The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  The catalogs also included a copy of the August 4, 1925, separation agreement, previously disclosed in Dorothy Ruth Pirone’s 1988 memoir, My Dad, the Babe: Growing Up with an American Hero, written with Chris Martens.

  Walsh’s handwritten calculations of how much Ruth owed in arrears, copies of the voided checks, and all the subsequent correspondence with her estate attorney, James Conlin, pertaining to the settlement of her estate as well as the final disposition of the case, cast the story in an entirely new and not particularly flattering light.

  Chapter 15: October 26, San Jose

  Interviews: Donna Analovitch, Don Cardoni, Joseph and Richard and Tony Cirone, Genevieve Herrlein, Chris Ivy, Diane Lechner, Marla Duino Lenz, Dorothy and Ken Patterson, Richard Pinard, Robert Pinsky, Carolyn Rendon, Andrew Shepherd, Julia Ruth Stevens, Tom Stevens, and Linda Ruth Tosetti.

  Two San Jose families—the Cirones and the Randazzos—made this chapter possible. Joseph, Richard, and Tony Cirone shared the story of their grandfather’s eventful day at the ballpark. Tom and Joe Randazzo shared the story of their father’s experience playing in the game, the highlight of his baseball career.

  In addition to the coverage in the rival daily newspapers, I relied on the following retrospective accounts: “The Day the Babe Connected Here,” in the October 18, 1959, San Jose Mercury-News, featuring an interview with Tom Randazzo Sr. and Mario Duino; “When the Babe Came to San Jose,” also in the Mercury-News, on September 14, 1975; a November 19, 1974, interview with Duke Perry in the Santa Clara Sun; and an October 26, 1987, Los Angeles Times piece, “When Giants Walked the Land in California, Barnstorming with Gehrig and the Babe.”

  Marla Duino Lenz, “Speeder” Duino’s niece, and daughter of the longtime sports editor of the local paper, provided portions of his unpublished diary, including descriptions of the game. Richard Pinard shared the story of his father’s participation in the game. At age sixteen, he was the youngest player on the field. But he got edged out of the photograph taken with the Babe by a bunch of younger kids.

  With the help of librarians at the San Jose Public Library and a 2010 “San Jose City Planning Study” commissioned to evaluate the land where the ballpark once stood, I was able to unscramble the confusion between Sodality Park and the field at Dunsmuir, which looked remarkably alike. An original print of the Dunsmuir photograph, in which Bennie Cirone thought he recognized himself and his brothers, was sold by Robert Edwards Auctions in 2013. Expected to sell for $500 to $1,000, the photo fetched $1,659. Despite the revelation that the boys pictured in the grandstand behind the plate in Dunsmuir are not his relatives, it remains the centerpiece of the altar Tony Cirone built for his memorabilia collection.

  The interview with Jesse Linthicum was shared by Mike Gibbons. Waite Hoyt’s letters were shared by Robert Creamer’s son, Jim. Carl Sandburg’s condescending spring training interview with Ruth, “Sandburg, Poet, Fans Ruth with 750 Words,” which enraged Westbrook Pegler, appeared in the Chicago Daily News, Tampa Bay Times, and elsewhere on March 27, 1928. Robert Pinsky, a kinder poet, and son of a catcher for the New Jersey Aces, provided much-needed perspective.

  Harry T. Brundidge’s May 23, 1929, story in the St. Louis Star and Times, written just a month after Ruth’s marriage to Claire, declared him a new man: “Babe Ruth, King of Swat and Bad Boy of Baseball, Is Bad Boy No Longer.” More significant than the declaration of reformation was Ruth’s heated insistence that he was neither an orphan nor a bad kid. The ineffectiveness of his plea was evident in the stories that followed, particularly those written while he was dying. For example, the widely circulated magazine story, “The Babe Ruth You Never Knew” in the July 1947 issue of Sport, promised a new Babe but delivered the same old saws.

  Julia Ruth Stevens was happy to share the account of her happy childhood and the gratitude she felt at being adopted by Babe Ruth. The account of Dorothy Ruth’s troubled childhood is the product of multiple interviews with three of her daughters and her best friend from her teenage years, Carolyn Rendon, as well as her 1988 memoir and the raw notes she provided for her ghostwriter to use. According to Dorothy’s daughter, Donna Analovitch, she reconciled with her stepmother before Claire Ruth’s death in 1976.

  The sad chasm in experience and sisterly affection on view at the Yankee Stadium observance of the fortieth anniversary of Ruth’s death was reported by Harvey Araton in the New York Daily News on August 17, 1988.

