The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (34 page)

SANDBURG
: If some boys asked you what books to read, what would you tell them?

RUTH
: I never get that. They never ask me that question. They ask me how to play ball.

SANDBURG
: If you were to name two or three books you like a lot, what would they be?

RUTH
: I don’t know. I like books with excitement, dramatic murders.

SANDBURG
: At least a million hot ball fans in the country, admirers of yours, believe in the Bible and Shakespeare as the two greatest books ever written, and some of them would like to know if there are any special parts of these books that are favorites of yours.

RUTH
: A ballplayer doesn’t have time to read. And it isn’t good for the eyes. A ballplayer lasts only as long as his legs and eyes. He can’t take any chances on his eyes.

(Pause.)

RUTH
: If somebody reads a book to me I get more out of it. I memorize nearly all of it. When I read it myself I forget it.

SANDBURG
: You have met President Coolidge, haven’t you?

RUTH
: Oh, yes.

SANDBURG
: If some boys asked you for a model of a man to follow through life, would you tell them that President Coolidge was pretty good?

RUTH
: Well, I always liked President Harding.

SANDBURG
: If some boys asked you which of all the Presidents of the United States was the best model to follow is there any one you would tell them?

RUTH
: President Wilson was always a great friend of mine.

SANDBURG
: Is there any one character in history you are particularly interested in, such as Lincoln, Washington, Napoleon?

RUTH
: I’ve never seen any of them.

SANDBURG
: Some people say brunettes have always been more dangerous women than blondes. How do you look at it?

RUTH
: It depends on the personality.

SANDBURG
: What’s your favorite flower?

RUTH
: I don’t care about flowers.

SANDBURG
: What’s your favorite horse?

RUTH
: Oh, I quit that. I quit playing the horses a long time ago.

SANDBURG
: There’s a lawyer, Clarence Darrow, staying at the hotel there that some people call the Babe Ruth of lawyers.

RUTH
: Yes, I met him yesterday. We were talking.

SANDBURG
: Have you followed any of Clarence Darrow’s big cases when the newspapers were printing so much about them?

(Pause.)

RUTH
: I just bought a piece of property this morning—$32,000 it was—$200 a front foot. We’re thinking about forming what they call a corporation, capital $165,000.

Sandburg thanked the Babe at the end. He said he hoped, as a ballplayer, Ruth’s legs and eyes wouldn’t give out for many years. That was his dry, final, easy shot.

“Can you imagine the gall of the fellow?” Pegler asked in the
Chicago Tribune.

The interview certainly did what Sandburg wanted it to do, finding the many holes in the Bambino’s education, but Sandburg’s air of intellectual superiority left the reader looking for a companion piece: what would happen if the Noted American Poet went over to the ballpark and tried to hit Lefty Grove, say, for half an hour? The Babe was the Babe. He had never pretended to be anything else. That was the beauty of him.

America didn’t care if Huckleberry Finn didn’t know anything about flowers. He’d hit 60 home runs.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

T
HE
B
ABE WROTE
a book in 1928. (Take that, Carl Sandburg.) Okay, maybe he didn’t actually write the book. Maybe Ford Frick of the
New York Evening World
wrote it, but it was titled
Babe Ruth’s Own Book of Baseball
, and the listed author was George Herman Ruth, and it was quite good.

Frick/Ruth told a lot of stories, made some observations, used some words that one of the two collaborators probably didn’t know. The subjects ran from hunting to bunting, the different pieces of George Herman’s life. One of the best little vignettes was a description of the world champions in transit, Murderers’ Row on the train:

In one section, a card game is in session, Meusel and Bengough, [Dutch] Ruether, Koenig and Lazzeri are playing “black jack.” They have their coats off, their collars discarded and their shirts open at the neck. They’re kidding and laughing over the game…. Down the car a bit, Hoyt sits reading a book. Further on, the fussy foursome is busy at bridge. That’s Gehrig, [Don] Miller, [Mike] Gazella and myself.

Shocker is reading the newspapers and his berth is messed up with a dozen sports pages, torn from as many different papers. Now and then he makes some discovery and pauses to discuss baseball with Pennock, who is writing letters across the aisle…. Through the open door of the drawing room, you can see Huggins, smoking his pipe and talking with [Charlie] O’Leary and [Art] Fletcher, his assistants.

This was the life of the world champions.

The train was their portable fraternity house, membership open to an exclusive few men who knew absolutely what to do with a well-thrown baseball. They clattered through the small towns of their individual pasts, zip, a bell ringing, a barrier dropped across all roads. They stayed in the best hotels, ate in the best restaurants. Dressed in suits that became better with each jump in pay, they traveled the seven-city circuit of 77 road games on a 154-game schedule, plus exhibitions, plus spring training, plus the World Series itself, preceded by press clippings, notable if not famous, caught in a sophisticated environment most of them never even had known existed. They sang songs and won ball games and learned which fork went with which course at dinner. Waite Hoyt had said it first: “It’s great to be young and a Yankee.” Well, that was right.

