The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  The second of the blasts, hit in the seventh inning, was a drama in itself. Sherdel, burned already by Ruth’s homer in the fourth, quickly whipped two strikes past him this time. The second strike was called, and Ruth turned around to argue with umpire Charlie Pfirman. While Ruth was turned, catcher Wilson whipped the ball back to Sherdel, who in turn whipped it back to Wilson, straight across the plate. The crowd cheered for strike three.

  Ruth objected immediately in colorful and emphatic words. He said this was a quick pitch, which was illegal. Pfirman agreed. Sherdel never had set himself, simply had thrown the ball back in an absolute hurry. This was legal in the National League, but not legal in the American. The two leagues had agreed prior to the first game that the quick pitch would be illegal in the Series.

  Sherdel protested. Catcher Wilson protested. Manager Bill McKechnie came out of the dugout to protest. The entire Cardinals team, in fact, gathered around Pfirman in protest. Ruth stood at the side, making fun of all of them, the longtime truant suddenly on the right side of the law.

  Pfirman held firm. Sherdel was forced to throw another pitch, a curveball, and the result on this day was totally predictable. The ball cleared the pavilion and was last seen heading toward Grand Boulevard.

  Ruth loved this home run. He waved his hand at the crowd. He waved directly toward his friends in the left-field stands. He waved again as he turned third base, headed for home. The shot had tied the game, 2–2. Gehrig then came to the plate and hammered Sherdel’s second pitch down the line for another homer. The Yankees wound up scoring four times to take a 5–2 lead on the way to a 7–3 win.

  The third homer by Ruth was in the eighth off the fading Alex the Great, who had been brought into the game in relief. The Bam finished off his day by making a spectacular running catch of a high fly ball from the bat of Cardinals shortstop Frankie Frisch for the final out of the game. He galloped at full speed on a diagonal across the foul line and speared the ball as he hit the fence, fighting off fans in the process.

  He held the ball high in the air as he ran across the field in triumph. He was still holding it in the clubhouse, still excited, still babbling.

  “There’s the ball that says it’s all over,” he shouted to no one and to everyone. “There it is, right where I grabbed it out of the air. What a catch! Boy, maybe I wasn’t glad to get my hands on that ball.”

  “Hooray,” someone shouted. “Ruth for President!”

  “Ruth for Sheriff!” someone else shouted. “Vote for Ruth.”

  “I told my friends out there in the bleachers I’d hit two homers in this game,” Ruth babbled. “Wow! And I hit three. And what’d I hit? All hooks.”

  Someone started to sing “The Sidewalks of New York,” and soon the whole team, everyone in the room, was singing. They sang the entire song, the parts about the “ginnie playing the organ” and “Me and Maggie O’Rourke” and “East Side” and “West Side, all around the town” and the tots singing “Ring-a-Rosie” and “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” The final line—“On the sidewalks of New Yorrrrrrrrrk”—was held longest and loudest by the man still holding the baseball.

  Was there any doubt about the best team in the game? This same group now had won three pennants and two World Series in a row. Won? They had annihilated the National League, four games and out, for two straight years. Was there any doubt about the best player in the game? The man still holding the baseball had hit .625 for the Series. It was a record.

  “Gee,” Waite Hoyt, who was the winning pitcher, said, “it’s great to have a fellow like Ruth in there with you and not against you.”

  The final train trip of the year was a cross-country alcoholic hayride. Ruth had his mysterious St. Louis sources deliver a clothes basket full of ribs and ample amounts of what one paper called “amber-colored liquid that foams when poured.” Other, heartier spirits magically appeared. The players sang, cavorted, and floated home.

  “The hustlingest, fightingest world champions that ever rapped home runs over right field walls are on their way back to Baghdad-on-the-Subway,” Jack Kofoed of the New York Post reported with a headline, “Eastbound on the Yankee Special.” “This train is just one large package of exuberance.”

  The leader of all exuberance was the Bam. He had picked up a Mexican hairless dog somewhere along with the ribs, beer, and whatever else. He carried the dog, which shared space with a few bottles of ginger ale on a silver tray, through the cars on the train. An ice bucket was under Ruth’s other arm.

