The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

They had toured the newspaper, posing in front of a San Jose News truck, and addressed the monthly luncheon of the Rotary and Lions Club, with Ruth telling the membership, “If we don’t make good this afternoon we won’t be able to look at the kiddies at all. We’ll get out of town in 20 minutes. If we sock them a mile, though, we may want to hang around for an hour or so.”

  Then he hustled off to the newly opened Theodore Roosevelt Junior High School to warn students about the evils of smoking, arriving at Sodality Park for Dan O’Leary’s speed-walking exhibition just in time to see the puffs of smoke wafting from the stands behind home plate courtesy of four boys armed with a pocketful of matches and a handful of wet grass.

  Payne had set the admission price for all children under the age of fourteen at thirty-five cents—as long as they brought a note from their parents saying they were allowed to skip school that day. But that was still too rich for the Cirone brothers—Dom, Joe, Nuncie, and Bennie—who grew up in a two-room shack with a dirt floor on Bird Avenue in the Palm Haven subdivision abutting the park. Like most of the Italian immigrants who lived in the neighborhood, their parents worked in the fields picking fruit processed in the California Packing Corporation cannery that stood right behind the right field fence. That was the reason for the misshapen field. The right field wall was indented like a can of prunes that had fallen off a truck.

  Later, the Cirones would move south to the town of Campbell, now the home of eBay, where they farmed their own fruit trees. But upward mobility was still years away. Dom, the oldest of the Cirone brothers, hatched a plan that would allow them to join the paying idolaters.

  “You guys go behind the outfield fence and dig a hole and I’ll go underneath the grandstand and light a fire,” he said. “To make sure it doesn’t catch, I’ll put wet grass on it.”

  While Ruth and Gehrig were fighting the wind blowing in from right field and failing to hit any of their customary batting practice home runs, Dom, the arsonist, shimmied through the hole his brothers dug, crawled under the grandstand, and lit a fire. Nothing big, mind you, just enough to smolder and scatter the gathering crowd.

  In the smoke and commotion as officials ran to put out the fire, Joe, Nuncie, and Bennie joined their older brother, and the paying customers, in the covered stands behind home plate.

  The game proceeded without incident until the fifth inning, when authorities proved no match for the youths of San Jose, who surged over fences onto the field, and “fondled” the major leaguers, halting play for half an hour, according to a prim dispatch in the San Jose News. Lefty O’Doul was in left field, having been summoned by the Babe for some companionship. O’Doul vaulted the outfield fence to escape the attentions of his many female admirers. The superintendent of schools put down the insurrection by threatening to end the game.

  In the ninth inning, Luke Williams, managing the Larrupin’ Lous, known locally as the team from Consolidated Laundry, summoned a junk-throwing, camellia-growing future police officer named Earl “Duke” Perry from shortstop to face the Babe, who had so far managed only two singles against regular pitching and a lusty wind blowing in from right field.

  Unlike Tub Perry the day before in Marysville, Duke Perry was happy to serve one up for mythology. Duke was a pretty fair ballplayer at Santa Clara College but no pitcher. He gave up a leadoff single, a triple to Mario “Speeder” Duino, a local boy who was scheduled to report to the San Francisco Seals in the spring, and then walked another Santa Clara boy, Tom Randazzo, a future city councilman, pitching around him to get to Babe Ruth. It was the greatest accomplishment of his father’s baseball career, Tom Jr. said later.

  Joe Pizzo, Ruth’s batboy that day, brought the Babe his bat, which felt as heavy as a telephone pole.

  Press-box wags claimed to see a wiggle in Duke’s windup and a twinkle in his eye as he “shot the ball down the grove.” In the aftermath, he was declared as much a hero as Ruth for giving the Babe a chance to gratify his fans. “I motioned to Ruth to indicate where he wanted the pitch,” he told the San Jose Mercury-News in a 1959 retrospective. “He shouted out to me, ‘Anywhere around the plate.’ I threw the first pitch for a called strike on the outside corner. I remember remarking to the umpire that was a dangerous spot because Ruth was liable to belt it back and knock my legs off. The second pitch was low and inside. And he really connected.”

  As he did, the wind died.

