The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  On Wednesday, Helen’s brother William threatened “red hot exposures” after Helen’s funeral and declared the family’s intention to fight him for custody of Dorothy.

  Finally, Ruth broke his silence, his composure cracking: “Never! I’ll stand for almost anything but that. You can never have Dorothy.”

  Meanwhile, the International News Service reported, “The child played on the snow-covered slope on the grounds of the Academy of the Assumption at Wellesley Hills, cheeks rosy and eyes twinkling.”

  Late in the day, the second medical examiner released his findings: no poison, no drugs, no stab wounds, no unexplained bruise on her scalp, no evidence of foul play of any kind. Helen’s body was released to her family for burial.

  Their claims and threats evaporated, but not their enmity and suspicion. Thomas Woodford’s daughter, Jean Beswick, said her father refused to speak about Babe Ruth ever again except to say that he was a bum. “He hated him,” she said.

  Two of Nora’s daughters, Patricia Grace and Kathy Honey, claimed that Helen lived in fear of the Babe. “When she was in a department store with my aunt Helen—she might have been 23 years old—my aunt Helen all of a sudden said, ‘C’mon, quick, we gotta go, we gotta leave, we gotta leave,’” Grace said. “They went out the back way.

  “Aunt Helen was in fear for her life because Babe Ruth wanted a divorce because he was carrying on with women. Of course, we were a Catholic family and she would not divorce. He was trying to get rid of her. He had these hoodlums or what have you. Those are the stories my mother told me.”

  Ruth arrived at the Woodford residence on West Fourth Street in the tangled South End of Boston near midnight on Wednesday, January 16, in impressive company: Police Superintendent Crowley, his son Arthur, and attorney John Feeney. The show of strength may not have been intended as such but would prove necessary. Gray-ribboned mourning crepe draped the doorway where a guard stood in the cold. “A crowd of the curious”—a new feature of the American century—filled the side streets and front stoops of Southie.

  Helen’s brother Thomas opened the door to the Babe and showed him to the parlor, which was overflowing with floral tributes from Yankee management and players. Nora greeted her brother-in-law with the fury of a biblical curse. “I’m sure you’ll suffer more than Helen.”

  Petite in life, eviscerated in death, twice embalmed, and laid out in the massive bronze casket Ruth had purchased—said in press reports to have cost $1,000 or perhaps even $10,000—Helen was overwhelmed by him even in repose. He knelt at her side, clutching the coffin rail with one hand and a set of rosary beads with the other, staring into her face for a full five minutes. Moaning, sobbing, and sweating, he called her name, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, Helen.”

  What was it he saw in her stilled features that shook him so convulsively? Was he thinking about the sordid end of his parents’ marriage? His mother’s death in 1912, when she was thirty-two, just a year older than Helen?

  The dashed hope for something better, something solid, had prompted their whirlwind courtship and the mad dash to the altar in the fall of 1914. The premature end of Helen’s life and of their life together also signified the end of the George she knew when he was young enough to require his father’s permission to marry.

  He collapsed by her coffin when he tried to stand. Arthur and Michael Crowley helped him to his feet. John Feeney whispered in his ear that all the arrangements for the funeral had been made.

  “What funeral?” the Babe said.

  V

  On the day of the fire that claimed Helen Ruth’s life, Jack Frederick drove to the town of Colusa, twenty-five miles west of Marysville, where Tub Perry had accepted a job with Pacific Gas & Electric, in hopes of reclaiming the Marysville Giants pitching ace for the 1929 season. He was out of luck. Perry would lead the Colusa Prune Pickers to the 1929 Sacramento Valley League championship with a 16-2 record—and a streak of twelve straight wins. No one in league history had ever pitched better, and it earned Tub another shot with the San Francisco Seals, the team he had spurned a year earlier.

  He was summoned to pitch their last game of the season in Sacramento on October 4. Tub held the Senators to five hits. “You have a million-dollar arm but need more experience,” Seals manager Nick Williams told him. “We need left-handed pitchers and we need you. We will take care of the money side of it.”

