by Jane Leavy
They planted castor beans for the outfield wall and Bermuda grass for the infield.
“We stole every other pole in the chain link fence to make the backstop”—burying the four-by-fours and two-by-fours in the desert at night. “The guards, they didn’t come around. They were mostly on the gate. We’re on the desert. There’s nothing out there for fifty miles. Where we going to go?
“We dug out the dugouts and used the dirt to smooth the base paths. We picked the big rocks by hand. I threw a lot of rocks. Then we screened the pebbles.”
Those were used for the dugout floors. The head dietician contributed flour to use for baselines. Empty rice bags filled with dirt doubled as bases.
They constructed a grandstand and painted and numbered the rows. They printed tickets in English and Japanese. Those who could afford the good seats were expected to pay their way; a coffee can was left at the entrance for other donations. Zeni used the money to send away for equipment to replace uniforms made out of mattress fabric.
On March 7, 1943, camp director Leroy Bennett threw out the first pitch at Zenimura Field, in an 8–0, one-hit shutout won by Block 28.
Zenimura organized a thirty-two-team league. He placed advertisements in the newspaper seeking games against Negro League, Pacific Coast League, and California Winter League clubs. And they came. The games were covered by the Arizona Republic.
When the Zenimuras were released from the camp in 1945, he wrote a letter to the Gila River internees thanking them for their support and invoking the healing power of baseball: “I will be returning to Fresno and while I am there will try to make a team to play in the league in the city, [to] try to speed up the mutual feeling between the Americans and the Japanese.”
Zeni continued to play and coach baseball, catching his last game at age fifty-five. At home, he never talked about the game at Firemen’s Park; nor did he speak about Babe Ruth. After serving in the U.S. Army, and graduating from Fresno State University, where both were star baseball players, Howard and Harvey Zenimura moved to Japan to play professional baseball for the Hiroshima Carp. Zeni coached until his death in an automobile accident in 1968. Years later Howard found his father’s treasured photographs, and the ball autographed by Babe and Lou, in the orange iron trunk labeled Fresno Athletic Club that he took to Japan in 1927. The wooden home plate, all that remains of Zenimura Stadium, went on display at the Hall of Fame in May 2017.
VII
Bishop John E. McGinley was the keynote speaker at the 7:00 P.M. banquet at the Hotel Fresno on Saturday evening, October 29, 1927. Two hundred guests, including the coaches and players from Fresno State University and St. Ignatius College, but none of the Nisei players, assembled in the lobby for what the newspaper called “pleasant music.” Organized as a fund-raiser for the Monterey-Fresno-Catholic Diocesan Campaign and a testimonial to Ruth and Gehrig, McGinley saluted Ruth as an example of the Catholic doctrine of perseverance, the key to all of life’s success. When Father Crowley introduced the Babe predictably as “the boy who never grew up,” the paper reported that “the ovation sounded for blocks around.”
Reporters did not record Ruth’s response to the tired refrain or the size of the pledge he made to the campaign. In his remarks, he proudly acknowledged his debt to St. Mary’s and to Brother Matthias, whom he now called “a big brother” instead of the father he never had—one indication that he had done some growing up since then. He extolled the virtues of sports especially for children who came from family difficulty, which may be the closest he ever came to acknowledging his own.
But he interrupted his remarks when he noticed a couple of young interlopers eyeing the dessert tray. “Dive into the pie,” he told the kids. “There’s plenty more where that come from.”
Chapter 18
October 30 / Los Angeles
RUTH WIRES HE'LL SMASH TWO HOME RUNS OFF ROOT
—LOS ANGELES TIMES
SPORTS BRIEF: RUTH AND GEHRIG BACK HOME AFTER THREE WEEKS TOUR
YANK HOME RUN TWINS TRAVELED 8,000 MILES
PAIR PLAYED BEFORE 220,000, MOSTLY KIDS, AND AUTOGRAPHED 5,000 BASEBALLS
—SCRANTON REPUBLICAN
I
“Glad you signed Root to pitch against me,” Ruth cabled from Santa Barbara, it was reported in the Los Angeles Times. “Tell the fans for me that I’ll hit two home runs off Root or be disappointed.”
