The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  George Jr. spent the first two years of his life in the home of his paternal grandparents, John Antone Ruth and Mary Strodtman Ruth, two miles from the grit and bustle of the Baltimore waterfront. John’s family was well regarded and well established in Baltimore City. Two brothers, Francis J. and Jacob A.—John Antone’s father—had emigrated from Germany in December 1832. Baltimore was second only to New York’s Ellis Island as a point of entry into the United States. By 1850, there were 20,000 German-born residents of the city. By the beginning of the Civil War, that number had grown to 32,613, not counting the American-born descendants of those first-generation immigrants. The B&O Railroad facilitated the arrival of German citizens through an agreement with the Norddeutscher Lloyd (North German Lloyd) shipping line that brought immigrants into the city at Locust Point.

  In immigration records, Francis J. Ruth was listed as a carpenter and his brother Jacob, nine years his junior, as a farmer. The brothers settled in the Fells Point area of east Baltimore, a neighborhood of merchants and mariners where Harriet Tubman hid the first slave she rescued via the Underground Railroad. The brothers married quickly and fruitfully, proudly giving their children and their children’s children the same Christian names—a frustration to later generations of genealogists attempting to reconstruct the history of Babe Ruth’s family in Baltimore.

  Francis prospered and diversified. He was a tinner, a canner, and an oysterman—employing two hundred men at his cannery—at a time when Baltimore was the largest oyster supplier in the world and a leader in canned fruits and vegetables. He opened an oyster house, which he supplied with catch brought in on the schooner Francis J. Ruth, until it ran aground on Christmas Day 1885.

  He was wealthy enough to tithe liberally, donating enough money to St. Michael the Archangel Roman Catholic Church, descendants say, to have an assigned pew in the church that served the German population of east Baltimore.

  Jacob became a cabinetmaker in Ward 17, also home to Fort McHenry. He had six children, three of whom he named John. John Antone, born in 1844, would become Babe Ruth’s grandfather. He spent his earliest years, as would his grandson, surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins in a tight-knit—some said clannish—community that worshipped in churches where services were conducted in German, read German-language newspapers, and attended German-speaking schools.

  When John Antone registered for the draft in 1863, he listed his occupation as a carpenter. By then, he had relocated to an alley address in southwest Baltimore. The family was now divided east from west by the Baltimore harbor. The split widened further when John Antone married into the Lutheran faith. His marriage to Mary Strodtman, daughter of a bank night watchman, was performed by the renegade Lutheran pastor Leonhard Frederick Zimmerman, who that year sued his former congregation at St. Stephen’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church for reinstatement.

  John Antone and Mary would settle in Ridgely’s Delight, on the cusp of Pigtown, home to many African Americans pushed out of their houses during the construction of Camden Station. John Antone was inventive and ambitious. He became a lightning rod manufacturer and received kudos from the Baltimore Sun in 1871 after removing a broken 50-pound weather vane atop the cupola of the G. W. Gail and Ax’s Tobacco Works—165 feet off the ground. “A Lofty Performance,” the paper called it.

  A savvy businessman, he made sure to advertise his services in the same edition of the newspaper. When Baltimore celebrated its 150th anniversary nine years later, he sponsored a float in the parade featuring a house with a steeple surrounded by lightning rods and a picture of Ben Franklin flying his kite.

  He received patents for a lightning rod insulator, a wagon, and a clothes fastener to use with heavy-duty outerwear, which he advertised to motormen, conductors, and policemen in the Sun: “It is like a stove in front of your clothing. Make your tailor put it on for you.”

  He ran his lightning rod business from a building on Haw Street around the corner from Schamberger’s saloon. When the building was demolished in the early 1890s as part of an initial effort to build a city sewer system (construction of a comprehensive system was not begun until after the 1904 fire that destroyed seventy city blocks), he moved his family and business to a house on the western outskirts of town that also functioned as a kind of saloon.