  Lefty Gomez, an old friend from the Valley Peach League, was being scouted by the Yankees, who also liked what they saw in Tub, according to family lore. “That is when the Yankees asked him to go to New York,” Tub’s grandson Steve Perry said.

  Tub said no. San Francisco was as far as he would go. If that far.

  When spring training rolled around in 1930, Perry required “a special bodyguard in the person of Eddie ‘Fat’ Aflinso to personally guide him to the city,” Abe Kemp wrote in the San Francisco Examiner. “Perry had heard so much about the pitfalls of a wicked city for innocent boys that he demanded to be chaperoned—and was. The Perry’s [sic], which include the missus and the little one, called on Nick Williams upon his arrival and had to be reassured that good-looking pitchers—good looking in the sense of ability—do not have to fear the city traffic cops.”

  Manager Williams noted that Perry had added to his frame since he was first signed in the summer of 1927. “He’s six feet two, weighs 210 pounds and is three feet wide.”

  Williams named him the starting pitcher for a preseason game against the Prune Pickers on March 30, 1930—Tub Perry Day in Colusa. His hometown gave him a gold watch. The San Francisco Call declared him “a fine major league prospect.”

  But he wasn’t. The gold watch proved to be both the highlight of his professional career and the signifier that it traditionally is—a sign that it was time to retire. He didn’t pitch much that season and he didn’t pitch well. The Seals decided to try him in the outfield in 1931 where, the San Francisco papers reported, “he moved with all the grace of an elephant.”

  He went home and pitched for the Prune Pickers in 1932 and for the Marysville Giants in 1933, the year his daughter Joanne was born. There were more kids to feed, meters to read, ducks to hunt, one-arm chin-ups to count, and one-hundred-pound sacks of beans to hoist late into the night after his day job was done. But he never quit pitching—he pitched until he was fifty-five years old. He picked off Jackie Robinson when he came through town on a fifties barnstorming tour, a quarter of a century after he faced down the Great Bambino.

  On hot Sacramento Valley summer nights, when Joanne Perry Raub was growing up, she and her dad would lie on the cool kitchen floor and listen to the Senators’ games on the radio with a breeze blowing through a squirrel cage rigged up as an air conditioner. “The rest of the family—some of them went outside and slept on the grass; some got in bed and suffered,” Raub said. “But we stayed out there and listened to the ball game.” Lying there in the cool, he told her about the day he pitched to Babe Ruth, the day he refused to cater to artifice. He said he didn’t much like the Babe, though he never did say why. He thought Lou Gehrig was a fine fellow.

  It remains a matter of considerable civic pride in a town where there isn’t much left to be proud of—except for the roadside sign that still describes Marysville as the “Gateway to the Gold Fields”—that Babe Ruth didn’t get anywhere with Tub Perry.

  Tub talked about it until the day he died. “And we never got tired of hearing about it, either,” Raub said.

  He died in June 1971, not quite six months after his wife, Alice. The Marysville Little League Field was dedicated to him on April 16, 1977.

  VI

  On the morning Helen Ruth was buried in Section 10 of the old Calvary Cemetery in Mattapan, the Watertown city fire inspector visited West Junior High School and Parochial Senior High School to warn students about the dangers of overloaded electrical wiring; he would visit East Junior High school the next day.

  At the gravesite, mourners mingled with police officers, onlookers, and snowflakes; neither
Edward Kinder nor Dorothy Helen Ruth was among them. The service was brief and punctuated by the wails of Helen’s sisters. Head bowed, Ruth stood arm in arm with her mother, a family united only in grief.

  Helen was buried atop a slight rise, just across the road from the stonecutters who later chiseled the name HELEN (WOODFORD) RUTH into a Swedish granite headstone the color of butterscotch. Her brother William was buried beside her ten years later.

  The deed to the grave remains in the name of the purchaser, George Herman Ruth, as it will in perpetuity. “He was a man on fire,” said cemetery foreman Bill Cuddihy, pointing the way to her final resting place one fine summer day in 2016. “You can use that.”

  Although her grave is rarely visited, she still receives birthday cards and digital bouquets—182 of them as of April 2018—on her page at the modern celebrity website findagrave.com, which also rates the degree of fame of the deceased. Mary Ellen (Woodford) Ruth currently ranks 3.6 on a scale of 5.

