The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (3 page)

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.
M
ARY’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 in right and wrong, yes and no.

One favorite punishment was to send a disobeying boy into the yard to collect a pile of 10,000 pebbles. If a brother found the pile at the end of collection to be too small, he kicked it, sending the pebbles everywhere. The boy then had to begin counting again. He probably gathered enough pebbles this time.

One report estimated the number of severely retarded students in the school at 6 percent, adding that a greater number were “two to five years retarded” from a scholastic norm. The average stay at St. Mary’s was two years. Boys were sent back to their families whenever possible and sometimes were sent off to work on farms. The ages ran from 5 to 21, when a boy could check himself out of the institution and into the outside world.

George Ruth, the newest boy, would be an exception to the average. He would wind up spending the best part of his next 13 years at St. Mary’s. The “home” truly would become his home.

His nickname from the start was “Nigger Lips.” He would hear the word “nigger” infinitely more times in his childhood than Hank Aaron or Barry Bonds or any African American slugger who chased his records ever did. He would hear it more than Jackie Robinson did. The word was his name, often contracted from “Nigger Lips” to “Nigger” to “Nig.” Any of the permutations applied. He heard it 100 times a day.

The school was filled with nicknames. Louis “Fats” Leisman, whose pamphlet “I Was with Babe Ruth at St. Mary’s” is the one student account of those days, mentions Congo Kirby and Ike Russie and Skinny McCall and Kid Mears and Loads Clark and Lefty Blake in his stories. Nicknames mostly were handed out for obvious physical characteristics, for mistakes or failings, a reach for closeness, a form of friendship through mutual embarrassment. Everybody had a nickname. The more a kid disliked his nickname, the better it fit.

The new kid disliked his a lot.

He had facial characteristics—the lips, the nose—that gave him a mixed-race look in a time and environment when a mixed-race look was not a good thing to have. His skin was “olive like our mother’s side of the family,” according to sister Mamie, who added that she was “lighter,” more like their father’s side. The new kid was a darker face in an all-white school.

His size served him well. In an environment filled with troubled kids, confrontation and petty theft and matters of respect always were part of the package. Larger was much better than smaller. His temperament also helped. He was loud and physical and outgoing. Active. He was a boy with chronic ants in his pants.

“He had ADHD, no doubt about it,” his granddaughter, Linda Tossetti, suggested years later. “That would be the diagnosis today. My brother had it. He was the same way. Never slept. Two hours of sleep, three hours, that was enough. He would wake me at three in the morning to play with his toys. We would play all night, no one to bother us.

“That was the way my grandfather was. He always was moving. That’s how he could eat so much, drink so much, and not be affected. He needed the energy. He would just burn it all off. That’s why he would stay out all night. He couldn’t sleep, didn’t have to sleep.”

“He was pretty big for his age,” Brother Herman, one of the Xaverians, once said in a description of the 12-year-old Nigger Lips. “Not fleshy, in fact more on the wiry side, he was still an outstanding-looking boy. He had a mop of thick dark-brown hair. He was livelier than most of the boys, full of mischief. There was nothing timid about him. He was an aggressive, shouting boy who was always wrestling around with the others. He held his own, too.”

The fog again settles over a lot of his doings at St. Mary’s. One version has him in and out of the school a number of times. He would attempt to live with his parents at their latest address, the move would fail, and he would return. Some of the attempts would last months, some a year or two. Mamie’s memory from when he was in the school was that she and her mother visited him on a regular basis, taking the Wilkens Avenue trolley on Sunday afternoons.

The Fats Leisman version is very different. Ruth pretty much stayed at St. Mary’s from the time he arrived until he was 20 years old, the only exception a failed attempt at living in the St. James Home, sort of a halfway stop toward returning to the everyday world. Leisman also said that Ruth had no visitors.

“Babe would kid me and say, ‘Well, I guess I am too big and ugly for anyone to come to see me,’” Leisman wrote about visiting day. “‘Maybe next time.’ But next time never came.”