The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Chapter 8: October 16, Omaha

  Interviews: Anne Bernays, Bob Chenoweth, Steve Hayes, Jack Landers, Pat O’Donnell, Nancy Pope, Jane Landers Price, Steve Rosenblatt, Jean Svadlenak, Polly Thielmeier, Linda Ruth Tosetti, and Fred Toulch.

  Writing this chapter was easy and fun, given the mirthful saturation coverage accorded Lady Amco in the Omaha World Herald, the Omaha Bee, the Lincoln Evening Journal, the Norfolk Daily News, three wire services, and a full profile in the New York Times. Arthur Brisbane, the majordomo for the Hearst Syndicate, weighed in with a column that ran in, among other places, the Manitowoc, Wisconsin, Herald-Times on October 19: “It would surprise the idol of America to know that such a hen as Lady Norfolk is more important to the country than all its baseball players.”

  The only story I couldn’t find for her was an obituary. I was aided immeasurably by the surviving children of the chicken breeder A. R. Landers—Polly Thielmeier, Jane Price, and Jack Landers—and by Bob Chenoweth, whose father, Harold, filmed the meeting at the henhouse. Bob Chenoweth enlisted the aid of the UCLA film school in restoring his father’s footage, which he donated to the University of Nebraska–Omaha and which was made available to me by archivist Amy Schindler at the Criss Library. Information about airmail service in the United States in the fall of 1927 and the harrowing journey of the record-breaking egg from Omaha to the White House came from Nancy Pope, archivist at the United States Postal Museum.

  In the section devoted to Omaha baseball, I relied on Devon Niebling and Thomas Hyde’s Baseball in Omaha; Judy Horan’s 2015 article on “Western League Park,” available at www.omahamagazine .com; and interviews with Steve Hayes, the CEO of Omaha Print Company, and Pat O’Donnell and Steve Rosenblatt, whose fathers played in the game.

  To educate myself on the emerging industry of public relations and marketing, I read the following: Morris Markey’s “Reporter at Large, Merchants of Glory” in the August 28, 1926, issue of the New Yorker; Calvin Coolidge’s October 26, 1926, address before the American Association of Advertising Agencies in Washington, D.C., which I found online at Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley’s American presidency project; Bruce Barton’s novel, The Man Nobody Knows; the writings of Ivy Lee, and Edward L. Bernays’s Propaganda, Crystallizing Public Opinion, and Biography of an Idea; as well as Larry Tye’s biography, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations.

  Among Bernays’s papers at the Library of Congress, I found his typescript notes describing his relationship with Bernarr Macfadden, correspondence with his cranky uncle Sigmund complaining about royalties, and a list of the press releases he prepared for Jacob Ruppert and the United States Brewers Association, one quoting “a leading doctor of a Tennessee hospital” on the medicinal benefits of beer and another attesting to its unexplored uses in cooking: “Beer Imparts New Flavor to Vegetable Salad.” Walsh’s speech tweaking Bernays and the World’s Fair memo connecting them were found in the Christy Walsh files in the New York Public Library’s Fair archives.

  Benjamin Clark at Boys Town provided clippings and photographs of Ruth’s visits to the institution as well as the account of “Johnnie-the-Gloom-Killer’s” broadcast following Ruth’s 1927 visit—“Johnnie Tells Radio Audience About Babe Ruth”—in Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home Journal, November 1927. Frank Graham testified to the sincerity of Ruth’s good works on pages 210–11 in The New York Yankees.

  The background on the Dennison family is from “The Gray Wolf: Tom Dennison of Omaha” in Nebraska History magazine. Johnny Dennison’s account of “The Day the Babe and Lou Were in Omaha” by Michael Kelly appeared in the October 16, 1977, Omaha World-Herald.

  Accounts of Ruth’s gambling losses during his 1920 visit to Cuba were reported by Arthur Robinson in Collier’s, September 20, 1924. He elaborated in a July 31, 1926, New Yorker profile, “The Babe,” writing that Ruth had been forced to cancel his passage home because he owed $65,000. But Helen, who had saved enough money to buy apartment houses in Boston without Ruth’s knowledge, bailed him out. In the 1922 American Weekly series, author Mrs. Margaret Hill, identified as the “Queen of the Underworld,” quotes Ruth as telling Helen, “I’m cleaned out, busted, broke. I’ve lost $95,000 besides $35,000 that I won the first day.”

