The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  At the New York Public Library, I consulted Jacob Ruppert’s papers as well as the library’s holdings from the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, which include all of Walsh’s correspondence as director of sports publicity. The Bill Shannon Biographical Dictionary of New York Sports at the New York Historical Society was extremely helpful as was the “Bioproject,” a compendium of baseball biographies found online at www.SABR.org.

  Information about train travel in 1927 came from Chris Baer at the Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, which maintains a collection of old train schedules and from train aficionados David Splitt and P. K. Hannah.

  For information about the value and sale of Ruth memorabilia, I relied on Rich Mueller, editor of Sports Collectors Daily; Pete Siegel of Gotta Have It Collectibles; and www.pricerealized.com, a database of sports memorabilia sold in the United States. As of March 3, 2018, 13,733 Ruth items had been sold, of which 121 sold for more than $100,000 apiece.

  I realized early on that this book would require granular reporting. I set about collecting shards of information, like the small pieces of tile in a large mosaic, hoping they would add up to a coherent picture of the man.

  My own 250 interviews were augmented by 25 interviews conducted by Mike Gibbons for the Babe Ruth Museum in the 1990s, and by Kal Wagenheim’s interviews with Daily News reporter Marshall Hunt, whom Ruth called his shadow. By donating their research materials to the A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center at the Hall of Fame, Wagenheim and the late Marshall Smelser made my task considerably easier. The transcripts of Jerome Holtzman’s interviews for No Cheering in the Pressbox: Recollections Personal and Professional by Eighteen Veteran American Sportswriters were generously passed on to me by Leigh Montville. Bob Creamer’s son, Jim, shared his father’s correspondence with Ruth’s teammate Waite Hoyt. Chris Martens, co-author of Dorothy Pirone’s 1988 memoir, sent copies of the notes she had provided for his use.

  Three previous accounts of the 1927 barnstorming tour were indispensable: John B. Kennedy’s article, “Innocents Abroad,” published in the April 14, 1928, issue of Collier’s magazine, provided color, dialogue, and details from the tour. R. Gregg Kaufman’s podcast, “Symphony of Swat,” accessed on iTunes, and R. A. Cabral’s Barnstormin’ Across America: The Bustin’ Babes and Larrupin’ Lous, published online in September 2013, were useful guides. (Rick Cabral also shared taped recordings of interviews he conducted for his book.)

  Babe Ruth’s career statistics were provided by Retrosheet, the online compendium of baseball data, and vetted by Retrosheet founder David Smith and Major League Baseball historian John Thorn. Bill Jenkinson allowed me to copy his lovingly and meticulously compiled ledger documenting Ruth’s every game, home run, and barnstorming tour—an incomparable resource.

  Michael Haupert, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, who discovered seventy previously unexamined Yankee account books and daily ledgers at the Hall of Fame in 2000, combined his research on the economics of the team and Babe Ruth with the Christy Walsh accounting ledger I uncovered to produce a complete picture of the Babe’s financial clout.

  In order to be able to imagine Ruth in his time, I reviewed thousands of images—a select few of which appear in the book—shared by Wayne Wilson at LA84, Ben Weingarten/Weingarten’s Vintage, Heritage Auctions, John Horne at the Hall of Fame, Bruce Menard at BeeSmile, Jay Gauthreaux, the Babe Ruth Museum, and the Xaverian Brothers U.S.A.

  To immerse myself in Ruth’s time, I read with pleasure a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald and H. L. Mencken; Broun’s The Sun Field; Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day, set in Boston during the Red Summer of 1919, Ruth’s last year with the Red Sox; and David Stuart’s The Babe Ruth Deception, set in his early days in New York; as well as Thomas Mallon’s 2004 novel, Bandbox, set in a twenties newsroom. Also Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al, Damon Runyon’s The Best of Damon Runyon, Paul Gallico’s Farewell to Sport and The Golden People, Fred Lieb’s Baseball as I Have Known It, Red Smith’s Out of the Red, Bill Shannon and George Kalinsky’s The Ballparks, and the biography and collected works of Grantland Rice.

  To better understand the era that Ruth dominated, I read Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius: 1922—Modernism Year One, Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, Donald L. Miller’s Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time, and my prized 1927 first edition of Will Irwin’s Highlights of Manhattan with E. H. Suydam’s gorgeous illustrations of my hometown.

  A selected list of the primary resources I consulted appears in the bibliography that follows the notes. Below, more specifically, are the sources that were most instrumental in the writing of individual chapters.