  Incorporated by John Antone, his son John Jr., and several associates as the 21st Ward Industrial and Social Club in 1893, it was outfitted with tables and chairs, buffets, decanters, and spittoons. The club employed John Ruth Sr. as caretaker, paid the rent on the building, and allowed his family to occupy the living quarters. John Jr. and his brother George Herman lived at home and worked with their father in the lightning rod shop, in the club, and in the grocery store the family managed across the street. The brothers had tried to make a go of it in the tinning business as so many of their east Baltimore relatives had done, but their bid to secure a contract to provide license plates for Baltimore City was rejected.

  It was here on Frederick Avenue that George, Katie, and Little George were living when she became pregnant again in 1896; here that John Antone died of cirrhosis of the liver on January 31, 1897; here that the child was born less than two months later.

  In birth and death records maintained in the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, the child is identified as a female named Augusta. In Loudon Park Cemetery records, the child is identified as Augustav. A paid obituary notice in the Baltimore Sun described the baby as “an adored son Augustus.”

  By the time the baby died of pneumonia and spinal meningitis on March 16, 1898, five days after its first birthday, George and John Ruth Jr. had moved their families and the business they inherited from their father to adjoining row houses at 339 and 341 South Woodyear Street in southwest Baltimore. The child was buried in a family plot, large enough to accommodate future tragedies, purchased by the brothers a day after the unexpected death.

  II

  The 300 block of South Woodyear Street was an unlikely idyll. It backed up to the Mount Clare Yards, the sprawling industrial complex where the B&O Railroad built, maintained, and repaired its locomotives, freight cars, and passenger carriages; and where many of the men who lived on Woodyear Street found employment as iron molders and forgers, carpenters and boilermakers, cabinetmakers and machinists for the railroad.

  Each morning at 7:00, families were summoned from sleep by a shrill whistle calling husbands and fathers to work. The blacksmith shop, seventy-five feet wide and a tenth of a mile long—longer than the 300 block of South Woodyear Street—lay just on the other side of the Ruths’ backyard. And beyond that, the octagonal roundhouse that looked like it should have housed a merry-go-round.

  Loud and industrial as it may have been, Woodyear Street was also a kind of working-class refuge. Secure, stable, and self-enclosed, it was blockaded by two coal yards and railroad tracks at the south end of the street and by a row of adjoining brick houses to the north on McHenry Street. True, coal dust soiled clean clothes as quickly as Katie hung them out to dry. But the backyard oven of William Plimpster, a baker who lived just five doors down the block, added the sweet smell of fresh bread and a patina of flour to the coal-dusted air.

  Neighborhood grocers to whom a child could be sent on errands occupied each of the block’s four corners. Though one of the residents identified himself as a saloonkeeper in the 1900 census, there was no tavern on the block. There were plenty of those on the waterfront two and a half miles away.

  Most of the 254 residents were of German descent, including the aunts, uncles, and cousins in Little George’s extended family; 107 of them, according to the 1890 census, were children between the ages of two months and twenty-six years. Playmates were as plentiful as adult supervision. Uncle John had five children, all within five years of George Jr.’s age. George and Katie shared their home with his sister Annie and her husband, Milton C. Brundige. Two other uncles, an aunt, and two cousins born within a year of George Jr. lived two blocks away.

  The fifty-six
attached row houses on South Woodyear Street were small—just twelve feet wide—but also less than five years old. Downstairs there was a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen with a coal stove. Upstairs, three bedrooms, a tub, and a sink. There were flush toilets in the backyard, and coal chutes at street level that fed a bin in the basement. In better Baltimore neighborhoods, the front stoop would have been marble. The Ruths’ house had wooden steps. Mothers like Katie saw to it they were whitewashed every spring.

  The lots were deep; some houses had back porches; others had garages that exited onto South Carey Street opposite the Mount Clare Yards. George and his brother John ran the lightning rod business out of a shop in the backyard. Like their father before them, they advertised prolifically and were considered experts in their field. When a violent lightning storm struck the city in July 1900, killing ten people and eight head of livestock, George was interviewed by the Sun for a story headlined “Death from the Skies.”

