The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Ruth was less loquacious during a layover in Chicago, explaining to reporters he was saving all his chat for Colonel Ruppert. Edward Burns of the Chicago Tribune suspected a different reason for his reticence: “he now thinks, talks and writes at space rates.”

  Arriving in New York, he went straight to McGovern’s gym half a block from Grand Central Terminal, held court for reporters for forty-five minutes, and agreed to invest fifteen thousand dollars in the establishment as part of a plan for a chain of physical culture schools, described by Joe Williams as those “new health palaces where tired businessmen go to have his valves reground and his motor tuned.” Nothing ever came of that.

  Then, he called St. Vincent’s Hospital to inquire about Helen. Dan Parker of the Daily Mirror recorded the tender scene in Helen’s room when the Babe finally showed up at the hospital: “her pale, thin arms uplifted from her sick bed to engulf the man mountain who rushed to meet them” as “the big movie star and home-run man dropped a few honest tears on his wife’s face.”

  The reunion was brief. Leaving the hospital forty-five minutes after he arrived, Parker wrote, “Babe scowled when some tactless reporter asked him if he and his wife were to be divorced. ‘That old story is still going the rounds,’ snapped Babe. ‘There’s nothing to it. But I wish the scandal mongers would let a man enjoy a little privacy in his family affairs.’”

  Then he headed uptown for his meeting with the Colonel, which would last ten minutes longer than his visit with his wife.

  Most headlines hailed the negotiation as a success: Ruth had come away with a three-year contract for $70,000 a year, the largest in baseball history. One newspaper ran a chart describing everything Ruth could buy for that money: “Every Day Ruth Earns a Trip to Europe. Every Week Ruth Earns a New Automobile. Every Month Ruth Earns a New Home. Every Season Ruth Earns Enough to Support 20 Families Like This.”

  The last claim was superimposed over a photograph of a family with thirteen children.

  Walsh was less enthused. In fact, he was disconsolate. “He had circulated propaganda about a demand for $150,000, figuring that left Ruth a trading margin of $50,000, which had found publication all over the United States,” Pegler wrote in his April 25, 1927, column in the Post. “And a few days later,” Walsh told him in a subsequent interview, “I picked up a paper and read something like this: ‘Babe Ruth walked into the Yankee offices at the brewery today, grabbed a fountain pen out of Jake Ruppert’s hand, signed a contract for three years at $70,000 and walked out saying he was well pleased with the terms and expected to have a great season.’”

  Pegler called Ruth “the world’s worst trader” and described Walsh’s dismay at the Babe’s failure to learn his lessons. “Mr. Walsh’s disgust over the news that his fellow had quickly succumbed to the suasion of Edward Generous Barrow and signed for $70,000 a year was so poignant that he has not even mentioned that matter to the Babe since then.”

  The upshot was this: “In a five-minute interview Ruth was talked down to $70,000. This was a retreat of $5,000 a minute on a one-year basis or $18,000 a minute on the three-year contract, which the Babe eventually signed.”

  Or, as Parker put it, “He came. He saw. He compromised.”

  Ruth must have had second thoughts about the deal, too, telling Jack Lawrence of the New York American it was “a trifling raise.”

  He also predicted he would have his best season ever.

  III

  The game in Asbury Park started forty-five minutes late and ended three innings early. In the first inning, Ruth hit a 2-and-1 pitch into Deal Lake. No sooner had the ball splashed down than a boy in a canoe went overboard in search of it. He appeared on the field, dripping wet, shortly thereafter to procure Ruth’s signature on his soggy souvenir.

  It was a game worthy of a Mack Sennett movie. The Giants scored one run on an inside-the-park home run when a boy made off with the baseball. Two sure outs on foul pops behind home plate were lost when the catcher’s progress was impeded by the two boys located between his legs.

  Ruth was on first base in the fourth inning when another boy, determined to allow his hero to advance safely to second, pounced on a passed ball with the catcher in hot pursuit. Ruth, who was halfway to third base, retreated to second in the interest of good sportsmanship.

  Gehrig ended the game with a home run in the sixth inning, the Times reported, when he hit the last of thirty-six available baseballs into the lake.

