by Jane Leavy
This was the last of the barnstorming games the paper covered in detail, but not the last dispatch it published. Walsh importuned John Kieran to weigh in with an October 15 column. Other New York dailies, including the Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Herald, followed suit.
Local New Jersey papers, including the Asbury Park Evening Press, published Ed Neil’s interview in full and continuing coverage of the legal tussle over the gate receipts. The decision in Harry N. Johnson, Sheriff of the County of Monmouth, Complainant, v. Joseph Lyons et al., Defendants, in the Court of Chancery, handed down on October 13, 1928, was accessed at www.Casetext.com.
In addition to the daily newspaper coverage of the miracle at Johnny Sylvester’s bedside, I read Charles A. Poekel’s Babe & the Kid: The Legendary Story of Babe Ruth and Johnny Sylvester and Paul Gallico’s hyperbolic account on page 37 in Farewell to Sport: “. . . it was God himself who walked into the room, straight from His glittering throne, God dressed in a camel’s hair polo coat and flat camel’s hair cap, God with a flat nose and little piggy eyes and a big grin, and a fat, black cigar sticking out of the side of it.”
Sylvester’s autographed ball sold for a quarter of a million dollars in 2014.
Despite the inflated dollar figures bandied about in newspapers about Ruth’s contract with First National Studios for Babe Comes Home, the contract called for him to receive $30,000, as stated in a letter of agreement between Walsh and the studio, which I found in the Christy Walsh catalogs. (His net was $22,488.46.)
Tom Willman, a former editorial writer for the Riverside Enterprise, volunteered his story about Roman Warren as well as earlier coverage of the daredevil pilot in the newspaper.
Marshall Hunt’s daily coverage in the Daily News from the set of Babe Comes Home was as funny as it was invaluable. His elaboration on the events of that spring is from three sources: the transcript of his interview with Holtzman, the published account of that interview, and Wagenheim’s tape-recorded interviews at the Hall of Fame. The last is also the source for the meeting between Captain Joe Patterson and Babe Ruth en route to New York.
The account of the $33,000 press conference is from Kennedy in Collier’s. Walsh’s correspondence with the Bank of Manhattan is from the Christy Walsh catalog. Westbrook Pegler first addressed the issue of Ruth’s salary negotiation in two columns: “Babe Ruth Now an Industry and Has Acquired Manager,” which ran in the Washington Post on February 11, 1927, and “Ruth Jealous of Offer to Walker,” from the April 25, 1927, edition of the same paper, in which he offered his first re-creation of the dialogue on the train. Pegler revisited the issue on October 1, 1941, in his “Fair Enough” column in the Post, on the subject of collective bargaining and why it had no business in baseball (see chapter 11 note).
I am indebted to San Diego baseball historian William Swank for providing the legal documents in the case against Ruth for violating child labor laws (retrieved in 2004 from the San Diego Historical Society). They reveal just how much of a lightning rod Ruth’s celebrity had become by February 1927 and also Christy Walsh’s reluctance to pay legal bills, a recurring theme in his letters.
Stanley Gue’s grandchildren, Carl E. Conger and Karen Conger Scott, provided detail on the career of their eccentric, leftist grandfather and his zealous prosecution of the Babe. A true believer in his youth, Gue had a late-in-life political conversion when called to testify by the House Committee on Un-American Activities about communist activity in San Diego.
As for William Truby’s invitation to “Come See Babe Ruth Hit One 450 Feet into the Lake,” it was pure marketing. The high school field at Asbury Park is one of three sites on the tour still in use today; the others are at Santa Barbara High School and Balboa Stadium in San Diego. The concrete stands in Asbury Park remain intact. Using Google Earth images of the Asbury Park field in its present configuration and a postcard from the Ticknor Brothers Postcard Collection at the Boston Public Library, baseball physicist and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Alan Nathan calculated the distance from home plate down the foul lines to Deal Lake as only 355 feet and about 395 feet to straightaway center field. “Of course, we don’t know how far beyond the shoreline the ball traveled,” Nathan said. “But even at about four hundred feet, it was not a big deal, at least by today’s standards—except to everyone in attendance.”
