The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Walsh’s exchange of letters with the vice president at the Equitable Life Assurance Company in 1938 is from the Christy Walsh catalogs. After Ruth’s death, he kept track of Claire’s doings, clipping juicy headlines from New York tabs about her alleged relationship with a society polo player, among them this undated gem from the New York Daily News: “. . . The 31-year-old polo-playing socialite, linked romantically with Mrs. Babe Ruth, was arrested on Peeping Tom complaint brought by two UN interpreters. Story on page 4.”

  Ruth may have reinvented the game, but attendance figures do not support his cherished belief that he brought fans back to the park after the scandal of the Black Sox. “Legend is not fact,” said major league historian John Thorn. “The scandal broke in late September 1920, so Ruth saved baseball from what? Attendance figures for major league baseball in 1919, 1920, 1921, respectively: 6.53 million (during a 140-game season); 9.12 million; and 8.61 million. White Sox attendance did drop off the table, though, from 833,000 in 1920 to 544,000 in 1921. This accounted almost entirely for the decline in American League attendance in 1921, while the National League held steady.”

  The story about the itty-bitty ones appeared in the March 18, 1944, issue of the New Yorker.

  Background on the Gila River Relocation Center was provided by a 2012 National Historic Landmarks Theme Study produced for the National Park Service, “Japanese Americans in World War II.” Gila River was considered a showplace and was selected for a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt in April 1943. The first lady’s visit to the Butte Camp did not make much of an impression on Howard Zenimura. He and his friends were too busy playing baseball.

  The enrichment of future Yankees owner Del Webb through the construction of military facilities and Japanese American detention camps during World War II is documented in “Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites,” at https://www.amazon.com/Confinement-Ethnicity -Overview-Japanese-Relocation/dp/029598156, and a September 8, 1985, investigation in the Arizona Republic. According to Bill Staples’s biography of Kenichi Zenimura, Webb received contracts from the War Relocation Authority to build the Poston Relocation Center as well as a portion of the housing at Gila River (see page 117).

  Home plate from Zenimura Field, which is all that remains of the ballpark that Zeni and his family created, is now on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The wooden artifact, made out of scrap lumber abandoned by construction workers, bears witness to all the baseball spikes that landed upon it, as well as the rusty nails used to hold it together.

  More about this can be found in Staples’s May 22, 2017, article posted on the Gila River Indian News website, “Home Plate from Japanese-American Concentration Camp on Display in Baseball Hall of Fame,” and in Alex Coffey’s story, “A Field of Dreams in the Arizona Desert,” accessed at www.baseballhall.org. Home plate was found buried in the dirt near an olive grove by the family of a former internee. Stubborn desert weeds were growing in the cracks of the wood.

  Chapter 18: October 30, Los Angeles

  Interviews: Yogi Berra, Scott Boras, Bobby Brown, Matt Cwieka, William DeWitt Jr., Chris Epting, Jean Johnstone, Carolyn Neilson-Major, Mary C. Moran, David Nieves, Tom O’Doul, Ken and Dorothy Patterson, Eddie Robinson, Steve Rosenblatt, Sig Seidenman, Charlie Silvera, Toni Stein, Leigh Steinberg, Chuck Stevens, Julia Ruth Stevens, Lynne Thomas, Rolland Thomas, Bob Walsh, Katie Walsh, and Richard Walsh.

  The significance of the size of the crowd as a barometer for future growth of major-league baseball was much noted in the press. Bob Ray, who covered the game for the Los Angeles Times, cited it in his game story. Paul Lowry’s November 7 “Rabbit Punches” column in the Times pointed out that even with a top ticket priced at $1.50, sales had reached $40,000. Proof that L.A. would support big-league sports and, as Bill McGeehan wrote in the Herald Tribune, sufficient to convince the “magnates . . . at last that the barnstorming trips really help to swell future gate receipts.”

  The presence of Hollywood celebs at Wrigley Field, found on page 24 in Sobol, presaged the star-power always in evidence at Dodger Stadium—even if they do come late and leave early.

  James Gordon’s 2011 description of “Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field: ‘The Finest Edifice in the United States,’” published in National Pastime magazine, helped me re-create the scene at the park, as did Lawrence Ritter’s Lost Ballparks and Bill Shannon’s The Ballparks.

  Richard Sandomir elaborated on the estrangement between Ruth and Gehrig in his 2017 book, The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of a Classic, and Eleanor Gehrig’s unsuccessful campaign to exclude the Babe from the movie, quoting her as saying, among other things, that Ruth was drunk at her husband’s funeral.

