by Jane Leavy
Nicholas F. Cotton, public and media affairs manager for the Fulton County Clerk of the Superior and Magistrate Court, provided documents from Claire’s divorce from Frank Hodgson. Notice of the divorce was published in the Atlanta Constitution on July 10, 1920. The correspondence between the Yankees front office and Landis regarding Ruth’s betting is in the Ruth archive at the Hall of Fame.
Huggins’s conversation with Mark Roth about disciplining Ruth is on page 145 in Graham, pages 102–4 in Tom Meany’s Babe Ruth, and page 280 in Creamer.
The carny quality of the barnstorming tour was in evidence at Stockyards Park in Sioux City when a young boy standing behind a rope along the third baseline darted under it to greet Ruth at home plate after a home run. Ruth shooed concerned police away—“Officers, leave that kid alone,” he said, according to a letter the boy, Hy Albeck, later wrote to the Hall of Fame. “I said I wanted to take his picture and he posed for me. He then said, ‘anything else’ and I asked him to call Lou over, so I could take his picture. After I took Lou’s picture, he said, ‘anything else.’ So, I asked him to call Lou out of the dugout, so I could take their picture together. Babe then said, ‘anything else.’ I said I wanted their autographs, so I walked between them to the dugout where they signed my autograph book.’”
And, then he ran all the way home—as did batboy Phil Donohue, who made off with six autographed baseballs. His trove dwindled over time—he gave one away; four others were lost by his children on fields of play, until only one remained. By then Phil had fourteen grandchildren, his son Dan said. He sold the ball because he couldn’t decide whom to give it to. It fetched $13,000 at Guernsey’s 1999 New York auction when Mark McGwire’s seventieth home run ball sold for $3 million.
Chapter 11: October 19, Denver
Interviews: Jean Beswick, Father Eugene DelConte, Patricia Grace, Katherine Honey, Bernie and Nancy and John Kennedy, Robert Lipsyte, Ellen Maher, Father Jim Martinez, Tim Mitchell, Father George Riley, Father James Spenard, Julia Ruth Stevens, Linda Ruth Tosetti, Craig Woodford, and Steve Wulf.
After all the huzzahs and hallelujah headlines greeting Ruth and Gehrig, it was refreshing to read the unadorned coverage from Des Moines. “Ruth and Lou Gehrig Disappoint Local Fans,” was the headline in the Des Moines Evening Tribune on October 18, 1928. The game story in the Des Moines Register was blunter, calling it “a baseball atrocity,” an estimation buried on the jump page.
In researching the evolution of sportswriting from cheerleading to journalism, I immersed myself in Stanley Woodward’s primer, Sports Page, and his subsequent memoir, Paper Tiger: An Old Sportswriter’s Reminiscences of People, Newspapers, War, and Work; Jimmy Breslin’s Damon Runyon, A Life; Charles Fountain’s Sportswriter: The Life and Times of Grantland Rice; Ford Frick’s Games, Asterisks, and People: Memoirs of a Lucky Fan; Paul Gallico’s Golden People and Farewell to Sport; and all of the interviews with reporters who knew and covered Ruth in No Cheering in the Press Box. Woody Paige’s description of Otto Floto appeared in his June 16, 2007, farewell column in the Denver Post. Former Post staff writer Terry Frei described Damon Runyon’s brief but colorful tenure in Floto’s sports department, when he was still known as Alfred, in a July 24, 2000, story, “A Legend from Pueblo to the Big Apple.” Hired in 1905, Runyon was fired in 1906, allegedly because a prostitute was found typing a story in the newsroom on his behalf while he was indisposed.
For a beautifully written take on the press box in the Golden Era, and the standoff between the adherents of “aw nuts” and “gee whiz” sportswriting, read the chapter titled “Young Men of Manhattan,” pages 275–86 in Farewell to Sport, and Woodward’s chapter, “Aw Nuts and Gee Whiz,” pages 60–68 in Sports Page. The allusion to sportswriting as a “low form of art” is on page ix.
My education in ghostwriting began with the instructional tips in The Editor, February 25, 1920, “The Ghost Writer and His Story,” followed by the collected works of Westbrook Pegler on the sins of Christy Walsh and his ilk: “Spooks in the Press-Box, A Compassionate Look at the Troubled Lives of Our Literary Ghosts,” Liberty magazine, February 8, 1930; “Some Points About Incomes of Authors,” written for the Augusta Chronicle on November 12, 1946, now available online at http://ourgame.mlblogs.com; and “Babe Ruth’s Stab at Literature—a la Ghost,” written for the King Features Syndicate in 1948.