  The Bustin’ Babes cap bestowed upon the young pastry chef in Santa Barbara was sold by her grandson in 2008 for $131,450 and resold five years later for $155,000, according to Chris Ivy, of Heritage Auctions. To date, it is the only personal item from the 1927 tour to reach the marketplace. Duke Perry’s autographed ball sold for $5,530 in 2010. The inscribed portrait, graded PSA 9—almost mint—that Ruth sent to a former mistress on the day he married Claire sold for nearly $15,000 in 2007, according to a posting at www.bidami.com, a now defunct website. Which is why Ivy considers him “the gold standard” in the memorabilia business, a “blue-chip stock.”

  Chapter 16: October 28, San Diego

  Interviews: Debby Gumb, Michael Haupert, Toni McGowan, Bill Swank, Charles Turpinseed, Carla Walker, and Boomer Walling.

  I am indebted to Carl Klindt’s grandchildren Debby Gumb, Toni McGowan, and Boomer Walling for inviting me into their homes and their confidence in telling the story of his life. They provided letters, newspaper clippings, photographs from family albums, and an introduction to Carl’s daughter Carla, now deceased. Carl’s letter to a newspaper friend summarizing his career was particularly helpful if not entirely accurate. His assertion that he played in the game with Ruth and Gehrig was not borne out by the box score; nor was his name found in accounts of Ruth’s prior visits to San Diego. I am indebted to Bill Swank, author of two books on the history of baseball in San Diego, for ferreting out all the old game stories and for escorting me to the ballpark where Babe and Lou posed with Klindt prior to the game.

  “Doc” Gottesburen’s January 16, 1927, story for the San Diego Union provided most of the color and detail about Ruth’s fishing expedition. Max Miller, in his fishing column in the San Diego Sun, and later in his bestselling memoir, I Cover the Waterfront, was less generous in his praise for Ruth as an angler. The headline on his story read: “One Strike and He’s Out.”

  Walsh’s letter to Knute Rockne is from the archives at the University of Notre Dame.

  The dialogue between Walsh and Ruth on the subject of money is from Kennedy in Collier’s.

  All the financial records used in the chapter—including Walsh’s handwritten notes documenting Ruth’s indebtedness to his wife, his correspondence with the Bank of Manhattan, and with Helen’s estate attorney as well as court documents pertaining to the settlement of the case—were found among his papers at the time of his death. Those documents, along with photos and other ephemera, were reproduced in auction catalogs by Heritage Auctions in Dallas. Copies of those catalogs were shared with me by Kelly Merritt and Chris Ivy.

  Additional supporting documents, including copies of voided checks to Helen, were supplied by J. P. Cohen at Memory Lane Inc., a dealer in vintage cards and collectibles, who had purchased some of the lots from the Christy Walsh auction.

  Matthew Zaft, a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley in Washington, D.C., analyzed the bank records and earning reports to assess how well Ruth’s money was invested and how well his portfolio survived the Great Depression (see appendix 2).

  The figures for Ruth’s off-the-field income come from the ledger Walsh prepared for him in May 1938, which was among the papers reproduced in the Christy Walsh catalogs (see appendix 2).

  In order to provide perspective on the extent of Ruth’s wealth in 1927 and how it compared with that of the average American worker and average major leaguer, Haupert translated the dollar figures on Walsh’s ledger into 2016 dollars representing Ruth’s purchasing power in the present day (see appendix 2).

  Free agency, established in 197
5, which gave players leverage in contract negotiations, and Major League Baseball’s eight-year $12.4 billion television rights deal, which went into effect in 2014, make a comparison between Ruth’s salary, when he was baseball’s highest earner, and today’s best-paid player, Clayton Kershaw, economically irrelevant. “In 2015, Clayton Kershaw signed a seven-year contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers that guaranteed him an average salary of $30,714,286—919 times the salary of the average American worker—an amount that makes sense only in light of the MLB TV deal and the Dodgers’ twenty-five-year $8.35 billion deal with Time-Warner,” Haupert said. “A more relevant comparison is how well he was paid compared to his peers.”

  His three-year, $52,000-a-year contract, signed in 1922, represented a seismic shift in baseball economics not only because it was a multiyear deal but also because it was twice as much as any player had ever been paid before. In 1921, Ty Cobb earned $25,000, which at the time was the most any player had ever been paid. Ruth’s salary was also 10.5 times higher than the average MLB player salary.

