The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  They would remain shadowy figures in his life: the young wife who couldn’t keep his attention, and the stepmother with whom he couldn’t get along. “Babe and Martha, they fought like cats and dogs,” Mamie Ruth Moberly said. “All they had to do was look at one another—they disliked each other that much—and then they were in an argument. She had spells. Sometimes she could be as nice as oh anything; other times [she was] like the devil.”

  Mamie had quit school after seventh grade to help out—her father’s eyes were failing, she recalled. She cleaned the rooms for boarders who came through town, sometimes bringing lice with them, and fixed her mother’s recipes. She left home as soon as she could, taking a job at Hutzler’s, a local department store.

  On January 10, 1918, Martha’s brother Benjamin Sipes, who had intervened on her behalf with her first husband, was arrested in Ruth’s Cafe for selling dope to an Army private stationed at Camp Meade, outside Baltimore. It was a sting operation arranged with military police after the soldier confessed that he had been buying morphine from Sipes—known as “Doc” to members of the Ruth family—since the previous October. The charges were dropped after an analysis of the alleged morphine revealed that it was a compound of sugar, starch, and salicylic acid.

  Small wonder that George Ruth Sr. reacted fiercely when seven months later, on August 24, Sipes got into a heated argument in the saloon with his brother-in-law Oliver Beefelt. Beefelt was married to Martha’s sister, Nellie, who had been living with George and Martha.

  Beefelt, who was out on bail after being arrested for statutory rape of a sixteen-year-old girl, had quit providing for his wife. “My great Grandfather was a peddler and unscrupulous,” his great-grandson Jonathan Shahan reported in an email. “He had my great-grandmother Nellie Sipes committed in 1920 mainly because she was getting in his way of life. He was getting in trouble for scalping tickets and not having licenses and so forth. . . . Nellie was distraught, and her brother Benjamin went over to have it out with Oliver. But George was running a business and didn’t want that beef in his bar.”

  Sipes left the cafe and went across the street to buy a cigar. George Sr. intercepted him at the corner. An argument ensued and quickly escalated. Blows were exchanged. Sipes would testify that Ruth hit him twice and kicked him once without provocation before he retaliated.

  “Doc didn’t mean it to happen the way it did,” Moberly said. “Doc hit my daddy, right there at Lombard and Eutaw. He fell off the curb. The back of his head hit a manhole cover in the street. They say his brains was just laying out when they picked him up and took him to the hospital right up the street. He never gained consciousness. They said you could tell when he was laid out in the casket. The back of his head, I guess they couldn’t get it all back in place. It just didn’t look normal.”

  Sipes was arrested and taken to the Western District police station, where he spent the night in jail. A coroner’s jury exonerated him, ruling that he had acted in self-defense.

  It had already been a summer of upheaval for George Jr., whose manager, Ed Barrow, was every bit his equal in size and stubbornness. They were born to contend with each other and had done so, physically and otherwise, all season, which would end five weeks early due to the war. Barrow loathed Ruth’s innate insubordination as much as he had grown to depend on him. He had adamantly opposed converting Ruth into an everyday player until he needed another bat in the lineup and sent him to the outfield. “I’d be the laughingstock of baseball if I changed the best left-hander in the game into an outfielder,” he said.

  Then, in the summer of 1918, with baseball losing players to the draft and Boston’s pitching staff in a shambles thanks to the government’s “work or fight” mandate, Barrow ordered him back to the pitching mound. Ruth balked. He liked hitting home runs. He lost his temper, quit the team—to play briefly for the Chester Ship Building Company over the July 4 holiday—decamped for his father’s bar in Baltimore, then returned, compliant, as always.

  He was the winning pitcher on the afternoon of August 24, beating the St. Louis Browns 3–1, and looking forward to spending Sunday, an off day, at the beach with Helen. Instead they took the train to Baltimore after receiving a telegram about George Sr.’s death that morning.

  In a photograph accompanying his obituary in the Sun, George Sr. looks nothing like the man in the picture taken in Ruth’s Cafe two and one half years earlier with his son. Gone were the fullness of face and thick dark hair they shared. He had the appearance of a man much older than his forty-seven years, hollowed out perhaps by illness or maybe just life.