Walsh got lots of ink after Ruth’s death. Typical of the stories was Joe Williams’s column, “Christy Walsh, Old Ghost Man, Talks of Ruth.” After Walsh’s death, Williams revisited the subject in a January 5, 1956, column for the New York World-Telegram, “Christy Walsh Ran a Stable of Ghosts.” The article about ghostwriting appeared on page 185 of the October 1927 edition of The Bookman: A Review of Books and Life in a section called “A Bookman’s Notes.”
John Carvalho’s 2007 presentation to the Newspaper Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, “Haunted by the Babe, Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick’s Newspaper Columns About Babe Ruth,” was especially insightful.
The editorial in Editor & Publisher condemning the practice, “The Public Be—?” appeared in the magazine on September 8, 1923.
For Christy Walsh and the rise of tabloid journalism, see the sources listed for chapter 3.
The deluge of daily news stories documenting the surgery and scandal of 1925 provided the perfect demonstration of the evolution of the sports page. I read the coverage in every New York City paper as well as that in Washington, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The cumulative effect was to reinforce the truth of Gallico’s retrospective observation that the biggest story of the year was that so many cared about the fate of a baseball player. W. O. McGeehan’s columns in the Tribune were memorable—especially “The Age of Incredulity” and “A Demigod Has Indigestion” in which he famously dubbed Ruth “our own national exaggeration.” Dan Daniel’s September 3 thumb-sucker in the New York Telegram on the role of sportswriters, “Babe Ruth and the Scribes,” was as pointed as it was defensive and pointed the way forward for sports journalism.
The New Yorker chimed in on April 25 with the first of approximately 130 Ruthian mentions and full-length stories in a “Talk of the Town” item called, “The King’s Pajamas.” He would merit its attention in three of four September 1925 issues, including Morris Markey’s trenchant analysis in “The Current Press” of the mother lode of press attention Ruth received.
Richards Vidmer’s story about the baby at the train window is on pages 106–7 in No Cheering. Marshall Hunt’s anecdotes about the dinner party, the conversation on the porch, and the disappearing act in Florida are from the Wagenheim tapes at the Hall of Fame. Ruth’s cruel dismissal of Helen during spring training is on page 282 in Creamer.
Ruth’s visits from Brother Paul and Brother Matthias were reported in the August 31 edition of the Baltimore Evening Sun.
The anecdotes about the sudsy urine, the shared bottle of scotch, the whorehouse in St. Louis, and the baby at the train window are from Holtzman’s interviews with Hunt, Wagenheim, and Vidmer. Marshall Hunt’s story about Ruth’s disappearance into the woods is from Wagenheim.
The front page of the final edition of the August 31 Daily News was revolutionary in its makeup and content. The headline “Ruth’s Misconduct Defense” was stripped across the top of the page in huge block letters. The Pacific & Atlantic photograph of Claire occupied the lower right corner, giving extra weight to the image and the caption: “Babe’s Plea. While Babe Ruth was in Chicago last night seeking reconsideration of order banning him from baseball, interest here centered on Claire Hodgson (above), one of his fair friends. Meanwhile, Mrs. Ruth denies serious misunderstanding with Babe over friendships of his feminine admirers.”
Claire’s svelte figure filled the front page the next day, too: “Ruth’s Party Hostess Flees.”
Ruth pledged reform, reminding interviewers and readers of his column that he had come back to win the Most Valuable Player award in 1923 after being written o
ff in some quarters after the 1922 season. He kept his promise to go back to the woods—on a hunting trip with a gang of major leaguers, leaving just days after the wire services declared he would need more surgery because of a recurrence of his stomach abscess. Oddly, the wire services also quoted Helen Ruth, who apparently reemerged in the days after the World Series, as saying that his condition was related to a leg injury he had suffered at the end of the season. It is difficult to know what to make of the report, which also suggested that she and Babe hosted the hunting party at Home Plate Farm in Sudbury. Whether they had reunited for public appearances or had a more complex separation than the legal papers suggest is impossible to know.
Gallico’s description of the reformed Babe is from page 50 in Farewell to Sport.
In an effort to establish Ruth’s relationship with Father Edward J. Quinn, the priest who shepherded him from Grand Central Terminal to Helen’s bedside, and who was alternatively described as a longtime friend of the couple or Ruth’s friend from St. Mary’s, I contacted four priests who served with him, as well as four members of his family. None of them had ever heard of his relationship with Ruth, which raises the question whether he was recruited for the task by Walsh, who was curiously absent throughout the crisis.