  A conga line was formed, and the party danced through the aisles of the entire train, Ruth at the front. He left mayhem in his wake, going back to his favorite trick of smashing all straw hats. Another favorite trick, a specialty, was grabbing hold of a person’s shirt from behind, yanking in a certain way, and ripping the shirt off the person’s body. This was a trick that seemed to be learned easily, and soon everybody was doing it to everybody else, and soon the train was filled with shirtless bodies. The Babe was soon down to his silk underwear.

  An attempt was made to stuff Miller Huggins into some overhead compartment, but failed. (He was not hung off the back of the train, as legend has it.) A successful attempt was made to rip the silk brocade nightshirt of Col. Jake Ruppert. Ruth was the perpetrator.

  “Don’t you do it, Root,” the Colonel said, discovered in his drawing room. “This is custom-made silk.”

  “Aw, I only want a piece of it,” Ruth said.

  “Mr. Root, you are suspended!”

  Riiiiip.

  The train stopped at assorted towns and cities during the night. Assorted Yankees, many wearing their suit jackets but no shirts, came out to wave. Ruth, in an undershirt, spoke and directed cheers with a spare rib. In Mattoon, Illinois, he started to lead a cheer for the defeated Cardinals, then said, “No, they quit, the hell with ’em.”

  It should be mentioned here that during this season the Bam had become political for the first time. He had never voted in his life, but encouraged by Christy Walsh and other friends in New York, he had become a backer of New York Gov. Al Smith, who was running for president. Ruth had made headlines across the country by refusing to pose with President Herbert Hoover at a game in Washington in September (“I’m an Al Smith man”), and later he apologized.

  In Terre Haute, Indiana, before a crowd estimated at 2,000, people just waiting to see the new world champions pass, he added Al Smith to his list of people to cheer for. And three cheers for the next president of the United States…silence. The Babe left with the words, “The hell with you,” returning to the fun.

  It was quite a ride. Miller Huggins awoke in the morning and couldn’t find his false teeth. Ruth couldn’t find his dog.

  “Where the heck is my dog?” he shouted.

  “Doc Woods has it in his stateroom, giving it a dose of bicarbonate,” Joe Dugan said. “Your dog couldn’t stand the pace last night. It has a hangover.”

  There were crowds in Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, and Albany as the train from St. Louis continued to move closer to New York. At each stop there were cries first for Ruth, then for Gehrig. Each would come out for a wave and a few words. A kid in Rochester asked how Ruth had hit those three homers.

  “I just took a good sock at ’em, boys,” the Bam explained.

  The train reached Grand Central Station an hour and 15 minutes late at 9:05 P.M. Only a few hundred fans were waiting, but when word circulated that the Yankees had arrived, a crowd estimated at 3,000 soon mobbed the runway up to the station. Ruth was surrounded by six policemen as he made his way through the cheers. He then led a bunch of his teammates across the street to the Hotel Biltmore to see Al Smith. The governor was getting dressed to take his own train trip to campaign in the South. He was glad to see Ruth, whom he called “the boss of the youth of America.”

  “Are you all through for the season now?” Smith asked.

  “All except for a little barnstorming,” Ruth replied.

  “That’s what I’m going to do too,” Smi
th said. “Only instead of hitting the ball, I’ve got to hit the other candidate.”

  Waite Hoyt always remembered that the Babe talked on a radio broadcast from the room too, but that almost certainly took place on another day. Ruth spoke a number of times for Smith, even went to a convention in Louisville to speak for him. Whenever and wherever it was, the broadcast Hoyt remembered included Gehrig and Tony Lazzeri. Ruth introduced Gehrig, who said a few words for Al, then Ruth introduced Lazzeri.

  “Here’s Tony Lazzeri, great second baseman, world champions, blahblah,” the Bam said in introduction. “Tell us, Tony, who are the wops going to vote for?”

  Tony presumably said the wops would vote for Al.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A SEQUENCE of different typefaces led the reader of the Boston Post down the front page and into a tragic story on the morning of January 12, 1929, a Saturday. This was the Post style, a one-column progression of tight headlines that virtually told the story before the reader reached the story. Except this time it didn’t.

