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The Big Fella

Page 17

by Jane Leavy


  His battery mate George Ruth was an exception and an exemplar. Except for a brief and unsuccessful stay in 1913 at the St. James Home for Boys, a halfway house in downtown Baltimore where Ruth proved incapable of managing the limited freedom it afforded, he became, de facto, a lifer.

  “Welcome back, Nigger Lips!” the boys cried upon his return, Leisman reported.

  By then, he was so much bigger than his peers that visitors presumed he was a member of the staff. He embraced that role. He bought candy from the canteen for younger boys who had no money for treats. He fashioned baseballs for them out of heavy cord and black tape and warmed their small hands in his big paws on raw recess afternoons. He took the rap when a younger boy broke a laundry window. In Leisman’s words, “He made life a little more livable when life seemed unbearable.”

  The brothers did everything they could to prepare their charges for life on the outside. They even sponsored dances for senior boys approaching parole. But, Brother Arcadius said, “The family element was not there. They were like prisoners.”

  “Was it grim?” said Brother Peter Donohue, who served at St. Mary’s during the summer when other brothers went on retreat. “Some people had that impression. My impression was: this was their home. They went to school; they played sports. I might be prejudiced but I thought the brothers were substitute parents.”

  For George Ruth, that person was Brother Matthias, Big Matt, known in the Big Yard as “the Boss.”

  “He sensed something in Daddy that needed to be loved,” Julia Ruth Stevens said.

  III

  Martin Leo Boutilier was born in 1872 in Cape Breton, an island off the eastern shore of mainland Nova Scotia. He was a descendant of French peasants who arrived in Nova Scotia in 1752, and one of twelve children born to his parents—of which nine survived. They lived in a small windblown community called Lingan, three miles from Glace Bay, facing out to sea. Life was cold, poor, and insular.

  Cape Breton was coal-mining country. Many of the local men, including Martin’s father—listed in census records first as an engineer, then as a mechanic, and sometimes a deckhand on ships bound for Boston—worked for one of the eight coal companies operating in industrial Cape Breton.

  Martin’s closest childhood friend was Frank McGillivary, who was born at the next farm over. They grew up together, went to school together, and played Lingan ball together, an iteration of baseball that involved throwing a ball with one hand and hitting it with the other—a technique Martin would perfect on the Big Yard at St. Mary’s, where word was he batted one-handed because he once hurt a kid fielder when he hit with two hands.

  Martin’s father was a convert to Catholicism and enthusiastic in his faith. Eventually his overzealousness cost him his job in the mines, family member Jean Mor says. In 1881, when Martin was nine years old, Joseph moved his brood to Boston and settled in a neighborhood near the future site of Logan Airport. Two of Joseph’s sons became Boston policemen; another son became a fireman. No doubt he was pleased that two of his other sons, Martin and his older brother Thomas, consecrated themselves to the Xaverian Order.

  Upon professing his faith, Martin took the name Matthias, derived from the Hebrew Mattathias, meaning “gift of Yahweh.” He arrived at St. Mary’s in 1894 and was granted full admission to the Congregation of the Brothers of St. Francis Xavier (CFX) in June 1895. In his black cassock, with the Sacred Heart of Jesus sewn into the chest of his vestments, Matthias was a formidable figure and grew more so with each generation of boys. He was listed in his official Church biography as six foot four and 225 pounds, but he grew in myth to be six foot six and perhaps 300 pounds.

  Big Matt, chief of discipline, dorm prefect, and assistant athletic director, was large enough that the door to his six-and-a-half-foot-square sleeping quarters had to be hung on the outside of the doorjamb to accommodate the length of his extra-long bed.

  Brother Thomas More Page, who was known as Melvin Page when he attended St. Mary’s, long after Ruth’s parole, testified to Brother Matthias’s outsized authority. While on retreat at Mount Saint Joseph’s, a Xaverian high school in Carrollton, Maryland, Brother Matthias received an urgent call from Brother Paul: a riot was brewing among the older boys in the Big Yard. He was needed on campus immediately. “When the boys saw Matthias at the head of the steps overlooking the yard, they immediately dispersed without saying a word,” Brother Thomas More wrote.