  Introduction

  Interviews: Chris Davis, Mike Gibbons, Sally Prugh, Mark Rathbun, Cal Ripken, Tom Robbins, Ray Robinson, Greg Schwalenberg, Julia Ruth Stevens, C. J. Wilson, and Steve Wulf.

  I first interviewed Julia Ruth Stevens in August 2011 for a Grantland story, “Being Babe Ruth’s Daughter” (January 3, 2012). She spent another three days with me at her son’s home in Henderson, Nevada, in May 2013 in hopes that I would convey “Babe Ruth, the man.” Her invaluable observations and memories about growing up with the Babe suffuse this book.

  Jhan Robbin’s 1963 Sport magazine story, “The Time Babe Ruth Hit One for Me,” reprinted in The Best of Sport 1946–1971, was augmented by interviews with his widow, Sally Prugh, and son, Tom Robbins.

  Mike Gibbons and Greg Schwalenberg shared the story about Chris Davis’s encounter with Ruth’s bat. Davis elaborated on his comments in the August 26, 2013, Sports Illustrated cover story about his Ruthian turnaround, “Unlocking the Power and Mystery of Chris Davis.”

  After using the Babe’s bathtub for ten years to store baseball bats, Steve Wulf decided it rightfully belonged in the Ruth family, not in his garage. He rented a U-Haul truck and delivered it to the home of Ruth’s granddaughter, Linda Ruth Tosetti, who called the next day to inform him that the date stamped on the underside of the tub post-dated Ruth’s time in Sudbury. He went back the next day to collect the tub that Ruth never bathed in. It is now a very large flowerpot. “I should have taken the toilet,” he says now.

  Prologue: June 13, 1902, Baltimore

  Interviews: Christina Callender, Dorothy Miceli Dupski, Francis O’Neill, and Mary C. Tormollan.

  I am indebted to Fred Shoken for sharing a trove of census reports, Sanborn insurance maps, news clippings, and photographs from the period. (That information is also posted on his own website (www.BabeRuth100). I am equally indebted to David Bennett Stinson, and his website, deadballbaseball.com, through whom I met descendants of boys who attended St. Mary’s during Ruth’s time there. He also made introductions to Jean Mor, a member of Brother Matthias’s family, and to Francis X. McGillivary, whose grandfather was Martin Boutilier’s closest friend in Lingan. Caretaker Brian Cromer escorted us through the building where Ruth learned how to make shirts and showed us architectural plans for the campus, including the reclamation of the field on which Ruth played. (See “A Fight to Save the House That Built Ruth” in the May 17, 2010, New York Times, and Stinson’s April 1, 2016, blog entry, “The Mystery of the Stone Building at the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys Site,” at www.davidstinsonauthor.com.)

  Maps, deeds, and real estate documents pertaining to St. Mary’s were provided by William Greskovich and Bill Monk at St. Rita’s Hospital, which owns the property. Jerry Williams at the Baltimore Trolley Museum supplemented information I found in Michael R. Farrell’s 1973 book, Who Made All Our Streetcars Go? The Story of Rail Transit in Baltimore, enabling me to envision the trip Ruth took in 1902.

  To educate myself on the history and growth of the city, particularly west Baltimore, I relied on: Francis O’Neill at the Maryland Historical Society; John Thomas Schart’s 1891 History of
Baltimore City and County, from the Earliest Period to the Present Day: Including Biographical Sketches of Their Representative Men; Clayton Colton Hall’s 1912 Baltimore: Its History and Its People; the 2014 edition of the WPA Guide to Maryland: The Old Line State; Dorsey and Dilts’s A Guide to Baltimore Architecture; and America’s Great Road: The Impact of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad on the Baltimore Region.

  I found statistics on population growth, the racial and the ethnic composition of the city, and the growth of slums during successive waves of immigration in “Deconstructing the Slums of Baltimore” by Garrett Power, reprinted in From Mobtown to Charm City, published by the Maryland Historical Society in 2002. Five areas were designated as slums by the city labor commissioner in 1900, including the area “beyond Camden Station in Pigtown,” where the Ruth family made its various homes.

  I accessed Maryland legislation and a trove of other historical documents in the state archives at www.msa.maryland.com. Among them: “Baltimore City, Maryland, Historical Chronology 1900-1999”; “Maryland Manual Online: A Guide to Maryland and Its Government”; and a history of the Gwynns Falls watershed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “Baltimore City and County Mills,” which described the formerly pastoral land on which St. Mary’s and the Wilkens “hair mines” were built. For an understanding of how industry sullied the land, I relied on the “Gwynns Falls Watershed Ecological Resource Atlas.”