  T. L. Huston’s correspondence with Landis is housed in the Ruth archive at the Hall of Fame. The letter from Jerome Williams commending Landis can be found in the Kenesaw Mountain Landis archives. For additional background on the fight with Ruth and the commissioner’s judicial career, I read “The Jurisprudence of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis” by Shayna M. Sigman, Marquette Sports Law Review (2005); and David Pietrusza’s Judge and Jury: The Life and Times of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The assertion that Huston paid off promoters of the canceled games appears on page 98 in Ruth and Considine.

  The dollar amount he generated for the Yankees in 1921 is based on an economic analysis of the Yankee accounting books and daily team ledgers at the National Baseball Hall of Fame compiled by economist Michael Haupert.

  Hunt’s stories about Ruth’s 1921–22 barnstorming tour and the “Back to the Farm Dinner” are from Wagenheim. I found Margery Lee’s account of the opening performance in Boston in the Christy Walsh scrapbooks in Cooperstown. Variety, which reported Ruth’s weekly salary as $2,500 for twenty weeks, provided extensive coverage of the tour, including the opening-night telegram he received from Helen Keller, then touring in her own vaudeville show on the Orpheum Circuit, and less than satisfactory receipts resulting in the firing of the original piano player.

  I first saw the morals clause inserted in Ruth’s 1922 contract at the home of Jay Baker, a collector who had purchased the original agreement. It is widely available online. (See “Behave, Bambino: Ruth’s 1922 Contract at Auction,” Sports Collectors Daily, May 18, 2015.) I also read about the issue in a 2015 article in Marquette University School of Law’s Current Ethical Issues in Sports Law, “Morals Clauses in Sports Contracts: A Look at the Past and Future Use of Morals Clauses in Player Contracts and Sponsorship/Endorsement Agreements” by Scott A. Andresen.

  “Yankees Training on Scotch” can be found on page 74 in Graham’s The History of the New York Yankees. The account of the private eye hired to follow Ruth et al. is also in Graham, pages 76–80. The fees the Yankees paid for their services are from the daily ledgers in Cooperstown.

  A. R. Landers never raised another champion chicken. He raised rabbits for food for his family after leaving Nebraska. After his sudden death in December 1967 on a trip back home to Norfolk, his wife, Dorothy, who had worked the farm alongside him, wrote a family history, “A Grandmother Remembers,” for her grandchildren, which provided the only account of their brief fling with fame: “My father had a large chicken farm and your granddaddy managed it. We raised high egg-producing chickens, trap nested and kept records on each hen. Had to grade eggs each hour,” she wrote with typical midwestern understatement. “There was a lot to do and to learn.”

  Chapter 9: October 17, Aboard the Rock Island Line to Des Moines

  Interviews: Donna Analovitch, Jerry Della Femina, Kevin Goering, Michael Haupert, Genevieve Herrlein, George Lois, Leigh Steinberg, and Julia Ruth Stevens.

  Jean Svadlenak, official historian for Lee Jeans, documented Ruth’s participation in the Whizit campaign of 1927–28 and the distribution of $1,000 in prize money and provided copies of the original photograph of Ruth in his Union-Alls as well as a scan of the advertisement that ran in Liberty magazine comparing the speed of the Whizit to a Walter Johnson fastball. She could not confirm Ruth’s reported $3,000 fee, which Walsh later disparaged as “purported”—probably because he didn’t arrange the endorsement—in a November 1927 deposition pertaining to the Baby Ruth bar.

  The case file in George H. Ruth Candy Co., Inc. v. Curtiss Candy Co., Inc.—including all briefs, depositions, and appeals before the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals on May 14, 1931, and the decision handed down on May 27, 1931—was acquired
from the United States Custom and Patent Court archive in Kansas. Walsh’s correspondence with company officials and their attorneys, including the angry reply from Louis Glick, dated April 23, 1927, accusing Walsh and Ruth of having been dishonest in their initial negotiations, is from the Christy Walsh catalogs.

  Attorney Kevin Goering, an expert in sports law and the right of publicity, not only schooled me in courthouse legal history but gathered all the related cases: Roberson v. Rochester Folding Box Co.; George H. Ruth Candy Co. v. Curtiss Candy Co.; O’Brien v. Pabst Sales Co.; Haelen Laboratories v. Topps Chewing Gum; Pirone v. Macmillan Incorporated. He also dug out of the mothballs Ruth’s testimony in Ruth v. Educational Films. Although August 20 was an off-day for the Yankees, the statement was “read in support of Motion.” The subsequent lawsuit was reported in the Times on September 16.

