for just playing baseball, can there
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