The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth Read online

  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 Mc
Call 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.”

  The average St. Mary’s resident tried a number of jobs before settling into one that seemed to suit him. The one that seemed to suit Nigger Lips was the tailor shop. He became accomplished at sewing shirts, eventually working in the High City Tailor Shop, which manufactured the best clothes. He would, when he made big money, always have an eye and appreciation for a well-made shirt.

  His education at the school would be best expressed in his handwriting, always a Catholic school priority. He would write with his right hand, not his natural left, in an elegant script that was fashioned by assorted whacks on his wrist by a brother’s wooden ruler.

  Only one fight ever has been mentioned, a slug-out with a newly arrived bully, but there must have been numerous discipline situations. An active boy, a loud boy, pleasant-natured as he might have been, would have been fodder for the disciplinary system.

  “They took us into a room that had straps lined up against a wall,” Jimmie Reese, a friend and teammate of Ruth’s with the Yankees and a visitor to St. Mary’s years later, said. “They said ‘These are the straps we used on Babe Ruth.’”

  Again, there is much that is missing about these years. A lot of time passed. Christmases, birthdays, colds, fevers, high points, low points, school events, report cards. What happened? Did he get any presents? Did he sing any carols? Blow out any candles? Ever get an A for anything?

  In 1904, two years after he was first enrolled in the school, a massive fire swept through downtown on February 7, the Great Fire of Baltimore. In 31 hours, it destroyed 70 blocks of the city, 1,526 buildings, and put 35,000 people out of work. All of this happened within four or five streets from Pigtown, where the Ruth family lived. Was he at home when it happened, nine or ten years old, terrified, wondering if the conflagration would come his way? Did everyone run to the water? Did everyone run to the fire to help? If he was at school, which was located on one of the highest points around the city, the fire certainly was visible. Was he sitting out there wondering what was happening with his mother, father, and sister? Where was he? Was he scared? Did he care? What happened?

  The fog is in the way.

  His mother died when he was 17 years old. Was he at home? Was he at school? Did he go to the funeral? Did he stand at the grave at Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery? Did he cry?

  The fog is in the way.

  He was another boy in the overcrowded system, anonymous and wounded, trying to overcome hard beginnings. He was Nigger Lips. He was ticketed to move along with Fats and Skinny and Congo Kirby and Loads and all the rest, off to find anonymous places in a society filled with anonymous places.

  Except, of course, he found baseball.

  The fog began to lift.

  One version: he played baseball the first day he arrived at St. Mary’s. Brother Herman, in charge of athletics, was putting together a game. He spotted a sad-eyed new arrival at the edge of the playground. He called the boy to the group.

  “What do you play?”

  “Huh?”

  “What position do you play? Or don’t you care?”

  “I don’t know. I ain’t played.”

  Brother Herman threw him a catcher’s mitt, not knowing the boy was left-handed. The boy put the left-handed mitt on the wrong hand, but was ready to go. A career was born.

  Another version:

  “The Babe told me that his father had no one to help him in the tavern, which made it very difficult to keep an eye on him,” Fats Leisman wrote. “So, like any other boy, he took advantage of this opportunity and would often go out into the streets of South Baltimore and play ball.

  “During these ball-playing episodes every now and then he and his teammates would break a window. There were so many complaints coming from the neighbors regarding this situation, and many other mischievous acts, that the Babe’s father decided to place him in St. Mary’s Industrial School.”

  The truth: probably less melodramatic than either version.

  The figure who drew Nigger Lips to the game—or at least kept him there—was 30-year-old Brother Matthias Boutlier, a charismatic character from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He was the Prefect of Discipline, lord over all behavior, punisher of miscreants, a giant of a man, maybe as tall as 6-foot-6, weighing as much as 300 pounds. He was so large that the door to his tiny room had to be hung on the outside of the jamb rather than the inside to accommodate his bed.

  He talked and the toughest kids listened. He walked and they watched to see what he would do next. He hit a baseball and their jaws dropped.

  “What I think every boy who was at St. Mary’s at the time will remember are the Saturday evenings after supper whenever the news got around that Brother Matthias would be hitting baseballs,” Brother Thomas More Page, a onetime resident at St. Mary’s, remembered in the book by Brother Gilbert and Harry Rothgerber. “Then, every boy in the school from all the five yards would gather in the upper yard, over 500 of us, awaiting the occasion. He would stand at the bottom of the steps and, with what seemed like an effortless motion, hit a ball with the fungo bat in his right hand only, while up and up the ball seemed to
soar, almost out of sight, and then when it came down there was a mad scramble for it. We knew the end was coming to this extraordinary exhibition when he hit one ball after the other in rapid succession, and the balls kept falling down like snowflakes over the entire yard.”

  Who could resist the majesty of that performance? Certainly not the new arrival from Pigtown. He would talk for all of his days about the greatness of Brother Matthias, talk about his strength, talk about the balls he hit, talk the same way people would talk about…Babe Ruth.

  Here was the birth of the swing that would change baseball. Fungoes are hit with a different, upward motion from the downward chop that was considered the strategic basic of the game. Here was a grand magic trick that made people ooh and aah, not applaud politely. Wouldn’t it be great to do that?

  Brother Matthias was an accessible hero. The new arrival soon followed the big, tough man almost as a course of nature. The brother ran, it was noticed, with a short, pigeon-toed stride. The new arrival soon ran with a short, pigeon-toed stride. The brother swung the bat in a great, upward arc. The new arrival soon swung the bat in a great, upward arc. The baseballs—when the new arrival was not so new anymore, as he grew bigger and stronger and more proficient—followed the same wondrous course.

  Nigger Lips had found the perfect inspiration. He also had found the perfect place to learn and develop. Or perhaps fate had intervened. If he had been a millionaire’s son and wanted to be a baseball player, if he had been willing to sacrifice anything toward that goal, he couldn’t have gone to a better place than St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. He was in a veritable baseball academy. Brother John Fidelis, describing the importance of sports at the school, once said that “playing activities is an eighth sacrament.” Baseball was the basic liturgical part of that sacrament.