Walsh protected the identity of the scribes in his “All-Star Ghost Line-up” until the Sporting News serialized his memoir, Adios to Ghosts, in January 1938. Then he named names, thirty-seven of them: Bozeman Bulger and Ford Frick had written for Miller Huggins; Frick, Bill Slocum, and Frank Graham for Lou Gehrig; a slew of writers, including, on occasion his assistant Joe Bihler, Arthur Robinson, Joe Gordon, and Robert Harron, all wrote for Ruth. Frick and Slocum were the mainstays. Slocum was his preferred muse. “He writes more like me than anyone else I know,” Ruth said. He couldn’t remember Frick’s name.
Typical of the skepticism Ruth faced after the 1925 season was Hugh S. Fullerton’s May 1, 1926, story in Liberty magazine, “Can Ruth Come Back? Baseball’s Bad Boy Presents the Season’s Snappiest Speculation.” Walsh’s strategy to counter the scuttlebutt is evident in the August 1926 piece he placed in Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine, “Babe Ruth Brought Back by Physical Culture, by Art McGovern, the Man Who Brought Him Back, as Told to Edwin A. Goewey”—seven pages with the tale of the tape measurements and photos of the Babe in revealing work-out gear. Taking no chances, Walsh would place a similar story under McGovern’s byline in the April 9, 1927, issue of Literary Digest, “Salvaging the Wreck of Babe Ruth.” But some newspapers were no longer satisfied with photo-op images of the Babe wrestling, stretching and catching a medicine ball. The Binghamton, New York, Sun-Bulletin demanded pictures of his head hitting the pillow at 10:30 P.M. There is no record in Walsh’s account ledger for “Babe Ruth’s Complete Course” of exercise. Perhaps that had something to do with the cost buried in fine print in the advertising copy: a $1 deposit and $11 due upon delivery.
Chapter 12: October 21–22, Bay Area
Interviews: Roger Angell, Chris Davis, Arnold Hano, Michael Haupert, Bill James, Jim Lefebvre, Jordan Muraskin, Jason Ochart, Ray Robinson, Francesca Santoro, Rick Schu, and Vin Scully.
The uneasy accommodation of the national pastime—and Ruth himself—to the radio age is beautifully rendered in James Walker’s Crack of the Bat. Ruth’s debut as a radio personality was retold by Harold Arlin in an April 5, 1969, interview with Ted Patterson in the Sporting News.
I could not have written this chapter without the input of the batting gurus who helped translate the language of biomechanics and physics into English—Jim Lefebvre, Rick Schu, Jason Ochart, Jordan Muraskin. But most of all, I am indebted to Bill James for reaffirming my core belief that Ruth’s power was as much a consequence of personality as it was testimony to physical and biomechanical skill—in short, it was a concerted effort by one of America’s greatest rule breakers. “I remember a discussion I had about Ruth during the steroids era, that somebody insisted that Ruth would never have used steroids,” James told me. “I remember thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, this person doesn’t know ANYTHING about Babe Ruth.’”
He elaborated on this theme in a January 20, 2014, story for Slate, “Life, Liberty, and Breaking the Rules: In Defense of Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, Jaywalkers, and All Other Scofflaws That Make America Great.”
Furman Bisher’s 1949 interview with Shoeless Joe Jackson for Sport magazine was accessed online at www.blackbetsy.com, “Shoeless Joe Jackson’s Virtual Hall of Fame.”
For a modern, annotated critique of Hodges’s July 18, 1920, story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, see Alan Nathan’s analysis at www .baseball.physics.illinois.edu. The findings of A. Terry Bahill and Tom LaRitz about the perceptual abilities and inabilities of hitters were published in the May–June 1994 issue of American Scientist, “Why Can’t Batters Keep Their Eyes on the Ball: A Laboratory Study of Batters Tracking a Fastball Shows the Limitations of Some Hoary Baseball Axioms.” The New York Times ran a story on their research on June 12, 1984, “Take Your Eye off the Ball, Scientist Coaches Sluggers.”
I was lucky to find and to interview a hardy band of baseball aficionados who are old enough to have seen Ruth play and eloquent enough to be able to describe him, chief among them Roger Angell, Arnold Hano, Vin Scully, and the late Ray Robinson. A deep dive into contemporaneous accounts of his hitting technique revealed only two writers that studied and described his form as he waited for a pitch he liked: Grantland Rice and Shirley Povich.
What he liked was fastballs— “I just loved them,” he said in a recently discovered thirteen-minute interview recorded by Joe Hasel for Armed Services Radio in 1943. The recording was found in storage at his high school alma mater, Cheshire Academy in Connecticut, and reported for NPR by Diane Orson on February 22, 2018.