  “Babe Ruth was the highest-paid baseball player in the major leagues for thirteen consecutive years from 1922 until he left the Yankees after 1934,” according to Michael Haupert. “No player in history before or since has been the highest-paid player for even half that long. In eight of those seasons he earned more than ten times what the average player earned and in five of those seasons the second-highest-paid player earned less than half what Ruth earned. It wasn’t until 1998 that another major league player would outearn the league average salary by more than Ruth did.”

  Another measure of Ruth’s value to the Yankees was the $100,000 they invested in four life insurance policies in 1932, reported in team minutes dated March 2, in the Yankees files at the New York Public Library.

  As Ruth’s career faded and syndicate sales declined, Walsh turned to commercial radio to maintain a public presence and generate new income—advertising revenues increased from $18.7 in 1929 to more than $80 million by the end of the 1930s. The Ford Motor Company’s $100,000 sponsorship of the 1934 World Series was a watershed moment for baseball and advertising. Why not get Ruth some? Walsh negotiated a 1934 deal with Sinclair Oil for the Esso-sponsored “Babe Ruth Boys Club,” which was to run for thirteen weeks three times a week at 6:00 P.M. on NBC’s Blue Network. Charter members were promised club pins and cards, and a weekly Babe Ruth newspaper loaded with tantalizing contest offers—balls, gloves, trips to spring training—and coupons to be redeemed by their parents at their local Esso station. Half a million kids had joined up by the time the government declared the program illegal, a violation of the code of fair competition outlined for the petroleum industry in the National Recovery Act.

  “Sorry, kids,” said the Babe, who nonetheless received $12,375.

  Walsh then turned to Quaker Oats, which proved to be a safer and more lucrative sponsor, paying Ruth $62,787.50 over the next three years. The makers of Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice created their own Babe Ruth Boys Club and another radio program that ran for thirteen weeks, beginning on April 16, 1934. Quaker Oats distributed “Ask Me” buttons to go with a Babe Ruth “Ask Me” game of baseball facts, printed four-color newspaper advertisements designed to look like Babe Ruth comic strips, and offered prizes in exchange for box tops—books and badges and a girl’s beret. By the end of the run he had received one million letters and 850,000 box tops.

  Quaker Oats also produced a series of fifteen-minute fictional parables called “The Adventures of Babe Ruth” in which the King of Clout was transmogrified into a King of Altruism: an all-knowing, all-forgiving, crime-solving amateur psychologist and ethicist, who pinch-hits for his dying ghostwriter in an episode called “Harry the Hat,” risking a slump by staying up all night to write the column. It’s unlikely any of his young listeners would have gotten the irony of that particular plot. (The series was revived by the United States Navy after Ruth’s death.)

  The transition to the era of live radio was not always a smooth one. Lou Gehrig was selected by Post Huskies to go head-to-head with Wheaties in 1930. In his inaugural appearance on Ripley’s Believe It or Not on NBC—Bob Ripley was an old pal of Walsh’s as well as his client—Gehrig was asked, “What do you have every morning, Lou?” To which he replied unequivocally, “A heaping bowl of Wheaties.” Embarrassed at the flub, Gehrig offered to return his hundred-dollar endorsement fee. Post refused. Four years later, Wheaties made an honest man of him by putting him and Jimmie Foxx on the cereal box.

  The personal-services contracts Ruth signed with Christy Walsh Management were conspicuously absent from the documents included in the auction catalogs. Nor was there any mention of the percentage Walsh took in any of the documents or correspondence. However, some of the deals he negotiated for Ruth, including one with Spalding, continued to generate money, albeit in decreasing amounts, after the end of their contractual relationship. On May 11, 1942, Walsh wrote to Ruth enclosing a check for “his 75% share of the annual profits” from Spalding—a measly $256.00. Detailed accounting sheets for 1934 appear to confirm that Walsh took a 25 percent cut of Ruth’s endorsement income. The accounting sheet lists total receipts for the year as $48,544.44 and the amount paid to Ruth as $36,708.32, or approximately 75 percent of the gross.

  According to Haupert’s calculations, if Walsh received 25 percent on every deal enumerated in the ledger, he would have earned $159,130 through his representation of Ruth, which translates into $13,253,335 in 2016 dollars.

