The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Among literally hundreds of stories published about Ruth’s birthplace, two stand out for their color and detail about the neighborhood in 1895: John Schulian’s August 8, 1981, story for The Sporting News, “Babe Ruth’s Shrine Draws Few Visitors”; and David Simons’s January 2, 1983, story in the Sunday Sun, “Ruth Fans Go to Bat for Museum Funds.”

  The suspect time line for Ruth’s commitment to St. Mary’s appears on pages 2–3 in Ruth’s authorized autobiography, The Babe Ruth Story, by Babe Ruth and Bob Considine. It is restated on page 42 of The Babe and I, written by Mrs. Babe Ruth with Bill Slocum.

  In re-creating the working-class neighborhood where Ruth lived until age six, I relied on former residents Esther Hyson and Dotty Schluepner, who provided invaluable color and detail about daily life on Woodyear Street. Mencken’s description of the playing field near Woodyear Street—now the Carroll Park public golf course—and being chased from it by ruffians who lived by the B & O railroad shops appears on page 229 in Happy Days in “Records of an Athlete.”

  Even Mencken’s memory was fallible. In Mencken on Mencken, in the chapter “Memories of a Long Life,” he describes the Union Saloon at the corner of Paca and Baltimore Streets kept by Babe’s father, whom he had conflated with another German saloon keeper named Louis W. Ruths, according to Francis O’Neill at the Maryland Historical Society.

  Chapter 3: October 11, Trenton

  Interviews: Scott Boras, Casey Close, Jerry Della Femina, John Holway, Bill Jenkinson, George Lois, Michael and Paula Messina, Leigh Steinberg, Richard Walsh, Bob and Katie Walsh.

  The opening anecdote about the ladies of the night who accompanied Ruth to Penn Station is from page 1 of Ken Sobol’s Babe Ruth & the American Dream.

  In addition to daily coverage in the Trenton State Gazette, the Trenton Evening Times, and the New York Times, I was aided by R. Gregg Kaufman’s research and his October 24, 2002, article in the Trenton Times, “In 1927, the Babe Hammered Three in Trenton.” Author Steve Kettmann, the ghostwriter for Joe Plumeri’s grandfather, provided the background on how Joe Plumeri Sr. and Charles Giasco wooed Ruth and Gehrig to Trenton.

  Ruth’s cogent statement on behalf of the rights of ballplayers is from the New York Times, October 18, 1921.

  For a man who had been largely forgotten and rarely acknowledged, Christy Walsh proved an easy subject to report. He was a PR guy and made sure to get his own name in the paper, frequently, starting with an October 7, 1916, item in The Fourth Estate: A Newspaper for the Makers of Newspapers and Investors in Advertising. His professional comings and goings, personal triumphs and travails, were documented in dispatches in Advertising & Selling, Editor & Publisher, The Fourth Estate, and then in a succession of Bay Area and Detroit dailies that sold his sports cartoons and stories. His hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, recognized him as “a local boy who made good,” in a February 1, 1924, column titled “Observations by the Innocent Bystander, W.M.H.”

  More substantial profiles followed: Joe Williams’s July 29, 1927, encomium in the New York Telegram, “A Close-Up of Christy Walsh: The Man Behind Mr. Babe Ruth,” which also ran under a different headline in the Pittsburgh Press; L. H. Gregory’s January 14, 1929, puff piece in the Morning Oregonian, “Gregory’s Sport Gossip, $130,000 Saved for Babe Ruth by Christy”; Norman Beasley’s October 1, 1929, piece in Forbes, “What Babe Ruth Does with His Money.” Most essential, reliable, informative, and hilarious was Alva Johnston’s November 23, 1935, profile in the New Yorker, “The Ghosting Business.” Its only notable flaw is the timing of publication, which came as Walsh’s ghosting syndicate was near its end.

  According to Robert Acosta, producer of a failed 1984 off-Broadway play, The Babe, who read correspondence between Walsh and his son, supplied by Christy Walsh Jr., “there was a fight between Babe Ruth and Christy Walsh about him representing Lou Gehrig. He wasn’t getting all the attention.” That correspondence was also the source for Walsh’s comments about the agenting business.

