The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  By the end of Ruth’s Yankee career, the team had earned over $2 million it would not have made without him. “That’s $12.6 million in net profits adjusted for inflation,” Haupert maintains. “For each dollar they spent on Ruth, they made back twenty.”

  IV

  At a meeting in Christy Walsh’s office the day before Babe and Claire were married on April 17, 1929, Ruth agreed, in writing, to allow Walsh to manage the trust as he saw fit. Walsh wrote to Hilton twelve days later, informing him that it was no longer necessary to consult Ruth or apprise him of deposits and transactions. “This would prevent him from objecting as frequently as he does, feeling that he needs the money for some other purpose,” Walsh explained.

  He also confided his intention to bring the total in the trust to $150,000 by the end of the year, at which point he intended to step away from daily management of the account. “I hope by then he will be able to continue the good work of his own accord, because in spite of the satisfaction it gives me you can appreciate it has taken an unlimited amount of my time and energy.”

  Hilton replied swiftly that it was incumbent upon bank officials to notify Ruth of all transactions. Walsh’s beleaguered and defensive response, more retort than reply, noted that it was 3:00 P.M. and he had just had lunch. “That is the way it goes with me every day.”

  He enclosed a statement from Ruth authorizing the arrangement, pointing out that the Babe had even scrawled “thanks” next to his name. “Sometimes he is less pliable than others and I would rather not discuss the matter again with him until I have reached the goal of $100,000.”

  If Hilton felt it necessary to copy Ruth on all future correspondence, Walsh suggested the bank send it to his office.

  No doubt keeping the Babe on the financial straight and narrow was exhausting. But Walsh had other reasons to want to remove himself, given his role in funding the trust and the annuity at Equitable Life while allowing the debt to Helen to accrue.

  Even before Helen’s death, Ruth had begun planning for a life with Claire and Julia. According to a letter in Walsh’s files, Ruth asked for the language in the trust to be amended before it was executed in April 1927, allowing him to designate a new beneficiary “in the place and stead of said DOROTHY RUTH and said next of kin of donor” after a period of five years.

  Another unsigned letter in Walsh’s files, drafted upon their return from the barnstorming tour in December 1927, instructed a bank attorney to “eliminate the beneficiary’s names now standing” on an unnamed account or policy and “substitute with the following ‘Mrs. Claire Hodgson and Julia Hodgson.’”

  The changes were not implemented. The final trust document gave him the right to change beneficiaries but only by changing his will, which he did not do until the last week of his life, when he named Claire in Dorothy’s stead. This gave her use of the principal during her lifetime with the remainder to be shared equally by Dorothy and Julia upon her death.

  That financial windfall of 1927 enabled Walsh to put $70,000 in the trust and have enough cash left over for Ruth to write a check to Helen on October 11 for $29,000, at which point he was only $5,000 behind in the scheduled payments to her.

  Another $25,000 was due in October 1928. The payment was not made. That month, Walsh added $10,000 to the trust, which, ironically, became public on the day of the fire that took Helen’s life. (He had also made a $10,123 contribution to Ruth’s Equitable Life insurance policy in July.) Once again, obligations to Helen came last.

  At the December 1928 meeting in Walsh’s office with Helen and her sister, Nora, Ruth had given him a check for $31,000 to cover the payment due two months earlier plus the interest on the overdue amount. Apparently, the check was made out to Walsh, as suggested by his letter to Ruth on January 28, 1929: “I certainly have no advantage in keeping it there in my name and want to turn it over the very second I can.”

  But Helen would never see the check. On July 26, 1929, six months after her death, estate attorneys reached a settlement that called for Ruth to pay the remaining $32,007.50 he owed, including interest, in two installments: $15,000 due by September 1, 1929, with the balance due the following September. Helen’s lawyer held on to the Equitable Life Assurance policy purchased in 1923 as collateral and did not return it until the last payment was received. Her estate would not be settled until 1932.

  The final accounting of Helen’s will, reported in the Boston Globe on October 29, 1932, included $4,190 in jewelry relinquished by Ruth as part of the 1929 settlement—her diamond-and-platinum wedding ring, a diamond-and-platinum dinner ring, and an elaborate diamond brooch. The total value of the estate was $20,000 less than reported at the time of her death. She left $29,000 to Dorothy and $5 to each of her siblings, her mother, and her husband.