Ed Neil quit the fun-and-games department to become a foreign correspondent the same year Babe Ruth quit baseball. His travels took him to Ethiopia to cover the Italian invasion, to Palestine to document an Arab uprising, to London to witness the coronation of King George VI, and to a town named Caudé in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, to cover the insurgent forces led by General Francisco Franco for the Associated Press. He and four other reporters were huddled in a car caught between the lines when an artillery shell hit their vehicle on December 31, 1937. Neil finished the story he had been writing in the car and died two days later. The only survivor was Harold A. Philby of the Times of London, who, in the tradition of war correspondents, sent Neil’s copy to the AP. He later became infamous as Kim Philby, the British agent who spied for the Soviet Union. Ruth was named in Neil’s obituary as one of his many friends.
Chapter 6: October 13–14, Aboard the Manhattan Limited to Lima
Interviews: Brother Arcadius Alkonis, Kathy Carmody, Gerald Cohen, Father Gabe Costa, Brian Cromer, Carolyn Reed Detrick, Teresa Diehl, Brother Peter Donohue, Doris Kiel-Shamieh, Mike Lackey, Jean Mor, Francis X. McGillivary, Jan McNamee, Harry and Gina Pippin, Jonathan Shahan, David Stinson, Linda Ruth Tosetti, and Mary Tormollan.
The description of the fare available aboard the train came from “Pennsylvania Railroad Information Bulletin,” which was published in September 1927, and included two pertinent stories: “Dining Car Workers of This Railroad Go to School” and “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig.” The description of what Ruth imbibed on board the train comes from page 6 in Sobol.
Details about the hectic day in Lima were found in the Allen County Reporter, which was published by the Allen County Historical Society in 1995, and featured photographs of Halloran Park and other highlights about their visit. Raymond A. Shuck’s stories, “When the Broadway Limited Stopped in Lima: An Ohio Town Embraces the Babe,” and “Babe’s in Tourland: How Babe Ruth Was Well-Suited for Barnstorming,” can be found in Baseball and the Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth at 100, a compendium of essays written for the 1995 Hofstra University Symposium held in honor of Ruth’s centenary.
I am indebted to Mike Lackey, former sportswriter for the Lima News, who arranged for an item to be placed in the paper soliciting information for the book, which resulted in invaluable interviews with Carolyn Detrick, whose uncle umpired the game, and Teresa Diehl, whose mother presented the trophy to Ruth.
In the section of the chapter devoted to Ruth’s life at St. Mary’s and the brothers who served there, I relied extensively on Cyril M. Witte’s PhD dissertation, submitted to the University of Notre Dame Department of Education in August 1955, “A History of Saint Mary’s Industrial School for Boys of the City of Baltimore, 1866–1950.” It was a godsend.
To supplement his account of daily life in the institution, the growth of the campus, and its early history, I examined the annual reports prepared for state and city officials in the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and the archives of the Baltimore Sun, which routinely covered doings at the school. The 1906 annual report noted that sixty-six head of cattle, averaging 1,800 pounds, had been shipped to Scotland. That same year, the state allocated $50,000 to build a separate dormitory for minims, with a gym on the first floor, as well as a new building for teaching the trades in which George Ruth learned to make a proper collar.
I’m especially grateful to Kevin Cawley and the staff at the University of Notre Dame, who photocopied the entire St. Mary’s file in the archives of the Xaverian Order, which included religious histories for each of the brothers at the school. The file for Brother Matthias, Martin Boutilier, included the reports of his fall
from grace and his removal from St. Mary’s.
Brother Arcadius Alkonis, archivist at St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, Massachusetts, where Matthias spent the remainder of his life, provided essential background on the Xaverian Order and the men who served in it. In addition to sharing his personal memories, he provided otherwise impossible-to-find newspaper articles in the religious press, among them Tom Sheehan’s column in the Church World from April 4, 1992: “Xaverian Brothers Influenced Babe Ruth’s Early Life,” with biographical information on Brother Matthias. He also introduced me to Brother Peter Donohue, who served at St. Mary’s.
I also relied on Paul F. Harris’s account of Ruth’s early life, Babe Ruth: The Dark Side, and Lewis Leisman’s thirty-six-page pamphlet, I Was with Babe Ruth at St. Mary’s, found in the archives at the Babe Ruth Museum. Harris’s reporting in 1995 was impressive; he found and reproduced previously unseen childhood documents. But in the absence of the full story of the family’s dissolution, he came to a harsh and judgmental conclusion. Leisman became an unlikely witness for Alger Hiss in the McCarthy-era prosecution of him as a Communist spy.