  Matthias possessed a receding chin hidden by his clerical collar, sloping shoulders, and “a boy’s heart hidden beneath his cassock,” as described by the Baltimore Sun. A 1919 official report submitted to the St. Mary’s school board said he was of “pleasing manner and impressed us that he was one of the boys entering in all things, education, play and work with them.”

  The Boston Evening Transcript ascribed to him “a shambling gait, and a quiet and diffident manner.” He never needed to raise his voice.

  Electricity was his hobby. Baseball was his passion. On Sunday evenings after supper, Brother Matt provided the entertainment for five hundred boys by hitting fungoes (with his right hand only) that fell “like snowflakes over the entire yard,” Brother Thomas More wrote.

  As disciplinarian in an overcrowded school full of disenfranchised boys, Matthias had charge of a multitude of young souls. According to Westbrook Pegler’s 1920 confabulation, he singled out Little George on his first night at St. Mary’s, proffering a lifeline in the form of a bat: “I made the Colts, the smallest ball team in the institution, as catcher, and it was only a couple of days later that I stepped up to the plate with the bases full, measured a nice groove ball and socked it over the center fielder’s head for the first home run of my career.”

  In his playing days, Ruth would credit Brother Matt for his pigeon-toed gait and his uppercut swing—saying he was born as a hitter the first time he saw Matthias hit a ball. In his dying days, Ruth would credit him with “teaching me how to play ball—and how to think.”

  He called Brother Matthias “the greatest man I’ve ever known.”

  Pegler’s account omitted the role others played in Ruth’s development: Brother Herman, the director of athletics, under whom St. Mary’s won its first city championship in 1897, and Brother Albin, an Englishman, who played first base on many of the teams he coached. “I’ve heard older brothers say Brother Herman was the real discoverer of Babe Ruth when he was a new kid standing off to the side, shy,” Brother Arcadius recalled. “But he always stayed out of the limelight instead of claiming any fame to Babe Ruth. Of course, many brothers at St. Mary’s would say they taught Babe Ruth even though they weren’t born yet.”

  Baseball was more than a diversion at St. Mary’s. It was an organizing principle: dorm played dorm, floor played floor; and shop played shop. It was also a form of crowd control, a way to channel a surfeit of glands and hormones. In 1909, the school fielded twenty-eight uniformed baseball teams; three thousand spectators showed up for one home game that year. The brothers created a de facto farm system with a four-team league—the Red Sox, White Sox, Cubs, and Giants—for the top players. When Ruth outgrew the competition on campus, the brothers allowed him to play in weekend semi-pro and amateur league games around town. By the time he was released in 1914, St. Mary’s had forty-four teams in uniform.

  Ruth once estimated that he played two hundred games a year at St. Mary’s and he played every position—Brother Matt believed that a boy needed to be adept at everything. Ruth caught for the St. Mary’s Red Sox in 1913 when they won the school championship. He was a left-handed catcher playing with a right-handed mitt, which he would take with him to the major leagues just in case. His arm was so good, so accurate, that even after dropping the glove on the ground, and switching the ball to his left hand, he still threw most everyone out.

  “A bone out of joint, one of nature’s misfits,” is how Brother Gilbert would remember him squatting behind home plate.

  He became a pitcher by accident of misbehavior. As Brother Matthias told an inter
viewer from the Boston Evening Transcript in 1935: “He was catching for me one day and the boy who was pitching was hit hard, and ‘George’ was laughing and making fun of him from behind the plate. So I sent him to the mound in the hope that it might be a lesson for him. Instead ‘George’ struck out the side and went on to become a great pitcher.”

  Ruth went missing the week before the first big game of his life, a contest between the privileged students of Mount Saint Joseph and the ne’er-do-wells consigned to St. Mary’s. Bill Morrisette, the star right-hander for St. Joe’s, who was getting a lot of attention from the Baltimore Sun, was scheduled to face George Ruth, the unknown lefty from St. Mary’s. (Morrisette lasted parts of three seasons in the bigs, appearing in all of thirteen major-league games, and spent eleven years in the minors.)

  Classes were canceled while the brothers met to discuss the crisis. Lefty High, the night watchman who manned the back gate, and Mr. Hennessey, the school’s probation officer, went in search of him. He returned after three days on the lam, allegedly without coercion. Brother Matthias meted out his punishment: he had to spend all his free time standing on the road that divided the Big Yard from the Little Yard. His embarrassment was on display for all to see.