Root was one of the best pitchers in the National League in 1927, a twenty-six-game winner for the Chicago Cubs. “Charlie took that as an insult,” the Times said, and had been working out in earnest, vowing to approach the exhibition game sponsored by the American Legion with the same purpose he would have brought to a World Series confrontation. “‘Ruth is a great slugger, all right, but I don’t believe he’ll get any two home runs off me. Who can tell, maybe I’ll strike out the Bambino a couple of times.’”
Arriving at Wrigley Field on Sunday afternoon was a kind of homecoming for Ruth, who had helped inaugurate the new ballpark’s alternate life as a Hollywood location by filming scenes for Babe Comes Home there nine months earlier. The gates opened early and the stands filled quickly. The Times estimated 25,000 were in the house that held 20,500 without the extra seating in the roped-off outfield; the Examiner claimed 30,000. Hollywood was much in evidence—Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, Buster Keaton, Marion Davies, and her old man, Hearst. The Hollywood American Legion Band played. The lieutenant governor threw out the first pitch. The president of Piggly Wiggly donated one hundred baseballs for Babe and Lou to toss in a scramble after the game.
Down on the field, Ruth was greeted by a roster of familiar faces: Lefty O’Doul, making another command appearance at his behest, and a spate of local ballplayers he knew from around the major leagues: Ernie Orsatti, the former Hollywood stuntman turned Cardinal outfielder; Fred Haney, Christy Walsh’s pal; Jigger Statz and “Irish” Meusel, Bob’s brother, who’d played with the Brooklyn Robins that year; and Johnny Rawlings, the onetime Giants’ benchwarmer who taunted him during the 1922 World Series at the Polo Grounds.
The little gem of a ballpark built by Chicago chewing-gum mogul William Wrigley as the home for his newly acquired Los Angeles Angels was deemed perfect by the Times. Wrigley had ordered his architect, Zachary Taylor Davis, who designed both of Chicago’s major-league ballparks, to pattern it after the one then known as Cubs Park. Built of iron and steel, it cost six times the price of the original. “Wrigley’s Million Dollar Palace,” sportswriters called it. “The finest baseball edifice in the United States,” the Sporting News claimed.
The red roof and Spanish-style exterior matched the homes in the surrounding neighborhood (what is now South Central Los Angeles). Palm trees hovered over the outfield wall where eventually ivy would grow. An elevator whisked spectators to an observation platform with views from mountain to ocean. A twelve-story office tower stood at the entrance to the ballpark with thirteen-foot clocks on all sides, visible to the players on the field below.
In the next four seasons, Ruth would hit another 257 home runs, leading the American League in slugging and on-base plus slugging; and had they calculated such a thing back then, he would have led in wins above replacement, too. He would help the Yankees win two more World Series, batting .625 against the Cardinals in 1928, and keep his promise by hitting two home runs off Charlie Root, albeit five years later, at the other Wrigley Field, before his time ran out.
II
When Ruth returned to Wrigley Field in 1942 to play himself in The Pride of the Yankees, Lou Gehrig had been dead of ALS less than a year. Eleanor Gehrig did not want Ruth to have any part of the movie, as she made clear in an exchange of uninhibited letters with Christy Walsh leading up to the shoot. She was adamant: for once the Babe was not going to upstage her Luke.
Whatever reconciliation had taken place at home plate on July 4, 1939, when Gehrig said goodbye at Yankee Stadium, did not assuage Eleanor Gehrig’s feelings.
Samuel Goldwyn and Christy Walsh conv
inced her that Lou’s story could not be told without Babe Ruth but promised he would appear only in group scenes with the other Yankees. When he signed a contract for $1,500 a day on November 2, 1941, he weighed 267 pounds. He went on a crash diet, losing fifty pounds, and landing himself in the hospital on January 2 with what doctors called a nervous condition.
He seemed in fine condition to play his former self by the time he arrived at Los Angeles’s Union Station to a suitably Ruthian greeting orchestrated by Walsh: “SPECIAL SUNSHINE ORDERED FOR YOUR ARRIVAL AND UNIFORM BAND OF TWENTY LITTLE ORPHAN KIDS.” Walsh also had a dozen roses for Claire and breakfast arranged at the Hotel Roosevelt with Bill Dickey, Bob Meusel, and the orphans.