  Sandomir and Eig shared the correspondence between Christy Walsh and Eleanor Gehrig. Other details about tensions in the Ruths’ marriage were described by Dorothy Patterson, daughter of the family maid, and her husband, Ken; Dorothy Ruth Pirone elaborated at length in her memoir.

  As Ruth left the French Hospital, neighbors leaned out of windows in buildings across the street to see his condition. They wouldn’t have been able to see him wrapped in a blanket in the limousine for the short ride home. The anecdote about Walter Winchell’s broadcast that evening stating that Ruth had lost 125 pounds in the hospital is from page 197 in The Babe and I by Mrs. Babe Ruth.

  Three years after Bill DeWitt Jr. met Babe Ruth on the field in Sportsman’s Park, Eddie Gaedel, the three-foot, seven-inch pinch-hitter, wore his uniform when the Browns’ new owner Bill Veeck sent him up to the plate to pinch-hit for leadoff man Frank Saucier.

  Information about the FBI investigation of Christy Walsh was acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request. Documents, itemized receipts, and correspondence relating to his thwarted bid to establish an NFL franchise at the Los Angeles Coliseum were in the Christy Walsh catalogs.

  Walsh acknowledged that he intended to meet Rockne in Los Angeles on April 3—four days after the fatal flight he was allegedly supposed to make—in a radio address broadcast at Notre Dame on April 4. The transcript was included in the May 1931 edition of “The Notre Dame Alumnus” devoted to Rockne found in the Notre Dame Archives. His encomium was titled “Happy Landings.”

  Richard Walsh gleefully recounted his radio appearance with Babe Ruth. Some eighty years after the fact, some of the details about the occasion were fuzzy, including the exact date and station on which the joint interview was broadcast. On election eve in 1944, Ruth was photographed at an election night rally, standing behind Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey.

  Dan Daniel reported the story of the Newark managing job in a June 12, 1946, story in the Sporting News, “Turn-Down as Newark Pilot Aired.” Francis Coe’s description of Ruth’s appearance at the Banshee Luncheon for AP Sports Features was carried by the Palm Beach Post on April 27, 1947.

  Emory Perry’s 1947 correspondence with baseball commissioner Happy Chandler and 1948 correspondence with Ford Frick were found in the Ruth files at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, where I also found the September 19, 2000, letter from Aline Maas, the nurse who accompanied Ruth on his travels for Ford in the fall of 1947.

  Mary C. Moran, an attorney specializing in trusts and estates, currently director of planned giving at Massachusetts General Hospital, shared documents from the final settlement of Ruth’s estate in 1954 and Dorothy Ruth Pirone’s lawsuit against his trustees, as well as an invaluable explanation of them. Further details came from her August 1, 2009, article in Trusts & Estates, the Journal of Wealth Management for Estate-Planning Professionals, “Babe Ruth Hit Home Runs, but His Foundation Struck Out.”

  Carole Horn, MD, reviewed the following articles from medical journals concerning Ruth’s treatment and disease: Brian L. Hutchings, “The Synthesis of Pteroyl & Glutamylglutamic Acid,” published by the International Union Against Cancer (UICC), 1947; “Pterins for Malignant Disease,” in the Lancet, January, 31, 1948; Nadim B. Bikhazi et al., �
�Babe Ruth’s Illness and Its Impact on Medical History,” in the Laryngoscope, January 1999; W. J. Maloney, “The Medical Legacy of George Herman Babe Ruth,” January 22, 2011. She also reviewed coverage by William L. Lawrence in the New York Times, “Ruth Never Knew of Cancer Malady,” August 17, 1948, and “Details Are Given of Ruth’s Illness, Fatal Cancer Started in Spot Inaccessible to Surgery, Hospital Autopsy Shows,” August 18, 1948; and “Could Babe Ruth Have Been Saved?” which appeared in the November 1948 issue of Physical Culture magazine.

  Former New York Times medical reporter Lawrence K. Altman, MD, reviewed with me his two articles concerning Ruth’s health: “Stored Blood: A Research Treasure,” from August 18, 1987, and “The Babe’s Other Record: Cancer Pioneer, a Pioneer in Chemotherapy,” published December 29, 1998.

  Additional details about his illness came from Dorothy Ruth Pirone’s memoir and the notes she gave to Chris Martens. Macfadden’s postmortem on Ruth’s treatment appeared in the November 1948 edition of Physical Culture.