  For background on the evolution of the law and the Baby Ruth controversy, I read Samantha Chmelik’s in-depth profile of Otto Y. Schnering, posted on the online site immigrantentrepreneurship.org; Timothy C. Williams, “The Right of Publicity: You Can’t Take It with You,” Pepperdine Law Review, May 15, 1984; “When the Babe Struck Out, Protecting the Name and Likeness of the Baseball Icon Under Trademark Law,” a paper presented by attorney Sharlene McEvoy at the 1995 Hofstra University conference on Ruth’s one hundredth birthday; and Charles A. Poekel Jr.’s presentation at the 2010 Cooperstown symposium, “Babe Ruth vs. Baby Ruth: The Quest for a Candy Bar.”

  Among the most useful of the daily news stories were: “Candy Makers Know Value of a Brand Name,” Chicago Tribune, December 9, 1951; “Court Rules Ruth Name Is Private, Image Is Not,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 1990; “A Babe Ruth Myth Is Stirred Up Again,” New York Times, April 7, 2002; “Baseball Adopts a Candy, Whatever It’s Named For,” New York Times, June 6, 2006.

  John Kenfield’s recollections about his employment at the Curtiss Candy Co. and discussions with Ruth about the candy bar came from the University of North Carolina’s 2002 men’s tennis media guide.

  Coverage of the Baby Ruth candy drops was profuse. Additional details came from Jeff Wells’s article “The Day Baby Ruths Rained Down on Pittsburgh,” published on www.mentalfloss.com on October 19, 2015. The role of the candy drops in the fate of Enola Gay pilot, Paul W. Tibbets Jr., was confirmed by his November 2, 2007, obituary in the New York Times.

  The figures on Ruth’s endorsement income are from the Christy Walsh catalogs (see appendix 2). George H. Ruth Candy Co. lawyers might have had a stronger case had they produced as evidence the earliest Baltimore newspaper accounts of his career in which he was known as Baby Ruth.

  He suffered another promotional setback in 1931. In an effort to cash in on his reputation for sartorial splendor, he lent his name to an ill-timed venture in upscale men’s accessories—hats, ties, and belts—called “Babe Ruth’s Shop for Men,” which opened on Broadway with much fanfare in September 1930 and went belly-up seven months later. Once again, Ruth ended up in litigation over the use of his name when the creditors who took over the remaining inventory tried to market the resulting enterprise as Babe Ruth’s failure.

  The resurgence in Ruth’s marketing clout in the mid-1990s was thoroughly documented in Jeffrey Marx’s February 6, 1996, story for Sports Illustrated, “It’s a Babe-O-Nanza, on the Eve of Ruth’s 100th Birthday, Curtis Management Has Reason to Cheer.” By agreement, all endorsement income was split three ways, with a third going to the Babe Ruth League, a third to Julia Ruth Stevens, and a third split further by Dorothy’s five children. According to daughters Donna Analovitch and Genevieve Herrlein, the income was considerable, even after Curtis Management took a 40 percent commission.

  His name continued to have value in the marketplace. Julia was on hand at the ESPN Zone in New York on October 20, 2003, when the Donruss trading card company began cutting one-inch squares from a game-worn 1925 uniform, with the intent of inserting 2,100 such pieces into packs of baseball cards. (The company had purchased the uniform at auction the year before for $264,210.) Although the revenue has dwindled, Analovitch says, it has not dried up entirely.

  In 1946, Ruth gamely lent his name and his girth to Jockey, the men’s underwear company, in an advertisement for “Babe Ruth Longjohns” with the tag line “There Is Only One Babe Ruth, There Is Only One Jockey.”

  In 2013, Jockey came calling again. The advertising mavens dressed a Babe Ruth avatar in modern undies for a relaunch of the brand. The campaign was called “Supporting Greatness.” They stuck Ruth’s head, shoulders, and arms on top of a twenty-first-century lower body with an eight-pack he never had, in underwear he never wore, and added this message: “Babe Ruth’s Durable Jockey Underwear Supported His Greatness. His Bat Helped Too. But We Don’t Sell Bats.” (See Tim Nudd’s August 26, 2014, story at www.adweek.com.)

  The TV campaign, highlighting astronaut Buzz Aldrin, with General George S. Patton and Babe Ruth in supporting roles, obscured an ironic truth. Celebrity pitchmen are no longer a safe bet for advertisers. “Every single advertiser quakes before they hire anybody,” explained Jerry Della Femina, the Madman of Madison Avenue who created Joe Isuzu and the Meow Mix theme. “I once wanted to use Martha Stewart as a spokesman. They said, ‘What if she gets in trouble?’

  “I said, ‘She’s not going to get in trouble.’

  “Two years later she was in jail.”

  In death, Ruth became what he never was in life—unassailable.

