by Jane Leavy
There were two rival saloons on the same side of the block, and seven doors down, the Baltimore branch of Jacob Ruppert’s New York Brewery. The Ruppert family was not yet in the baseball business.
Baltimore was a thirsty city—twenty breweries had been consolidated by the so-called beer trust into the Maryland Brewing Company four years earlier. George Sr. was counting on the unquenchable thirst of traveling salesmen and local laborers to keep his saloon busy. Katie prepared crab cakes and hot German potato salad in the kitchen.
George Sr. joined a Bohemian social club, Spolek Veselych Hochu—the Jolly Brothers—where he served on the dance committee. He looked plenty jolly posing with his new brothers in a bow tie and a Panama hat worn by all Baltimore gentlemen after May 15. And he looked prosperous in a top hat and tails at the Christmas party held at the Germania Maennerchor Hall on Lombard Street, just a couple of blocks from the saloon. Being a Jolly Brother was good for business.
A twenty-round boxing match was scheduled to take place at the Germania on the evening of June 13.
Eleven days after opening for business on West Camden Street, George Ruth had been fined ten dollars and costs by Judge Poe for “allowing minors to play billiards and pool in his place.” That was one consequence of his decision to uproot his young family from a stable, working-class neighborhood to an apartment above a bar. The minors were not named in the complaint. But a local beat cop named Harry C. Birmingham, who patrolled the streets he and George Sr. had prowled as boys, had already concluded it was no place for seven-year-old George Jr.
Legend would hand down a bill of particulars against him and history would presume him guilty on all counts: stealing one dollar from his father’s till to buy ice cream for his pals; filching vegetables from arabbers and hurling them through shop windows; knocking over vegetable baskets and running home to hide; chewing and smoking tobacco; emptying glasses left behind on the tables in his father’s saloon.
“When I wasn’t living over it, I was living in it,” Ruth once said.
And, everyone agreed, he just wouldn’t go to school.
Of course, in June 1902 he wasn’t yet of school age. And children who were enrolled were just getting out for the summer.
A patron told George Sr. he had parked his own unruly son at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, a Catholic-run institution on the southwestern edge of the city for white boys deemed “incorrigible or vicious, or beyond the control” of their parents.
St. Mary’s unique quasi-public status was granted by the state in 1874 when the school was publicly incorporated and local courts were authorized to institutionalize “any destitute white boy, or any white boy convicted before such court or magistrate of any offence against any law or laws of this State; provided, that the parent or guardian of said boy or boys shall request that they be committed.”
The school also accepted orphans and boarders whose parents paid tuition.
George Sr. sought Harry Birmingham’s advice. Birmingham, who worked out of the Western District on Pine Street, was a familiar and formidable presence in his Keystone Copper’s cap and brilliantined mustache. It was his job to know every barkeep’s business. He didn’t drink, his great-granddaughter would say, and liked telling others not to. Nosiness, an asset for a beat cop, came naturally to him.
The liquor situation, as it was sometimes called in Christian publications, was much in the news. Enforcement of hundred-year-old blue laws banning the sale of liquor on Sunday was an ongoing battle and topic of newspaper conversation. On June 13, 1902, the Sun reported new charges had been brought against six tavern operators “upon testimony furnished by agents of the Anti-Saloon League.”
One of the other saloons on West Camden Street had been cited twice that spring. Birmingham had participated in a March undercover raid on Charles Bradley’s establishment around the corner on South Eutaw, entering the premises through the back gate while posing as a customer.
Birmingham, officially Patrolman 469, agreed that St. Mary’s was a good solution for George Sr.’s high-spirited son and offered to escort him there. Harry’s great-granddaughter recalled hearing that he came to collect the boy in a police car, which the force wouldn’t have until 1911. They might have taken a police cart or the Lombard Street trolley, recently extended to the city line just past St. Mary’s.
Whether Birmingham volunteered to transport the boy, as his obituary recounted fifty years later, or was asked to do so as a favor to an old family friend, the fact remains that Little George left home in police custody on June 13, 1902.