Undoubtedly, the greatest PR coup of Christy Walsh’s career was the testing he arranged at Columbia University in 1921 that landed Ruth on the front page of the Times on September 11, 1921. Hugh S. Fullerton’s full 1921 account in Popular Science Monthly, “Why Babe Ruth Is the Greatest Home-Run Hitter,” was accessed from their online archive.
GQ’s attempt to replicate the tests with Albert Pujols was published in the August 22, 2006, issue, “St. Louis Cardinals Slugger Pujols Gets Ruth Test at Washington University.”
Chapter 13: October 23, Bay Area II
Interviews: Rugger Ardizoia, Dick Beverage, Bill Jones, Mark Macrae, John McCarthy, Tom O’Doul, Randy Stuart, and Carole and Thomas Tollefson.
This chapter was a pleasure to write, thanks to the late Rugger Ardizoia and the family of the late Jack “Whitey” Stuart. Bill Jones, past president of the San Francisco Baseball Old Timers Association, deserves credit for tipping me off to the story of Jack Stuart, grabbing a tinny, cheesy microphone from the current president at the dinner I attended in San Francisco and bellowing into the mike, “Jack Whitey Stuart! Jack Whitey Stuart!” Jones described Stuart’s wake and the jersey laid out in his coffin. Jack’s daughter, Carole Tollefson, remembered her father’s description of the Babe as a “big, looming guy.” His son, Randy Stuart, remembered his disappointment in Ruth.
Mark Macrae, Rugger’s friend and frequent companion during the last years of his life, was as stunned as I was to learn that Rugger had attended both games on that Sunday by the San Francisco Bay. Mark thought he had heard all of Rugger’s best stories.
Dick Beverage, the founder and president emeritus of the Pacific Coast League Historical Society (PCLHS), schooled me in the history of the league and put me in touch with Gus Suhr Jr., Chuck Brown, and other invaluable sources. Tom O’Doul took me to lunch at Lefty’s bar before it closed in 2017 and filled me in on the relationship between Ruth and O’Doul.
Chapter 14: October 25, Marysville
Interviews: Marlene Coleman Benniger, Jean Beswick, Frank Bichard, Ken Goldin, Patricia Grace, Kathy Honey, Patricia Johnstone, Bruce Minton, Randy Newton Sr. and Randy Newton Jr., George Nicholau, Ryan Nicholson, Jerry Paine, Steve Perry, Joanne Perr
y Raub, Carolyn Rendon, Bob Stassi, and Craig Woodford.
In writing this chapter, I was greatly assisted by Tub Perry’s family, and the Sutter County Historical Society, which assembled a roundtable of Marysville citizens with knowledge of the game and Tub’s career. Joanne Raub, Tub’s daughter, and grandsons Steve Perry and Bruce Minton made Tub come alive again. Joanne copied her father’s scrapbook for me. Steve introduced me to George Nicholau, ball shagger and batboy for the Marysville Giants. Like Rugger, whom I met on the same trip, he was manna from heaven.
The Perrys connected me with Randall Newton Sr. and Randall Newton Jr., descendants of Jack Frederick and his daughter, Doris, who told me their mother’s stories about Ruth bringing steak to breakfast. The Perry family also put me in touch with John Rattray’s daughter, Patricia Johnstone, who shared the history of her chiropractic family.
Ed Burt’s scorecard sold for $7,500—“light” in industry argot—said Ken Goldin of Goldin Auctions, who auctioned it in 2016.
Telling the difficult story of Ruth’s first marriage was made immeasurably easier by members of Helen Woodford Ruth’s family—Jean Beswick, Patricia Grace and Kathy Honey, and Craig Woodford—who added perspective and depth to the story of her life and death. Ryan Nicholson of the Watertown Fire Department made an invaluable contribution by scouring the town archives for the fire and police department records, which had not been examined since Helen’s death.
Details about the attempt by a local volunteer group, the Box 52 Association, to revive Helen are from the January 17, 1929, issue of the Watertown community newspaper.
The tragedy set off a competitive feeding frenzy between Boston and New York newspapers and rival news services—Universal, INS, AP, UP—to ferret out every awful detail of her death, including unsourced charges of murder and drug abuse. Those accounts plus the crucial January 14 and January 29 letters from Walsh to Ruth—and the trove of telegrams and press releases contained in the Christy Walsh catalogs—gave the story new context and helped provide an understanding of the charges made by her family in the aftermath of her death.