Brother Gilbert’s memoir, Young Babe Ruth: His Early Life and Baseball Career, from the Memoirs of a Xaverian Brother, was helpful in reconstructing the not-yet-Babe’s baseball career at St. Mary’s and was certainly far more reliable than Westbrook Pegler’s 1920 fantasy, or Babe Ruth’s Own Book of Baseball, ghostwritten by Ford Frick (as he belatedly admitted to Sports Illustrated in an April 9, 1962, profile), which offered few observations on life that Ruth would have recognized as his own.
The details about the culinary fare at St. Mary’s are from pages ix–x in Brother John Joseph Sterne’s foreword to Young Babe Ruth.
Jesse Linthicum’s recollections were recorded for an April 27, 1948, Baltimore radio show that was shared by Mike Gibbons.
An April 12, 1928, story in the Sun sheds light on Ruth’s ongoing relationship with the brothers at St. Mary’s: “Brother Paul Takes a Larger Field, New Xaverian Superior.” The account of Tommy Padgett’s death is in his obituary in the Olean, New York, Times Herald from March 16, 1920, “Well Known Ballplayer Meets Death.” The description of his friendship with Ruth, of the baseball offer Ruth turned down, and of his visit to the cemetery is from the Boston Daily Globe, October 21, 1921, “Ruth Weeps at Grave of Chum.”
According to Julia Ruth Stevens, George Jr. was given leave to attend the funeral of his mother, about whom Paul Harris would later write that he had “never seen or heard of a woman more neglected.” An account in the February 6, 2008, Baltimore Sun, “A Buried Past, 96 Years Later, Katie Ruth’s Grave to Be Marked,” described the efforts of Harris and the Babe Ruth Museum to rectify her son’s alleged dereliction of duty, which culminated in a five-minute service held the following summer in heat so scorching that elderly mourners stayed in their cars. Father Gabriel Costa, a mathematics professor at West Point and baseball analytics guru, blessed the newly erected rose granite headstone with holy water, read from John 6:53–58, recited the Lord’s Prayer, and gave the blessing asking the Almighty to “cast out all evil.”
The date of George Ruth Sr.’s marriage to Martha Sipes was found in Druscilla Null’s “My Father Was of German Extraction.” The description of “the big to do in the saloon” was drawn from Mamie Moberly’s aforementioned story in People.
An original print of the photograph of George Sr. and Jr. behind the bar in Ruth’s Café, with the photographer’s credit visible in the lower right-hand corner, V. Velzis Studios, was sold by Robert Edwards Auctions for $39,000 on May 5, 2018.
The fight in the bar that resulted in George Sr.’s death in August 1918 got big play in the Baltimore papers—“Fight Ends in Death,” reported the Sunday, August 26, 1918, edition of the Sun—as did the arrest and subsequent acquittal of Benjamin Sipes. George Sr. was prominent enough, or his son was, to merit a front-page obituary and an accompanying photograph. No one in the press appeared to connect the fight to a small item that had appeared in the Sun on January 11, “Sold Soldier Dope IS CHARGE, Benjamin A. Sipes Arrest.”
The sorry details of George Sr.’s death are from Mamie Ruth Moberly’s 1991 interview with Mike Gibbons.
Chapter 7: October 15, Kansas City, Missouri
Interviews: Ray Cauthen, Max Gail, John Holway, Monte Irvin, Bill Jenkinson, CeCe Moore, Harry Pippin, John Resnikoff, John Paul Stevens, and Linda Ruth Tosetti.
I first heard the rumors about Ruth “passing” from my father, a water boy for the 1927 New York football Giants, who had heard them from his father. Speculation about Ruth’s ethnicity has never fully abated.
Bill Jenkinson alerted me to the April 9, 1927, column by W. Rollo Wilson in the Pittsburgh Courier, which as far as I can tell is the first time such speculation made it into print. Frank Graham divulged the altercation in the Giants’ locker room at the Polo Grounds in the New York Yankees: An Informal History, pages 85–87. Creamer re-created the scene on pages 269–70 in Babe; he quoted Louis Leisman’s account of racial taunting at St. Mary’s on page 38, where he also related the story of Ruth’s preemptive greeting of a schoolmate at Madison Square Garden in 1930; on page 185, he elaborated on the Red Sox racial taunting. Fred Lieb’s interview with Holtzman on page 54 of No Cheering provided further details. See Charles Leerhsen’s Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty for a reconsideration of Cobb’s racism.
I am indebted to John Holway for the wisdom and perspective he shared in our conversation and in two stories posted at www.baseball guru.com, “The Myth of Ruth” and “Barry and the Babe.”