II
There was only one route: straight out Wilkens Avenue, the boulevard named for, and endowed by, the industrialist William Wilkens, proprietor of William Wilkens & Co., Manufacturers of Steam-Curled Hair and Bristles, which occupied fifteen acres in a natural hollow between his eponymously named thoroughfare and Frederick Avenue, where Little George had spent the first two years of his life in the home of his paternal grandparents.
Wilkens Avenue extended south and west from downtown Baltimore into farmland acquired in the 1888 annexation. It had been expanded as part of the one hundredth anniversary of the Revolutionary War, and at the urging of local businessmen, including Wilkens, to facilitate the increasing traffic on this rapidly industrializing portion of U.S. Route 1. Wilkens, who came to America with eighteen cents in his pocket in 1836, donated thirty-three acres of land to the city to erect what he envisioned as a grand boulevard for the immigrant laborers, most of them German, who serviced the stockyards, brickyards, coal yards, breweries, lime kilns, butcher shops, and slaughterhouses—not to mention his own factory, where pig bristles and horsehair were turned into paintbrushes and stuffing for mattresses and chignons for the chic matrons of the town.
Wilkens had in mind a broad avenue on a par with Charles Street in downtown Baltimore. He built a seven-block promenade, planted with hyacinths and tulips. Among the flowering white maple and poplar trees stood pewter urns and cupids—the Wilkens statuary—and a fountain of a chubby little boy holding an umbrella over a chubby little girl to protect her from the manufactured rain. George Jr. and his younger sister, two-year-old Mamie, were protective of each other that way, shielding each other from cloudbursts of parental rage.
“Daddy had a powerful big hand,” Mamie would say later. “When he walloped you, you knew you were walloped.”
There was a natural bottleneck near the promenade at the foot of Wilkens Avenue, where cars and horse carts and Streetcar Number 9 had to slow while negotiating an acute right turn from South Gilmor Street. Looking back over the basin of Baltimore Harbor, George Jr. would have had an unobstructed view of the B&O warehouse under construction just a block from home, and the twin smokestacks of the Baltimore Cold Storage Company poking through a scrim of cloud and omnipresent coal dust.
A century later his statue would be erected on that spot.
The avenue had been terraced in expectation of urban development. Vacant lots on Mill Hill would be transformed into the longest continuous block of houses in Baltimore—neat, brick proletarian structures with electric wiring and gas heat built for Mr. Wilkens’s workers with clay that came out of the surrounding hills. For generations of boys who grew up in those houses, the reform school at the top of the hill would become a threat and a caution. Behave—or you’ll get sent where the Babe went when he was bad.
By streetcar, the two-mile ascent of the Gwynns Falls valley would have taken perhaps twenty minutes, depending on how many horse-drawn wagons were also riding the rails, built to the same wide gauge of carts delivering livestock to the Union Stockyards just south of Brunswick Street. Old-timers told of seeing herds of pigs and cattle driven through the streets en route to market and slaughter. Discarded pig bladders, washed and inflated like balloons, were fashioned into footballs by neighborhood boys, who according to legend were barred from wearing red in case a bull got anxious en route to his fate.
The stockyards, a sprawling split-rail, four-legged mu
nicipality large enough to house five thousand cattle, eight thousand sheep, and thirteen thousand hogs, was the culmination of the effort by city fathers and railroad officials to remove the messy business of slaughtering animals from the city’s downtown. New track had been laid, allowing for the consolidation of the Pennsylvania and B&O Railroad stockyards in 1891. “Every hoof under one roof” was the motto. The property was practically adjacent to St. Mary’s, where the brothers, who fed the boys three hot dogs each Sunday, the only meat in their diet, were fattening up sixty-six head of cattle for export.
The avenue crossed lower Gwynns Falls and a railroad spur Mr. Wilkens had laid to facilitate deliveries to his plant in Snake Hollow, where slithering reptiles lived in a stream that powered the plant and carried away the residue of its success. “The hair mines,” local boys called it. Scalded pigskins and horsehides were laid out on Hog Hair Hill to dry in the sun; when the wind turned southwesterly, as it had on June 13, 1902, the stench rivaled poison gas, Mencken said.
