The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

So it figured that he would be standing in the right spot in the Yankees dugout when Babe Ruth, hair, voice, and strength ravaged by radiation, an experimental form of chemotherapy, and the cancer it had been prescribed to kill, and swathed in a topcoat that fit him like a shroud, stumbled while trying to climb the four steps to the field that once was his.

  It was April 27, 1947, Babe Ruth Day at Yankee Stadium and throughout major-league baseball. Rugger Ardizoia had been waiting a baseball lifetime for a chance to make a difference—just not this one. “I grabbed him and held him up for his people,” he said. “They came over and brought him out on the field. He gave a little speech out there. When he came back, both of his tenders held him—one on each arm—and helped him on down the stairs.

  “When he fell, he said, ‘Thanks a lot, kid.’

  “I said, ‘You’re welcome, Babe.’”

  Three days later, in St. Louis against the Browns with the Yankees trailing 13–4 in the seventh inning, Rugger finally got his chance to pitch in the major leagues. He survived the seventh inning. In the eighth he faced one of the guys he’d looked up to at Jackson park, Walt Judnich, who’d been with him at Iwo Jima. “I had 3 and 2 on Walt. And I said, ‘What the hell? Another run’s not going to hurt.’ So I toot one down the middle and boom!”

  Eight days later he was sold to the Stars. His major-league career was over, his pitching line complete.

  One game: 9.00 ERA, 2 IP, 4 H, 2 ER, 1 HR, 1 BB, 0 SO.

  The Yankees won the World Series without any help from him.

  He didn’t figure to get a ring or a check. But a month later, on his birthday, November 20, a card came in the mail. It had a picture of the Babe on the front, all decked out in a tuxedo, blowing out forty-nine candles on a three-tier cake at the annual Baseball Writers’ dinner in New York. “Rugger, Wishing you a very Happy Birthday!”

  It made no difference to him then—or in his last days, at age ninety-five, when he was the oldest living New York Yankee—that the card was signed by “The Yankee family.” He had no doubt it came from the Babe. “This was on his authorization,” he said firmly. “He made up the list of who to send. The way I got on a list was helping him when he stumbled.”

  It validated what he already knew about the Big Fella. “The Babe was a real nice guy. He never phoofed nobody. Y’know, flipped nobody. ‘See ya later, buddy, take a hike.’ He always had a good word for his teammates.”

  Even a Yankee for one game.

  Chapter 14

  October 25 / Marysville

  HOLIDAY DECLARED FOR RUTH-GEHRIG

  —OAKLAND TRIBUNE

  TROTSKY BOOED OUT OF OFFICE

  —WOODLANDDAILY DEMOCRAT

  I

  The town of Marysville, named for one of the surviving members of the Donner party, declared a municipal holiday when arrangements for the 10:00 A.M. game were finalized late Sunday afternoon. Closing all shops and city offices for the morning, Mayor E. J. Carlin expressed regret that he lacked the authority to dismiss the public schools, which the superintendent promptly agreed was the proper course of action.

  Word of the game overshadowed all other news, including a demand by the beloved Marysville Giants for a change in league rules allowing the team to keep all future home-game receipts at Marysville Municipal Ball Park, an estimated $1,700 that year, and a wire-service story datelined Moscow informing citizens of the Sacramento Valley that Leon Trotsky had been booed off the stage at the Communist Party convention.

  The addition of the Tuesday-morning game, sandwiched between a Monday-afternoon date in Stockton, ninety miles south of Marysville, and a previously scheduled Tuesday-afternoon date in Sacramento, was curious. Pure greed was the only explanation, Stockton Record columnist John Peri would opine, in a morning-after snit occasioned by Ruth’s lackluster showing in the pregame hitting exhibition. “In trying to grab off more dates than can be conveniently handled, Manager Christy Walsh of the tour only injured the drawing power of his attraction particularly if he should plan a return engagement next year.”

  Peri’s pique was a startling departure from the usual obsequiousness that greeted them in the local press and more than a bit odd given Ruth’s five hits that afternoon, including a home run that “kissed the moon,” the Record reported.

