The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

INTRODUCTION

THE GRAND YEAR for researching Babe Ruth biographies was 1973. Five writers traveled around the country, stopping at retirement homes and suburban neighborhoods to talk to the last old men who remembered their time as teammates or friends of the greatest baseball player who ever lived. Reminiscences of long-ago hijinks and debaucheries were jotted into notebooks, impressions captured on tape recorders before the stories and the storytellers left the flat face of the earth.

The timing was important. Henry Aaron of the Atlanta Braves was on schedule to break the Babe’s biggest record of all, 714 career home runs, in the first months of the 1974 season. The excitement of that moment would also turn the focus to the past, making not only the followers of baseball but the general public remember the outrageous character who had set the record in the first place. Each of the five writers figured he had found an untapped and marketable story.

The Babe had been dead for 25 years, hadn’t swung a bat in almost 40. The previous biographies, including two ghostwritten autobiographies, had woven fable and half-truths around the no-nonsense statistics of the box scores and record books. The feeling was that the real story finally should be told. Get it right. Get it out. Each of the five writers had decided independently on the same course.

It was a shock when each learned he was not alone.

I was having a very nice lunch with Jumpin’ Joe Dugan, Kal Wagenheim, the author of Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend, says. Joe was a teammate and a friend of the Babe. I remember him saying—after he had told some wonderful stories—‘The Babe suddenly seems very popular.’ I asked what he meant. He said, ‘You’re the third guy who’s interviewed me, writing a book about the Babe.’

Almost the same thing happened to me, Ken Sobol, author of Babe Ruth and the American Dream, says. I think it happened to all of us.

In another version of the deflating moment, New York sportswriter Harold Rosenthal, a friend of Bob Creamer’s, author of Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, sent a message to Creamer that someone named Kal Wagenheim was writing a Babe Ruth book. Rosenthal didn’t know Wagenheim and wrote, I know what a Kal is, but what’s a Wagenheim?

Everyone was stepping on everyone else’s toes. Everyone kept typing.

The strongest figure in the field, beginning to end, was Creamer. He had started first, seven or eight years before everyone else, and carried the most clout. He was a senior editor at Sports Illustrated, a tall and erudite man in his early fifties who already had written as-told-to books on New York Yankees star Mickey Mantle, broadcaster Red Barber, and umpire Jocko Conlon. The Ruth book was a personal challenge to see if he could write a biography on his own without the tape-recorded aid of the subject. His pace had been relaxed, the project added to his weekly chores at SI.

The approach of Aaron toward the record and the rumors of other Ruth books brought a call from the publisher. The relaxed pace was finished.

My editor, Peter Schwed, asked me how I was doing, and I told him I already had 70,000 words written, long enough to be a book, Creamer says. I also told him that at the end of the 70,000 words, the Babe was 19 years old and just starting to play for the Red Sox. Peter told me to get moving. I promised I would be finished by the fall, the date of the autumnal equinox.

None of the other writers was a sportswriter. Wagenheim had been a 37-year-old stringer for the New York Times, writing out of San Juan, Puerto Rico, when the plane carrying Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Roberto Clemente and relief supplies for earthquake victims in Nicaragua crashed while leaving the San Juan airport on New Year’s Eve in 1972. He covered the immediate story of Clemente’s death for the Times and in the aftermath was contacted to write a book. His hurried effort, Clemente!, was a best-seller. His publisher, pleased with the success, asked him to try another baseball biography. Wagenheim picked the Babe as his subject.

Ken Sobol was a writer for the Village Voice. His agent called him, suggesting a Ruth book. Robert Smith, 69, was a novelist, but also gravitated toward baseball nonfiction. Reviewers had called his 1948 book Baseball the first true history of the game.

The fifth writer, Marshall Smelser, was an academic. He was a historian, a member of the faculty at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book was The Winning of Independence, the tale of the American Revolution. Following baseball was one of his many hobbies—a large picture of the Babe had graced his office door for years. He decided to merge vocation and avocation to write not a book for baseball people, but a baseball book for people. The title was The Life That Ruth Built.

The five contenders followed separate but often overlapping tracks. Smith did little face-to-face interviewing, writing a book with a larger scope—a history of the period with the Babe’s life serving mostly as touchstone and timeline. The other writers contacted teammates, family, friends of the Babe. Smelser sent a mimeographed set of questions to the former Yankees teammates of Ruth who were still alive. Sobol, looking for some negative voices, found them in the wives of former teammates. Creamer, after a lot of work, finally convinced former pitcher Waite Hoyt, Ruth’s teammate on both the Yankees and Red Sox, to talk for three days in Florida about the Babe. Wagenheim found great help from former sportswriters who had covered the Yankees. Everyone rolled through miles of microfilm in his local library.