  And the ball soared and soared and soared over the truncated right field wall, over the Guadalupe Creek that flowed around the outfield, and in some accounts, over the cannery buildings. “Clearing the fence by at least 50 yards,” the Mercury-Herald said, it “plunked against a little house a few feet west of the city limits sign.”

  Young enthusiasts intercepted the Babe between second and third and hoisted him high upon their shoulders. “Before I got to third, the kids swarmed out on the field and mobbed Ruth,” Randazzo said. “He never did complete the circuit.”

  That wasn’t the story the Cirone boys told their sons and daughters and nieces and nephews. The point wasn’t what they saw; the point was that they saw it. So years later, when Uncle Bennie, a prune farmer all his life, drove three hundred miles north to Mount Shasta to collect mountain water, as he often did, and saw in a gift shop in Dunsmuir a photo of four little boys peeking out from behind the pillars of an old wooden bandbox during a barnstorming game, he was sure he recognized himself and his brothers.

  Look at the black eye. That had to be his brother Joe. You could never say anything bad about Italians to Joe. Look at the cold sore on his lip. The tilt of his head.

  “Where was this picture taken?” Bennie asked.

  “Babe Ruth was in Dunsmuir,” came the reply, “and this is where the picture was taken.”

  “Well, I’ve never been in Dunsmuir before. How could my picture be here?”

  Bennie didn’t press the point. But, upon his return home, he got a copy of the negative from the San Jose Mercury-Herald and made prints for Dom, a military attaché with the Army; Nuncie, a butcher; and Joe, a convivial barber turned building contractor, all of whom became convinced that they were the boys in the picture and that the picture had been taken at Sodality Field.

  “Let me tell you about how I saw Babe Ruth,” Joe told his children, two of whom, Richard and Joe Jr., were by then prominent pediatricians in town. “If you notice, most everybody’s got seats except us four little guys in the front.”

  Local sports bars displayed their picture on the walls of their establishments. Richard and Joe hung it in their medical office and told the story in infinite iterations to generations of San Jose children who needed to hear that moxie can triumph over a dirt-floor start.

  II

  Babe Ruth had more power than he knew. He had the power to create a story that defied provable fact—the distinguishing characteristic of myth—a story transporting four poor sons of immigrant parents, boys so poor they wore kerosene wicks as neckties in a family portrait, to a baseball game they couldn’t possibly have attended. He had the power to convince them that they saw themselves looking over his shoulder in grainy reproductions of the original image, their features eliding with each successive reprint.

  The Dunsmuir photograph, as it is known in the Ruth oeuvre, was taken on October 22, 1924, by Sponagel & Hermann/Commercial Press Photographers of San Francisco, hired by Christy Walsh to document a game scheduled at the last minute at the City Ball Park in Dunsmuir, one of the few from that era still in use today.

  What made the photo unusual and valuable, according to Robert Edwards Auctions, was its perspective. Taken from the vantage point of the pitcher, it is a folk-art tableau of small-town baseball in the not-so-roaring twenties. In the background, behind the Babe, batboys and players slouch against the slatted wooden backstop, a ramshackle affair; some of its unmatched, vertical boards are coming apart. Behind them, in the grandstand, and peering over either one of the catcher’s shoulders, are two boys—one in overalls with slicked-back hair, and the othe
r with a shiner nearly obscured by a thick forelock draping his brow—both gazing intently at the man with the interlocking NY on his cap and NEW YORK spanning the great vault of his chest. Walsh had the uniforms made to look like Yankee road jerseys.

  By the time Ruth and Gehrig arrived in San Jose three years later, barnstorming Yankee players were prohibited from wearing uniforms that resembled the real thing, which is why Walsh commissioned the Spalding Company to produce a limited edition of Bustin’ Babe and Larrupin’ Lou regalia. When the Babe gallantly presented his Bustin’ Babes cap to the sweet young thing employed as a pastry chef at the Carrillo Hotel in Santa Barbara the next day, he had no idea what a rich gift he was giving.

  The cap would be sold by her grandson in 2008 for $131,450 and resold five years later for $155,000, according to Chris Ivy, director of sports auctions at Heritage Auctions. To date, it is the only personal item from the 1927 tour to reach the marketplace.

