by Marty Appel
In April he had some setbacks, notably phlebitis, that began to confine him to his 1120 Fifth Avenue apartment. He went to opening day, but only one other game all season. In November he had to skip his usual winter trip to French Lick, Indiana, and was treated at Lenox Hill Hospital. He got through Christmas and New Year’s, but then deteriorated rapidly. News stories alerted people that his final days might be near. He was seventy-one, and had owned the Yankees for twenty-four seasons.
Babe Ruth, keeping posted via the newspapers, was just leaving the hospital himself after some heart tests.
On Thursday, January 12, 1939, Ruth phoned Al Brennan, the Yankees’ treasurer and the Colonel’s secretary of twenty-seven years.
“I want to see the Colonel,” he said.
“Come right up,” said Brennan. It was around 7:00 P.M., and Ruppert had been in an oxygen tent since 4:30. It was removed for the Ruth visit.
He managed to tell his nurse, “I want to see the Babe.” But Ruth was already in the room. He held and patted Ruppert’s hand.
“Colonel,” he said, “you’re going to snap out of this and you and I are going to the opening game of the season.”
That got a faint smile out of the old brewmaster, and as Ruth prepared to leave, the Colonel was heard to say, “Babe …” and nothing more.
Ruth left in tears. It was the only time the Colonel had called him that. Ruppert called everyone by his last name, and in his German accent, Babe had always been “Root.” That evening, Ruppert was given Last Rites of the Catholic Church.
On Friday the thirteenth, Ruppert awoke, drank some orange juice, and fell into unconsciousness. At his bedside were Brennan, his brother George, his sister and her son, and his late sister’s daughter. He died at 10:28 A.M.
Barrow took Brennan’s call at the Yankees’ Forty-second Street office and began alerting the world. Within minutes, messages of condolence were being read on the radio. Ruppert had been so many things—a baseball man, brewer, patron of the arts, real estate investor, and more.
The Times reported that he was one of the richest men in the world, despite going through Prohibition and then the Great Depression. They estimated an estate at up to $100 million, where it had been $60 million before the crash. They attributed this good fortune to his real estate investments, said to be worth $30 million. These included the thirty-six story Ruppert Building at Fifth and Forty-fourth St., a thirty-five-story building at Third and Forty-fourth, and a twenty-three-story building at Madison and Fortieth. In 1915, when Ruppert had inherited his estate from his father, it was valued at just under $6.5 million.
Ruppert’s place among the wealthiest Americans was a tribute to fortitude. He had survived anti-German feelings in the throes of World War I. He had survived Prohibition and laid off few workers by making near beer (sold at the stadium), producing syrups and sweeteners, and bottling soda. He had survived the Great Depression by quietly selling off his rare book collection, many of his racehorses, and the Hudson River Stock Farm/Driving Park (where Poughkeepsie Speedway now sits).
Funeral services were first scheduled for Monday at St. Ignatius Loyola on Eighty-fourth and Park, but it was clear they had to be moved to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which held so many more. The police estimated that some fifteen thousand lined the streets along Fifth Avenue and across the street into Rockefeller Center to watch the spectacle of this famous man on his final journey.
From baseball, Ruth represented former players and Gehrig the current team. Honus Wagner was there, as was Clark Griffith, Barrow, Weiss, McCarthy, tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (who used to dance atop the dugout to entertain the fans), Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Al Smith, Senator Robert Wagner, former mayor John Fitzgerald of Boston, Horace Stoneham of the Giants, Marie Mulvey of the Dodgers, as well as the owners of Schaefer and Rheingold breweries and William Burckhardt, a forty-nine-year employee of Ruppert Brewery.
A fifty-car motorcade departed St. Patrick’s for Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, about a forty minute drive into Westchester County. There he was interred in the family mausoleum along with his parents.
He was laid to rest as defending world champion. He would have liked that. He was a man who liked winning a World Series in four straight, never mind the extra revenue the additional games might bring.
Barrow said he had no knowledge of what Ruppert’s wishes were for the team, “but I know that whatever they are, he wanted the Yankees to go on, and that we will do.”