Four of the books appeared in the immediate glow of Aaron’s achievement on April 8, 1974, his 715th career home run, off Al Downing at Atlanta’s Fulton County Coliseum. Creamer’s 443-page effort was the acknowledged winner. Its publication was preceded by a three-part series of excerpts in SI, and the magazine’s reviewer called it the best biography ever written about an American sports figure.

The books by Wagenheim, Sobol, and Smith, each of them solid and taking a different tack on the Babe’s life, were mostly lost or disregarded in the backwash of the praise for Creamer’s biography. In a few cases, one or two of the other works were compared to Creamer’s effort, sometimes favorably, often not, but mostly the books weren’t reviewed at all.

Smelser’s biography did not appear until 1975. It was, as promised, a fat and scholarly book, 592 pages filled with footnotes. It was mostly well reviewed, but the marketplace moment had passed. Oddly, the book became a favorite of baseball people, but not people. Too many writers had tackled the same subject at the same time.

It was all an education about the publishing industry, Wagenheim, who never has written another sports book, says. In the middle of everything, you had Watergate and all the books that came out of that. I remember calling my publishers after I learned that other books were being written about the Babe. I was thinking they would arrange some big public relations campaign. What they did—immediately—was cut back the press run.

None of the books, not even Creamer’s, made the best-seller lists.

More than 30 years have passed since this biographical rush in 1974. The images of Aaron breaking the record now seem dated: the uniforms just not right, the hairstyles odd, the film of the moment grainy and amateurish when played on a high-definition screen. Aaron’s feat has been assimilated into the history of the game with the same quiet grace with which it was accomplished.

The Babe remains remarkably vibrant. He probably is even more popular now than he was when the five books were published. The long-ball approach to baseball that he single-handedly brought to the sport now dominates it. The parks are built for home runs. The players are built for home runs. A cavalcade of home runs is shown every night on ESPN’s SportsCenter and Baseball Tonight, baseballs hitting off foul poles and facades, landing in the Pacific Ocean, dropping into packed crowds of spectators who spill their $7 beers and lose their designer team caps in happy pursuit.

Threaded through all of this, however, are the drumbeat questions about steroids, about what is real and what isn’t, about cheating. The biggest names, the record breakers like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, are surrounded by suspicion. Were their feats concocted in laboratories as much as performed on the diamond? Who took what, and when? What exactly was the clear? A skepticism, a lack of full acceptance, taints their accomplishments. At the least, these were men who used as much legal modern science as possible to enable them to hit a baseball a long way. They weren’t walk-off-the-street human beings. At the worst, they cheated, injecting and ingesting illegal substances to make their bodies stronger.

The complications of it all—and the complications certain to arrive in the future with genetic engineering and other medical advances and God knows what—make a look back at Babe Ruth ever more inviting. Steroids hadn’t been invented when he did what he did. Beer and scotch and hot dogs were his nutritional supplements of choice! He is seen as a big and natural man who did big things that are part of our culture now, each passing year oddly making their distant glow a little brighter. The Babe never sat in front of a congressional hearing trying to explain himself! He sat in front of magistrates, describing why yet another car flipped while he was behind the wheel on yet another rainy night!

This book is an attempt to tell the story again for the SportsCenter generation, to bring back the supposed-to-be-uncomplicated in the time of the complicated. The approach is not so much to tear down the myths that grew around George Herman Ruth as to explain how and why they developed in the time in which he lived. Why did an entire country fall in love, go gaga over him? Why was this one man so good, so much better than his contemporaries? That is a question accusingly asked in our time of steroids, and it can be asked about the Babe too. The answers are surprising and attack the well-constructed image of him as the totally self-indulgent fatso.

The authors of the 1974 biographies have been very kind. The old men they found across the country are all dead now, but they still talk in the research that these writers accumulated. Robert Creamer provided six boxes of material from Babe: The Legend Comes to Life. Kal Wagenheim provided tapes that he made with a bulky, first-generation recorder. Marshall Smelser, who died a year after the publication of The Game That Ruth Built, left all of his materials to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, which also supplied tapes from other researchers. Ken Sobol wanted to provide words but, alas, said, I’ve moved 17 times since that book. I have no idea where everything went.