  For background on the development of the area, I relied on materials from the Carrollton Ridge Neighborhood Association and extensive coverage in the Baltimore Sun, especially a May 25, 1924, story, “Do You Know the Street on Which You Live? Wilkens Avenue. Historic and Religious Shrines Adjoin Thoroughfare Named for Donor of Ground.”

  The item about the arrest of Mary Custis Lee is from WETA’s Washington, D.C., history blog, Boundary Stones.

  Photographs of the Camden Yards neighborhood and west Baltimore as it was in Ruth’s youth were found at the B & O Railroad museum in Baltimore. St. Mary’s annual reports were accessed at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, where I also immersed myself in the collected works of H. L. Mencken. Vince Fitzpatrick, curator of the collection, found every mention of Ruth, baseball, and west Baltimore in Mencken’s vast oeuvre, materials that informed my description of the sights and smells of his hometown. The allusion to the Wilkens hair factory and the smell of the harbor in summer appears on page 70 in Happy Days, published in 1940. The description of the language of the arrabers and the polite term for Baltimore outhouses comes from The American Language, Supplement II, pages 162–63. The quotation about “dirt pedagogy” is from Newspaper Days: 1899–1906, page 151.

  While I was fact-checking another part of Ruth’s childhood, Rodger H. Pippen’s 1947 story in the Baltimore News-Post about Patrolman Harry C. Birmingham popped up on my computer screen—an act of the cyber-gods: “80-year-Old Ex-Cop Remembers Babe Ruth as a Boy.” His great-granddaughter Mary C. Tormollan and other family members confirmed the account. Newspaper clippings about his career and his relationship with the Ruths were supplied by his family, Shoken, and O’Neill.

  These sources were also drawn on in writing chapters 2, 4, and 6.

  Chapter 1: October 10, Providence

  Interviews: Ed Achorn, P. T. Conley, Dan Daley, Carole Dooley, Elaine Regine, and Julia Ruth Stevens.

  Daily newspaper coverage in the Providence Journal and the Providence Evening Bulletin was supplemented by interviews with local baseball aficionados P. T. Conley and Dan Daley. Carole Dooley, Judge Dooley’s daughter-in-law, shared a limited-edition book about the judge, Quiet Little Man, written by Boswell Johnson and published by Turf and Sport Digest in 1987.

  For background on Peter Laudati, the Steam Roller, Kinsley Park, and the Cyclodrome, I relied on his daughter Elaine Regine and consulted the following sources: http://artinruins.com; a 2005 story posted on www.profootballhof.com, “NFL’s First Night Game”; and John Hogrogian’s 1980 post on www.profootballresearchers.org, The Coffin Corner: “The Steam Roller”; as well as Laudati’s obituary in the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin from September 15, 1977.

  Though Jack Dempsey fought at Kinsley Park in 1922, the field got only three mentions in the Providence Journal, the first on November 13, 1925, when it was leased for baseball, and the last on November 16, 1933, when it was demolished. The Journal provided ample coverage of Ruth’s tenure with the Providence Grays, including Arnold Bailey’s February 6, 1995, story, “The Babe’s 100th Anniversary, Providence Saw the Early Babe,” and Brian MacPherson’s August 9, 2014, story, “Babe Ruth a Hit in R.I. before He Became a Baseball Legend.”

  I found the interview with Mike Gazella, recorded on June 6, 1978, by Nick Cullop, in the collection of the Cleveland Public Library. Bill Nack’s August 8, 1998, story in Sports Illustrated, “The Colossus,” re-creating Ruth’s march to sixty home runs, supplemented the details I found in the daily coverage of New York City newspapers. The description of the accident outside Philadelphia and Charley O’Leary’s hat is from Robert Creamer’s Babe: The Legend Comes to Life.

  The background on Albert “Truly” Warner comes from a variety of sources, including a September 8, 2017, post at www.philly.com, “A Philadelphian Who Knew How Sports Gets in—and on—Our Heads.” Julia Ruth Stevens supplied the information on the floral tributes awaiting her father after he hit the sixtieth home run.

  Ford Frick’s role in creating the myth of the quaking Pirates was described in Louis Effrat’s New York Times interview with Pie Traynor published on October 5, 1960.