  W. C. Heinz’s description of Ruth’s last appearance at Yankee Stadium is in What a Time It Was: The Best of W. C. Heinz on Sports. Additional details about Nat Fein’s career were provided by David Nieves, curator and administrator of his estate. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for the photograph he titled “No. 3 Bows Out,” Fein remained with the New York Herald Tribune until it folded in 1966. According to Nieves, the New York Times declined to hire him because of his age. He spent the rest of his career doing aerial photography for a utility company.

  Julia Ruth’s family sold the gold watch he received that day for $650,108 in 2014.

  Footage of Ruth and Gehrig on the hunting trip with Glenn E. Thomas was graciously provided by his step-granddaughter Carolyn Major-Neilson and Chris Epting, who first wrote about it in an August 15, 2012, story for the Los Angeles Times, “In the Pipeline: Local Babe Ruth Footage Unearthed.” Additional details and photographs were shared by Thomas’s granddaughter Toni Stein.

  The anecdote about Ruth’s plans for the winter of 1927 is from Sobol, page 24, and the Fresno Bee of October 29, 1927.

  Eddie Robinson, now the oldest living major leaguer, kept the bat Ruth autographed for him for three decades, displaying it first in his Baltimore restaurant and then in his home in Texas. (Bob Feller, to whom the bat belonged, protested in true baseball fashion: I wuz robbed.)

  One day decades later, Robinson decided to find out what the thing was worth and called Barry Halper, the über–Yankee collector (since deceased), to feel him out. Not wanting to sound too interested, Halper asked what he wanted for it. Robinson figured he’d ask for the moon—$10,000. He’d have happily settled for half that.

  The check was in the mail the next day.

  Years later Halper sold the bat for $107,000 to Upper Deck, the baseball trading card company, which gave it away in a sweepstakes contest to a retired truck driver, who couldn’t afford to pay the taxes on it.

  Feller and a consortium of supporters purchased the bat for $95,000 and installed it in Feller’s museum in Van Meter, Iowa, in an oversize protective test tube that hung from the ceiling, in front of the grinning image of Chief Wahoo, former mascot of the Cleveland Indians. When the museum closed in 2014, four years after Feller’s death, the bat was transferred to the town hall, and then in April 2015 to the Bob Feller exhibit at Progressive Stadium in Cleveland, where, needless to say, Babe Ruth never hit a home run.

  The bat from the Joe E. Brown collection, which he said Ruth used to hit the sixtieth home run, was sold on May 18, 2018, by Heritage Auctions for $660,000. Tom Shieber, senior curator at the Hall of Fame, remains confident that the real thing is in Cooperstown.

  Ruth’s rewritten will, which became the subject of litigation between Dorothy and his estate, was stolen from his probate file in the New York Surrogate’s Court and sold to a memorabilia collector for $30,000, according to documents in Ruth’s FBI file obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. An unsigned copy of the will was sold for $1,067 by Robert Edwards Auctions in 2012.

  Epilogue

  Interviews: Mike Klepfer, George Lois, Jack McKinney, Kelly Merritt, Andrew Nagle, Julia Ruth Stevens, Linda Ruth Tosetti, and Richard Walsh.

  The interview with Mamie Ruth Moberly was conducted by Mike Gibbons for the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum; she added further details in the 1985 People feature.

  Details about the scene in Ruth’s hospital room and his relationship with Loretta are on page 191 in Pirone and Martens. The detail about the statue of St. Martin de Porres at Ruth’s deathbed and Father Kauffman’s description of his condition are found on page 540 in Smelser.

  Frank Haggerty’s account of the tears he didn’t shed appeared in the February 6, 1988, edition of the Baltimore Sun: “Missing Pieces of the Legend Museum: in 1947 Frank Haggerty Stood in for the Babe. Today, He Shares His Memories.”

  Jack McKinney filled in details of the day he spent with his father at Ruth’s funeral, first mentioned in his 2005 memoir, Tales from the St. Joseph’s Hardwood. Walsh’s thank-you note to the Babe was provided by Kelly Merritt. She also shared a recording of the banquet that took place the day Walsh died, from which I excerpted Fred Haney’s remarks. Walsh’s eulogy for Ruth and his radio address are from the Christy Walsh catalogs.

  The story about the pizza delivered to the Babe in 2004 was told to me by Andrew E. Nagle, associate manager of the Trustees of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which manages Gate of Heaven Cemetery. The pizza was left overnight in front of Ruth’s grave. When the section foreman returned the next morning, only a slice or two remained.

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