He was back in his element at Wrigley Field, trading insults with his old teammates and entertaining East Coast scribes visiting the set with precise memories about how many home runs he had hit off of whom. But he was still run-down and caught pneumonia and was hospitalized in critical condition on April 2, generating lots of worried headlines and forcing the director to shoot around him.
The photogenic ballpark was almost as popular with Hollywood directors as it was with baseball sluggers: the Hollywood Stars, L.A.’s other PCL franchise, shared it with the Angels until 1939. Wrigley Field played a supporting role in fourteen feature films after Babe Comes Home and Speedy inaugurated the ballpark as a film location in 1927. Gary Cooper had delivered a rousing speech to a packed stadium for Frank Capra in Meet John Doe just the year before he returned to the field as Lou Gehrig.
Walsh kept Eleanor Gehrig up to date on all the latest gossip in detailed, single-spaced letters, describing the scene in the Ruths’ suite on arrival.
“To give the devil his due Babe and the Great Woman acted simply swell so far. No COMPLAINTS but you ought to have heard him griping because trunks didn’t arrive AT ONCE and when they did, he started looking for golf togs and boy, what a show . . . he simply poured the trunk contents all over the room and out the window. Raising hell because someone in N.Y. had failed to pack his favorite golf stuff and then after 30 minutes of that—he found the stuff right under his nose.”
The state of the Ruth marriage was a topic of conversation in the make-believe clubhouse in Los Angeles and elsewhere—much to Christy’s and Eleanor’s glee. The family maid, Nora McIntyre, told her daughter, Dorothy Patterson, about shouting matches in the Riverside Drive apartment and one aboard a Pullman involving who gave who a social disease. Another time, as he left on a purported hunting trip, Claire looked out the back window of the apartment and saw him getting into a car with a female behind the wheel. “Call Abercrombie and Fitch,” she instructed Nora. “I want some hunting clothes.”
She meant to track her prey.
A week later, Walsh sent Eleanor Valentine’s Day greetings and more gossip.
The Great Woman has been in virtual seclusion. But you would have absolutely expired with laughter the other day. Dickey, Meusel and Babe and I were in their dressing room which has kitchenette, ice box, shower bath etc. They were all sitting around wise cracking etc and finally Babe started talking about his “old woman.” Night before he had been out with Rice, Gene Fowler, Barrymore, and a few others. He was supposed to get home at 9:30 P.M. but came in at 11:30 and you ought to hear what his “old woman” said to him. He told us, he told her if she didn’t lay off, she could pack up and go home etc etc. She was griping because she is “golf” widow etc and because she is “alone all the time out here.” Thurs. night we went to annual stag dinner Baseball Assoc. She raised H—— again. Anyway, Babe was ranting and threatening and telling Dickey, Meusel and me how he was going to be in charge from now on but all the time we were splitting our sides laughing and Meusel and Bill were winking at me on the side. The chances are when he went home that night he pussy-footed in with hat in hand. SPECIAL BULLETIN: Mr. Ruth officially announces that he and his “old women” now sleep in separate bedrooms!!!
III
The critical and financial success of The Pride of the Yankees inevitably triggered thoughts about a Babe Ruth movie, which in 1942 lacked the obvious pathos of Gehrig’s life story. Walsh, who had refreshed his acquaintance with General John J. Pershing in making a deal for a 1943 Eddie Rickenbacker feature film, told Eleanor he was also busy acquiring the film rights to the life story of Yale football coach Howard Jones.
It was too soon for a Babe movie. He had to get sick first.
The forties were unkind to both men. They stayed busy and disappointed. Walsh, the staunch right-wing anti-Communist, was investigated by the FBI in 1943 on suspicion of exchanging coded messages with the lighthouse keeper at the Molokai Light Station in Hawaii, who was suspected of tracking a U.S. Naval Minecraft #30 built in 1919. Secret ink tests for code proved negative.
Walsh had recruited former clients to join what he called a “non-partisan sports committee” opposing Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and wrote to Ruth soliciting his support four years later. “In other years, I know that you have hesitated to lend your name to a political committee. But, Babe, from the bottom of my heart, I tell you that the crisis is deeper than POLITICAL.
“The very money that you have saved in your insurance and trust funds is liable to be taken away from you very cleverly unless the present communistic trend is stopped in its tracks at the next election.”