  Chapter 10: October 18, Sioux City

  Interviews: Dan Donohue, Carole Horn, R. C. Raycraft, Joanne Loughlin Sanderson, Julia Ruth Stevens, Tom Stevens, Lee Swanson, and Linda Ruth Tosetti.

  R. C. Raycraft, filmmaker and flea-picker extraordinaire, made this chapter possible. In March 2011, he shared the story of his acquisition of the footage of Ruth’s visit to the Donohue family home, along with some of the footage, with the New York Times; this resulted in three stories: “Film Shows Babe Ruth, at Leisure and Up Close,” on March 22, 2011; and two stories on March 25, “Memory and Mystery for Family in Ruth Film” and “A Man Remembers Meeting the Babe,” featuring an interview with Phil Donohue, the boy with the wicked lasso.

  The space allotted to the story is an indication of how rare it is to see the Babe on film, especially film of this quality, which was shot by Dudley Scott, who owned two movie theaters and was president of a company that made motion cameras.

  Joanne Loughlin Sanderson, the youngest of the surviving Donohue children, said the family was puzzled by the use of part of the footage in two 1990s HBO documentaries, When It Was a Game 2 and Babe Ruth. The family assumed it had the only copy. Sanderson sent me copies of all the newspaper clippings she had, as well as a photograph taken that day showing her brothers with Ruth and Gehrig and the pony, Molly.

  Raycraft shared the entire sequence with me, allowing me to see the Babe’s exuberance close-up and the profound alteration in his mien when he no longer wanted to be photographed.

  The Sioux City Journal published its own account, “Lost & Found: Fresh Film of Ruth, Gehrig in Sioux City Resurfaces,” on March 29, 2011. I am indebted to Terry Hersom, sports editor of the Journal, not only for sending me the paper’s entire clip file on Ruth’s visits to the city but for writing a column soliciting help for my re-creation of the 1927 game. That resulted in interviews with Pat O’Donnell and Steve Rosenblatt, whose fathers were on the field that day, as well as Phil Donohue’s son, Dan, and daughter Joanne, who was featured in the Cherokee Chronicle Times on April 11, 2011, “Cherokee Woman’s Family Hosted Sports Legends, Ruth, Gehrig, Louis, Dempsey Visited Sioux City Home.”

  In the section about Ruth’s life in Sudbury, I relied on Smelser’s correspondence with former Sudbury town historian Francis Bradshaw, current town historian Lee Swanson, and the Middlesex County Registry of Deeds. According to county records, Ruth did not purchase the property until June 1923. Marshall Hunt’s anecdotes about Ruth’s pranks and the journalistic fallout from the Dolores Dixon affair are from Wagenheim. />
  Dixon did not completely disappear from the printed page. On August 5, 1923, the Pittsburgh Press ran a two-page spread with Dixon prominently featured in a fur coat: “How the Wolves of the Underworld Entrap Their Victims, Rather Startling Revelations of the Methods of the New York Blackmailers to Squeeze Large Sums from Prominent Men Who Cannot Afford to Be Involved in Public Scandal.” Ruth was quoted at length and in high dudgeon: “A girl who has a jail record accused me of doing some serious things and sued me in court. A lot of people advised me to hush the affair up, but I didn’t do what she said I did and I decided to fight it. I had been trimmed by some crooks before. I had an opportunity to settle this girl’s case, but I spent twice as much proving I was innocent than it would have cost me to settle.”

  The dollar amounts for Ruth’s fines, advances, and medical expenses are itemized in the Yankees daily ledgers in Cooperstown.

  Background on the construction of Yankee Stadium comes from multiple sources: daily coverage in the Times; minutes of Yankees board meetings in Jacob Ruppert’s papers at the New York Public Library, in which executives agreed to pay $550,000 for ten acres from the Astor estate, plus $15,000 for two adjacent lots owned by Peter Braschoss and his wife ($10,000 of which was financed at 5.5 percent interest); a transcript of an August 5, 1938, radio interview with Ruppert, which puts the figure at $600,000 plus $2.5 million in construction costs. The Yankees accounting books examined by Michael Haupert placed the cost of 11.6 acres in Goatville at $792,000.

  Equally helpful was a review in the November 7, 1923, issue of the American Architect. While extolling the toilet arrangements, the reviewer, an architect from Portland, Oregon, despaired of the sight lines and the short porch in right field. Clearly, he didn’t understand that the dimensions were tailored for Ruth’s left-handed swing: form followed function. I also drew on “The Ballpark and the City: Yankee Stadium’s Renovation,” published in New York Affairs in 1983.