The “branch,” as locals called it, coursed downhill, rejoining the falls below the stockyard’s abattoir, adding momentum and detritus to its flow. The waste city fathers had sought to banish was re-deposited in the back bay. Epidemics were common and virulent. Babies died. Little George had seen plenty of that.
He was eight blocks from St. Mary’s. Up, up, up, they climbed, ascending Mr. Wilkens’s Avenue to God’s country. Life as he knew it receded from view.
St. Mary’s Industrial School stood 124 feet above sea level. From that elevation, Little George could see the spire of the Baltimore Basilica, the first Catholic cathedral built in the United States, and the emerging skyline of Baltimore’s business district, a great steel and granite mass of Progressive Era commerce—the Maryland, Union, and Continental Trust buildings, as well as the Equitable and Calvert buildings, all of which would be gutted in the Great Fire of 1904. The Fidelity Building at 210 North Charles Street, on the northwest edge of the burnt district, would survive the conflagration. Two years later, at that address, depositions would be taken in the Second Baltimore City Circuit Court, Case No. 8862, George H. Ruth v. Katie Ruth.
III
At the corner of Wilkens and Caton Avenues, Harry Birmingham delivered George Jr. into the care of the Xaverian Brothers who ran St. Mary’s. He was a minim now, the name given to the youngest of the boys—“the least of the little fellows,” they were called in the school’s 1902 annual report. He went to sleep that night in a dormitory organized in rows of wrought-iron cots as straight as pinstripes. A bentwood chair was stationed beside each starched pillow. No bed was more than two feet away from its neighbor. The boys slept head to toe, with just enough room between them to get down on their knees and pray.
It was as impersonal and as orderly as a hospital ward, an ethos in keeping with the description of St. Mary’s as a “moral hospital” in the 1880 Baltimore Sesquicentennial Memorial Volume. The Church called them “young unfortunates.”
They called themselves inmates.
He would join the other solemn, sullen boys lined up to be photographed in fussy collars and bows (produced in the tailor shop by older boys) for annual reports prepared for state and city authorities, upon whom the brothers were dependent for financial support. They stared gravely into the camera’s lens and an uncertain future.
Birmingham would continue to walk his west Baltimore beat throughout George Ruth’s tenure at St. Mary’s. He closed bars on Sundays, broke up craps games, locked up drunks, chased shoplifters, and broke two ribs jumping from a moving train in an effort to catch an escaping prisoner. He also won a commendation for saving a family of four from a house fire and always made time to check up on young George.
He was the first—though hardly the last—of a series of father figures who would enter his life at crucial moments when he most needed their counsel and advice. He would visit George in the “Little Yard” the brothers had set aside for the minims, and later in the “Big Yard” reserved for the older fellows, chasing him down when he ran away, taking him back up the hill as often as he had to, with a stern admonishment that he had no place else to go.
He felt sorry for the boy, living above a bar like that, he later told his children and grandchildren. And he told anyone who would listen what he told Baltimore sportswriter Rodger Pippen in 1947, when reports of Ruth’s failing health reached his hometown. “I remember that Babe was a little rascal. Although he was not a bad boy—just mischievous, and no more so than any other boys his age. He certainly never gave the police any trouble. But his father decided to send him to St. Mary’s because he just couldn’t make him mind at home. Babe had a will of his own and was never one to take orders.”
Even if he had filched vegetables and hurled them, chewed tobacco, and stolen a dollar from his daddy’s cash register—how bad could he have been? He was seven years old.
Of all the many journeys of Babe Ruth’s life—from uncouth to couth, spartan to spendthrift, abandoned to abandon and back again; from the dead ball era to power baseball; from Baltimore to Boston to New York, and back to Boston for a finale with the only team that would have him; from grand tours of Europe and the Orient to barnstorming tours of the American heartland; not to mention 714 trips around the bases—the trip from home to the home, fateful and formative, was the most important one of all.
Chapter 1
October 10 / Providence
HOME RUN KING AND CROWN PRINCE HERE TODAY
—PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
BOTH STARS PITCH IN WEIRD CONTEST AS AUTOGRAPH-SEEKERS SWARM AROUND PLAYERS AT ALL TIMES
SCORE OF TILT IS MYSTERY.
—PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
I
Jean Bedini, a vaudeville star known in the trades as “the Turnip Catcher” for his ability to apprehend root vegetables dropped from skyscrapers with a fork clenched between his teeth, met Babe Ruth at home plate at Kinsley Park in Providence at 2:30 P.M. Bedini had canceled the opening performance of his new burlesque show, “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo,” to present his pal with a large floral tribute.
No one could have anticipated when Bedini’s troupe was booked into the Empire Theatre that the Babe would be in town—an impromptu one-day engagement organized just twenty-four hours earlier, after he put a premature end to the World Series, leaving an unexpected hole in his schedule.
There was no percentage in opening up against the Babe and plenty of advantage to be had in appearing with him. So Bedini brought the entire cast of “the peppiest, jazziest show on earth” to home plate, all sixty of them, one for every home run the Babe had hit that season. There were chorines and choristers, dancing girls and jugglers, comedians, acrobatic dancers and eccentric buffoons, Harry Reser’s ten-piece orchestra, straight from the Folies Bergère in Atlantic City, as well as a radio artist and phonograph recorder.
Also waiting for the Big Bam at home plate was Lou Gehrig, otherwise known as the Little Bam, as well as the promoters of the game, the first stop on a barnstorming tour their agent Christy Walsh billed as “A Symphony of Swat.” In their fedoras and business suits, the promoters stood out among the leggy lovelies: Judge James E. Dooley, who, having served a single year on Rhode Island’s Eighth District Court, earned a title for life; Tim O’Neill, the “sandlot baseball king”; and Peter Laudati, who had built Kinsley Park as a home for the current iteration of the Providence Grays.
Hasty as the arrangements were, the advertisement in the morning Journal promising that “Babe Ruth, King of Swat, and Lou Gehrig, Fence Buster, Will Positively Appear” proved persuasive. Five thousand “hilarious fans of all sexes and conditions” showed up, among them “2222 yelling, romping, tumbling kids,” each of them intent upon joining the scrum at home plate.
This was two days after Murderers’ Row had done in the Pittsburgh Pirates in four straight with Ruth as chief executioner. He batted .400, drove in seven of the Yankees’ nineteen runs, and hit the only two home runs of the series, ensuring each of his teammates a $5,709 chec
k for four days’ work.
It was four days after the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, opened at the Warners’ Theatre in New York. Six days after sculptors began chiseling George Washington’s nose on Mount Rushmore. And twelve days after the Big Fella had made good on his New Year’s pledge to Yankee owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert, which had been bannered across the top of the New York Telegram: “I promise 60 homers to Jake.”
It was an audacious promise, considering he hadn’t hit as many as fifty since 1921, one he made while living it up in Hollywood between vaudeville engagements and movie negotiations—and, most notably, before coming to terms with Ruppert on a 1927 contract.
But the Babe made good. Circling the bases on the afternoon of September 30, doffing his cap, bowing, grinning, winking, Ruth crowed: “Sixty! Count ’em, sixty. Let’s see some other sonofabitch do that!”
Bedini, who put an end to his vegetable-catching days after sacrificing all his front teeth to a one-pound turnip, had a particular appreciation for the showman Ruth had become, the sheer gameness of the man. More than anyone, Bedini was in a position to grasp the difficulty of the stunt Ruth pulled off on behalf of Citizens’ Military Training Camps the previous July, when Christy Walsh stationed him on a dusty Long Island airfield to try to set a world record for catching a baseball dropped from an airplane—a record Walsh invented for Ruth to break.
Walsh would do just about anything to align his Rabelaisian charge with what he called “pure Americanism of the horse and buggy sort” and divert attention from his less savory ways. He posed the Babe in a lot of woolen military garb, in this instance at high noon on the same airfield where Lucky Lindy would take off for Paris ten months later. It took seven tries, with Ruth darting about the empty field in a blistering sun, and the propellers kicking up tornadoes of dust that obfuscated everything but the man on the ground and the plane in the sky.