Another wonderful book, No Cheering in the Press Box by Jerome Holtzman, also appeared in 1974. It is a collection of oral-history interviews of sportswriters from the twenties and thirties, men who dealt often with Ruth. Holtzman, now the historian for Major League Baseball, noted in his opening that the interviews were conducted over a three-year period and totaled over 900,000 words of transcript, of which approximately 10 percent were used in the book. Did he still have those original transcripts? Yes, he did. They arrived in a large cardboard UPS box. Again, dead men talked, telling colorful tales.

Holtzman, an authority on baseball literature, says that 27 books have been written on Ruth, the most for anyone who played the game. (Jackie Robinson is second at 25.) Many of those books have been written since 1974, notably My Dad, The Babe and Young Babe Ruth and Babe Ruth and the 1918 Red Sox, and have further filled out the picture of the man. In addition, numerous scholarly papers and articles have been written about the Babe, especially by members of SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research. A symposium on his life and career was held at Hofstra University in 1995 on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

It is from atop this mountain of information—plus interviews, side trips, phone calls, Google-found Web sites, and the requisite ancient newspaper stories—that the typing begins again (on a computer keyboard). The job is an honor. Babe Ruth’s story belongs to all of us.

CHAPTER ONE

T HE LITTLE BOY and the man get on the Wilkens Avenue trolley on the morning of June 13, 1902. It is a Friday. They are off on a trip of great dimensions. Details are important but do not seem to be available. There is so much we want to know. There is so much we never will.

Is it really morning?

Or maybe early afternoon?

Probably not night.

The man and the boy take seats in the second row. Or maybe they are all the way in the back. The boy is on the outside so he can see the streets of Baltimore pass. Or maybe he is on the inside. Maybe he is looking at his shoes.

The jangle of nickels and pennies rolling through the conductor’s coin box is background noise. Wasn’t the coin box always background noise on a trolley? The ding-ding of the bell is heard when the trolley makes a stop. What is the weather? The Baltimore Sun predicted showers and cooler. Is it raining right now? Cool enough for a jacket? Don’t know. Can’t be sure.

The man is sad or resolute or perhaps secretly happy. The boy is…does he even know where he is going? Is the packed little suitcase on the seat next to him a clue? Or is there no suitcase? He is dressed in the best clothes that he owns. Or are there no best clothes? The conversation is quiet, short sentences, the man’s mind lost somewhere in the business of the moment. Or perhaps there is no conversation, not a word. Or perhaps there are laughs, the man talking and talking, joking, to take the edge away.

What?

Imagination tries to build atop slim facts. The man is 31 years old. That is birth certificate truth. His wife is 28 years old. That is another birth certificate truth. Their first son, the boy, as recorded in the Office of the Registrar of Vital Statistics, Baltimore City, by midwife Minnie Graf, is seven years, three months, seven days old, except…except he will believe for most of his years that his birthday is one year and one day earlier.

Why is that?

The urge is to sketch in the rest of the picture, make judgments, add colors and emotions and maybe a passing billboard or two. Can it be resisted? The mother has kissed the boy good-bye at the front door of 426 West Camden Street, a tear rolling down her cheek. Or she has said nothing. Or she was relieved. Or maybe she wasn’t even there. The boy is sad, crying. Or he is mute, defiant. Or he is clueless and confident, always confident.

The biggest mysteries in the life of George Herman Ruth—and some researchers say Herman is his true middle name, handed down from his father, and some say it is his confirmation name—are front-loaded and frustrating. The topographic representations of most famous lives feature well-defined peaks of public achievement, brightly lit and easily seen, but a fog often settles over the personal life below. The fog here covers everything.

Babe?

Babe Ruth?

Behind that moon face with those small eyes, that flat nose, those big lips that will be captured in any instantly recognizable portrait in a blue New York Yankees cap, the boy will forever hide. He is only a shape, glimpsed here, glimpsed there, lost again. No one has found that boy at the beginning of it all, touched him, gotten to know him. No one ever will. If the right questions ever were asked, the answers never were given. Time has finished the job. There is no one to talk to now. No one is around.

He will become the Sultan of Swat, the Bambino, the Big Bam, baseball royalty, the greatest home run hitter of his time or any time, a character as interesting as Einstein or Edison or Elvis or any other twentieth-century innovator or inventor, but he will never fill in the early blanks. Want to grow up to be Babe Ruth? He will never explain how to start.