  Ruth’s death produced a spate of favorable publicity for Walsh, much of it written by his friends in the press, vouchsafing his role in the Babe’s financial prosperity, including a widely disseminated Associated Press dispatch headlined “Ruth Had to Learn Dollar Value, Fun-Loving Babe ‘Wised Up’ Under Christy Walsh.” Very little was written about him in the four decades after his death. Richard Miller resurrected him in a March 5, 1999, story for Sports Collectors Digest: “Babe Ruth’s ‘Ghost’ Put Words in Athletes’ Mouths, Walsh Took Care of Ruth While Managing Syndicate of Writers.” A far more in-depth treatment, “Babe Ruth’s Ghostwriter,” written by Robert Messenger, was posted to the www.ozTypewriter.blogspot.com on March 4, 2015. Mark Ahrens’s August. 4, 2010, post on the now defunct website www.booksonbaseball.com, “Christy Walsh—Baseball’s First Agent,” was especially useful as it led me to Walsh’s nephew, Richard, who introduced me to his grandson, Bob. Whatever information I couldn’t find in print was supplied by Walsh’s extended family.

  Walsh’s most extensive writing about himself and his business can be found in his previously mentioned self-published memoir, Adios to Ghosts. All the figures I’ve used regarding syndicate sales and profits come from his book. Ruth’s yearly earnings from ghostwriting are in the accounting ledger Walsh prepared in May 1938 at the end of their contractual relationship. That ledger appears in appendix 2.

  Walsh also wrote a valedictory for the syndicate man in the November 6, 1937, edition of Editor & Publisher, the journal in which he had announced the formation of the Christy Walsh Syndicate in 1921: “Ghost Writing Not Dead but Lacks Novelty, Christy Walsh Says That Too Many Papers, Not Too Few, Killed It . . . Sees Revival.” This was wishful thinking. He contributed a self-mocking biographical sketch, “That Old Feeling,” to the Roaring Lions Magazine of Loyola University, which was then excerpted in The De Andrein, an alumni newsletter published by his alma mater “Old St. Vincent’s” in March 1938.

  Grandson Bob Walsh and his wife, Katie, described life at Walshchateau and Walsh’s courtship of the Babe. Nephew Richard Walsh provided the alternative version of events. Matt Cwieka, Christy Walsh Jr.’s son-in-law, detailed Walsh’s financial dependence on his father-in-law. Walsh’s correspondence with General John J. Pershing was discovered by archivist Jeffrey Flannery in the Pershing archives at the Library of Congress.

  For the history of tabloid journalism and the New York Daily News, I read the following: Megan McKinney’s The Magnificent Medills: America’s Royal Family of Journalism During a Century of Turbulent Splendor; John Arthur Chapman’s Tell It to Sweeney: The Informal History of the New York Daily News; Leo McGivena’s The News: The First Fifty Years of New York’s Picture Newspaper; Simon Michael Bessie’s Jazz Journalism; John D. Sevens’s Sensationalism and the New York Press; Michael Shapiro’s “The Paper Chase: For Tabloid King Emile Gauvreau It Took a Lifetime to Slow Down,” in the Columbia Journalism Review; “The President’s Bible,” Time magazine, August 15, 1927; and Jack Anderson’s profile of Joseph Medill Patterson in the August 13, 1938, issue of the New Yorker, “Vox Populi II,” which discounts the legend of the meeting on the battlefield, maintaining the cousins met in Paris after the Armistice. I also relied on the correspondence I found in the papers of Joseph Patterson at Lake Forest College.

  The statistics on daily newspaper circulation in the United States are from N. W. Ayer & Son’s 1927 Annual Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals. The New York City daily and Sunday circulation figures were gathered by Rebecca Federman, electronic resources coordinator at the New York Public Library, who reviewed circulation figures for each of the newspapers in the library’s collection. (She also supplied back issues of the New York Daily News sports page beginning in 1919.) The figures on the increase in daily sports coverage and readership are from Francis C. Richter’s The History and Records of Base Ball: The American Nation’s Chief Sport, cited in Robert McChesney’s chapter “Media Made Sport: A History of Sports Coverage in the United States” in Med
ia, Sports, & Society, and from pages 116–17 in Stevens.

  While John B. Kennedy’s April 1928 article for Collier’s provided essential details and dialogue for many of the chapters in this book, it is clear that Kennedy was not present until midway through the tour and may have written some portions based on secondhand accounts. He includes some anecdotes from Ruth’s 1926 barnstorming tour and there are a few errors in his version of the 1927 itinerary. That fall, he was also reporting a Notre Dame football story for Collier’s, which gave him access to Walsh and Rockne.