It was magic.

“You’d have players come up to New York from the sorriest little towns,” Marshall Hunt said. “I mean they were born on a farm, probably the whole income $125 a year. Then they got to playing on a Sunday school team, then a town team, and then they got into a small league, and of course, when they hit, there the scouts would be looking at them, and if they were good, they’d wind up here…. It always fascinated me that this fellow that came from that horrible side hill farm with that smelly outhouse, very little to eat, some kind of pork, corn, and pretty soon he’s getting $22,000 a year and wearing Brooks Brothers clothing and conducting himself real well.

“All the time these players would be with the Yankees or any other major league club they would be quite credible fellows. You could take them anywhere. They read the papers a little bit. They didn’t crucify the king’s English…. I mean, this rise—I don’t think you see it or have it brought to your attention as much in the steel industry, even in the movies, as you do in baseball.”

Trips would start and end in big-city palaces of transportation, heels of shined shoes clacking across the marble floors of Grand Central or Pennsylvania Station toward an overnight to Boston, the
Orange Blossom Special
to Florida, a long jaunt all the way to St. Louis. Action was everywhere. People. Bustle. Style. An estimated 47 million travelers would move through Grand Central in 1928, everybody going or coming, busy. The idea of airplanes as commercial carriers was only beginning to dawn. The long automobile or bus trip was a bouncing, punishing aggravation. The train was the way to travel. Seven cities to visit in the American League.

“To go from New York to Philadelphia, driving a car, you started by taking the ferry to Hoboken or someplace,” Hunt said. “Then you’d drive over cobblestones for stretches. Then you’d get behind a hay wagon. Couldn’t move. It would take a good five hours to reach Philadelphia. You’d be hard-pressed, driving from New York to Boston or Washington, to make that trip in a day.”

The Yankees and the writers who followed them would travel in two, sometimes three Pullman cars attached to the end of a regularly scheduled train. They would rattle along, take their meals in the dining car with the rest of the travelers, look out the windows, talk, play cards, talk, sleep, talk some more for as much as an entire 24-hour day. The trip to St. Louis would start around five o’clock in the afternoon in New York, with dinner at sunset while crossing the Hudson River, and finish at five o’clock in the afternoon the next day on the banks of the Mississippi.

There was time to get to know each other.

Marshall Hunt, say, would be sitting in the dining car. Earle Combs would come along for lunch.

“Anyone sitting here?”

“No, sit down, Earle.”

America would slide past the window. Hunt always would look at the men working in the fields, red necks bright in the sun, and feel comfortable and secure with his newspaper and his cup of coffee on the white linen tablecloth. Wouldn’t you rather be here than there? America would open up conversation.

“Now, look at that,” Earle Combs might say. “There’s a very prosperous farm, and that farmer’s out there working with a mismatched team. He can do better than that. We do better than that in Kentucky.”

More farms. More.

“That’s good ground, though,” Earle Combs might say. “Much better than Kentucky. Too many hills in Kentucky. Can’t get enough bushels from an acre of land.”

“Did you farm, Earle?”

“Barefooted. I pushed one of those plows.”

“I suppose you’re pretty lucky, Earle.”

“Luck? I’d like to think I had something to do with it.”

The hotels at the ends of the trips were filled with businessmen, with well-to-do families on vacation, with bellboys and room service and maids to make your bed with clean linens every day. The Buckminster in Boston. The Aldine in Philadelphia. The Raleigh in Washington. The Book Cadillac in Detroit. The Hollenden House in Cleveland. The Cooper-Carleton in Chicago. Now there was a place, the Cooper-Carleton over on Lake Shore Drive, because management didn’t want the players too close to the Loop and the after-dark temptations. The Cooper-Carlstein. That’s what the players called it. Filled with Jewish people. Kosher kitchen. Part of the education.

In St. Louis, the hotel was the Chase, across from Forest Park. On hot nights, after that 24-hour trip, players would just sit out on the lawn. Talk baseball. Some other subjects might intrude, but baseball was 90 percent of a night’s conversation. If the heat was too much, some of the players and some of the writers would take their blankets to the lawn and sleep under the stars.

With the 3:30 starting time and most games completed in two hours or less, both the nights and the mornings were open for exploration. A man could think, walk, read, watch a movie, name his poison. All choices were laid in front of him.

“They had these black-and-tan clubs in Chicago,” Marshall Hunt said. “These great Negro tap dancers. Great singers. Great food. We were there one night, a guy pulled a gun and started shooting at another guy. Ford Frick was really amazed by it all. He was kind of a rube. He kept saying, ‘What if we got hit?’ I told him, ‘They weren’t shooting at you.’ I don’t think he ever got over it.”

Magic.

“Here’s one that might surprise you,” Hunt said. “I took Babe to an art gallery one time, some show that was going on. I remember he came out and said, ‘Goddamn it. How do those bastards do it?’ Something he saw had got to him, touched him. You wouldn’t think that.”

