The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  TERMS: GUARANTEE WITH PRIVILEGE OF PERCENTAGE

  Walsh posed them behind home plate at the Stadium, one on either side of him in the uniforms he had designed for the tour: Ruth in a black Bustin’ Babes uniform with a white cap and Lou in his white Larrupin’ Lous costume with a black hat. Walsh wore his customary double-breasted suit. The caption on the wirephoto might as well have said: For sale to the highest bidder.

  But when the World Series ended prematurely, the only dates in place were those he’d arranged in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Kansas City. Walsh scrambled to fill the Babe’s dance card.

  The Lincoln Giants of the Eastern Colored League quickly made themselves available for a Sunday doubleheader at the Catholic Protectory Oval in the Bronx. The Negro Leaguers were always happy to see the Babe and the guaranteed payday he brought, but the weather wasn’t promising.

  Walsh claimed that more than fifty cities were vying for their services. He had received feelers from Toledo and Lima, Ohio; El Paso, Texas; and Portland, Maine, where the Twins were wanted for a Tuesday-afternoon game. He grandly offered the Knights of Columbus in Oxnard, California, “the opportunity to underwrite an exhibition game” for their community. Ruth had been a member of the Catholic organization since his Red Sox days, and the Knights came through with multiple sponsorships, though not one in Oxnard.

  Ruth got other offers, too, forty telegrams a day begging him to attend this banquet and that luncheon. Leaving the Stadium in the company of a police guard during the World Series, he had been engulfed by three thousand fans, among them Joe Plumeri, a Sicilian immigrant who had a small real estate business in Trenton, New Jersey, and ten $100 bills in his outstretched hand. “What do you got there?” Ruth asked.

  “This is for you if you’ll come and barnstorm,” came the reply.

  So much for Portland.

  Gehrig announced the game in Trenton during a Sunday-evening radio interview broadcast from the new Fifth Avenue studios of WJZ, the flagship station of the NBC Blue Network, which had debuted on New Year’s Day. The 50,000-watt signal overwhelmed local stations for miles around and reached as far as Decatur, Illinois, where the local newspaper reported that Gehrig had given “a very nice radio talk. To many listeners it appeared that Gehrig is a sincere friend and respecting pupil of the Big Fellow, and is thankful to be playing on the same team.”

  Listeners in Trenton were startled by the announcement and by their good fortune.

  Meanwhile, Walsh was negotiating with Judge Dooley, a fixer and sports promoter in Providence, who called with an invitation to play on Monday afternoon. Dooley was a classic Irish pol in every way except that he was a Republican. He importuned Tim O’Neill, a former sportswriter for the Providence Journal who knew Ruth from his time with the Grays, to recruit a supporting cast for the Diamond Busters. O’Neill was known around town as the “Caliph of Kids,” one of whom, Andy Coakley, was Gehrig’s coach at Columbia, thus his other moniker—“the man who discovered the man who discovered Lou Gehrig.” He enlisted the top two teams from his best amateur league to provide competition.

  Peter Laudati supplied the location. Tucked between the Nicholson File Company and the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad tracks, just south of the Woonasquatucket River on the western edge of the city, Kinsley Park was at times home to the Providence Gold Bugs, the local professional soccer team, and the local National Football League franchise called the Steam Roller, of which Laudati was co-owner. He was nothing if not hands-on—he moved first-down markers himself during the 1928 season when the Roller beat the Frankford Yellow Jackets for the NFL championship. A year later, Kinsley Park would host the first night game in league history—with the pigskin painted the color of egg whites.

  Ruth wired Judge Dooley on Sunday night: “Christy Walsh tells me Lou Gehrig and myself are booked for Providence Monday. Believe me, I am glad to come back to Providence where the fans treated me great when I was a green kid with the Grays. Lou Gehrig is a wonderful boy and a real home-run champion. The Providence fans will like him. Will arrive in Providence tomorrow morning.”

  He detrained at Union Station at noon and was whisked to City Hall, where he was greeted on the steps by Mayor James E. Dunne, Judge Dooley, and Ruth’s onetime teammate Jean Dubuc, now coach of the Brown University baseball team, who, while pitching for the Detroit Tigers, had surrendered Ruth’s fifth major-league home run, the longest ever hit at Navin Field.