The trolley ride with his father on that June day of 1902 will always be a bewilderment. The boy will say as a man only that he was a bad kid. Not much more than that. He was seven years old. He was an only son. He was taken to that trolley because he was a seven-year-old bad kid? How bad could he have been? Incorrigible was a word that was used.

There are no stories of a mother, none—good or bad or madhouse crazy. There is one picture of her, a grainy shot, pulled from a group photo of a family reunion, her famous child in her lap. Her hair is up. Her high collar is buttoned. She is not smiling.

There are few stories of a father. He was a lightning-rod salesman and then the owner of a succession of taverns. He had an anger that coursed through him. Or so it seemed. The one famous picture of father and son, later in life, shows a beefy man, striped shirt, necktie, vest of a waiter. He has a cigar in his left hand, stands behind his bar. Christmas decorations hang from the ceiling. He would like to pour you a beer.

The environment can be stitched together from history books and memoirs of local writers, but it is a broad picture of turn-of-the-century Baltimore and a bad neighborhood and working-class woes. Stevedores, sailors, wagons, horses, the many-layered bustle of business—these are the backdrop in an area of alleys and cramped brick houses near the docks on the wrong side of Pratt Street, the downtown dividing line for class and economics.

The general neighborhood, which included the house of George Herman’s maternal grandmother at 216 Emory Street, where he was born, was called Pigtown. He is a boy from Pigtown. The name comes from the great herds of pigs, hundreds of pigs, that are run through the streets on a regular basis from the nearby stockyard to the nearby slaughterhouse. Residents, it is said, would open their basement windows and reach out and try to grab a passing, squealing potential Sunday dinner.

The specifics of family life are elusive. The father ran assorted taverns in the area, nine in one count, one after another, so the family moved often. The mother was pregnant much of the time, had eight children, including two sets of twins. Six of the children died early. She herself was dead of exhaustion, the word on her death certificate, at age 39. The certificate also said she was a widow.

A widow?

That’s wrong.

Isn’t it?

The meager bits of information scrawled on forms and in ledgers by bored civil servants are pen-and-ink riddles as much as facts. The father was supposed to be Lutheran, the mother Catholic. They were married in a Baptist church. The boy supposedly was baptized Catholic, but 11 years later was baptized Catholic again. The word convert was written on the side of the official certificate. Why was that? Any mistakes made then are codified now, preserved as Paleolithic truth when found by armchair archaeologists.

The most spare anecdotes or one-liners are repeated with each succeeding retelling of the larger tale, gathering weight each time. They are repeated here. The grown-up boy supposedly told Chicago Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance fame that his father took him to the basement and beat him with a horsewhip. Another story mentioned a billiard cue. Another said his mother beat on him in frustration.

The image that clicks into place is an embattled household on the perforated edge of poverty. Alcohol fuels discord and noise. Volatility is the one constant of every day, the smallest situations ticking, ready to explode. Love and quiet are luxuries that can’t be afforded. Bills are always due. Frustrations sit in a pile that never will get smaller, life turned into existence. An unpleasant existence at that. The birth date for little George—if it is right—indicates that he was born seven months after his mother and father were married. What about that fact? Did his parents know? Was that why they were married in the first place?

Is any of this right?

A sister survived. Mary, called Mamie, was five years younger than little George. Or maybe six. She would live to be 91 years old, dying in 1992, but was of little help. She developed a mostly romanticized version of childhood, as many people do. Her parents were in the restaurant business. Her brother was a very big boy for his age, very good-hearted to everyone he met. He would get very angry at times, but it was soon forgotten.

She did say, Mother was not a very well person. She didn’t elaborate on what sense of well she meant. Physical or mental? Or both? Didn’t say. At times she was at variance with things her brother said. He said he had an older brother, John, who died in a street fight. She said there was no older brother; George was the oldest. He also said their mother was a mix of Irish and English. Mamie said this was nonsense; their mother was German.

Research seems to back Mamie’s side. The mother, maiden name Katie Schaumberger, was the daughter of Pius and Anna Schaumberger. They both were born in Germany; then Katie was born in Maryland. The other side of the family also goes back eventually to Germany. George Ruth Sr.’s parents both were born in Maryland. There is dispute about where his grandparents were born, either in Germany or Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Dutch country. Pick one. If Bucks County is the choice, the great-great-grandparents were from Germany.