  Meanwhile, Walsh continued to add money to the trust, and the Bank of Manhattan continued to invest the Babe’s money. Their investment strategy was the antithesis of the Babe’s approach at the plate: I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can. Their fiscally conservative approach would allow him to continue to live large throughout the biggest economic crisis in American history. They invested 70 percent of his money in fixed-income U.S. government and municipal bonds and 30 percent in dividend-paying blue chips, utilities, railroads—Standard Oil, Southern Pacific, Penn Power and Light, U.S. Steel, General Motors, General Electric, Standard Brands, R. J. Reynolds, Hershey, companies that long outlived the Babe. “Pretty much all, if not all, were dividend-paying stocks, which was very key because dividend stocks pay even if the stock is going down,” Matthew Zaft, a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley in Washington, D.C., points out.

  When the crash came, the King of Clout would not take a hit.

  Unencumbered by Ruth’s interference, Walsh added $3,000 to the trust on September 11, 1929, bringing the total to $97,000, and another $3,000 on October 24—otherwise known as Black Tuesday, when the Dow Jones dropped 11 percent at the opening bell, signaling the beginning of the Great Depression.

  Along with the check, Walsh sent Frank Hilton a chirpy, prophetic note. “Babe does not know it is this high and I want to surprise him and reach the $100,000 by depositing the enclosed $3000. This takes a big load off my mind and I am very happy to have done this much toward protecting him from the rainy days of the future.”

  Four days later, when the New York Times lead headline read: “Stock Prices Slump $14,000,000,000 in Nation-Wide Stampede to Unload,” Hilton took a moment to applaud Walsh’s efforts.

  “In the light of what took place last week, it would seem to me that any one [sic] who had taken precaution to set aside a definite sum in the hour of prosperity has much to be thankful for when an adversity such as overcame so many people in the stock market last week leaves them immune to such a catastrophe.”

  Walsh commemorated the occasion with a memo found in his files after his death: “Entire amount paid into Trust derived from newspaper syndicate and other revenue outside of Yankee baseball salary. Starting this date, Mr. Ruth will receive more than $5000 per year in dividends for the remainder of his life. Within (approx.) eight years, at age 43, he will have received $50,000. in dividends, one half the full amount of his investment. At age 53, Mr. Ruth will have received $100K in dividends—the entire amount of his investment.”

  In fact, Ruth would reach that milestone in 1941, well in advance of his fifty-third birthday.

  At Walsh’s urging, Ruth would continue to add large chunks of change to the account—$50,000 in 1930 and 1931. All the while, he was receiving a return on his money of close to 5 percent. “Making Babe add to the trust allowed Manhattan to buy low and it allowed them to not have to sell low,” Zaft says. “As banks were failing, and stocks were dropping, it allowed them to wait and sell high. In fact, he profited on literally every sale made from July 16, 1930, through April 20, 1931.”

  The “corpus of Ruth’s portfolio,” including his Equitable Annuity, had reached “a Quarter of A Million Dollars,” Hilton wrote in a letter
praising the “magnificent result” Walsh had achieved and expressing his regret that Walsh felt his job was done. “Words fail me,” he said.

  By the end of 1935, Babe Ruth and Carl Klindt were out of work. The economy had cost Klindt his sporting goods business and the sales jobs he took afterward. He quit the business for the security of a position as a police officer with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department but lost that, too, in a departmental shake-up. By the spring of 1935, he was working part-time as a security guard at the big California Pacific International Exposition in Balboa Park near the stadium where he had brought Babe and Lou to play.

  When that ended, he moved his family to an unheated cabin in the Cuyamaca mountains an hour and a half northeast of the city and began collecting K-rations from the Navy surplus store—dented, swollen cans of beans, meats, vegetables, and sardines that he would continue to hoard for the rest of his life. In 1937, he went back to work as a patrolman for the Coronado Police Department. His annual salary was less than the quarterly dividend checks Ruth received from the Bank of Manhattan.