According to Walsh’s nephew, Richard, Uncle Christy arranged for him to appear on a thirty-minute pre-election radio broadcast with the Babe in support of Thomas Dewey in 1944. He was just a teenager. In one of his lines, he was to complain that he had known only one president during his lifetime. There was only one problem: Ruth had lost his place in the script. “He was drunk out of his mind,” Richard Walsh said. “One thing you can’t be on the radio is drunk. There was a thirty-second pause before he could find in the script where he was supposed to be.”
Walsh’s attempt to create a new, profit-sharing sports syndicate for TV and movies, Sportswriters, Inc., went nowhere. He went all in with the actor Don Ameche in an effort to bring professional football to Los Angeles and to acquire the right for pros to compete at the Coliseum, previously the sole province of collegiate competition. As vice president of the American Football Conference and part owner of the Dons, he traveled the country, signed players, and hosted fund-raisers, all on his own dime, only to be pushed out when Ameche withdrew without warning and a new ownership group took over.
His instincts were sharp—he was prescient about the future of professional football. But he would not share in the success. After eighteen months of unpaid effort in 1944–45, during which he laid out $13,000 of his own money, it took more than two years to recoup his losses.
He had seen the future of major-league baseball on the West Coast, too, in the sellout crowd that showed up at Wrigley Field to see Babe and Lou. He said right then, “They’ll come out for baseball if you give them baseball to see.” And then he learned that the Ruth project he’d been unsuccessfully pitching for years had been sold out from under him. He would have no part in the making of The Babe Ruth Story. Negotiations for the sale of the film rights to the forthcoming Bob Considine book had been under way for some time when he learned of a prospective deal with Roy Del Ruth and Republic Pictures.
Walsh’s August 31, 1946, letter to Ruth was gracious considering his deeply hurt feelings—and pocketbook. He wrote that he had long hoped to make such a picture but had been unable to interest any of the studios he had approached. Universal-International had turned it down; Twentieth Century Fox had not rejected the idea but nor had it shown any indication of accepting. “After all the years we were associated, it will be a great disappointment not to be associated in the making of your picture,” he wrote, before closing with some prophetic, unheeded advice. “Make sure to get approval of the shooting script and don’t tie up with any but a major studio.”
When the deal with Allied Pictures was announced in July 1947, paying Ruth $150,000, one of Walsh’s sportswriting allies, Oscar Ruhl, ran a sympath
etic item in his column, noting that Walsh had been “knocked out of a $25,000 cut” of the action.
Ruth, too, was at loose ends. He refereed two wrestling matches in 1945, losing ten pounds in the process. He traveled to Mexico with Claire and Julia at the invitation of Jorge Pasquel, the head of the Mexican League, which led to speculation about a possible job, but there was nothing there for him either. He couldn’t quite hide his enmity toward the power structure of baseball, revealing a grudge he’d been carrying since 1914 when he turned down big money from the Federal League, then vying to become a third major league, “because we were told by organized baseball that if we jumped we would be barred for life. But nobody was barred for life and I just got jobbed out of $20,000 without a thank-you from anybody.”
He swallowed what remained of his pride and wrote to Larry MacPhail, now running the Yankees, and begged for the job in Newark he had rejected in 1934. MacPhail replied by mail three weeks later—always a bad sign, Babe told Claire—saying he thought there was lots of opportunity for him in organizing sandlot baseball.
Then the headaches began.
Headaches so searing, Dorothy said later, that he threatened to jump from the apartment window. He left the apartment in a wheelchair on November 26, 1946, and was taken to the French Hospital on West Thirtieth Street, where he would remain for three months.
He was first misdiagnosed with sinusitis and then with dental problems, so doctors pulled three teeth. His face swelled, his left eye shut; he lost the ability to swallow and then to speak. When an X-ray showed a mass at the base of his skull, radiation treatments were begun. His hair fell out in chunks. He had to be fed intravenously and lost eighty pounds.
Cancer had taken root in the air passages behind his nose, an area inaccessible to surgery, and it had spread from there. In December, a mass appeared in the left side of his neck. Doctors operated but were unable to remove it all. The cancer was strangling his carotid artery. They tied it off and prescribed female hormone treatments and more radiation.