  BURNED TO

  DEATH, HER

  BED AFIRE

  Woman Is Victim as

  Home Blazes with

  Husband Away

  WIFE OF PROMINENT

  WATERTOWN DENTIST

  Flames Go Through

  Ceiling to Reach

  the Bedroom

  The two paragraphs on the front page described how Mrs. Helen Kinder, 31, wife of Dr. Edward Kinder, prominent dentist, had burned to death in her bedroom at 47 Quincy Street in the Boston suburb of Watertown. Her husband was attending a night of boxing matches at the Boston Garden, and she was alone. The fire started downstairs in the living room, probably from faulty wiring.

  A woman, passing along Waverly Avenue, saw the flames coming from the Quincy Street home at around ten o’clock and pulled the corner alarm. The story was continued in the fourth column of page 6. That was where the picture was.

  The picture of Helen Kinder.

  Who was Helen Woodford.

  Who was Helen Ruth.

  Poor Helen. Even in death there were complications. She smiled from the printed page the same way she had smiled on opening day and other stiff-upper-lip occasions, the stylish little hat on her head, the diamond brooch the Babe had bought attached to her sweater, and if one of her sisters in South Boston or a bunch of other people hadn’t spotted the picture and disregarded the caption that said “Helen Kinder,” the onetime waitress from Landers Coffee Shop who married the young baseball player from Baltimore would have been buried under the wrong name in a West Roxbury cemetery, invisible to the end.

  The true identification of her remains by her sisters wasn’t made until Sunday morning, two hours before she was due to be interred, but by that time a rush of activity had occurred. The Boston newspapers had gotten hold of the story on Saturday night after calls from readers and were blanketing the Watertown neighborhood. Dr. Kinder, wanted for questioning, had gone into hiding. Members of Helen’s family were asking questions and making charges. Helen wasn’t married to this Dr. Kinder! What had happened here? The word “murder” was mentioned more than once, quickly denied, then mentioned again. The word “drugs” was mentioned. The quiet life of the quiet wife of the famous man was laid out for tabloid autopsy. The burial, of course, was put on hold, and confusion was everywhere, bound to grow larger before it ceased—because the Babe arrived at Back Bay station at seven o’clock on Sunday morning on the overnight train from New York.

  He looked terrible, dressed in black, rumpled from the ride, cigar ashes on his suit jacket, grief obvious on his famous face. He had learned about Helen’s death at nine o’clock on Saturday night at Joe Dugan’s house. One story said there was a call, another said a telegram, a third said an unnamed emissary from Dr. Kinder had appeared, carrying Helen’s diamond brooch, singed from the fire. The news, however it arrived, had sent the Babe to the train station.

  He was met now in Boston by Arthur Crowley, a friend, the son of Boston police commissioner Michael Crowley. Crowley shook the big man’s hand, and they hugged.

  “Arthur,” the Babe said, “isn’t it a tough break to get?”

  He wanted to whip into action, wanted to go to Watertown, wanted to go to see his daughter Dorothy—Dorothy! Where was she? She was at the Academy of the Assumption, a boarding school in Wellesley—wanted to do something. Crowley urged him to check into the Hotel Brunswick, his usual suite waiting for him, room 574, and clean up and quiet down.

  Crowley ordered him breakfast at the hotel, a double portion of ham and eggs, but Ruth could touch nothing. He drank only coffee. He paced. At 8:45, he and Crowley left the hotel and went to the nine o’clock Mass at St. Cecilia’s. The Babe prayed the rosary in a monotone, fingering the large brown beads as the Mass progressed. Once he let out a large sob, startling the people around him.

  What the hell had happened?

  Helen and Kinder had been living as man and wife in Watertown for at least a year and a half. He was the same age as Helen, and they had grown up together in South Boston. He had served in the war and was cited for bravery in France for crawling into no-man’s-land and treating three fallen American soldiers under heavy gunfire. He had returned to dental school at Tufts University. His father said that Kinder and Helen had been legally married in Montreal, a statement that proved to be wrong.