  American flags draped the grandstand the day of the game. George Ruth pitched a shutout, beating St. Joe’s 6–0. “Ruth, one of the ‘star’ slabmen allowed but one hit, that being a two-base hit. He also struck out twenty-two and issued but one pass,” the school newspaper reported. “During that same game, he hit safely four times.”

  In his end-of-the-year report to the city and state Brother Paul noted: “One boy created a sensation by his excellent work.”

  Jack Dunn, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, may or may not have attended the game. How and when he learned about the prospect “out the Frederick Road” is a matter of debate. Either Brother Gilbert, the St. Joe’s coach who had already lost Morrisette to the Orioles and did not want to lose another pitcher (Ford Meadows) to Dunn, tipped him off. Or he heard about Ruth from Washington Senators’ pitcher Joe Engel, an alumnus of Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, who had seen Ruth pitch at the Mount. Or both. Dunn was a premiere baseball scout—he discovered big leaguers Lefty Grove and Ernie Shore. It was his business to know the local talent.

  On Saturday, February 14, 1914, one week after Ruth’s twentieth birthday, Dunn showed up at St. Mary’s with Yankee third baseman Fritz Maisel, Brother Gilbert, and a rookie sportswriter for the Sun named Jesse Linthicum and asked to see Brother Matthias. Yes, he assured them, “Ruth can hit.”

  “Can he pitch?” Dunn asked.

  “Sure, he can do anything,” Brother Matt replied.

  Ruth was summoned from the High City tailor shop in a pair of overalls that matched the ones Brother Matt was wearing. Dunn took him out in the Big Yard and had him throw. It didn’t take him long to figure out what he had. Nor did it take long for Dunn and Brother Paul to agree on a $600 contract for the 1914 baseball season. “It was an easy matter to produce a baseball contract,” Linthicum said. “But after all he was in an orphanage. He was a minor and could not sign such a contract and have it legal. So Dunn was forced to sign two contracts, a baseball contract with the Babe and he also signed a contract to become his guardian.”

  The brothers routinely delegated that authority to prospective employers. That would prove helpful to the Orioles’ owner later in the spring when “Jack Dunn’s Baby”—a moniker acquired early in spring training in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and soon shortened to Babe!—attracted the attention of the rival Baltimore franchise in the upstart Federal League. The guardianship that enabled underage George H. Ruth Jr. to leave St. Mary’s also precluded him from accepting a big-money offer from the Baltimore Terrapins without Dunn’s permission—“Ruth Safe from Federal Raids,” the Scranton Truth noted on May 28, 1914.

  There was no High City tailor fitting for him. Brother Paul took him downtown to purchase clothes befitting a professional baseball player—one more indication of the status he had achieved and its importance to the institution.

  A new entry was made in the St. Mary’s roll book: “George Herman Ruth, discharged Feb. 27, 1914—To join the Balt. Baseball Club.”

  IV

  Within eight months of leaving St. Mary’s, George Ruth was sold to the Boston Red Sox, for whom he made his major-league debut on July 11; demoted to the Providence Grays, for whom he hit his first professional home run on September 5 at Hanlan’s Point in Toronto; and met his first wife, Mary Ellen “Helen” Woodford, a waitress who served him breakfast at Landers’ Coffee Shop in Boston, whom he would marry that fall.

  He was not yet twenty-one. Not exactly a man of the world. His first love letter to a girl he had somehow met on Edmondson Avenue in Catonsville while at St. Mary’s was ghostwritten by a young Baltimore sportswriter named Rodger Pippen, who covered St. Mary’s and Orioles’ spring training. Ruth later faulted the quality of his prose for the lack of a response.

  His mother, Katie, was dead two years, having spent her final days living with her sister Lena around the corner from the house in which she gave birth to her son. She died at age thirty-nine in Baltimore’s Municipal Tuberculosis Hospital on August 11, 1912, after being hospitalized for eleven days. Her death certificate described her as a widow. The cause of death: exhaustion and lung disease.

  She was buried in an unmarked grave in the Schamberger family plot in Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery in east Baltimore. Her son was granted leave for the day to attend his mother’s funeral.