  The aggrieved parties were still arguing when Ruth and Gehrig ran for their 5:30 P.M. train.

  By then, it was clear to everyone, including Joseph Lyons, the executive secretary of the school board who was holding the gate receipts, that there wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy Grieco’s judgment, cover expenses (including $350 to be shared by the Brooklyn Royal Giants and the other players on Ruth’s team), repay Donahay, and make sure the school district got its 10 percent cut. So Lyons refused to relinquish the money: the total receipts came to $2,300.00—$1,500.00 less than expenses.

  When a meeting on October 20 failed to produce a settlement, Sheriff Johnson brought suit in the New Jersey Chancery Court to recover Grieco’s $466. The Board of Education argued that Donahay automatically became the promoter when he financed the game and that the receipts, such as they were, belonged to him, not Truby. Someone had to get the short end of the stick.

  The litigation continued for a year. Finally, in an opinion released on October 13, 1928, the court ruled that the Good Samaritan Donahay had allowed “his business judgment to be overwhelmed by his enthusiasm.”

  In short, funds were too short to reimburse him. However, Donahay had been reelected to another five-year term as surrogate with twice the number of votes he received in the 1922 election.

  Chapter 6

  October 13–14 / Aboard the Manhattan Limited to Lima

  RUTH AND GEHRIG WIN HEARTS OF CHILDREN BY GENIAL SMILES

  —LIMA NEWS (OHIO)

  REPORTER SEES BABE, LOU; FORGETS SCORE

  —THE GIRL REPORTER, LIMA MORNING STAR (OHIO) AND REPUBLICAN-GAZETTE

  I

  The dining-car waiters aboard the Manhattan Limited en route to Chicago (with stops in Newark, North Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Lima, Ohio) had spent an hour that week in Columbus in the Pennsylvania Railroad’s newly opened Experimental Kitchen, a replica dining car in which they were taught the fine art of arranging silver, hoisting trays, and folding linens. Each man was required to spend three hours a week in school, one just prior to departure.

  No amount of training could have prepared them for the spectacle of Babe Ruth and his “eats.” Baked ham in cider sauce was on the menu that night, garnished with pineapple fritters, baked apples, and candied sweet potatoes—a new menu for the railroad perfected in the Experimental Kitchen. Ruth ordered triple portions of the best they had and a quart of fruit juice, into which he poured a fifth of bootleg gin. Then he drank the whole thing. With a chaser of bicarb, no doubt—a jug of which he kept in his locker at Yankee Stadium for postgame indigestion, prompting, sportswriter James Kahn observed, a belch that caused “all the loose water in the showers” to come down.

  By 1927, his appetites had been amply documented, somewhat curbed, occasionally exaggerated, and generally regarded with a degree of awe usually reserved for the Seven Wonders of the World. Ford Frick testified to breakfasts of eighteen-egg omelets with six pieces of toast and three slices of ham. Room service on tour was known to require two waiters and three trays. By the time they got to San Francisco after two weeks on the road and Ruth heaved himself on the scale, he weighed 230 pounds. “That’s a lot of weight,” he said.

  His unslakable appetite was generally attributed to impoverished beginnings in the Ruth home, a misconception he never discussed or corrected. Food was plentiful in George Sr.’s saloons, where two generations of women fed traveling salesmen hearty meals of heavy German food. But George Jr. didn’t live there. He lived at St. Mary’s, where the Xaverian Brothers struggled to feed t
heir flock on the eighty dollars per boy allotted by the city and state each year. That, the school’s annual report noted, came out to six cents per child per meal.

  At St. Mary’s the boys ate in silence, interrupted only by the scraping of their utensils on tin plates. An offender was made to stand in front of the dining hall for the duration of the meal, then whipped, though not severely, one boy said; the public humiliation was far more painful.

  They had gruel for breakfast and bread and soup for lunch and dinner. They had a single pat of butter on Fridays, and meat once a week, on Sundays—three hot dogs with their midday meal and three slices of baloney for dinner.

  Is it any wonder that he gorged himself on hot dogs?