  There was a more compelling reason than a measly thousand-dollar guarantee for the unlikely detour north to the old gold-rush town where city fathers had kicked in fifty dollars each toward the visit. Ruth had been tipped off to the services of a chiropractor named John W. Rattray, the trainer for the Marysville Giants, who maintained an office two hundred feet from the entrance to the Hotel Marysville, where the traveling party arrived two hours late for a banquet in their honor scheduled to begin at 8:00 that evening.

  The advertisement for the $1.25 full-course dinner in the Marysville Appeal-Democrat was accompanied by the now ubiquitous photo of the Babe with Lady Amco of Omaha, the champion hen having been identified that morning by the United Press as Mrs. Babe Ruth, his real wife, Helen, having disappeared from public view after her cameo appearance at the World Series.

  A reception committee of “50 prominent citizens” and “some 30 young Americans” began gathering at 6:30 P.M., an hour before the promised arrival of Ruth and Gehrig. Among them was George Nicholau, an eight-year-old newspaper boy for the Appeal-Democrat with twenty papers to sell and plenty of time to do it.

  Marysville was a drinking town and a baseball town: tickets to the game were sold at the Brunswick, one of the many saloons along the main drag, D Street, which had broadcast World Series games as a public service. The sidewalks had filled with whoops and roars. Devotion to the game was fierce. Standing in the street talking baseball for three and a half hours, long after his bedtime, was heaven for an eight-year-old newsie who figured it was as close as he was ever going to get to Babe Ruth, what with school the next morning.

  Marysville’s own Hall of Famer, Harry Hooper, who advised Ed Barrow to make Ruth an outfielder in 1918 and then observed the transformation of the Babe from “a human being into something close to a god,” signed a one-game contract with the Marysville Giants at the end of his career just so he could say he retired as a member of the home team. He went 2 for 4 that day.

  At 10:05 P.M., Ruth stepped gingerly from the car belonging to the president of the Giants, Jack Frederick, and the stampede was on. Ruth acknowledged the crowd like a potentate and said a few words before being ushered into the hotel’s banquet room, where guests awaited promised remarks about the World Series and impressions of California that would not be forthcoming. After a moment of decorous restraint, Nicholau said, the kids swarmed through the entrance and through the legs of their elders.

  “Here’s where the war starts,” Ruth groaned as he took his seat of honor.

  Immaculate in a blue suit and cravat, he seemed far more put together than Gehrig, who had on a rumpled suit, a crooked tie, and a bashful smile, “attesting to the fact that he had been asleep on the train,” the Appeal-Democrat noted. “His hair is curlier than Ruth’s.”

  The paper detected in Ruth a mood of tolerant boredom. “We are tired, and I’ve got a wrenched back, something cracked when I missed that ball today, and we’ll see in the morning if it’s going to come out,” Ruth said. “Our tour this month has been tougher than six months on the ball field. We’ve slept only two nights in hotels since we left New York.”

  Gehrig shuffled like a schoolboy, the paper reported, when summoned to speak. “I get a kick out of Babe. I call him Babe even if he did call me Mr. Gehrig a minute ago. He is always boasting that he has had eight or nine years more experience than I have. He may be older, but he can still go more than I can. Babe entertained friends in Stockton and on the train, but I slept. They woke me up in Sacramento, so I could see that new million-dollar theater.”

  With that, the mayor hustled them off to bed without so much as a bite of the telegram-shaped cake the Ideal Bakery had prepared in welcome.

  The King o
f Clout did not sleep.

  He called Doc Rattray instead, spent an hour on his chiropractic table, and made an appointment to see him again at 7:30 A.M. John W. Rattray, a true Scot from the MacDonald clan, had been born in the small town of Pipestone in Manitoba, Canada. While still living north of the border, he fell off a horse, which then landed on him, injuring his hip. During his convalescence in the hospital, he met his future wife, Esther Lensgraf, a member of the first family of American chiropractic. They would relocate to Davenport, Iowa, to study together at the Palmer College of Chiropractic, along with Esther’s sister and six brothers, later moving to California, seeking warm weather for his compromised hip.

  They were the first chiropractors licensed by the state, opening their practice, Rattray & Rattray, in Marysville, where they acquired a reputation for setting things straight among ballplayers coming through town. One of the Sacramento Senators had referred Ruth to Doc Rattray’s care.