  Gehrig took a later train, having stayed behind at his mother’s bedside at St. Vincent’s Hospital, where she was recovering from goiter surgery.

  Ruth retired to the Biltmore Hotel, where he met with reporters and dressed for the game. He answered their baseball questions but was far more interested in hearing how his movie Babe Comes Home had fared in local theaters than in reviewing the abbreviated World Series. “That was a lotta fun making that picture. It was funny!” he said. “I saw it about eight times myself and laughed my head off.”

  He predicted they’d repeat in 1928 as American League champions. “It’ll be tough to keep us out because we’re getting more young fellows all the time,” he told the Evening Bulletin. “It’s going to be a real club for three or four years, at least.”

  Yep, the Yankees were an intimating bunch. Seeing a photograph of the young Pittsburgh Pirate stars, Paul and Lloyd Waner, prior to the Series, Ruth harrumphed, “Why, they’re just kids. If I was that little, I’d be afraid of getting hurt.”

  Legend had it that the Pirates quaked before the first pitch of Game 1 after seeing the Yankees take batting practice. Or so Ruth’s paid propagandist, Ford Frick, wrote in the New York Evening Journal, a notion that went unchallenged until the eve of the 1960 World Series, when former Pirate great Pie Traynor declared that none of them had even watched batting practice.

  Ruth’s estranged wife and daughter, Helen and Dorothy, rarely seen or mentioned in public anymore, attended Games 3 and 4 in New York, occupying a field box just beyond the Yankee dugout along the left field line. Dorothy abandoned her seat, announcing, “I’m going down to see Daddy,” just as he strode to the plate in the bottom of the seventh of Game 3 and drove an opposite field home run into the left field bleachers.

  They posed for a series of family photos. In one particularly awkward shot, used, among other places, in the Sioux City Journal after the Yankees won the series, little Dorothy was draped around her mother’s neck, her back turned to her unsmiling father. The caption read: “Ruth Family Happy It’s Ended.”

  Not that there hadn’t been moments of anxiety for Yankee manager Miller Huggins, especially in the ninth inning of the final game. The score was tied 3–3 when Donie Bush, the Pirates manager, brought in Johnny Miljus to face Earle Combs. Combs walked. Mark Koenig bunted safely for a single, sending Combs to second. A wild pitch—an unsettling harbinger in the Pirates dugout—advanced the runners. Up stepped the Babe, who, having brushed off a car accident en route to the ballpark the way he brushed off all his vehicular mishaps, had driven in all three of the Yankees’ runs, the last two on a two-run homer in the fifth inning.

  Bush had vowed not to pitch around Ruth but ultimately lacked the courage of his convictions. Ruth cursed him all the way down the first base line. The oaths and imprecations were not audible to the 35 million Americans listening to the first national broadcast of the World Series, which was carried on fifty-seven stations by the new networks of CBS and NBC.

  As Gehrig stepped to the plate, Huggins, the Mighty Mite manager—“the only man that could walk straight up in the dugout”—began to pace. Unable to watch, he relied on utility man Mike Gazella to tell him what happened, squeezing the scrub’s thigh between pitches until it turned black and blue.

  Gehrig struck out. Then, Bob Meusel struck out. The count went to 2 and 2 on Tony Lazzeri. “Huggins never saw a single pitch,” Gazella recalled. “On the two-two pitch, Miljus’s curveball didn’t break. The catcher Johnny Gooch didn’t reach up high enough. The ball hit the tip of his g
love and rolled away and Earle Combs scored and the World Series was over. I looked around for Huggins and I thought he was dead. All that excitement could have killed him.”

  Ruth celebrated in the locker room with Dorothy and his teammates. “Yes, Dorothy, the man gave your daddy a low curve on the inside this time. Yesterday the other man curved the ball on the outside. Yes, Dorothy, those were the two that landed in the stands.”

  Forty-eight hours later, Huggins was alive and well and Ruth and Gehrig were conducting a pregame home-run hitting contest in Providence, a staple of their barnstorming games. At the plate, Tim O’Neill reviewed the ground rules with umpires Tim Ferrick and Dan Burke: pitchers would not be allowed to walk Ruth or Gehrig.