On opening day of the 1940 season, a plaque honoring Jacob Ruppert was hung on the center-field wall behind the Huggins monument, saying GENTLEMAN-AMERICAN-SPORTSMAN, and of course the Seventh Regiment Band played Ruppert’s favorite, “Just a Song at Twilight.”
BARROW WAS RELIEVED to see how careful Ruppert was with the Yankees. He appeared to have taken better care of them in his will than any of his other holdings. He instructed his estate to pay all inheritance taxes on the Yankees and to furnish the necessary funds to continue to run the team at existing levels. Of all his holdings, only the Yankees were left “intact and inviolate.”
However, it took almost six years to settle the estate, and it wasn’t anywhere near as good as expected.
He did a most unusual thing with the ownership and management of the team. He left the club to three women in his life—his nieces, Helen Ruppert Silleck-Holleran and Ruth Rita Silleck-McGuire (the married daughters of his sister Amanda Ruppert Silleck Jr.), and a “friend,” Helen Winthorpe Weyant.
The nieces lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and had shown little interest in baseball, occasionally attending an opening day or a World Series game and asking little about the club.
“Winnie” Weyant, on the other hand, was a constant companion to the Colonel. Journalist Dan Daniel visited Ruppert at his estate in upstate Garrison and found Miss Weyant very much engaged in the team’s operation, very much a student of baseball.
“She wasn’t sure about Gordon succeeding Lazzeri,” recalled Daniel. “When I told her Gordon would jump right in and make good, she laughed, and doubted it,” he wrote.
“So many people are worried about Tony,” Ruppert chuckled.
Weyant, thirty-seven, was a former actress who had last acted off-Broadway in 1929. She never attended a game with Ruppert but was seen with him at social events, notably at the announcement that the Colonel was to help fund Admiral Richard Byrd’s second Antarctic expedition in 1934. She was clearly the woman of the house at the four-hundred-acre estate in Garrison, walking the Saint Bernards and guiding Daniel around.
Informed by reporters at her West Forty-fifth Street apartment of her inheritance, she was described by the Times as having spent a “semi-hysterical day.” She said she had “no idea why so much money had been left to her.”
“I feel very honored by it all,” she said. “I’m surprised and frightened.” When asked when she had first met the Colonel, she said “he had been a friend of the family for a number of years.” Asked what her father did for a living, she replied, “He was a businessman, let it go at that.”
Now she owned a third of the New York Yankees.
Her brother Rex, in fact, had been assistant traveling secretary to Mark Roth for the previous three years. (A footnote: Weyant succeeded Roth and had no assistant. Neither did any of his successors. But the popular 1990s TV show Seinfeld, which regularly lampooned George Steinbrenner, had the character of George Costanza serve in just that position during two seasons of the show’s run.)
The three women owned the team in equal parts. However, it was a four-person group of trustees who would actually run the team. They included Amanda’s husband, Henry Garrison Silleck Jr.; Jacob’s brother George; Byron Clark, Ruppert’s personal attorney; and Barrow. When George Ruppert stepped aside, he made Barrow president of the team, claiming he was entitled because of his years of service, his stature in the game, and his knowledge of the business. George, although nearly seventy himself, ran the brewery.
George Weis
s was promoted to secretary (and heir apparent) to Barrow.
Any decision to sell the team could be made only by unanimous consent of the four trustees, with no involvement by the three owners, although they could request the trustees to vote on it. The club could be sold only as a whole, not in pieces.
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DESPITE THE EARLY predictions of an estate worth up to $100 million, by 1945 it was finally resolved that the gross value was just $9.5 million, and the net $4.7 million. Ruppert owed Barrow half a million dollars. According to family historian K. Jacob Ruppert, the unveiling of the final numbers was a shock to many, owing largely to late tax filings, properties mortgaged to the hilt, and not enough cash on hand to meet the deadlines for the estate taxes. It was a far more complicated organization of the estate than was first believed.