  Ruth’s investment income continued to grow every year from 1935 through 1940, paying $8,000 annually until mid-1941, when interest rates declined. Only then would the trust account show its first loss—less than 1 percent. During his lifetime, the account was never worth less than the $200,000 Walsh invested for him. It had thrown off $148,000 in cash by his death in 1948.

  Asked to evaluate how well Christy Walsh had looked after Babe Ruth and his money, Zaft’s reply is unequivocal: “On a scale of one to ten—eleven.”

  Kind of like the home run the Babe hit during the pregame exhibition in San Diego, a clout so frightful, the San Diego Tribune said, “it almost paralyzed a cuckoo bird in a sentinel tree” beyond the left field fence.

  Chapter 17

  October 29 / Fresno

  HONOLULU BOYS HELP LOU GEHRIG DEFEAT BAMBINO

  ZENIMURA, YOSHIKAWA, AND NAKAGAWA ALL REGISTER HITS IN 15–3 WIN

  —HONOLULU STAR-BULLETIN

  MORE THAN 200 ATTEND BANQUET FOR RUTH-GEHRIG

  —FRESNO BEE

  I

  One week after arriving in San Francisco at the conclusion of a six-month goodwill tour of Asia with his Fresno Athletic Club, Kenichi Zenimura, all five feet, 105 pounds of him—known in the Japanese press as “positive poison to every opponent”—learned that Babe Ruth was coming to California. By the time he made his way home to meet his new four-month-old son, Howard, word was Babe and Lou would play at Fresno’s Firemen’s Park against an all-star team of the city’s best local talent sometime in late October.

  By any reasonable definition other than size, Zeni—or Ken, as he was known in the Caucasian press—was an all-star shortstop and catcher. Born in Hiroshima, raised and educated in Hawaii, Zenimura was Issei, a member of the first generation of Japanese immigrants. In 1920 he settled in Fresno, where he founded a baseball team and created a wooden stadium for it to play in next to the city dump. He was also the manager and promoter of the team, organizing trips to the Far East in 1924, 1927, and 1937. They had beaten Pacific Coast League teams in 1924, and Negro League teams in 1926–27.

  Zeni had managed two all-white Fresno Twilight League teams in 1926. He had led his team of Nisei players—second-generation Japanese Americans—to a record of 42-6-2 during their tour of Japan, Korea, China, and Hawaii. The invitation had been arranged through a close family friend, Takizo Matsumoto, who introduced the sport to Meiji University upon returning to Japan after living in Fresno for a time.

  Fresno was fertile baseball ground: Frank Chance was a native son, as were Alex Metzler, the hot young outfielder for the Chicago White Sox, and shortstop Lyn Lary, who would join the Yankees in 1929. There was plenty of talent to choose from.

  On October 18, managers Pete Shepherd and Gene Jewett announced that four members of the Fresno Athletic Club, including Zenimura, would play with Ruth and Gehrig: left fielder Harvey Iwata, catcher Fred Yoshikawa, and center fielder John Nakagawa, known as the Nisei Babe Ruth. Zeni immediately scheduled a game on October 23 between his club and an all-star team representing the Veterans of Foreign Wars to ensure they would be at their best for Ruth and Gehrig.

  The starting pitchers were ringers from the Pacific Coast League. Zeni went 3 for 5. “Now everyone was warmed up and ready for the Ruth-Gehrig show to arrive in Fresno,” the Fresno Bee declared.

  II

  Waiting at the station for Ruth and Gehrig that morning was Father John J. Crowley, aka the Desert Padre, the pastor of Fresno’s St. John’s Cathedral, known for his religious tolerance and his flair for publicity. With him was photographer Claude C. “Pop” Laval, who took perhaps a hundred thousand photographs of life in Fresno beginning in the 1900s.

  Pop captured in granular detail the scene at the Southern Pacific depot: the conductor watching from the train platform above, a passenger peering through the car door, the priest casting a beneficent “mind-your-manners” glance at an unnamed boy in a tartan-plaid jacket receiving a ball from Babe Ruth, and a glum gaggle of youths looking on in envy. “Everybody in Fresno wanted to be that boy,” Pop’s great-granddaughter Elizabeth Laval recalled. And over the years, three would come forward presenting their bona fides, presenting a problem for local newspapers who anointed the wrong one and had to retract the story when someone else showed up with the actual jacket.