  The Rattrays and Fredericks were friends. Jack Frederick was a big muckety-muck in town and not just in baseball circles: he was a supervisor at Pacific Gas & Electric and president of the Marysville Merchant Association. He helped raise the money to bring Ruth and Gehrig to town and invited them home for breakfast the morning of the game, after Doc Rattray got the kinks out.

  The Babe brought steak.

  Jack’s young daughter Doris, a shagger at Marysville Giants games, was told to wait on the Babe. He rewarded her with a beat-up batting practice ball he dug out of a canvas equipment bag and signed for her, she later told her son. “My mother always said that was the first time she’d ever seen a steak. She said in one sitting, he ate a steak and a loaf of bread, which, at the time, was more food than her family almost would eat in a week.”

  Then Jack and Doris and old Doc Icy Fingers and his son Jimmy headed for the ballpark with Babe and Lou riding shotgun, honking and waving, with young Jimmy hanging out the window, announcing who was riding in his daddy’s car.

  II

  The little ballpark on Third and H Streets, which would blow away in a windstorm in the 1930s, exerted something like centripetal force on the morning of October 25. Though it had seating for perhaps eight hundred spectators, more than two thousand people—a third of the town’s population—showed up. That didn’t include an untold number of kids who crawled through a hole in the left field fence and adults from all over the valley who drove their vehicles right on up over the curb and parked behind the outfield wall.

  A section of the grandstand had been set aside for children, who dutifully reported to school at the 8:00 A.M. bell only to discover that classes had been canceled. “They marched us to the ballpark rather than let us go on our own,” Nicholau remembered. “They didn’t want guys running all over, loose.”

  Like Doris Frederick, George was a ball shagger for the home team, a paying job that involved retrieving foul balls for the batboys, Vince Fasano and Bill Conlin, a future sportswriter for the Sacramento Bee. There were fewer balls to return than usual that day as spectators helped themselves liberally to souvenirs. George regretted not doing so himself. One of the balls Babe Ruth hit in batting practice proved unretrievable, landing in a passing boxcar headed for Oregon, making it the longest home run ever hit. At least that’s what locals would tell their grandchildren.

  Thanks to his exalted position with the organization, Nicholau was allowed to sit on the field near the dugout. “I was kind of getting in the way. I hoped for a ‘Hi kid, how are you?’ Coming back to the dugout, I got a pat on the head from Babe and Gehrig. I was damned glad to get that.”

  On the mound for the Larrupin’ Lous was Marysville’s own Clyde “Tub” Perry, the biggest, brightest, widest star in the Sacramento Valley League at a time when “the Sunday league played better baseball than some lower classifications of pro leagues,” Bill Conlin would write in 1973.

  Tub was twenty-two years old, married to his high school sweetheart, Alice, and the father of a baby girl, Jane, not yet two years old, and Clyde, known as Brud, who turned two months old that day. He had been pitching for the Giants since 1925. In July, the local papers reported Tub had signed with the Seals, but it was really only an invitation for a tryout. Still, it was a big deal. “Tub Signs.” An earlier tryout with the Sacramento Senators had not gone as he had hoped.

  Facing Ruth in the bottom of the first inning was an opportunity he did not mean to squander. This wasn’t just lefty versus lefty. This was a confrontation of intentions and expectations. Perry was everything Ruth was not: rooted, earnest, purposeful, and most of all, serious about that day’s game. “I didn’t want to let him hit a home run, but I didn’t want to walk him,” he said, recalling Ruth’s first inning at bat. “I aimed for the corners and worked up a three and two count.”

  A couple of inside pitches almost hit the Big Fella, who didn’t much like the young man’s attitude. Gehrig called time and walked to the mound. Tub assumed he was in for a scolding. C’mon, let the guy hit. Instead, Gehrig said, “Let’s see you strike this bum out.”

  “I tried my damnedest, but I walked him,” Tub remembered.

  Much as the hometown folks loved Tub, they didn’t much like that. “I knew they would ‘Ooooh’ when he was walked because they wanted Tub to let him hit one,” Nicholau said. “But Tub was trying to make a name for himself. In his mind, this was a challenge to prove himself.”