  Nearly a century later he was excoriated for failing to erect a headstone for his mother and neglecting her eternal soul, in a widely circulated and credited history of Ruth’s childhood written by prominent Baltimore attorney Paul F. Harris, whose father had played for Mount St. Joseph’s.

  “Shame on the Babe,” Harris thundered in Babe Ruth: The Dark Side.

  In 2008, he arranged with the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum for a headstone to be erected and prayers to be said at her grave. Harris died without knowing he owed Katie’s son an apology.

  There were no guests at the wedding of George H. Ruth Jr. and Mary Ellen Woodford at St. Paul Catholic Church in Ellicott City, Maryland, on October 14, 1914. There was no pomp or flourish either; the only attendants were two members of the congregation, one of whom was the officiant’s sister.

  It is tempting to dismiss this sweet, early, impetuous act of adulthood as a doomed, youthful folly. What did he know of his bride, who served him breakfast at the coffee shop in the morning and sneaked out of her parents’ house to meet him at night? What could he know about women? Or about himself? But it was also the conventional act of a young man conforming to societal norms. This was not the wild man of myth who, freed from the strictures of St. Mary’s, indulged every appetite and vice. His first instinct was to construct a family, to give himself a place at the table, reclaiming the spot he willingly relinquished in Pegler’s fabulist version of his childhood.

  V

  George Sr. remarried a year later on Christmas Day, 1915. His bride was Martha E. Sipes, twenty years his junior. She had been married before, when she was sixteen, to a Baltimore cop who made an honest woman of her only after being threatened by her brother Benjamin. The groom lost his job with the city. The marriage lasted six months.

  She was living with George above his saloon at 406 West Conway in 1912 when he applied for a new liquor license at that address; when the bar was raided by police for serving liquor on Sundays; when a fire started by rats gnawing on matches in the cellar forced them to drop her nieces out of the bedroom window into the arms of waiting police; and when Katie Ruth died.

  In the aftermath of all that, George Sr. quit the saloon business. He went back to what he knew: repairing lightning rods and harnesses. George Jr. was having more success in his line of work. In 1915, his first full season as a pitcher for the Red Sox, he won eighteen games and lost only eight, leading Boston to the World Series against the Philadel
phia Phillies. Deemed too young to trust in such crucial games, he made only one appearance in the Series—which the Red Sox won, four games to one—as a pinch-hitter, grounding out in the ninth inning of Game 1. But he earned a full World Series share, $3,780.25.

  The brothers urged him to take an off-season job selling cars. Instead he used his money to set his father up in a swanky new saloon, which his daughter Julia later construed as evidence that he had forgiven, if not forgotten, the pain of paternal abandonment. “Daddy never held it against his father,” she said. “He even went and helped out.”

  Ruth’s Cafe was no gin joint. It occupied an enviable location at the corner of Lombard and Eutaw Streets opposite the Emerson Tower, a Baltimore landmark modeled on Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. Helen and Babe would spend the winter of 1915 living above the saloon with George and Martha.

  Father and son were photographed behind the bar one evening as they awaited the holiday crowd. The cafe is decked out with Christmas balls, banners, lanterns, and tinsel dangling from the pressed-tin ceiling. A gleaming punch bowl and empty crystal glasses refract light from the bar’s mahogany sheen. A patron in a crisp fedora, an African American waiter, a barman, and a dog perched on a wooden chair eyeing the raw bar fill out the tableau. A 1916 calendar advertising the saloon as “Babe Ruth’s Favorite” hangs on the wall behind George Sr.’s shoulder—perhaps it was New Year’s Eve.

  In the photograph, the only known picture of George Sr. and Jr., their identical attire—black vests, striped shirts, and unblemished white aprons—underscores the profound similarity in face and build. But the distance between them—ten feet or more—also speaks volumes.

  The father, grim, stiff, and unsmiling, looks sideways at the camera—florid even in black and white. He dominates the foreground, as stout as his son would later become, a lit cigar burning between the stubby fingers of his left hand.

  George Jr. meets the camera’s lens with the nonchalance acquired in public life. He is accustomed to attention and has the bonhomie his father lacks. He has already distanced himself from the old man. Two women, perhaps Helen and Martha, linger in the shadows of a darkened doorway at the far end of the bar.

 

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