  The Dunsmuir photograph took on a life of its own in the Cirone family and the world of sports marketing. Donated to the Helms Athletic Foundation (now known as the LA84 Foundation) by members of Christy Walsh’s family, it was reprinted and misidentified by the San Jose Mercury-News in 1973.

  So Bennie Cirone’s confusion was understandable. The grandstands in Dunsmuir and San Jose looked a lot alike, except for the wooden boards in the backstops, which ran vertically in Dunsmuir and horizontally in San Jose. In 1994, at the height of the baseball trading card mania, the Ted Williams Trading Card Company produced a colorized version of the Dunsmuir photo, offering it as the premiere card in its ’94 limited-edition series. The company also made a poster version, and put the image on that year’s marketing brochure, which Tony Cirone spotted in a baseball card shop in a strip mall owned by his uncle Bennie. Uncle Bennie’s tenant gave each of Joe Cirone’s sons a copy of the poster.

  “Everybody attaches something to him,” said Richard, the oldest of Joe Cirone Sr.’s sons, looking at the photograph in the light of new and unwelcome information a reporter has just delivered. “They had that story and they attached that story to the picture. I guess I should take it down . . .”

  Though he and his brother Joe have retired from practice, the photo is still hanging in the pediatric office now run by Joe’s son Chris. “But . . . the kid had a black eye and a cold sore. And my dad said, ‘That’s me.’”

  III

  At some point in the trajectory of fame, real life becomes apocryphal. Home runs travel in perpetuity, drafting on a perpetually willing suspension of disbelief. The temporal facts of biography no longer matter because everyone knows a person who can hit sixty home runs will live forever. It’s hard to say the exact moment when Babe Ruth passed over into that other realm, though September 30, 1927, is a good guess.

  By the time he arrived in San Jose on the afternoon of October 26, 1927, he had become a “legend in his lifetime,” a phrasing devised by the writer Giles Lytton to describe Florence Nightingale in 1918. No one asked what that felt like—or, if someone did, recorded his reply. No one asked if he knew what he meant to the hordes of boys who would pass him down in their DNA. Or what it meant to him. Those weren’t questions for locker room confab in 1927. And besides, the inquiry would have been superfluous. All you had to do was look at him to see how he basked in the white glare of attention, inhaling the bloated roar of approval that drowned out unquiet memories of his own loud childhood.

  Reflection was not his wont; that would have required sitting still. Introspection was not the fashion of the time. No one wrote elegies to absent parents in the Jazz Age. In fact, according to the U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, none of the great poets of Western civilization touched upon the death of a parent until the self-indulgent sixties. Why would we expect more of the Babe, who had no time or instinct for rumination?

  Ruth never said much about how he felt about his celebrity, though he did march himself unbidden into Red Grange’s hotel suite before a 1926 football game at the Polo Grounds to offer advice: “Don’t believe anything they write about you and don’t pick up too many checks.”

  Of course, Grange was also getting advice from his agent C. C. “Cash and Carry” Pyle, who had signed him to a professional contract in 1925 and was doing for him and for French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen what Walsh had been doing for Ruth for years.

  The best evidence of his feelings on the subject is photographic. Look at his smile and his body language as five thousand boys try to press themselves into a single frame outside a ballpark in Syracuse, New York. They stand shoulder to shoulder, filling the photographer’s viewfinder with their exuberance, mouths agape, caps and grins of every variety tilted this way and that, gloves and hands saluting the camera in an expression of “see me” modernity. There’s one little girl, held aloft on a pair of sturdy shoulders. And one mama’s boy in the front row wearing an egregious beanie and a knotted tie, craning his neck to look back at the Babe, who stands—presumably, he was standing—gridlocked in a clot of joy, head and shoulders above them all, with a gobsmacked teenager draped about his shoulders like one of Claire’s fur boas, wearing his fame as jauntily as his crooked bow tie and cockeyed straw boater.

  There isn’t a hint of claustrophobia in his lopsided grin. The Babe, who chafed at every constraint—who according to his daughter Julia couldn’t stand to have his feet tucked beneath the bedcovers—felt safe inside the frame of fame.

  This was who he was raised to be in the overcrowded dormitories at St. Mary’s Industrial School, where 130 boys slept, bathed, dreamed, and survived puberty in a space designed to accommodate 90 of them. One reason he loved baseball as much as he did, teammate Waite Hoyt said, was that “it projected him into a certain limelight, which was commensurate with Babe’s sense of well-being.”