Added to the confusion are a couple of other names, Erhardt and Gerhardt. These were names mentioned mostly by the boy, the son, in later years. He tried to explain, more than once, that Ruth was his real name, not Erhardt or Gerhardt. Who exactly thought his real name was Erhardt or Gerhardt was never explained. Someone—perhaps a bunch of someones—must have thought so. Why else would he explain?

In his autobiography, The Babe Ruth Story, ghostwritten for him just before his death, he takes care of all of this childhood material in just five paragraphs, less than 300 words. One sentence, I hardly knew my parents, pretty much wraps up his genealogy. Another sentence, I had a rotten start and it took me a long time to get my bearings, pretty much wraps up his early childhood.

He will never say much more. The reporters of his time never pressed, never tried to squeeze out the smallest details, the darkest secrets, the way they do now in a tell-all time of celebrity. They never fanned across his beginnings and interviewed neighbors and boyhood chums, teachers, and shopkeepers. That wasn’t the style. Neither his father nor his mother told a single story, not one. There are no first smiles, first steps, first confrontations with a curveball. There are no tales of mischief or honor. No school paper has been preserved, a star pasted at the top.

Babe?

Babe Ruth?

The boy who became famous was born and existed for his formative first seven years in the wide margins between very few words. He learned his first lessons about love, life, survival. He learned about keeping secrets. He was one of the forgotten children, the same then as now, kids who are born into hard circumstance and either figure out what to do or don’t. He was left alone with his questions, had to find his own answers.

He still is alone. The man who grew out of the boy very much decided to leave the boy back there. What happened? The man would never say, so the boy is seen only in outline. There he is, living in the apartment above the father’s tavern. There he is, running down the street with a pack of kids, throwing something at some merchant directing a horse-drawn cart. There he is…where is he?

The docks of Baltimore grow darker and more threatening as they are seen from farther and farther away. Images from movies intrude: drunken sailors and longshoreman louts walking the cobblestone streets, hard women in doorways bidding them hello. Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the country, a major port, calling itself the Liverpool of America. Images of Liverpool join the picture. Giant schooners sit with wooden masts. An everyday covering of soot and smoke touches all objects. A drizzle always seems to be falling, a lonely streetlight losing the battle with the blackness of the alleys.

The fog settles over everything and will not leave.

Maybe the man reads a newspaper. Maybe an earlier passenger left it on the trolley. Maybe the man brought it with him to pass the time. Maybe there is no newspaper, but it is put there to establish situation and circumstance, a use of dramatic license. Maybe the man reads. Maybe he talks. Small talk.

Orioles won yesterday, he says to the boy. Beat the Tigers, 9–3 in Detroit.

The 1902 Orioles are in sixth place in the eight-team American League. The glories of the nineteenth-century world championships won by John McGraw, Hughie Jennings, Wee Willie Keeler, and Steve Brodie are pretty much gone. Only catcher Wilbert Robinson is around from those days, 39 years old now. He went 1-for-4 in Detroit, a double. The Chicago White Sox are in first place, a game and a half in front of the Philadelphia A’s. There is no American League team in New York.

How about this? the man says. "‘In a baseball game between the city team from Charlottesville and the Christian Science reading room, a ground ball took a bad hop and struck Charlottesville shortstop W. Reade Jarman in the throat. He picked up the ball, threw to first to nip the runner, then grabbed his throat and fell to the ground. He was dead three minutes later.’

Can you believe it? the man says.

He turns from the sports page to the front. Two sergeants testified before Congress yesterday that they did, while serving in the Philippines in 1900, hold suspected insurgents’ heads under water in order to extract information…. A group of striking workers fired upon a coal train in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania…. There is another big strike in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Police fired upon a crowd…. A corn shortage is reported at the exchange in Philadelphia…. And a genuine Porto Rican Panama hat can be had for $2 (a $5 value) at the Hat Box in the American Building.

The man mentions the insurgents perhaps, but not the bargain hat. Or the hat and not the insurgents. Or neither.

Probably neither.

There probably is no newspaper. The boy would never become a reader. Never would read an entire book in his life, not even the two he supposedly wrote. The man is probably not much of a reader either.

Probably no newspaper.

