For days, the headlines had chanted that the count was 3 & 2. Yet on the night when death finally came to Babe Ruth, New Yorkers found the news hard to believe. Newspaper switchboards lit up within minutes after the radio bulletin, and were jammed for hours. At Memorial Hospital five extra operators were put on, to repeat over & over that Ruth had died.
No death since Franklin Roosevelt’s had moved the people—and the press—to such maudlin excess. Between the pumped-up sentimentality of the public mind and the morticianly manners of the public prints, it was impossible to decide which influenced the other more. The genuine tributes to flamboyant George Herman Ruth were drowned in a messy fog of tear-jerking pictures and prose.
Beautiful Death. For four days, the newspapers played the story for all it was worth, and then some. They bickered over whether Ruth really knew that he had cancer of the throat, or had merely known —since the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church were administered July 21—that he was bound to die; they told conflicting stories about whether Teropterin had been used to treat him. They quoted the priest who blessed the Babe (“He died a beautiful death”). They quoted or put quotes into the mouths of moppets who hung around the hospital (“Urchins from nearby brownstone houses and cold-water flats,” sniffled the Daily Mirror, “huddled in the dark outside . . . fighting off tears when the news came”). For days, photographers had been carefully posing the children, chin-in-hand and with bat-&-ball props, to illustrate “The Vigil.”
Yet it was not newspaper buildup but word of mouth that sent thousands of fans and curiosity-seekers to Yankee Stadium, the “House That Ruth Built,” after his widow agreed (too late for most afternoon papers to report it) that he should lie in state there. Whether 82,000 people filed past his bier, or 97,000, or 115,000, depended on which paper you read. Reporters patrolled the shuffling line to extract suitably printable comment.
In Hearst’s Journal-American Paul Gallico wound himself up and let himself go: “Home was the Home Run King . . . For this was what Ruth was king and master of —the stroke that led to home. All men are ever turning homeward. The very baseball phrase—’Home Run’—has a music of its own . . .” On the sport page, Bill Corum told how he had known for some time that “the Great Umpire had his thumb pressed against ‘strike three’ on the final and inescapable indicator.” And Sport Editor Jimmy Powers, a more literary fellow, quoted John Donne about not sending to know for whom the bell tolls.
Great Gate. The day of the funeral, it rained. With admirable restraint, nobody wrote that “Even the skies wept for the Babe”—except the New York Times’s Sport Columnist Arthur Daley, who passed off the remark on a defenseless taxi driver. In St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Francis Cardinal Spellman presided at a Requiem Mass (attended by 6,000), with Governor Dewey, New York’s Mayor O’Dwyer and Boston’s Mayor Curley as pallbearers. The press reported that 75,000 people were “in the area,” which could be said of Rockefeller Center any weekday. The Daily News headlined: RUTH’S LAST GATE HIS GREATEST. The News was realistic enough to report that “hardly had the family left the cemetery when the inevitable horde of souvenir hunters broke through a rope barrier and began picking at the remaining mass of floral tributes.”
Back from a desperate search for a human-interest story, a Minor sport-writer wrote: “Ed Barrow, the Babe’s rough, tough baseball father, pulled up the shade on the years to let the sunshine of the Bambino’s rollicking history pour through the room of his tree-shrouded Rye home as he abstractedly nodded: ‘Babe Ruth was just a human citizen—a human American citizen.'” Westbrook Pegler, putting his worst (kickless) foot forward, told how Ruth, “a burly oaf [who] could suck half a pound of tobacco and spit through his ears,” had autographed a baseball for him, a gift that helped him win his bride 26 years ago.
Here & there, as some of the sport-writers recovered themselves, straightforward obituaries appeared on the national hero who set or tied 76 baseball records.
At week’s end the press reluctantly dropped the Babe Ruth Story—and a sheetmusic firm brought out a new number, dedicated to the Babe’s memory, called Safe at Home.
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