The Sporting News editorial about the color line in baseball was published on December 6, 1923.
Spike Lee’s column in the May 2001 issue of Gotham spawned a new round of speculation and rejoinder in the press, including Daniel Okrent’s May 7, 2001, column in Sports Illustrated, “Background Check, Was Babe Ruth Black? More Important, Should We Care?” and Clarence Page’s May 17, 2001, syndicated column for the Chicago Tribune, “Was Babe Ruth Black? And Why It Matters,” which was widely reprinted.
Historian Lawrence Hogan, who has written extensively on the history of the Negro Leagues, shared his essay at www.BestThinking .com, “Babe Ruth Was a Negro Leaguer!?” which included many clippings from the African American press.
Bill Jenkinson traced Ruth’s engagement with the African American community and “mixed-race and race players” in an essay posted at his website in 2009 and updated in 2016, “Babe Ruth and the Issue of Race.”
I found the Associated Negro Press account of Game 3 at Wrigley Field in the archives of Black Newspapers at the Library of Congress; E. M. Swift retold the story in his 1980 history of Wrigley Field for Sports Illustrated, “One Place That Hasn’t Seen the Light.”
Hendrik Willem van Loon’s interview with the United Press, “Noted Writer Discusses Ku Klux Klan, Kreisler, Art and Babe Ruth in Interview,” appeared in the Pittsburgh Press on October 15, 1927. For general background on the Ku Klux Klan in 1927, I read the Literary Digest from that period. For history on the Ku Klux Klan and its competition against an All-Black Baseball Team in Wichita, see the March 26, 2012, post “Baseball History, Only a Game, WBUR, May 26, 2012,” and subsequent stories at www.kansasreportingblog.com. (The Klan Nine also played the Hebrew All-Star Nines in Washington, D.C., on Labor Day, September 1, 1926, as reported in the Washington Post. One of the players on the victorious Hebrew squad was Abe Povich, whose brother, Shirley, was sports editor at the Post.)
For Ruth’s dislike for underwear, see Arthur Robinson in Collier’s, September 20, 1924; for details on his unsanitary habits, see Ken Sobol’s Babe Ruth & the American Dream, pages 62–63. Creamer, on pages 19–20, quotes the owner of the toothbrush as saying the story was untrue. However, another former roommate, Charlie Deal of the Boston Braves, told stories of Ruth’s inclination for spitting chewing tobacco across their small apartment while sitting on the toilet.
Background on Wheatley-Provident Hospital, the fi
rst such facility for African American children in the Midwest, is from the Journal of the National Medical Association, “The Pediatric Department of Wheatley-Provident Hospital, Kansas City, Missouri.” Background about Ruth’s visits to Mercy Hospital for Children, including the follow-up story about the donation of the Monitor Top refrigerator, was provided by the Miller Nichols Library at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
Background on photographer George Cauthen was not hard to find, considering how often he made news. On March 6, 1931, he was punched in open court by a lawyer and former U.S. senator after photographing his client, Mrs. Myrtle Bennett, who was on trial for shooting her husband during a hand of bridge. (She was acquitted the next day.) Other exploits are described in Jack Price’s history of photojournalism, News Pictures, including Cauthen’s “shot-by-shot” coverage of a gun battle between a posse of lawmen and three escaped convicts who had abducted Leavenworth warden Thomas B. White. In August 1934, the AP reported that Cauthen took a gun off a robber who had attacked him in his car in Adrian, Missouri. (The .38 Smith and Wesson is now in the collection of the J. M. Davis Gun Museum in Claremont, Oklahoma.) By 1938, Cauthen had quit the newspaper, disappearing from the pages of the Journal and memory, and had a new job working as a photographer for an Oklahoma homicide-suicide squad.
His photograph from Wheatley-Provident is preserved in the Christy Walsh scrapbooks at Cooperstown and in digitized images of pages from the Chicago Defender and the New York Amsterdam News. The original negative could not be found.
The banquet at the Palmer House, hosted by Christy Walsh prior to the Southern Cal–Notre Dame game, was attended by all the important football writers in Chicago and the Midwest, and many from New York. “Grid Tutors to Speak by Radio Before Big Tilt,” the Lincoln Evening Journal reported. Though the speeches by Rockne and the other coaches were broadcast, neither Ruth’s disappearance that afternoon nor his drunken remarks were reported until Kennedy’s April 1928 piece in Collier’s.