  On the afternoon of the funeral, the Babe slept. Arthur Crowley issued a statement on his behalf, telling reporters that “the future of little Dorothy is in the hands of a competent attorney.”

  The next day, before leaving for New York, Ruth admitted, “This week has been a living hell for me—absolutely torture,” he said. The Universal News service dispatch went on to describe the “one bright spot, the only one of his Boston visit,” a trip to the Academy of the Assumption in Wellesley “to arrange for the future of Dorothy. He was greeted by a crowd of Academy boys with glad cries of ‘Hello, Babe.’ It brought a smile to his lips.”

  He did not take Dorothy with him to New York. Nor, apparently, did he tell her Helen was dead.

  A week later, Dorothy recounted in her memoir, she was awakened in the middle of the night by two nuns who escorted her to the New York Foundling Hospital on the East Side of Manhattan. There she was delivered into the care of a hospital employee named Miss Dooley, who took her to live in Brooklyn, where she was to stay until her father came for her some months later. Miss Dooley told her that Helen had gone to heaven.

  Two weeks after Helen’s death, on January 29, Dorothy’s father sneaked out of New York City, leaving for Florida several weeks in advance of spring training, in hopes of playing some golf and getting away from it all. But there was no getting away from it. That morning, details of Helen’s will, which had been filed in probate court, were made public. She had left the bulk of her purported $50,000 estate to her “beloved charge and ward, Dorothy Helen Ruth, at one time known as Marie Harrington.” (This was the name Miss Dooley told Dorothy she was to use while she lived in Brooklyn.)

  The posthumous acknowledgment that Dorothy was not Helen’s biological daughter opened the door to contention, speculation, and grievance, and set in motion another cascade of headlines and revelations, claims and counterclaims, that would result in a lifetime of heartache and uncertainty for Dorothy Helen Ruth.

  In her will, Helen left five dollars to each of her brothers and sisters as well as her estranged husband. The news accounts listed among her assets “a cause for action for $13,000 against a resident of New York City”—presumably Babe Ruth, which was accurate although the figure was far too low.

  Judson Hannigan, the Woodfords’ attorney, immediately threatened to contest the will, which he hadn’t read, noting that it was strange that Helen would “slight her family.”

  The family’s attempt to break the will would prove unsuccessful. But within a week another interested party stepped forward, filing suit in New York State Supreme Court, claiming that Dorothy was born to a murderess serving twenty years at the Auburn state prison. The lawsuit was dismissed but the warden felt compelled to deny the allegation.

  All of this proved too much for Helen’s sister, Johanna McCarthy, who vented to the Associated Press: “Little Dorothy is the real daughter of Babe Ruth. My sister carried his secret to her grave, a brave heroine because she wanted to protect Babe and never let his friends or other members of our family know the truth.

  “Mrs. Ruth was the child’s foster mother. Let him tell who the mother is if he cares to do so. The mystery about Dorothy has gone far enough, and now that she is accused of being born of criminal parents we must correct this impression that Dorothy will not be stigmatized.”

  Which was curious, as it contradicted their attorney’s written statement of two weeks earlier stating that Dorothy was neither the adopted nor biological daughter of Helen and Babe.

  Walsh wrote from the West Coast, urging Ruth to make arrangements to “bring Dorothy closer.” But her fate was not the most pressing issue in Walsh’s view, as evidenced by a January 24 letter to Ruth he considered so sensitive he would not allow his lawyer to keep a copy of it. The subject was the December meeting in his office that Nora had attended. His letter, which does not mention divorce or a demand for $100,000, casts the financial conversation in a different context—Ruth’s tardiness in meeting the terms of the 1925 separation agreement. The final installment of the promised $100,000—$25,000—had been due in October. He hadn’t paid it. He had been chronically late in making the payments while building up his trust fund at the Bank of Manhattan. At the meeting, Ruth apparently gave Walsh a check to make up what he owed, as Walsh noted in his letter:

  Dear Babe:

  After the first shock of the terrible news from Boston the first thing I thought of was the $31,000 you gave me for Helen before I left New York. I certainly hope now that you save that entire amount and I would like to turn it over to you at once. But Babe the whole affair is so mixed up I want to be careful. I will most assuredly protect your interests as you know I have always done—but I must also protect my own interests.