  II

  Life at St. Mary’s was orderly and regimented: up at 6:00 A.M. to wash and dress for Mass and breakfast; classes (vocational or academic) from breakfast until 10:00; recess from 10:00 to 10:30; and another hour of classes until dinner and free time, which lasted from 11:30 until 1:30 P.M. Then classes again until 3:15, followed by Christian doctrine, required for Catholics only. After that, free time in the yard until supper at 6:00. The boys were outside in every season and every sort of weather except rain. The constant exposure to sun made George Ruth’s swarthy skin even darker. Lights out was at 8:15, after three Hail Marys and a devotion read aloud by one of the brothers.

  Until 1922, formal education at St. Mary’s ended after eighth grade, at which point the boys picked a trade with which they would make their way in the world. They learned farming and floral arranging; shoemaking and tailoring; steam fitting, woodworking, glazing, electrical engineering, and plumbing; bookbinding, bookkeeping, and typing. They rolled cigars and knitted stockings and made all their own underwear. They did the laundry, milked the cows, and cultivated the vegetable garden. They’d even run pipe to a reservoir fed by a natural spring when additional land was acquired in 1885.

  In 1902, a brush and broom shop was added, which was replaced by a toy factory in 1908 and then by a shirt factory, which by George Ruth’s last year at St. Mary’s employed seventy-five boys and was one of the school’s most profitable enterprises.

  George Ruth’s first job was with the maintenance crew. Then he graduated to the Low City tailor shop on the second floor of the Manual Training building, and from there to the High City tailor shop on the floor above, where he learned to sew collars on work shirts sold to the Oppenheim, Obeindorf & Co. shirt factory—he earned six cents apiece. He would always have an appreciation for a well-turned collar and fix his own when dissatisfied with the tailoring of so-called experts.

  The High City tailors also had the happy task of outfitting senior boys upon their release. “They were taken to the tailor shops at St. Mary’s and were measured for suits,” recalled Brother Arcadius. “They would describe how they felt like a million dollars, getting all this tailor-made stuff.”

  But of all the in-house enterprises, the print shop was the most lucrative and essential, producing annual calendars, the collected works of the school’s superintendent, the weekly school newspaper—St. Mary’s World, which became the Saturday Evening Star and later the Little Flower—and glossy annual reports prepared for state and city officials and benefactors that detailed the school’s good works and chronic debt.

  The 1902 annual report included photos of senior boys milling about the Big Yard in ties, jackets, and suspenders, all made in-house (usually they wore overalls); dogs and cows mingling in a meadow; dining-room tables set with soup bowls; and chalkboards inscribed with multiplication tables—6’s, 7’s, and 8’s. There were two photographs of the newly planted greenhouses and four-color drawings of them in bloom.

  A drought in the spring of 1902 had cut the number of bushels of wheat produced by the farm in half but allowed the brothers to charge fifteen cents more than the year before. They were always quick to tip off the local press to their industry—a bumper crop of potatoes in 1911 merited local headlines.

  But by the end of 1902, St. Mary’s was $32,863.36 in debt, despite $20,000 appropriated by the city and $15,000 by the state. The 22 brothers who served the school and its 453 boys earned $12.50 a month. “Some dreaded the thought of being sent there when they were young,” said Brother Arcadius. “As with any boarding school, you’re on duty around the clock.”

  Need would always exceed funding; students would invariably exceed the available space. By 1908, there were 3,000 children being cared for at Catholic institutions in Baltimore by 500 members of various religious orders. Brother Paul, who became superintendent in 1907, complained bitterly about parents who failed to pay promised tuition. By the following year, the school was so overcrowded that there were 130 boys sleeping in dorm rooms meant to house 90. The brothers were forced to place beds in dorm hallways. “For fear of fire or disturbance among so many boys in one room at a time, we keep a watchman in each room all night,” Brother Paul told the Baltimore Sun. “He walks from one end to the other every minute. In case of danger he could flood the place with light in an instant.”

  Until 1912, when the boys constructed a stone wall around the perimeter of the school with rock hewed from the property, the only barrier to freedom was constructed of wire, wood, and hedge. The back acreage dipped down into the woods at the tree line, where a small stream wound its way into Maiden Run and then into the Lower Gwynns Falls.