The fog will make everything greater. That is the weird beauty of the fog. The fog will be part of the magic. The fog will be the beginnings of the myth. Anyone can succeed! Uneducated, socially inept, but able to do one thing better than anyone else in the world—swing a wooden bat and hit a baseball for astonishing distances—the boy will grow up to meet presidents and kings and be carried high in the air, showered with money and kisses (a lot of kisses), and loved with a fondness usually reserved for the family golden retriever. The fog will make him forever accessible, universal.

He will be the patron saint of American possibility. In the middle of the night in small towns across the country, crowds will gather at railroad stations. Word will pass that he will be on the train when it stops to pick up coal or to add cars or to subtract cars or to change tracks. The people will gather for a sighting, perhaps a word. He will shuffle to the train’s door in his bathrobe and slippers, wave from the steps, thank everyone for saying hello. The train will depart, and the people will go home satisfied, somehow fulfilled. See that? He is real.

His success will be a lottery ticket in every empty pocket. If he can do it, then why can’t I? Or why can’t my kids? He grew up worse than all of us. He came from the terrible, unspeakable fog. Look at him now.

His fame will be manufactured in part, packaged, kept alive by a host of inventions, but its core will be performance. He will hit his 714 home runs, be part of seven world championship teams, do things that will demand to be reported in grand, bombastic ways. For the people who never could see him on the big stage, he will bring the show to them. He will hit home runs in wheat fields and mill towns, take the best pitch of the local phenom and send it clattering off grain elevators and warehouses. Little plaques will dot the land, testimonies to where he hit a baseball farther than anyone in that particular town ever did.

His deferred childhood, extending pretty much through all of his life, will be a shared, wicked delight. No scandal will be large enough to touch him. He will crash cars, change wives, wear funny hats, curse, howl, eat, drink to excess, and belch afterward in public. None of that will matter. Hey, that’s the way he is! He will be crude and rude and kind and approachable, sometimes all in the same ten minutes, and it all will be fine. He will be credited with miracles. Fine.

The two best things ever said about him will be said by teammates. The first will be a quote by Harry Hooper, an outfielder for the Boston Red Sox, talking to author Lawrence Ritter in 1965 for a book called The Glory of Their Times. Ritter will set up a first-generation tape recorder in the old baseball player’s living room in California, and the old baseball player will remember the man who emerged almost from nowhere:

You know, I saw it all happen from beginning to end. But sometimes I still can’t believe what I saw: this 19-year-old kid, crude, poorly educated, only lightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization, gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and the symbol of baseball the world over—a man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that has perhaps never been equaled before or since. I saw a man transformed from a human being into something pretty close to a god. If somebody had predicted that back on the Boston Red Sox back in 1914, he would have been thrown into an insane asylum.

The second quote will come from teammate Waite Hoyt, a pitcher on both the Red Sox and New York Yankees, in a letter to author Robert Creamer. Trying to solicit Hoyt’s aid for his 1974 biography, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, Creamer has written a number of letters to the old baseball player. The old baseball player, reluctant until now, will decide to talk, but still has reservations:

"I am convinced YOU WILL NEVER learn the truth on Ruth. I roomed with [ Joe] Dugan. He was a good friend of Babe’s. But he will see Ruth in a different light than I did. Dugan’s own opinion will be one in which Dugan revels in Ruth’s crudities and so on. While I can easily recognize all of this and admit it freely—yet there was buried in Ruth humanitarianism beyond belief—an intelligence he was never given credit for, a childish desire to be over-virile, living up to credits given for his home run power—and yet a need for intimate affection and respect—and a feverish desire to play baseball, perform, act and live a life he didn’t and couldn’t take time to understand….

There are a HUNDRED facets to Ruth’s complex character, yet he was so simple as to be difficult. He was hated, derided by some—and some of the men he played against, or even with, might describe him as nothing short of an immoral boor. Could be…but I will argue that point.

He will be a great pitcher. He will be an even greater hitter. He will be a pied piper for children. He will be a rascal in the night. He will be a good husband, a bad husband, an indifferent husband, depending on the moment. He will be a willing but absent father. He will have a million friends. He will have very few. He will be a loner. He will farm, bowl, play golf, hunt, wear a tuxedo for Park Avenue soirees. He will be a profligate spender. He will be a very good businessman. He will never sit down.

For all of his adult years, no one will live a more public life, not even the president of the United States. His schedule will be unremitting. His hide will be tough, his energy constant. His curiosity will work only within tight boundaries. His humor will be basic. His weight will fluctuate. The reports of his death will be greatly exaggerated a half dozen times, but when the moment comes, he will be mourned as if he were a head of state. His cars will be fast. His life will be a wonder. His beginnings will be a closed book.