  “Mr. Geo. H. Ruth of the Baltimore Lightning Rod Works, speaking upon the subject yesterday, said, ‘Lightning rods should be placed upon country houses and tall buildings in the city. An unpainted metal roof with down spouting and good connection throughout is sufficient, provided the highest points, as the chimney for instance, are also coppered. I do not think that painted roofs will do as well.’”

  A month later, on August 2, 1900, Katie gave birth to a set of female twins: Mary Margaret, whom her older brother would call Mamie, and Anna, named for George’s sister. Mamie was a sickly baby and not expected to survive. It was a surprise then when Anna, who had seemed so healthy, died three months later of “bronchopneumonia and asthma.”

  Little George was five years old.

  Mamie Ruth Moberly, the only one of his siblings to survive into adulthood, was the primary source of family history in the decades after her brother’s death. Though her memory faltered near the end of her life—she died at age ninety-one in 1992—and she sometimes confused names and dates, she consistently claimed that Katie bore eight children and buried six of them. “There were four boys and four girls, with two sets of twins, one set of boys, and one set of girls,” she wrote Ruth’s biographer Marshall Smelser in 1972.

  The Maryland State Archives has no record of a set of male twins born to George and Katie. The births of six children and the deaths of four of them have been verified. In the 1972 letter, Moberly said she believed she was Katie’s fifth or sixth child. A fragment of her 1900 birth certificate, which is all that remains on file in Annapolis, attributes five births to Katie Ruth.

  How many babies George Jr. saw die by the time he turned five is unknown. How the legacy of death and disease and grief would have affected him is easily guessed. How much time and attention his mother would have had for him is an open question.

  But Woodyear Street also offered distraction and solace. His aunt Annie, to whom he would turn for shelter later in childhood, gave birth to a healthy baby, Ellen, in 1898. And Carroll Park, twenty acres of public parkland purchased from the Mount Clare estate in 1890, was within walking distance. There were open fields where games of baseball were played. H. L. Mencken, who lived a half mile away in the gilded sanctuary of Union Square, would later write how he and his uptown crew would be harassed by “brigandish fellows from the neighborhood” who “in a mild mood would chase” them from the field, or worse, “cabbage their bats and balls.” Which might account for his lifelong antipathy for the game, which, he said, stimulated “a childish and orgiastic local pride, a typical American weakness.”

  At age two, when the Ruths arrived on Woodyear Street, George Ruth Jr. was too young to harass anyone. He was six—a boy in full—by the time the family left, and full of boyish mischief. Nellie Ruth, one of Uncle John’s daughters, never forgave him for one prank he pulled. “She was out in the backyard with her mother,” according to her grandson Tony Brady. “Her mother was hanging clothes up, and he sneaked up behind her and dropped a snake down the back of her dress and was laughing and laughing. It was a black snake. It scared her to death. She didn’t like him at all. He was a hellion. Typical boy.”

  Magdalena Henrietta Freudenberger, who was two years his senior, lived down the block on the other side of the street. She wouldn’t leave Woodyear Street until 1961, when she moved in with her children and shared a bedroom with her granddaughter Dotty Schluepner, to whom she would tell stories about growing up with George Herman Ruth Jr. He was her favorite playmate, the only boy who would play with girls: “They played softball or whatever it was called. They had to go to the field because they couldn’t break windows. Many times, she’d come home dirty; and her mother would say, ‘What were you doing?’

  “She said, ‘Well, we played ball.’

  “Later, when she turned school age, her mother told her she needed to quit playing with the boys. Her dress was getting dirty playing ball in the field at Carroll Park.”

  By then, the Ruths had left Woodyear Street, which was just as well as far as Magdalena’s mother was concerned. Reports about George Jr. being sent to St. Mary’s filtered back to the old neighborhood. “The word of mouth came back that it was a good thing they weren’t playing anymore,” Schluepner said. “And her mother believed everything that went around.”

  Nor was Schluepner’s grandmother well disposed to George Sr.’s new line of work. “They were very possessive of their values, and they wanted their values to be passed on. One of their values was not to have friends that run saloons. That was frowned upon; it wasn’t a good occupation.”