  Laval, who maintains Pop’s archive and has cataloged every photograph he took, says he took only two that day, both at the station. She believes there was an agreement that he would cover the arrival and that Frank Kamiyama, a prominent Japanese American photographer, would cover the game because of its significance in the Nisei community. Howard (Taizo) Toshiyuki, a pharmacist and owner of a local drugstore, brought his 16mm camera to further memorialize the occasion.

  In baseball, the saying goes, the older you get, the better you used to be. That’s true of virtually everyone who ever played the game, with the possible exception of Babe Ruth. Retelling the events of October 29, 1927, some thirty-five years after the fact, Kenichi Zenimura’s memory of his performance had improved a bit. “The very first time up I got a single,” he told the Fresno Bee.

  In fact, he walked.

  “I was very fast and took my usual big lead off first. Ruth glanced at me and said, ‘Hey, son, aren’t you taking too much of a lead?’

  “I said, ‘no.’

  “He called for the pitcher to pick me off. The pitcher threw and I slid behind Ruth. He was looking around to tag me and I already was on the sack. I think this made him mad. He called for the ball again. This time he was blocking the base and he swung his arm around thinking I would slide the same way. But this time I slid through his legs, and he was looking behind. The fans cheered. Ruth said, ‘If you do that to me again, I’ll pick you up and use you as a bat, you runt.’”

  The box score shows that Zeni walked twice and stole a base.

  What it doesn’t show is that the Big Fella had met his spiritual equal in Zenimura, a diminutive man who needed baseball—who relied on it to organize his day and define the boundaries of his life—every bit as much as did the Babe. They would both find a future without it impossible to tolerate.

  With the help of Zeni and the Nisei players, the Lous whomped the Babes, 13–3 or 15–3, depending on which newspaper you read. Either way, they were whomped. John Nakagawa was 1 for 2 with a stolen base. Fred Yoshikawa had a double. Harvey Iwata did not get in the game.

  Afterward, Frank Kamiyama gathered the four Japanese Americans beside Ruth and Gehrig for a commemorative photograph. Toshiyuki had his 16mm camera running as Kamiyama tried to herd them into place.

  In the still photo, Ruth and Gehrig tower over Zeni and the others like skyscrapers on a block of tenement houses, with the Babe using his shoulder as a convenient armrest, smiles and smirks frozen in place. The footage remained buried in an attic for seven decades until family members presented it to Zeni’s son, Howard, at a memorial service for
his niece. He gave it to Kerry Yo Nakagawa, a local filmmaker and author, whose uncle John was one of the Nisei.

  He screened it that night on his laundry room wall, watching as the figures in the still photo camera came alive, his Uncle Johnny grinning, and Zeni clowning, pulling Gehrig into the center of the group, Lou bending a knee so as not to dwarf him too much.

  “You start seeing Babe Ruth swinging, [taking] batting practice, mingling,” Howard said. “He made sure my dad was in the middle. He’s leaning on my dad, making fun of him. He’s the great kidder, Babe Ruth. I couldn’t imagine how small he was and how big Babe Ruth was. How can he compete with guys that big?”

  Johnny was bigger than the others and had had to turn down a scholarship to play baseball for a Japanese university in order to help out on the family ranch in Fresno. When his nephew, Kerry, pointed to the picture on the wall and asked about the game, Johnny could say, “We were on Lou Gehrig’s team and we beat Babe Ruth.”

  Kerry Yo Nakagawa would establish the Nisei Baseball Research Project and tell their story in a documentary and a book, Through a Diamond: 100 Years of Japanese American Baseball. “For Johnny, it was much like the Negro League players—his chance to show how equal they were inside the lines,” he said.

  For Zeni, it was also an opportunity to try to accomplish what no one else had been able to do so far: arrange a trip to Japan for Babe Ruth.

  When he received copies of the still photograph taken at the game, Zenimura scribbled a handwritten note on the back of one and mailed it to his friend at Meiji University and also to Japanese newspapermen, hoping to elicit interest in promoting a tour for the Babe, who had turned down an offer of 30,000 yen from Waseda College—approximately $15,000—in 1925. (Walsh had demanded $25,000.)