  The obituary ended on a jarring note that suggested there was more to the story than the writer was allowed to say: “Mrs. Ruth today denied that she had any trouble with her husband before the dispute as was reported.”

  He was buried in Loudon Park Cemetery with four of the children who predeceased him: Augusta (or Augustus), Anna, Gussie, and William. An imposing granite headstone identifies him as the “Beloved Husband of Martha E.”

  She inherited the bar and its contents, itemized in probate documents: “43 Cases Whisky, 40-Gal Whisky, 20-Gal Whisky, 40-Gal Wine, 40-Gal Gin, 3 Half Barrels Beer, 20 Cases Beer, Miscellaneous Cordials, 500 Cigars, Miscellaneous Lot of Bottle Goods, 1 Box Pretzels, 3 Cash Registers, One Player Piano, Clock, 11 Pictures, Iron Safe, 80 Rolls Toilet Paper.”

  In 1920, Martha married George’s bartender, George Strohmann, her third husband, whom she outlived by fifty years. Upon her death in 1966, she was buried with him, leaving George Sr. alone in the ground with his dead children.

  Ruth’s Cafe at 38 South Eutaw Street now operates as a strip club called the Goddess Gentleman’s Club.

  With George Sr.’s death, twenty-three-year-old Babe Ruth became the orphan that history had deemed him to have been.

  VI

  His allegiance to Brother Matt and to St. Mary’s never wavered. The brothers would remain a source of solace and moral authority long after George Ruth became the Babe. “I’m as proud of it as any Harvard man is proud of his school, and to get crude for a moment, I will be happy to bop anybody in the beezer who speaks ill of it,” Bob Considine wrote in The Babe Ruth Story.

  After the 1919 fire that destroyed most of the school he took Brother Simon, Brother Matthias, and the St. Mary’s band on a tour of American League cities to raise money to replace their lost equipment. He loaned money to classmate “Dope” Flaherty to start a moving company. He sent flowers often to the grave of his closest pal, Tommy Padgett, after his death in March 1920 and detoured off his 1921 barnstorming tour to pay his respects. They had arrived at St. Mary’s together and had both pitched for the St. Mary’s Red Sox. A scout from the Class D Interstate League offered them each seventy-five dollars a month to sign. Padgett took the offer and played for three years in Hornell, New York. Ruth held out for more money and when it didn’t come through elected to stay at St. Mary’s. After serving in the Army in World War I, Padgett took a job as a brakeman for the Allegheny Division of the Erie Railroad. He died a couple of days later after falling between cars of a moving freight train.

  In coming seasons when Ruth encountered problems adhering to routine and convention, accepting the authority of manager and management, the Yankees turned to the brothers for help. “That boy needs a talking to!” Brother Paul would declare, hastening to New York.

  Ruth responded with devotion, Brother Paul told the Baltimore Sun, rushing from the field to the clubhouse to put in a long-distance call to the brothers after setting a home-run record. In the summer of 1920, Big Matt gathered all the boys in the grandstand by home plate to read aloud the Baltimore Sun’s account of the Babe’s great success: “Baltimore Boy Exceeds His 1919 Record by Making Two, Ball Player Gets $100,000 Movie Contract as Result of Feat.” Six years later Brother Matthias showed up in the lobby of the team hotel in Chicago at the invitation of Yankee management, which had arranged for him to be invited to an international eucharistic congress, where he delivered a long lecture on
the importance of avoiding a recurrence of his misadventures in 1925.

  In gratitude, Ruth bought Matthias a second $5,000 Cadillac Touring Car. At his behest, the boys in the St. Mary’s automobile shop cared for it like a Stradivarius. On August 17, 1927, the day Ruth hit the thirty-eighth of that season’s sixty home runs, the car stalled out on the B&O tracks in Dorsey, Maryland, and was demolished by an express train, leaving only two tires intact. Ruth bought the good brother another machine.

  The Sun was quick to report that Brothers Benedict and Matthias were Ruth’s special guests at the first two games of the World Series in Pittsburgh. By then, Matthias had become intrinsic to the myth of the Babe, thanks to Westbrook Pegler. Yet within four years, Matthias dropped from public view. With the exception of the 1935 interview in the Boston Evening Transcript, later reprinted in the Sporting News, there was no mention or sighting of him; no more visits to Yankee Stadium or tickets put aside for him at World Series games.