Ruppert’s Yankee stock was actually held by the Jacob Ruppert Holding Corporation, which oversaw his real estate, and Manufacturer’s Trust had a lien on the company. Had they chosen to do so, the bank could have become the owners of the Yankees.
Despite the woeful financial setback, the Yankees would continue to be the model for sports operation in America. Barrow, Weiss, and McCarthy enjoyed a wonderful relationship in which no man stepped on the other’s toes. Separating the owners from the management team proved very effective. George Steinbrenner liked to say that “buying the Yankees was like buying the Mona Lisa,” which meant Ruppert was Da Vinci.
Ruth Rita Silleck-McGuire died in 1962, and Helen Ruppert Silleck-Holleran died in 1978.
Winnie Weyant never married, lived in Westchester County, and died there in the 1980s. She left her money to various Catholic charities.
SINCE RUPPERT HAD enjoyed the World Series on the radio, the coming at last of broadcasting to Yankee fans in 1939 should not have been a surprise. The three New York teams had resisted this move for a long while. If it was his last “blessing” for Yankee fans, it was a meaningful one.
One could almost hear the dialogue in the Forty-second Street offices: “Radio? Give away the product for free? No one will ever pay to come to a game!”
The forward thinkers who understood marketing could see that properly done, broadcasting could be used to make the in-park experience something to be coveted, to produce “I wish we were there!” moments—and then there was the announcer telling you when the next game was, and how you could get tickets!
With the five-year agreement to black out radio in New York having expired, it was Larry MacPhail of the Dodgers who took the lead, hiring Red Barber from Cincinnati and broadcasting all 154 regular-season games. It was a masterstroke; Red, despite his unfamiliar southern accent, was a big hit. And there was something “exotic” about listening live to out-of-town games.
The Yankees and the Giants would play it safer. They would do only home games (which seemed like a backward philosophy if they were worried about cutting into attendance). Since they were never home at the same time, the same station—WABC—and the same announcers, Arch McDonald and his young assistant Melvin Allen Israel, could do both teams.
McDonald, the more senior broadcaster, moved to Washington the following year and became a fixture there. As for Melvin Allen Israel, he was Mel Allen on the air, and he would become the Voice of the Yankees.
Just twenty-six when he sat in Yankee Stadium on opening day of 1939, he delivered the game as Barber had—with a smooth southern accent, only not as pronounced. Few New Yorkers could have told you that he was from Alabama.
After studying at the University of Alabama, Mel worked his way to New York for a job with CBS before winning an audition to do the joint Giant/Yankee assignment. After McDonald left, he did Yankee games with screen actor Jay C. Flippen and Giants games with Joe Bolton, who would later be “Officer” Joe Bolton on WPIX children’s programming.
Mel went into the army in 1941 and returned in 1946, when the two teams separated their broadcasting (the Yanks on WINS) and Mel worked with Russ Hodges for three years. There were few Yankee games broadcast during the war, so Red Barber and the Dodgers owned the New York air-waves. But from 1946 until he departed after 1964, Mel Allen was as big a star as any of the players he reported on. He got almost as much fan mail—and responded to all of it. So big did he become in broadcasting circles that it would be unthinkable to have anyone else known as the Voice of the Yankees, even a half century following his initial departure from the booth. (He would later come back to do cable broadcasts from 1978 to 86.)
And “man, oh, man,” could he sell that Ballantine beer and those Yankee home games. Giant fans and Dodger fans couldn’t stand to hear his voice. They were convinced that Mel was a Yankee fan through and through, and all of his broadcasts showed that prejudice. But he never said “we” or “us” about the team; he delivered it very straight compared to his contemporaries elsewhere. It was just that his voice so often translated into a Yankee victory, and the ones who rooted against the Yanks couldn’t stand the sound of it.
As important as radio and then television advertising would be to baseball, it is worth noting that stadium billboard advertising in its time, appearing in newsreels and newspapers, was the major place for advertisers to put their money before broadcasting truly caught on. No billboard advertiser was more prominent in Yankee Stadium than Gem razor blades, which dominated the outfield billboard signage, and before that, the fronting of the left-field bleachers right at field level, going back to opening day of Yankee Stadium in 1923 and on through 1957.