  As far as I’m concerned the money is yours. But my opinion or your opinion in a time like this must take second place to the opinion at the courts. Although everything seems now to be amicably settled—between you and Helen’s parents—still some of them showed themselves pretty nasty the first day or two after her death. And there is no telling what they might try to do regarding this $31,000.

  They knew about your agreement with her and her sister Nora was a witness in my office when you handed me that check.

  If I pay it to you now without an official order from some authorized court they might sue me. Or you. Or both of us. Of course, as long as you are alive and have the money it would be okay. But if you should die (like Rickard or anyone else) or for any other reason didn’t have the 31,000 then her relatives could sue and COLLECT from me.

  Even at the time I hesitated taking the money. I held the check several days before accepting and depositing same—because I disliked the responsibility of such a position. My only reason for going ahead was my friendship for both yourself and Helen.

  Apparently, Walsh wanted a court order to determine whether the separation agreement was still binding and whether the money belonged to Helen’s estate or to Ruth. But mostly he wanted to be rid of it. In closing, he again apologized for his absence during the period of shock and publicity and encouraged Ruth to look “to the bright side of the entire situation and the future.”

  Little wonder he didn’t want anyone to see the letter.

  VII

  George Nicholau and the other children of Marysville who had marched to the old Third Street ballpark in supervised formation broke ranks and chased Ruth and Gehrig’s sedan all the way back to the Hotel Marysville. As promised, the game had gone the full nine innings, unlike in bigger cities that had to settle for less. The municipal holiday declared by the town’s mayor in advance of the game had lasted less than two hours.

  Ruth and Gehrig set off by car for Sacramento, where they arrived to great huzzahs given their highly publicized promise to forfeit a guarantee in support of the Catholic Orphanage Building Fund. Somehow by the end of the grueling two-city doubleheader, the Sacramento Union reported, they had pocketed $1,000 in Marysville and $2,300 in Sacramento. Ruth hit three home runs. “I guess I did pretty good for the shape I’m in,” R
uth said. “I ought to be in the hospital instead of on the ball field.”

  Ruth also told reporters, “I would not be in uniform if Dr. Rattray had not taken care of me”—an endorsement Rattray would use to promote his practice, bragging that he made $85,000 in seventeen days as the result. Rattray also claimed that he saw indications of Gehrig’s future disease in 1927 and when he saw him again two years later.

  In its morning recap of the biggest day in Marysville’s history since the first riverboat steamed up the river carrying gold prospectors, the Appeal-Democrat described Ruth’s weariness and his eagerness for the barnstorming tour to be over. “Ruth’s wife and baby are waiting for him in New York, where he hopes to spend a quiet and peaceful winter after the long grind of the American League season, the World Series, and his tour of the country.”

  Chapter 15

  October 26 / San Jose

  KIDDIES REIGN WHEN BABE HIT HOME RUN OVER FENCE IN NINTH

  —SAN JOSE MERCURY HERALD

  GIRLS WHO DROVE RUTH GOT THRILL

  —SAN JOSE NEWS

  I

  Smoke began to fill the grandstand behind home plate just before game time. The swells in the important seats were just getting settled in them when it became apparent that it was important to leave them. Pop Warner, the Stanford coach, who was Walsh’s guest and client, was there along with teammate Ping Bodie, umpire “Beans” Reardon, and G. Logan Payne, publisher of the San Jose News, the host and sponsor of the “King Ruth and the Crown Prince of Swatonia.”

  Sodality Park was an old wooden bandbox, built in 1908. It looked and felt much like other amateur ballparks of the era except that it was set among fruit orchards and canneries on land that had been donated by the men’s Sodality of St. Joseph’s Church. “A little burg in the prune trees,” was how the Babe described the city of sixty thousand when Payne collected Ruth and Gehrig at the train station that afternoon.