  Gehrig batted cleanup and played first base for the pennant-winning team from the Universal Winding Company, known as the Universals. Ruth batted cleanup and played the outfield for the runner-up team from the Immaculate Conception Institute, known as the ICI. A bushel basket of balls and a crate of fountain pens were provided for the occasion; he tucked one of the pens into his back pocket the next day in Trenton to facilitate signing autographs on the field. It provided added incentive to hit the ball far enough to ensure he wouldn’t have to slide.

  The game resembled baseball for five innings. Special rules be damned. When Ruth asked the opposing catcher Emilio “Cappy” Cappalli what to expect from the kid on the mound, Cappy said: “The straightball, no curves.” The kid struck him out on three straight curves.

  Decorum broke down. All that stood between Ruth and 2,222 boys was a score of overdressed Providence city cops and a flimsy railing marking the boundary between propriety and jubilation. They poured out of the grandstand and leaped from the box seats. They flew to him, climbed on him, clung to him.

  Soon the kids began to storm the field between at-bats, and between pitches, accosting Ruth and Gehrig at their positions, and in the batter’s box, racing each other—and outracing the cops—for every batted ball. “After a few stray notes, the orchestra jumped the fracas,” the Evening Bulletin reported, the spooked musicians scrambling pell-mell for shelter from the mob.

  Ruth and Gehrig accommodated everyone, signing schoolbooks, pocketbooks, diaries, handkerchiefs, order slips, collars, and cuffs, “everything but blank checks, which earned them a 10,000 batting average in the signing department,” the paper said.

  In the seventh inning, Ruth decided to take a turn on the mound, an ill-advised decision that yielded the only home run of the day, a majestic thing that sailed off Gehrig’s bat and over the center field fence.

  In the eighth, Ruth meandered to the plate, two batters out of turn, to face Gehrig, who hadn’t pitched since his days on Morningside Heights. “Here began the greatest battle between a pitcher and a batter in the history of baseball,” the Providence Journal declared. “Gehrig struck him out three times and walked him at least once oftener than that.”

  Ruth refused to leave the batter’s box. Gehrig kept pitching. Ruth kept swinging. The last of seven pecks of balls disappeared. Still the Babe refused to budge. Time was called. Tim O’Neill was compelled to surrender the last available ball in the ballpark—one signed by Ruth and Gehrig that he had sequestered in his jacket pocket.

  “Babe waved the outfielders back and then on the 25th or 26th pitch . . . history being forever in the dark as to the exact number . . . The Babe hit the ball into right for a single and two men went over.”

  A hundred kids fell on O’Neill’s souvenir. The umpires called Ruth out for batting out of turn and called the game on account of no more baseballs. The final score was either 13–7 or 13–9, depending on whether you counted the last two men to cross the plate.

  Before catching a late train back to New York, Ruth advised Joe Plumeri not to expect them in Trenton in time for lunch with the governor the next day; their train wouldn’t arrive until an hour and a half before the first pitch. He had business to clear up in the city before leaving on the barnstorming tour that was getting longer each day. He would have to miss Tim O’Neill’s testimonial dinner at the Biltmore in Providence on October 18, too. They’d be in Sioux City, Iowa, by then. He would telegraph his regrets and send a letter of praise to be read in his absence.

  Chapter 2

  October 10 / Aboard the New York Central to Manhattan

  THE WORLD SERIES HAS NOTHING ON BABE COMES HOME

  SEE HIM “SOCK” HIS GREATEST HOME RUN

  —WINNIPEG EVENING TRIBUNE

  BABE RUTH LOSES FILM JOB BECAUSE HE CHEWS

  CHICAGO CENSOR SEES NO INHERENT VIRTUE IN USE OF TOBACCO

  —ASSOCIATED PRESS

  I

  Babe Comes Home was no longer showing in Providence or many of the grand movie palaces on the East Coast. It had premiered at the Friars Club in New York on April 27 at a screening Ruth and Walsh hosted for five hundred editors, publishers, and sportswriters, and opened to the general public at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre on July 25. Unfortunately, the newly installed Vocafilm system, which was to supply sound effects though no dialogue, malfunctioned, emitting piercing noises throughout the movie. Half the audience had quit the theater by the time the Babe got the girl.