LOU GEHRIG WAS clearly slipping in 1938, but that was considered the normal aging in the life of any athlete. No one realized he was playing with a serious illness.
But in spring training in ’39, he played like someone who would be cut in the first round of roster trims, if he hadn’t been Lou Gehrig. He was unsteady. Doc Painter saw him fall down when he couldn’t lift his leg high enough to slip it into his trousers. No one moved to help him; “He was lying there like a helpless puppy,” said Painter. “We dared not help him up. He finally crawled to his feet … There was a tear in his eye.”
He made errors on simple plays. He had no oomph in his bat. Teammates were patting him on the back if he hit a routine fly ball. His great musculature was clearly diminished.
The press wasn’t being discreet. Everyone was writing about his awful spring and signs that he might be done.
The Iron Horse just wasn’t cutting it. Babe Dahlgren, who was going to play some third base and spell Rolfe, was quietly taking ground balls at first—just in case.
Gehrig took some days off during spring training but hadn’t improved by opening day. Still, he was out there: He was the team’s captain, and he hadn’t missed a game since 1925. If he was going to come out of the lineup, it would be his call, not McCarthy’s. He deserved that.
On April 30 in New York, he played in his 2,130th consecutive game. He went 0-for-4. The team then boarded a train for Detroit. Lou knew what had to be done.
In the lobby of the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, sitting next to sportswriter Charley Segar, Gehrig spotted McCarthy and asked if he could talk to him in his room. The two men went upstairs.
There, Gehrig told him that he was taking himself out of the lineup “for the good of the team.” In his mind, he thought maybe he’d take two days off, maybe play after the Detroit series.
There were probably tears in the room. Gehrig was a sensitive man, and both he and McCarthy had been in baseball a long time. They knew the significance of what was happening, and they probably understood that there was more to this story. How could this great man have deteriorated so quickly?
McCarthy returned to the lobby, gathered the New York writers around him, and informed them that Lou would not be playing that afternoon.
“What Lou had thought was lumbago last year when he suffered pains in the back that more than once forced his early withdrawal from games was diagnosed later as a gall bladder condition for which Gehrig underwent treatment all last winter,” wrote James Dawson in th
e Times. “There had been signs for the past two years that Gehrig was slowing up. Even when a sick man, however, he gamely stuck to his chores … out of a driving desire to help the Yankees, always his first consideration.”
At the ballpark, Lou dressed. Yankee uniforms that season had a sleeve patch for the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens. Photographers gathered around him, taking dramatic shots of his peering onto the field from the dugout. The Tigers would play in this field for another sixty years. It would always be hard to look at the small visitors’ dugout without recalling those photos.
Dahlgren and Gehrig met privately before the game, and Dahlgren reportedly tried to talk Lou out of his decision. But Lou slapped him on the back and said, “Go on, get out there and knock in some runs.” Dahlgren hit a homer.
Gehrig, as he often did as captain, took the lineup to the plate at the start of the game. There were 11,379 fans on hand as Detroit broadcaster Ty Tyson took the public-address microphone and said, “How about a hand for Lou Gehrig, who played 2,130 games in a row before he benched himself today!”
The fans cheered as Lou walked to the dugout. He tipped his cap in appreciation, took a drink from the water fountain, and welled up in tears. Remarkably, one of the fans in the stands that day was Wally Pipp, who lived in Grand Rapids and had come to see his old team play.
Lou continued to travel with the team, and even went with them for a June 12 exhibition game with the Yanks’ Kansas City farm team. Phil Rizzuto was the Blues’ shortstop. Lou decided to play. Maybe something magical would happen.
He grounded out meekly to second base in the second inning. He made two errors at first base. A line drive “knocked him down and he fell on his back,” wrote Kansas City catcher Clyde McCullough in 1982. At the end of the inning he left the game, and at the end of the day, he left the team and flew to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for a thorough analysis of his condition.