The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  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, Pennsyl
vania…. 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 p
rison 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.