  What nobody seemed to know was who he was—how he was—when there was no frame to fill. That was true in 1914 when Jesse Linthicum, a young reporter for the Baltimore Sun, observed this when he accompanied Jack Dunn to St. Mary’s to sign George Ruth to pitch for the Orioles in 1914. “No one ever knew the Babe real well,” Linthicum told Mike Gibbons of the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in the 1990s. “As a matter of fact, he didn’t know other people. He always seemed sort of bewildered as far as the other fella was concerned.”

  Hoyt, who influenced a succession of Ruth biographers through his correspondence with Babe author Robert Creamer, and through his rain-delay broadcasts while a play-by-play man for the Cincinnati Reds, as well as his brief 1948 memoir, Babe Ruth as I Knew Him, laid it out in several letters to Creamer over a period of years: “I am almost convinced YOU WILL NEVER learn the truth on Ruth. I roomed with [Joe] Dugan. He was a good friend of Babe’s. But he will see Ruth in a different light than I did. Dugan’s own opinion will be one in which Dugan revels in Ruth’s crudities, and so on. While I can easily recognize all of this and admit it freely, and yet there was buried in Ruth humanitarianism beyond belief—and intelligence he was never given credit for, a childish desire to be over virile, living up to credits given for his home run power—and yet a need for intimate affection and respect, and a feverish desire to play baseball, perform, act and live a life he didn’t and couldn’t take time to understand. . . .”

  The truth about him was unknown, Hoyt said, and may be unknowable. “The guy was an enigma even to those who knew him and played with him.”

  IV

  On the evening in May 1923 that Ruth invited Claire Hodgson to dinner in his hotel suite in Washington, he told her he thought everyone hated him and that he pretty much shared their opinion, she wrote in The Babe and I. It wasn’t the kind of evening, or conversation, she was expecting. She thought they were having a quiet dinner, instead she found Ruth holding court in an easy chair amid a pestilence of floozies and hangers-on, ballplayers and pols eagerly refilling his glass. It was the sort of gathering Ruth garnered everywhere he went. If there wasn’t a crowd, he created one, throwing humdingers in the hundred-dollar-a-night hotel suites he rented
in every American League city. “A fella’s gotta entertain,” he liked to say.

  “I never saw so many people in one suite in all my life and the Babe later admitted that he didn’t know more than half of them,” Claire told the Buffalo Evening News in June 1974. “I knew they had crashed the party and it bothered me. But it didn’t concern the Babe at all.”

  She thought he seemed morose and worried about his performance after the disaster of the previous season, which began with his defiance of Commissioner Landis and ended with the public scolding by Jimmy Walker at the Back to the Farm dinner organized by Christy Walsh. Maybe they were all right about him: maybe he was through.

  He wasn’t. That year, he would do everything right that you can do wrong on a baseball field: he batted .393, drew 170 walks, a record that would stand for almost 80 years, led the league in on-base percentage (.545) and slugging (.657), home runs (41), and runs (151); set career highs for doubles (45), plate appearances (697), innings played in the outfield (1,335); he matched his career high for steals (17), tripled 13 times, threw out 20 baserunners from the outfield, and never got suspended. He was not only the Most Valuable Player of the year; he was the most valuable player ever.

  Though still married to Helen, he was making a new life with Claire. She was unlike Helen in so many ways, chief among them the fact that she never knew him as George. And, oh, she came with a crowd, a mother, a daughter, and two brothers.

  “Baggage,” in the words of Julia Ruth Stevens.

  “My home became his,” Claire would write in her memoir. “My mother was his; my daughter was his; my brothers his fishing and hunting chums”—one of whom never recovered from having been gassed during the Great War and leaped to his death from the apartment window while Babe and Claire were in Florida in 1936.

  But crowds were good. He liked crowds.

  Claire didn’t view herself as a home-wrecker. She couldn’t break up a marriage that was already broken, she often said. In the years before Helen’s death, he led a bifurcated life. Church doctrine and his very public identification as a practicing Catholic, albeit one who rarely went to church, made divorce untenable. So he had the best of both worlds: on the road he continued to live large, but quietly.