  Ruth didn’t much like it either.

  There was some chitchat back and forth as he gimped his way down the first base line. Damn farm kid made him run the bases.

  Which was the last thing he wanted to do. The way Tub’s niece, Marlene Coleman Benniger, heard it, “Babe went back to the dugout and says, ‘Who in the hell is that kid?’”

  Get that wild man out of there before I hurt my back again.

  Ruth said later he was in such a bad way Gehrig had to pick up his glove for him each time the Bustin’ Babes went back onto the field.

  Eddie Burt, sports editor of the Appeal-Democrat, and official scorekeeper, remembered to get Ruth and Gehrig to sign his scorecard at the end of the game but neglected to record Tub’s complete pitching line. His century-old, pencil-drawn hieroglyphics, as idiosyncratic as any scoring system, nonetheless make clear that Ruth got his wish. They got Tub out of the game before the Babe had to face him again.

  The manager brought in the starting center fielder to pitch and everyone went home happy. Tub kept his honor. Babe got his home runs: one in the seventh that flew over the center field wall, over the railroad tracks, the levee, and into the Yuba River, and a grand slam in the eighth.

  George Nicholau went back to the ballyard the next morning before school and collected a couple of neglected baseballs from foul territory to show off to his classmates. And Tub’s father-in-law, Bill McFarland, got a brand-new automobile courtesy of his winning ticket in a game-day raffle.

  III

  In January 1928, Tub Perry was rewarded with a contract with the San Francisco Seals, the perennial Pacific Coast champions who had finished second in the league that year. The team sent transportation money. But when the day came for Tub to report to spring training in Monterey, he was a no-show. He said he was never told when to report. The big-city sports columnists had a whole lot of fun with that.

  In February, Tub asked for his release but the team refused; management still saw potential in his left arm. He was placed on the voluntary retired list and went back to pitching for Marysville, where he remained the local boy who might still make good, which was not a bad thing to be. He had a good year for the home team.

  That fall, while the Yankees were celebrating their third consecutive pennant with a party in a Detroit hotel for which the Babe purchased a piano when the concierge failed to procure one, Tub was the starting pitcher for the Sacramento Valley League All-Stars against a team representing the San Francisco Stock Exchange in a much-anticipated series in Marysville.

  Ruth’s wife, Helen, did not make her customary cameo appearance that fal
l at the 1928 World Series. On September 10, she had been admitted to the Carney Hospital in South Boston for treatment of another nervous breakdown. She had left eight days later, declining the advice of her physicians, who urged her to seek long-term care at Dr. A. M. Ring’s Sanatorium in Arlington Heights, a rest home where women were treated for hysteria.

  She chose instead to go home to the six-room cottage at 47 Quincy Street that she shared with Dr. Edward H. Kinder, a Tufts-educated dentist and decorated war veteran, who practiced locally and in the Back Bay. Neighbors, bankers, and telephone operators all knew her as his wife. They were said to be a devoted couple.

  The name Helen R. Kinder appeared on the deed to the house and on the mortgage taken out with the North Columbia Co-Operative Bank of Cambridge on May 31, 1927. The couple had added a downstairs sun porch and a sleeping porch adjacent to the upstairs bedrooms. His family believed they had been married in Montreal; her people said they were old family friends from South Boston.

  They had enrolled a little girl introduced as their daughter, Dorothy, in a boarding school run by the nuns in Wellesley. They did not tell the child in advance why they were visiting the convent school, or that they would be leaving her there that same day. Nor did they bring her home on weekends or visit on Sundays. She would remember “many a Sunday crying myself to sleep because no one came to see me,” she said in her 1988 memoir.

  Neighbors on Quincy Street noted that she received a life-size doll when she came home at Christmas. During the summer, when she was often seen around the house, she seemed to have plenty of dolls and expensive playthings.

  Watertown, a small Boston suburb due west of Cambridge, is now best known as the site of the shootout between police and the Tsarnaev brothers on the evening of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. On Friday night, January 11, 1929, it was the site of a house fire caused by faulty electrical wiring in which a woman, identified as Mrs. Helen Kinder, died from “incineration and suffocation.”