  Kennedy protested vigorously, to no avail, when he received no credit on the book version of his eight-part 1930 series on Rockne, published by Bobbs-Merrill after the coach’s death, thereby breaking the cardinal rule of ghostdom. He became better known for his work as a radio broadcaster. Hailed by Time magazine as the “Voice of the People” in the February 6, 1939, issue of the magazine, he would receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

  Marshall Hunt’s observations and memories about the growth of the Daily News and sports writing are from two sources: Wagenheim’s taped interviews at the Hall of Fame, as well as the transcripts and published version of his interview with Jerome Holtzman for No Cheering in the Press Box.

  The description of the New York Evening Graphic as “the most abnormal sheet in U.S. journalism,” and the pejorative “BodyLove” Macfadden were found in the February 7, 1927, issue of Time. Within six weeks of its first press run, Macfadden’s rag had been banned by the New York Public Library.

  Lorena A. “Hick” Hickok, remembered in history chiefly for what was described as her “intimate friendship” with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was a groundbreaking female journalist. As a writer for the Minneapolis Tribune, where she was often known as the “girl reporter,” she also covered a “secret” Minneapolis Gophers football practice, using her professed ignorance of the game to get a foot in the door at a “rehearsal” before a big game with the Wisconsin Badgers, according to a January 18, 2018, post on the paper’s website. By 1927, she had moved to New York to write for the New York Mirror and then the Associated Press, covering the Lindbergh kidnapping and FDR’s 1932 campaign for the presidency. She quit the job and moved into the White House when the conflict of interest became untenable.

  For background on the evolution of sports photography, I read Gail Buckland’s Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, 1843 to the Present and Jack Price’s News Pictures.

  For background on Ruth and Dick Redding, I relied extensively on the research of Bill Jenkinson, as well as John Holway’s article in the SABR Research Journals Archive, “The Cannonball,” and an in-depth profile published by the Center for Negro League Baseball Research in 2013, “Forgotten Heroes: Dick ‘Cannonball’ Redding,” by Layton Revel and Luis Munoz.

  For background on the sports-agenting business I relied on extensive interviews with Scott Boras and Leigh Steinberg and read “Sports Agents—History and Law” on the Sportslaw website, as well as Gay Talese’s October 1, 1961, article for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, “Diamonds Are a Boy’s Best Friend; If a baseball star has what it takes—including the help of a business agent named Frank Scott—he can make a wad of money endorsing anything from pants to peanut butter.”

  I also watched the movie inspired by Steinberg’s life, Jerry Maguire, several times.

  Dan Parker recorded the scene at Helen’s hospital room in the March 3 New York Mirror: “Helen’s pale, thin arms were uplifted from her sick bed to engulf the man mountain who rushed to meet them. The big movie star and home-run man dropped a few honest tears on his wife’s face, and if there was a movie camera on hand it would have recorded one of the most unaffected love scenes on record.

  “Babe scowled, on leaving the hospital, when some tactless reporter asked him if he and his wife were to be divorced.

  “‘That old story is still going the rounds,’ snapped Babe. ‘There’s nothing to it. But I wish the scandal mongers would let a man enjoy a little privacy in his family affairs.’”

  Chapter 4: October 12, Cityline

  Interviews: Brother Arcadius Alkonis, Brother Peter Donohue, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Arnold Hano, Anthony Puliatti, Vin Scully, Julia Ruth Stevens, and Anthony Swick.

  I am indebted to Tom Barthel, author of Baseball’s Peerless Semipros: The Brooklyn Bushwicks of Dexter Park and Babe Ruth Is Coming to Your Town, Post-Season Barnstorming Games, 1914–1935, for his excellent reporting and generosity in discussing his research with me.

  I supplemented what I learned from him with information about Dexter Park, found at www.ourbrooklynballparks.com, and www.Brooklynology.org, the site of the Brooklyn Public Library; in articles posted to the website “Times Newsweekly Your Neighborhood the Way It Was” (http://timesnewsweekly.com), and most especially Jane and Douglas Jacobs’s excellent history published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal in 2000.

  For background on Maxie Rosner and the Bushwicks of Brooklyn I drew from “Maxie Rosner, The Bushwick Goon,” which ran in the Jewish Post on April 27, 1945, and “Bushwicks Paid Best, but Money Was Nothing to Talk about for the Semi-Pros,” published by the Ridgewood Times and Times Newsweekly on May 5, 2016.

  The life and death of Dexter the horse were well covered in the New York Times, as was the evolution of the racetrack from pastoral Eden to a public park known for pigeon-shooting competitions to the home of the best semi-pro baseball team in New York and the Brooklyn Royal Giants from 1905 to 1913 and again, under Nat Strong from 1923 to 1927.