  Helen, though, was known in the Watertown neighborhood as “Helen Kinder” and Dorothy was known as “Dorothy Kinder.” Neighbors suspected that Helen had money because she dressed well, owned a new car, and bought the 50-cent magazines at the local newsstand rather than the 10-cent or 15-cent magazines. One neighbor knew that Helen really was the Babe’s wife because she had seen a picture in the paper of Helen with the Babe at a ball game. The neighbor had never mentioned this to Helen.

  The couple seemed to stay up and go out late, but otherwise seemed unremarkable. They had few guests, no parties. No one remembered seeing the Babe in the neighborhood, but one man did remember Kinder saying that he was friends with the slugger and that a family Doberman, in fact, had been given to him by the Babe.

  Kinder, when he finally showed up at the Watertown police station, said he had been almost incoherent when he returned from the fights and found out Helen was dead. That accounted for the fact that he had said Helen was his wife. No, she was not his wife. He said he was “helping her out.” He had no comment for the press.

  The Woodford family in South Boston had a lot to say. Helen had four brothers and three sisters. One of the brothers, Thomas Woodford, who was a Boston policeman, brought up the subject of murder. He didn’t like the string of circumstances around his sister’s death: the fact that Kinder conveniently was at the boxing matches, the fact that the house was relatively new and shouldn’t have had any wiring problems, the fact that Helen never had mentioned a relationship with Kinder.

  “I want the truth,” Tom Woodford said, “and I’m going to get it, no matter who it happens to hit.”

  A sister, 19-year-old Nora Woodford, said Helen certainly wasn’t Kinder’s wife. Nora said she had traveled to New York with Helen and Dorothy only three weeks earlier in December. They all stayed at the Commodore Hotel. She said Helen wanted her along as a witness, because they went to Christy Walsh’s office to meet with Walsh and the Babe. The subject was divorce.

  The Babe, she said, wanted to marry another woman and “give her child a legal name.” Helen, she said, agreed to a quiet divorce in Reno, but only if the Babe would give her $100,000 to take care of her and Dorothy and pay expenses to Reno. The Babe said, “I’m not going to give you another cent,” and negotiations fell apart. Christy Walsh tried to be a voice of reason for both parties, but failed.

  “And there’s one other thing that I want to add and that is that the Babe threatened Helen with a gun while they were at the Sudbury farm about three years ago,” Nora Woodford said. “He chased her all over the farm and said that he would shoot her. I don’t know what the trouble was abo
ut at that time. The maid knows all about it and could tell you the whole story.”

  The district attorney, confronted with all of these accusations, ordered a second autopsy of Helen’s body, this time by a medical examiner who had equipment to analyze the contents of her stomach for traces of poison. A second fire inspector was called to reexamine the house to make sure that an overloaded socket caused the fire. A local hospital, in other news, confirmed that Helen had been a patient for nervous exhaustion three months earlier and had been advised to enter a sanitarium. Instead, she had checked herself out of the hospital and gone home. A second Woodford brother said Helen had told him in the past year that “she knew a doctor who could get her opium tablets.” Ruth Olson, a neighbor, said Helen had been in poor health for the past year and a half.

  “Mrs. Ruth faded away to a shadow in the year and a half I was her neighbor,” Olson said. “She was a healthy, robust woman when I first moved into the house next door to her. But after her last illness, when she was in the hospital, she weighed only 100 pounds.”

  One of the many mysteries was the relationship of the Babe and Helen to daughter Dorothy. Various reports had Dorothy born in Boston, Brooklyn, or New York City. She was Helen’s natural daughter. She was not Helen’s natural daughter. No resolution ever was made. No records of adoption ever were found. Members of the Woodford family declared that they would adopt her, that the Babe was not home enough to be a fit parent. The Babe’s attorneys said she would live with him.

  In New York, reporters staked out Claire Hodgson’s apartment on West 79th. She and her family had disappeared on Sunday night, and their whereabouts were unknown. The newspapers in both Boston and New York were riding the story hard.