  In June 1931, he was reported to a local priest at Mount St. Joseph’s near St. Mary’s and then to the provincial general of the Xaverian Order for consorting with a young woman, Helen Bownes, who lived on Amberley Avenue, less than two miles from the school. Neighbors of the woman in question, members of the parish, reported the liaisons with determination and damning detail. They had seen him coming and going at all hours of the day and night for at least six months and said they recognized him from a newspaper article. They provided dates, times, and the frequency of his visits, as well as the license plate numbers of the cars he drove, one a Cadillac Touring Car.

  After denials of wrongdoing and acquaintanceship, and after again being seen at the lady’s home at 3:00 A.M., Brother Matt was reassigned to St. John’s Prep in Danvers, Massachusetts, and ordered by the archbishop not to return to Baltimore, his home for thirty-eight years.

  The vigilant neighbors reported seeing him back on Amberley Avenue, where he spent eight to ten days with Miss Bownes between July 9 and July 27. Called to account by his superiors in August, he admitted to “keeping company early and late with the Bownes woman,” to violating his vow of poverty, and to defying direct orders from the archbishop.

  The final report, dated October 11, 1931, stated, “If Brother Matthias had been more amenable to discipline over a period of years, his scandalous actions might have been avoided.”

  Upon acknowledgment of and repentance for his sins, he was allowed to remain in the community and on staff at St. Joseph’s Juniorate, a Xaverian High School for postulants in Danvers, where Brothers Arcadius Alkonis and Peter Donohue would see him walking the grounds, using a fungo bat instead of a cane, to steady himself in old age.

  In Considine’s The Babe Ruth Story, Brother Matthias dies in the mid-1930s, just as the Babe’s major-league career is coming to an end—another factual error in the authorized account. Big Matt died alone in his room on October 16, 1944, at age seventy-two. Which suggests that either Ruth was out of touch with his mentor during the last years of Brother Matt’s life or with the author of his own life story.

  VII

  Arriving fully sated in Lima, Ruth and Gehrig were greeted by a brass band and whisked away to pay visits to the Allen County Children’s Home, St. Rita’s Hospital, and the St. Rose School. After that, the welcoming committee took them door-to-door shaking hands until they were sore, selling them like Fuller Brush Men. Next they paraded them through downtown, such as it was, and had them preside at “the Big Baseball Party” in the Public Square, sponsored by the Lima News, before dropping autographed balls from the roof of a local bank. Then, thanks to the good midwestern manners of Lima’s spectators, who declined to interrupt play, they played the first full nine-inning game of the tour and would be on their way to Kansas City via Chicago less than five hours later.

  It was Ruth’s second visit to Lima in as many years. A town in northwest Ohio known for harboring the KKK in the early twenties and for building locomotives and school buses, Lima was a place you went because so many important passenger trains went through it—the Erie, Manhattan, and Broadway Limited—en route to somewhere else. Ruth’s friend Bernie Halloran, the owner of the Murphy Street ballpark, had gotten in touch before there were any games scheduled between Brooklyn and K.C., offering Ruth $5,000 to get off the train in Lima.

  The year before, Ruth had played every position except right field and catcher, hitting two doubles and two home runs. In his telegram accepting Halloran’s offer, he vowed to play eight positions in his encore performance so that everyone in the ballpark could get “a close squint” at him.

  The home plate umpire was John Phillips, a local fireman summoned from the grandstand the year before when the original ump called too many strikes on the Babe. Fearing for the man’s life, Halloran had sent Phillips home to get his blue suit and his protective equipment.

  This game actually meant something to most of the players on the field, who were vying for the Allen County championship between Halloran’s Lima Beans and the Celina Carp. When Ruth came to bat for the Beans in the seventh inning with a runner on first, Gehrig was on the mound for the Carp. Determined not to give the Bam anything good to hit, he threw three straight balls low and outside. Ruth turned to Phillips and ordered him to call the next two pitches strikes—no matter what.

  The next pitch was also low and outside. Phillips called it a strike. The crowd booed. Phillips called the next pitch, thrown to the exact same spot, strike two. Ruth hit the 3-2 pitch over the center field fence, where Phillips swore it hit a B&O Railroad boxcar passing on the tracks outside the Murphy Street park.