  Billed as a romantic comedy, the plot required a lot of spitting and chewing, not a stretch for the Babe; nor was his role as a ballplayer named Babe Dugan, who falls for a pretty young laundress but nearly loses her, thanks to his offensive habits of mastication. Ruth was known at St. Mary’s to carry about a glass inkwell in lieu of a cuspidor.

  First National Pictures had lined up support from a national association of laundrymen in advance of the premiere, Motion Picture World reported, in exchange for filming certain scenes on location at the American Laundry in Los Angeles. This did not assuage the concerns of Mrs. Albert Stevenson, the high-minded censor responsible for maintaining the high moral standards of Highland Park, Illinois, a tony suburb of Chicago. “Babe Ruth cannot spit tobacco juice on the screens of Highland Park theaters and get away with it,” she declared in banning the film from her jurisdiction, thus causing the Babe to “lose a job,” as the Associated Press put it. “We do not wish the children of Highland Park to believe that one must chew to achieve fame.”

  First National Pictures vowed to take legal action. Leading lady Anna Q. Nilsson objected to his performance on other grounds. “He didn’t have any emotional scenes,” she sniffed. “He was just Babe Ruth.”

  The studio made sure the movie played in every American League city during the baseball season. The Olympia Theatre on Broadway near Columbia University had booked it to run during the World Series, figuring on local interest in the Lions’ former first baseman. But now the series was over. Football season had begun and all anyone could talk about was Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.

  The Babe’s silent rom-com was big now only in smaller towns—Zanesville and Coshocton, Ohio; Alexandria, Indiana; Decatur and Thomson, Illinois; Greene, Iowa; Helena, Montana; Tucson, Arizona; Eugene, Oregon. It was also playing in a few national league cities, black theaters in the “chitlin district,” and in Melbourne, Australia, and Winnipeg, Canada, where it was the feature attraction at the Province Theater, the lights dimming for the first show as Ruth headed home from Providence on the New York Central.

  The astute and uncredited reviewer for the Winnipeg Evening Tribune saw something in his performance that escaped the notice of others: the hurts of childhood projected and magnified in the dark on a big screen. “A childish pathos is still in his eyes, and neither fame nor fortune have given him excessive assurance,” the critic observed. “His natural gestures are the tentative ones of a child not quite sure that a rebuff is not waiting somewhere. Something is there which never fails to rouse the maternal instinct.”

  Except, it seems, in his own mother.

  Death, disease, discord, and dislocation had been constants in the marriage of George Herman Ruth and Catherine Schamberger. She was seven weeks pregnant with their first child, George Jr., when they married on June 25, 1894. B
oth were the children of German immigrants. Both came from large, extended families. He was Lutheran. She was Catholic. They were married in a Baptist church.

  They lived with George’s family on the western edge of the city, across the street from Mount Olivet Cemetery. Katie gave birth to her first child two miles away, in her parents’ bed on Emory Street, a dead-end side street in a neighborhood that was a rabbit warren of brick and cobblestone meeting at irregular angles. The Schambergers lived around the corner from the saloon her father, Pius, ran before going into the upholstery business, which was located across the street from the former site of John Ruth’s lightning rod shop. Perhaps that’s how George and Katie met.

  The baby arrived in the midst of a great continental freeze that began with a blizzard just after Christmas and spread across the country and up the Eastern Seaboard from Palm Beach, Florida, where the 35-degree temperature—the highest recorded in the United States at the time—killed all the royal palms and citrus trees. The temperature in Baltimore was just one degree above zero at 8:00 A.M. on February 6, a cold so fierce that water pumped from hoses at a store fire less than a mile away froze, encasing several firemen in ice. It is highly unlikely that Katie Ruth hiked to her parents’ house that day, as legend had it in recounting the miraculous birth of George Herman Ruth Jr.

  Not that she lacked resolve. She had her baby boy baptized on March 1, 1895, by Father J. T. O’Brien at St. Peter the Apostle Church, a Catholic church that served Irish immigrants, eight blocks from Emory Street, and managed to keep it secret from George Sr. Katie’s sister Lena Fell was named as godparent. “His father hated Catholics so much—he hated everyone so much—they had to hide it from him,” recalled Father Michael Roach, who served at St. Peter’s for fourteen years. “They had to sneak the little one in.” (This might explain why there are no baptismal records for any of George and Katie’s other children on file at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, where church records are maintained.)