Why did his father take him to that trolley?

One story, maybe true, maybe not, is that a customer fired a gun in the tavern and that was that, somebody reported to authorities that this was no place for a child to be living. Another story was that the mother was always working and the father was always working and the child was running free, chewing tobacco and sampling beer. Another was that the mother was just out of it, gone, zonked. Who knows what else was taking place?

Who knows?

The early days of a man known as the Babe will always be missing. The irony is obvious.

It has been a long trip on the Wilkens Avenue trolley. The activity has decreased with each succeeding stop, commercial to residential, then even the end of that, the familiar row houses disappearing at the 2200 block. The city limits have been passed now, Baltimore City into Baltimore County, green grass and trees. Farms. Agriculture. Rural. Has the boy ever been out here? Have there ever been picnics? The trolley car is open on the sides. The different atmosphere intrudes. A different world. Does anyone notice?

At the appointed stop, the boy gathers his things. Or the man gathers them. Or maybe there are no things.

Man and boy walk down the aisle, go down the steps, and leave the trolley car. Boy first. Or maybe the other way around. They stand in front of the huge gray building, dwarfed by its size. The trolley stop is right in front, almost on the lawn.

Where the heck are we? the boy asks.

Or maybe he already knows.

The man begins to explain. Or maybe there is no need. The two of them, man and boy, walk toward the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. The trolley departs. The bell goes ding-ding.

Or maybe it goes clang.

CHAPTER TWO

S T. MARY’S Industrial School for Boys must have looked like a maximum-security prison to a seven-year-old boy. It did to everyone else. The official name, startling in itself, was St. Mary’s Industrial School for Orphans, Delinquent, Incorrigible, and Wayward Boys. The main building was five stories tall, massive, faux-medieval, a gray and grim fortress that ultimately would have a chapel attached at one end, a dormitory at the other, six dark buildings in all. Entry and exit were through iron gates. A wall surrounded the premises.

The 800-plus youthful inhabitants—more than half of them remanded to the institution by local and state courts—moved through their days in military syncopation, all activities run to a schedule. Wake-up was at 6:00 A.M. Bedtime was 8:00 P.M. Obedience was the number-one virtue. The 30-plus members of the Congregation of the Brothers of Francis Xavier, the Xaverians, in charge of all aspects of daily life, walked the premises in long black cassocks, a cross on top of the Sacred Heart of Jesus sewn onto their chests, heavy rosary beads hanging from their belts.

No doubt was left about the idea that this was the end of all nonsense. The seven-year-old George Ruth had landed in an environment controlled by stern and steady hands.

What do you do with the unruly boy? a member of the Baltimore grand jury, which inspected the institution three times every year, once asked an unnamed brother described as a stalwart man.

I lay them across my knees and give them a good spanking, the brother replied.

The orphanage system in the United States had begun to grow after the Civil War, which left a need to house the children of fallen soldiers from both sides of the conflict. The concept by now had been broadened: the state was in charge of all troubled, disruptive, or unwanted children, fatherless or not, and orphanages or homes had sprung up everywhere across the country. Twenty-nine were in Baltimore alone.

St. Mary’s Industrial School was established in 1866. The Rev. Martin Spaulding, the Archbishop of Baltimore, asked for the school in response to the state-run orphanages. He was concerned about the large numbers of poor Catholic children, often the sons and daughters of immigrants, who were put into secular homes by the courts after arrests for thievery or mischief. He worried that these children would lose their religion in their new surroundings. St. Mary’s was his answer in this fight for their souls.

The Xaverians were members of a religious order started in Belgium in 1846. The order expanded first to England, then to the United States. In the 1880s, Archbishop Spaulding asked the Xaverians to run St. Mary’s after the school initially was mismanaged by laymen and local priests. The brothers, though they wore the white Roman collars and the cassocks, were not to be confused with priests. Like priests, they had taken the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but unlike priests, they could not say Mass or hear confession. They were foot soldiers of the Lord, the male equivalent to nuns, enlisted men on the lowest level of the Church’s organizational chart.

Any middle-aged graduate of a Catholic, all-boys high school can tell tales of the brothers who taught him. No matter what the religious order, the brothers would range in personality from devout to worldly, from meek to charismatic, from kindly to sadistic. (From manly to effeminate? Yes, that too.) They usually came from working-class families and were called to the religious life for various reasons, not the least of which at the turn of the century was an opportunity for three guaranteed meals a day and a guaranteed roof over their heads.