  Uprisings and breakouts always attracted the attention of the local press, perhaps because they were so infrequent. Between 1902 and 1909, the school recorded only 252 “parole violators.” In May 1908, the Sun reported: “Two discontented boys attacked a watchman Wednesday night in an attempt to incite an uprising, but the other boys seized them and notified the brothers.”

  Two months later, the Sun noted another incident. “Charles Gardiner, 13, who escaped from St. Mary’s Industrial School Wednesday, was captured yesterday morning by Baltimore and Ohio Railroad detectives. . . . Everything is quiet at the school and no further trouble is expected. The boys were given a good lecture.”

  In the school’s early years, discipline was harsh and corporal. When former inmate Al Jolson brought his wife to see the school in 1948, he was astonished to find the front gate open, biographer Herbert G. Goldman wrote. “It was always shut when I was here. I remember bars all around. Once I hit a boy on the stairs, coming down from chapel. They put me in solitary. That’s bad enough. But to look out the window—and watch the others playing—well, honey, I screamed and hollered until I ran a temperature. So they had to let me out.”

  By the time George Ruth arrived, the cells were gone and the penal uniforms had been eliminated. But straps were still in evidence when Ruth brought Yankee teammates around for a visit in 1923. He acknowledged he got his discipline the old-fashioned way.

  When he ran away, he sought refuge at the home of his aunt Annie and uncle Milton and cousin Milton Jr., who still lived on South Woodyear Street. Patrolman Birmingham or one of Baltimore City’s new attendance officers would come and get him. “George jumped out of bed and he ran out that back door, right into the cop’s arms,” Milton Brundige told reporters on the Babe’s one hundredth birthday.

  Birmingham’s great-granddaughter Mary Tormollan recalled her grandmother’s stories about Officer Birmingham’s rescue missions. “She said Grandpop went out to get George Ruth and take him back to the St. Mary’s Industrial School because he was safer there. That’s how she put it: ‘He’s safer there and he’ll learn more there because it’s a school.’

  “I said, ‘A school or just a home?’

  “She said, ‘No, it’s someplace he can live, and it’s a school.’”

  Visitors were welcome on the first Sunday of every month. His cousin Milton remembered taking picnics to St. Mary’s when they went to visit. His sister, Mamie, recalled, “Mother and I used to go out there once in a while” and bring “goodies he couldn’t get otherwise.”

  He liked chewing gum and anything sweet—pears, peaches, bananas. “On visiting day, we had a c
ertain place to go,” she told Mike Gibbons of the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum. “We met in this big hall with a lot of chairs. Pick your chair and sit down. Then Babe was notified his parents were here and we’d all get together. Had to stay in the hall until time was up. Then the bell would ring, and we had to go.”

  With Katie Ruth’s legal standing within the family precarious and her health deteriorating because of tuberculosis, her visits became less frequent. George Sr. never visited at all. Once Ruth’s classmate Louis “Fats” Leisman confided that he hadn’t seen his mother in two years. Replied Ruth: “You’re lucky, Fats. It’s been ten years since I have seen my father.”

  Another lonely Sunday, Ruth told his pal: “I guess I’m too big and ugly for anyone to come see me. Maybe next time.”

  That time, Leisman reported in his 1956 memoir, I Was with Babe Ruth at St. Mary’s, never came.

  Most inmates stayed at St. Mary’s no longer than two years. The youngest of them were five years old; the oldest were released upon reaching the age of majority at twenty-one.

  William Pindell, who was trained as a printer, succeeded at the trade for which he had been prepared. Others, like Brother Thomas More Page, who later became provincial general of the order, chose a life of service; Brother Arcadius served with six former St. Mary’s students. Some were unredeemable; others, like William’s brother Harvey, never recovered from the stigma and pain of abandonment. After his release, his family never saw him again.

  Meyers Christner, a Pennsylvania boy who had no use for book learning, spent six months at St. Mary’s when he was twelve years old. He slept two beds from George Ruth and was his catcher for the Third Dormitory Team, as he told reporters in 1929 when he was known as K.O., the heavyweight contender with a punch second only to Jack Dempsey’s. His stay ended abruptly when he threatened to run away, and his father took him out of the school.