  On April 13, 1901, George Sr. filed a petition for a liquor license for an existing saloon at 426 West Camden Street. Five months later, he sold the family house on Woodyear Street for forty-two dollars and quit the lightning rod business. It was surprising because he had acquired an enviable reputation in the field. It was equally surprising that he sold the house to someone other than his brother, who would buy it back from George’s purchaser two years later—indeed, John Ruth would live on South Woodyear until his death in 1932, and the houses would remain in the family for another thirty-five years. Surprising, too, that George would deprive Katie, who was pregnant again, of the helping hands open to her on Woodyear Street.

  Gussie Ruth was born above the saloon at 426 West Camden Street on August 25, 1901. She lived less than four months. The cause of death cited on her death certificate was marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition that led to progressive emaciation. In infants less than a year old, the disease was characterized by thinness, dry skin, poor muscle development, and irritability. Physicians of the era believed the causes to include unsuitable food, chronic vomiting, chronic diarrhea, and inherited syphilis.

  Little George was six years old.

  Gussie was buried with her siblings in the family plot purchased two and a half years earlier. Her uncle John was named as father on her birth certificate.

  There are many innocent and plausible explanations; a clerical error is most likely. (John is also identified as a saloonkeeper on her birth certificate.) But given the apparent rupture between the brothers, it is worth wondering exactly what caused George to sever business ties with John as abruptly as he did.

  III

  George and Katie remained on West Camden Street for two tumultuous years, during which they buried one child and sent another away. A turbulent and itinerant period of family life ensued. In April 1903, George applied for a liquor license at a new location on Hanover Street, a few blocks southeast of Camden Yards. A year later, he put that bar up for sale, advertising in the Sun: “Doing good business; License Granted.”

  They moved next to East Clement Street, a mile from Camden Yards, where they stayed just long enough for Katie to give birth to another son, William E., on August 25, 1905. Within three months, the family had yet another new address.

  Construction on the B&O warehouse adjacent to Camden Station was nearing completion when George Sr. opened a new saloon at 406 West Conway Street, now center field at Oriole Park at Camden Y
ards. He would remain in business at that address from 1905 until 1912, years Mamie Moberly would recall as “tough on occasion” but in “the majority, they were pretty good.”

  From her window, she could see trains loading and unloading their wares, and trucks backing up to the loading docks. “The neighborhood was mostly colored,” she told Mike Gibbons, director emeritus of the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum. “There was white but not right up on the block where we lived. We had colored and factories. We were surrounded by factories.”

  How much time George Jr. spent at home with his peripatetic family after June 13, 1902, is uncertain. His records were destroyed in an April 24, 1919, fire that demolished much of St. Mary’s and all of its written history. The only remaining documentation is a handwritten ledger in the archives of Catholic Charities of Baltimore. “Your grandfather just took up one line of the page,” Ellen Warnock, associate administrator, informed Ruth’s grandson, Tom Stevens, in an email in 2014. “It shows when he was admitted and discharged from St. Mary’s. The record is completely bare except for the dates.”

  June 13, 1902–February 27, 1914.

  The duration of his initial commitment is unknown. The time line given in his 1948 authorized autobiography, The Babe Ruth Story, written with Bob Considine, is factually suspect; among other things, the year of his mother’s death and the spelling of her family name are incorrect.

  Considine, a national columnist who did not know Ruth well, was working under deadline pressure imposed by the publisher and Ruth’s terminal illness. He hired his own ghostwriter, sportswriter Fred Lieb, who had the advantage of having covered Ruth for more than a quarter of a century. But Ruth, always a reluctant and unreliable narrator of his own history, was unable to contribute much.

  According to The Babe Ruth Story, he was in and out of St. Mary’s twice in 1902, staying a month each time; at home from Christmas 1902 until sometime in 1904; and committed again from 1904 to 1908. His second wife, Claire, adopted those dates in her later memoir, but they are unconfirmed.