  Background on Jean Bedini, “the Turnip Catcher,” also known as the “Ziegfeld of Burlesque,” came from the Jean Bedini Archive at www.Travalance.com, the Oakland Tribune, the Washington Herald, and the Washington Times, which featured this headline on November 4, 1915: “Jean Bedini Fails to Catch Turnip; Tears Mouth: Wife Falls in Swoon.” Reviews and descriptions of “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo” were found in Variety, the Providence Journal, and the Pittsburgh Press. See also his obituary in the New York Times on November 9, 1956, “Jean Bedini, 85, Produced Revues, Organizer of Vaudeville and Burlesque Shows Dies—Helped Future Stars.”

  Ring Lardner memorialized Ruth’s ankles in the March 18, 1929, issue of Collier’s magazine, calling them “the envy of many a Broadway chorus girl.”

  Chapter 2: October 10, Aboard the New York Central to Manhattan

  Interviews: Christopher Boone, Jim Brady, Tony Brady, Kathy Carmody, Shelby Fell Daugherty, Guy Drebing, Jack Dunn III, Anna Maria and Noreen Frontera, Sarah E. Hinman, Esther Hynson, Doris Keil-Shamieh, Jean Klus, Jan McNamee, John Munion, Harry and Gina Pippin, John Ridgeway, Father Michael Roach, Dotty Schluepner, Jonathan Shahan, and Ellen Warnock.

  Re-creating family life in the Ruth household would have been impossible without access to a 1991 tape-recorded interview with Mamie Ruth Moberly, conducted by Mike Gibbons for the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum. Quotations from that interview appear throughout the book.

  Moberly was generous with her recollections even as they faded, contributing to stories too numerous to count. Among the most helpful were the following: “Childhood Memories of the Babe,” Orioles Gazette, June 4, 1993; “The Babe’s Best Girl, Ruth’s Sister Remembers His Playfulness—and His Warmth,” Philadelphia Daily News, April 16, 1992; “Mary Ruth Moberly, Babe’s Sister,” People magazine, September 16, 1985; “Babe’s Sister Will Gaze Out on a Field of Dreams,” Baltimore Sun, April 5, 1992. Her 1972 letter to Marshall Smelser, author of The Life That Ruth Built: A Biography was among the papers he donated to the Hall of Fame.

  In 2010, when I began researching Ruth’s roots, there was no reliable family tree, as evidenced by the conflicting information on the many Ruth family trees posted on Ancestry.com by family and fans. I am indebted to Shelby Fell Daugherty, Doris Keil-Shamieh, and Jan McNamee for the spadework they did on my behalf piecing together their family history in Baltimore. Druscilla J. Null’s 2017 article for the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal, �
�My Father Was of German Extraction: Babe Ruth’s Ruth/Rudt Ancestors,” confirmed much of what we had been able to assemble and added crucial details to my understanding of the Ruth family in Baltimore.

  Dougherty shared Ruth’s baptismal record and other family documents she located at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. Father Michael Roach, former priest at St. Peter the Apostle, where George Jr. was baptized, described tensions in the Ruth marriage over religious differences.

  Birth, death, and divorce records for the Ruth family were accessed through the Maryland State Archives. The case file in the divorce of George and Katie Ruth contained all police reports, filings, depositions, and briefs, as well as both of the confessions George Sr. extracted from his bartender George Sowers, in two different hands.

  An updated version of Westbrook Pegler’s ghostwritten serial, edited by William R. Cobb, was released as a book in 2011 under the title Playing the Game: My Early Years in Baseball. Another literary endeavor attributed to Ruth, a children’s book called The Home-Run King, or How Pep Pindar Won His Title, was also published in 1920.

  Loudon Park Cemetery provided diagrams and interment records for the Ruth children buried in the family plot. The death certificate for George and Katie’s last child, William, identified the place of his death: the Thomas Wilson Sanitarium for the Sick Children of Baltimore. For further reading on the facility and the lack of pasteurized milk in Baltimore at the turn of the century, see the American Journal of Nursing (April 1904) posted at www.jstor.org and The Town: A Civic Journal (April 2016).

  Professors Christopher Boone at Arizona State University and Sarah E. Hinman at Leiden University in the Netherlands elaborated in separate interviews on their published work, History of Public Health for the City of Baltimore: 1880–1920. Hinson cited the lack of a comprehensive sewage system in Baltimore as a contributing factor in the high infant mortality rate, which had decreased from 25 percent in the 1880s to about 10 percent by 1900; the mortality rate in the Ruth family was higher than that of the city at large.