  To immerse myself in the development of celebrity culture I read the following:

  Leo Braudy’s The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History; Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s; Neal Gabler’s Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity; Donald L. Miller’s Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America; Karen Sternheimer’s Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility; Warren Susman’s Culture as History; Jules Tygiel’s Past Time: Baseball as History; and Patrick Trimble’s March 1996 contribution to the Colby Quarterly, “Babe Ruth: The Media Construction of a 1920’s Sport Personality.” I was especially influenced by Gumbrecht’s chapter on “Stars” and Christy Walsh’s use of a new kind of imagery; by Douglas’s discussion of the upheaval and intersection in technology and marketing; and by Braudy’s introduction, as well as the chapters “Above It All: Lindbergh and Hemingway” and “Democratic Theater and the Natural Performer.”

  For the revolution in technology and mass media, I read as much as possible from contemporaneous sources in order to get a sense of the wonder and excitement of the times. A few examples: “Our New Screen Grid Distance Getter, The Last Word in Sensitive Radio Sets,” which ran in Popular Science in September 1929 (the issue also featured a story predicting “80 Miles on a Gallon by 1939”); “Now—You Can Receive Radio Pictures,” from the October 1927 issue of Radio Broadcast; Calvin Coolidge’s Address at the Opening Meeting of the International Radiotelegraph Conference in Washington, D.C., on October 4, 1927 (accessed online at the website of the American Presidency Project); “Newsreel Theater,” which appeared in Time magazine’s November 18, 1929, issue; and “Wire Transmission of Photos Made Practical by Telepix Machine,” a page-one story in the January 2, 1925, edition of the Chicago Tribune.

  Additional sources included the AT&T website, which provides an excellent time line of its technological advances; “The History of Movie Newsreels,” retrieved from http://www.moviefanfare.com; “Behind the Dial” at www.radiostratosphere.com; Time magazine’s January 1, 2015, article, “Celebrating 80 Years of Associated Press’ Wirephoto”; “Radio Competition with Newspapers,” accessed at CQ Researcher archives; “And Now a Word from Our Sponsor: Early Radio Announcers” from Radio and Television Museum News; Jules Tygiel’s chapter “New Ways of Knowing” in Past Time: Baseball as History, and James Walker’s Crack of the Bat: A History of Baseball on the Radio.

  Heywood Broun was first
to fictionalize the Babe but novelist James T. Farrell, who was nineteen years old when he saw Ruth leaving Comiskey Park surrounded by “a crowd of over one hundred kids,” described the scene in My Baseball Diary: “Wearing a blue suit and a gray cap, there was an expression of bewilderment on his moon face. He said nothing, rolled with the kids and the strange, hysterical and noisy little mob slowly moved on to the exit gate with Ruth in the center of it. More kids rushed to the edge of the crowd and they, also, pushed and shoved. Ruth swayed from side to side, his shoulders bending one way, and then the other. As they all swirled to the gate, Ruth narrowly escaped being shoved into mustard, which had been spilled from an overturned barrel.”

  As a young boy, Anthony Puliatti accompanied his father and a troop of Italian-speaking New Jersey construction workers—taking a day off from building the Empire State Building—to see the Great Bambino. He remembered his acute embarrassment at the homemade sausage sandwiches and wine they brought to Yankee Stadium and how drunk they got on the idea of becoming fully American.

  Arnold Hano shared his memories of attending Ruth’s last pitched game on the final day of the 1933 season, a complete-game victory in which he gave up twelve hits and three walks but also hit a home run. “Two or three days later, I saw him crossing Broadway with his wife and daughter and said, ‘Babe, I saw you pitch the other day,’” Hano recalled. “He beamed at me. I said, ‘How come you didn’t strike anyone out?’ He laughed and said, ‘I wanted those eight palookas to earn their keep.’”

  Chapter 5: October 13, Asbury Park

  Interviews: Carl Conger, Carolyn Major-Neilson, Karen Conger Scott, Toni Stein, and Tom Willman.

  The New York Times lavished attention on events in Asbury Park with full game coverage and a four-deck headline that told the entire story of the day: “36 BASEBALLS LOST ENDING RUTH GAME, Game Supply Gone When Gehrig Homer Drops into the Lake—Babe Nearly Mobbed, RUTH DEMANDS CASH FIRST, Makes Sure of $2,500 After Park of Gate Is Attached—Hits Homer, Winning at Asbury Park, 8–5.”