  Chapter 17: October 29, Fresno

  Interviews: Donna Analovitch, Phil Coyne, William DeWitt Jr., Deems Grabowski, Sally Jo Greck, Steve Gross, Skip Hart, Genevieve Herrlein, Elizabeth Laval, Paula Lloyd, Kerry Yo Nakagawa, Tom O’Doul, Walter Petaluma, Ray Robinson, Vin Scully, Bill Staples Jr., Tom Stevens, Blake Talbot, and Howard Zenimura.

  In this chapter, I relied extensively on the memories, memorabilia, and most especially the honesty and kindness of Kenichi Zenimura’s son, Howard, and Kerry Yo Nakagawa, founder of the Nisei Baseball Research Project, who shared family photos and footage from the game at Firemen’s Park. Howard set me straight on the myth that his father packed the photograph taken at Firemen’s Park in his one suitcase when the family was sent to Gila River.

  Zeni’s biographer, Bill Staples, and Masaki Yoshikatsu, curator at the Hankyu Culture Foundation, made it possible for me to access the correspondence with Takizo Matsumoto at Meiji University, with whom Zenimura had tried to negotiate a deal for Babe Ruth to visit Japan.

  Stories in the Christian Science Monitor, “How One Japanese-American Runner Took on Babe Ruth” from May 6, 1997, and the Fresno Bee, “Zenimura: Dean of the Diamond” from August 2, 1970, helped me gain a further understanding of the man who rarely spoke about the game at Firemen’s Park.

  In addition to daily coverage in the Fresno Bee and Fresno Republican, reporting on the Saturday-night banquet was found in the Central California News, a onetime publication of the Monterey-Fresno Archdiocese, November 19, 1927, and The Tidings, Monterey-Fresno Diocesan News, November 4, 1927. For background on toastmaster Father Crowley, see Joan Brooks’s Desert Padre: The Life and Writings of Father John H. Crowley 1891–1940.

  Ruth’s statement that he needed time “to get his nerves back in shape” is from page 400 in Smelser. Tom Meany’s response to his copy editor is from page 347 in Creamer.

  Kelly Merritt shared Hendrik van Loon’s 1933 tribute to the Babe, written initially as a personal letter to Ruth. She also allowed me access to Walsh’s correspondence with his divorce lawyer, and with his friend and client van Loon, in which he complained bitterly about legal fees, the cost of maintenance of Christy Jr., and the pain of relinquishing custody of him. Little wonder, with headlines like these: “Walsh Gives Up His Unmanly Son” (New York Post, January 18, 1938) and “Walsh Yields ‘Cream Puff’ Boy to His Ex” (New York Mirror, February 2, 1938). Those letters offered an unguarded and unsanitized glimpse of Walsh, including a casual anti-Semitism all too common at the
time—in one letter, he remarked on the increased number of Jews and skyscrapers he observed upon returning to New York after a winter in Los Angeles.

  The movie he filmed for his mother’s seventy-fifth birthday and the unlikely quartet of crooners he assembled to sing to her—Eddie Rickenbacker, James A. Farley, Governor Al Smith, and Babe Ruth—was screened for me by Richard Walsh, who provided additional insights into the family and into his own career. Among other things, he invented a vibrator shaped like a clamshell and operated one of the first video dating services in the United States.

  In reconstructing the last days of Ruth’s career, I was immensely aided by interviews with Bill DeWitt, Skip Hart, George Morgenweck, George Nicholau, Walter Petaluma, and Blake Talbot, each of whom met him or saw him play during that period of his life. Jhan Robbins’s family filled in details of his visit to the Stadium in 1934. Conversations with Sally Jo Greck and Deems Grabowski, whose family owned Ruth’s favorite hangout in Greenwood Lake, were also helpful. Hart and Petaluma, young boys when Ruth frequented the area, remembered how the bravest among them would summon him from a saloon to play ball and were then delighted when he bought everyone ice cream before returning to other pleasures.

  The conversation in the Pittsburgh clubhouse prior to Ruth’s three–home run game at Forbes Field can be found in Smelser on pages 504–5.

  Phil Coyne had hoped to continue as an usher at PNC Park in 2018 for what would have been his eighty-second year with the Pirates but finally bowed to age. “I’m sad,” he said. “I tried to make it to one hundred, but I just couldn’t make it.”

  The episode with Lou Gehrig during the voyage to Japan in the fall of 1934 was documented by Jonathan Eig in his biography of Gehrig, Luckiest Man, pages 189–91, and in Eleanor Gehrig’s memoir, My Luke and I. John Drebinger’s story about Ruth’s loan to Gehrig is from an unpublished portion of his interview with Holtzman.