  Babe Ruth’s Beans prevailed 9–6, thanks to his two home runs and four innings of scoreless relief pitching. Although he didn’t play all eight positions, he was the winning pitcher, striking out all three batters in the top of the ninth, including Gehrig.

  This did not detract in the least from the opinion of the Girl Reporter representing the Lima Morning Star and Republican-Gazette, who was, as Walsh envisioned, in full reportorial swoon. “Gehrig, unmarried, could make the most hard-hearted Hannah melt in his arms. Being single and so impressed with Lima’s flappers, perhaps accounted for the ‘losing pitching and the lack of home runs.’”

  Phillips, who had the best vantage point in the ballpark, had to agree: Ruth was “all man” from the waist up, but Gehrig was “all man” from the feet up.

  “By the by, sisters of beauty, Gehrig was privately heard to remark that Lima sure had some ‘warm-looking mamas,’” the Girl Reporter reported, which was something of a scoop as no one had ever heard Lou Gehrig talk about warm-looking mamas before.

  She saw other qualities in “the Bambino of the diamond,” who was “gracious with all the flappers who were lucky enough to meet him.”

  That was not the opinion of New York society matrons—like Mrs. Adler of the New York Times Adlers, who happily solicited his help raising money for charity, then gasped at his offhand reply: Shit, lady, I’d do it for anybody.

  Or the hostess of a formal dinner who made the mistake of asking, “Don’t you like the asparagus salad, Mr. Ruth?” only to get a disquisition on its effect on the smell of his urine.

  The fact is, the Babe had come a long way since St. Mary’s. Ford Frick, who had escorted him to the asparagus disaster, saw it, as did Marshall Hunt. He had learned the niceties of etiquette and acquired, as Hunt put it, “at least the veneer of a gentleman.”

  Like Jack Dempsey, who came from similarly challenged circumstances, the Babe had acquired important social skills, such as holding out his pinkie finger while sipping from a china cup, and to bow and say, “Charmed to meet you.”

  “It got so you could take either of them anywhere with greater safety than a lot of businessmen,” Hunt told Jerome Holtzman. The Big Bam and the Manassa Mauler could be “civil and polite and even gallant at times.”

  Before taking their leave of Lima, Ohio, Ruth and Gehrig had one more civic task to perform: accepting bronze baseball statues from “two of
Lima’s feminine beauties,” who, the Lima News reported, were “expected to remind the twins to return to Lima not to play baseball but to enjoy some of its hospitality.”

  Gehrig politely accepted his statue of a right-handed slap-hitter, choking up on his bat, and asked to have it engraved, “Hello, Mother—with my Lima friends today,” and shipped home to Mom Gehrig.

  Ruth received his trophy from Miss Rosemary McNeff, a seventeen-year-old high school graduate, who also presented him with an opportunity for graciousness. Her aunt Rose, a local seamstress, had made her a brand-new suit for the occasion and borrowed a high-fashion accessory, a large, dead fox that she draped just so over her niece’s bosom, its snout nestled in the crevice of her cleavage and one of its tiny little feet pinned across her chest.

  The Girl Reporter, who reported everything else that transpired that afternoon, did not note any remarks from the Babe after the presentation. In the picture taken before he and Gehrig hustled back to the Pennsylvania Railroad Station, his eyes are firmly on the ball he autographed for Rosemary, which is still in her family.

  “What an awful break that the train left at four P.M.,” sighed the Girl Reporter.

  Chapter 7

  October 15 / Kansas City, Missouri

  BABE RUTH AND LOU GEHRIG ARRIVE FOR BENEFIT GAME

  NUMBERS WILL IDENTIFY PLAYERS

  —KANSAS CITY POST

  "WHAT IS THE RACIAL ORIGIN OF BABE RUTH?"

  —PITTSBURGH COURIER

  I

  The entourage detrained at Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, at 10:25 A.M. They were greeted by the Boys’ Pinto band; a sleek, tan-colored Cadillac sedan trimmed in blue, courtesy of the Greenlease Motor Company; and George Cauthen, photo editor of the Kansas City Post, who had given himself the plum assignment of following Ruth and Gehrig around town all day.