The Catholic orphanages tended to be large and crowded. A 1904 census noted that Catholic institutions made up less than 27 percent of the nation’s orphanages but housed 46.6 percent of the orphan population. Matthew A. Crenson, author of Building the Invisible Orphanage: A Prehistory of the American Welfare System, says that Catholic homes tended to keep their charges longer than the other institutions. The Protestant, Jewish, and secular homes would look for adoptive or foster parents, but the administrators of the Catholic homes feared that with a dearth of well-to-do members of the faith, the children would be adopted by wealthier non-Catholic couples. The institutional life also did not seem as oppressive to Catholics as it did to members of other faiths, since priests, brothers, and nuns often lived in the same kind of communal structure.

The conditions in most of these places were far from idyllic, Crenson said. "They worked these kids pretty hard. The food was rotten. There were lots of starches, very little milk. Lots of oatmeal. Sometimes the kids drank coffee. The food was served in wooden bowls and eaten with the hands or maybe a large wooden spoon. There was no talking in the dining room.

A lot of the orphanages featured marching drills, like you’d see in those old-fashioned prison movies. Most of them had corporal punishment, usually with leather straps. Solitary confinement up to a week was the punishment for some offenses. Reduced rations. The interesting thing is that a lot of the kids who came out of these places were still okay. Some of them led very successful lives.

St. Mary’s fit well into this picture out of the notebooks of Charles Dickens. As many as 200 boys were housed on each dormitory floor, their beds placed end to end in long, perfect rows. This was barracks living with shared lavatories, showers, and common areas. Privacy was nonexistent.

Academics were not a principal consideration. When the Xaverians first took control of the school, only one brother was assigned to classroom teaching, the rest to vocational training. Students under 12 received five hours of academic instruction per day; the number was lowered to three and a half or four hours per day for students over 12. Classes overflowed with 40 or 50 students per brother, everyone working on lessons in chalk on individual slate boards. A fine white dust could be found on most sleeves at the end of classes after countless erasures.

The rest of the day was devoted to work. The trades offered were floriculture, gardening, farming, tailoring, shoemaking and repairing, steam-fitting, woodworking, carpentering, baking, and glazing. Instruction also was offered in typewriting and instrumental and vocal music. The students maintained the grounds, cooked the meals, and sewed the very clothes they wore, all under the direction of the Xaverians.

A renovation program in 1912 added a large water tank for the upper floors, a clock and a flagpole topped by a cross on the main building’s tower, and a redesigned entrance to the school. Students did all of this. They worked long hours and hard hours.

I operated 16 different machines, one unnamed resident recalled about his days in the tailor shop. On one of them, if the bobbin became empty, all 2,000 needles had to be rethreaded, a half-day’s work.

Meals were held in silence. The apprehended whisperer was marched to the front of the room, where he had to stand in disgrace until the meal ended. Then he was whipped. (The whipping didn’t hurt so much, the same resident says. The worst part was just standing there, waiting to be whipped, thinking about it.) The food, indeed, was rotten. Brother John Joseph Stern, CFX, a onetime St. Mary’s resident, described the diet in the foreword to The Young Babe Ruth, a book written by Brother Gilbert Cairns, CFX, and edited years later by Louisville attorney Harry Rothgerber.

The food was of the simplest and would probably edify a Trappist monk, Brother John Joseph said. "Breakfast usually consisted of a bowl of oatmeal or hominy. If we received any milk, it would have to be in the oatmeal or in the thin coffee or tea served at all meals. For variety, there was a single pat of butter or oleo on Fridays and three hot dogs, which we called weenies, on Sunday morning. We surely looked forward to Sundays. However, during the week, many a lad would bet away his weenies or promise them in return for some other consideration. I’m sure [George] would have been involved in this ‘action.’

Lunch was a bowl of soup and bread. The bread was usually home-baked and heavy, our own students being the bakers. At times it was necessary to buy regular bread, which we called City Bread. That was before the invention of bread slicing. Supper usually was more soup and bread, though again on Sunday there was a change: three slices of baloney.

Oddly, religious instruction was not a major part of the curriculum. The students attended Sunday Mass and were baptized and received their first Communions and Confirmations, but the example of the Xaverian brothers was supposed to deliver most religious lessons. The brothers delivered daily, sometimes moment-by-moment instruction