The Babe traveled a bit differently from the rest of the players. He was the only one with a drawing room on the train. The rest of the players were in berths, uppers and lowers designated by seniority. The manager and the traveling secretary each had a drawing room. The two coaches shared one. The Babe had one to himself.

It was a move of necessity more than privilege. Out in the cars, he was a lure for travelers seeking an autograph, a moment. He could play his portable Victrola in the drawing room. He could play his ukelele. (Mercifully, he left his saxophone home most times.) He could entertain in his satin smoking jacket and slippers.

That didn’t mean he stayed away from the noise in the rest of the Yankees’ Pullman car. He would play cards, and he played a lot of bridge with Gehrig as his partner. They were predictable partners who played the way they lived, Gehrig reserved, Ruth flamboyant. He would nip into a quart of Seagram’s 7, become more flamboyant as the nips and the game progressed, bid on anything. Gehrig would become disgusted. Everett Scott, when he played with the Yankees, had made good money off the Babe in poker. Anyone who knew cards and had time would make good money off the Babe. He needed action and more action, pushing the bets. Money streamed from the Babe.

“One night in Cleveland I invited Herb Pennock, Bob Meusel, and Mark Koenig to dinner,” Joe Dugan said. “We used to exchange dinners, you know. I was broke as usual, though, and needed to borrow some money. Ruth was standing in the lobby of the Hollenden House. I went by him—he had the big polo coat on—and I said, ‘Jidge, your pal is empty.’ He reached in, handed me a bill. Just handed it to me, you see.”

The group had dinner. Dugan grabbed the check. He handed the waiter Ruth’s bill. The waiter asked Dugan if he was a wise guy. Dugan said he wasn’t, why ask? The waiter said a restaurant of this size never could cash a $500 bill. They had to wake up the owner to come down and cash the bill.

“Anyway, payday, I went up to Ruth and counted out five hundred-dollar bills,” Dugan said. “‘What’s this for?’ Ruth says. I said, ‘Remember that night in Cleveland you gave me a bill?’ ‘Oh, I thought I lost it. Thanks, kid.’”

Ruth had become the most experienced traveler on the team. Adding the barnstorming trips and the vaudeville trips and any number of other trips to the Yankees’ trips, he easily was on the road for more than half the year. He had connections everywhere. In every city, he would be met by a woman, by a man, by somebody. Who were these people? Even in the small cities in the South, places the Yankees never had visited, somebody would be waiting. How had it been arranged? He was not a planner, not someone to make a call. Did the people call him?

Mark Roth, the traveling secretary, always thought that railroad telegraphers were involved, that Ruth had the best communications network in the country. He knew where to find a bootlegger. He knew where to find a woman, a bunch of women. The fact that he left large quantities of money behind him did not hurt. These people liked to play with him for the same reason the cardplayers liked to play with him.

“Whenever we left St. Louis we left out of what they call Brandon Avenue, this suburban station,” Waite Hoyt said. “It wasn’t even a station, it was a crossing, really, and we’d wait there for the train to come from downtown. Ruth knew some people, and he always, when we left like that, he’d have a few gallons of home brew delivered to the train plus about 15 or 20 racks of spare ribs.

“We’d get on the train, and since we had our own car and nobody used the ladies’ room, Ruth would take over the ladies’ room and set up shop and for 50 cents you could have all the beer and all the spare ribs you could eat.”

The Babe would have the suite at the hotel, another difference, this one at his own expense, the bathtub filled with beer and the room filled with people. Or he would be gone, off by himself to see the local people, whoever they were. The House of Good Shepard! There were few contemplative moments. Maybe none. Except in the morning.

“Ruth and Joe Dugan always were making bets,” Waite Hoyt said. “I roomed with Dugan, and Ruth would come down in the morning, and they’d call these two friends back in New York, handicappers, Claude Kyle and Maddie Glennin. It’s strange I remember those names. They’d call up these handicappers from the road, ask who they liked, and make their bets, and they were ahead of the game. Except when they went home, they’d forget to call Claude Kyle and Maddie Glennin. And then they wouldn’t do well.

“I wasn’t a bettor, and I used to hate when they made bets from the room.”

The eating and drinking stories sometimes were overstated with the Babe—he’d usually have a normal breakfast, bacon and eggs, a large orange juice, and he wasn’t drinking alcohol every hour of every day—but he had his moments. John Drebinger, who traveled sometimes for the
Times
, once saw him chug a Coca-Cola bottle filled with whiskey in one gulp. Marshall Hunt saw him do some damage to some hot dogs.

“We’d just gotten on the train, everybody had eaten,” Hunt said. “The Babe gave the porter $5 to buy as many hot dogs as he could. The porter came back with this basket filled with hot dogs. Babe offered them around, but nobody was hungry. He stacked the hotdogs on the windowsill of the train. He was just sitting there, watching a card game, eating hot dogs. Pretty soon they were all gone. I bet he ate 18 hot dogs. All by himself.”