One Summer: America, 1927 Read online

  More than 3.5 million letters were sent to Lindbergh—primarily from females, it was noted—along with 15,000 parcels containing gifts and mementoes. Many of his correspondents included return postage—about $100,000 worth altogether, it was estimated—in the patently deluded hope that he would find time to reply. Western Union received so many messages that it had to assign thirty-eight employees full-time to manage them all. One message from Minneapolis contained 15,000 words of text, held 17,000 signatures, and stretched 520 feet when unfurled. For the less imaginative, Western Union offered twenty prewritten forms of congratulatory message that people could choose from. Thousands did.

  In Hollywood, a young cartoonist named Walt Disney was inspired to create an animated short feature called “Plane Crazy” featuring a mouse who was also a pilot. The mouse was initially called Oswald but soon assumed a more lasting place in the nation’s hearts as Mickey. Robert Ripley, author of the syndicated Ripley’s Believe It or Not newspaper feature, received two hundred thousand furious letters and telegrams after he ungraciously pointed out that sixty-seven people had crossed the ocean by air before Lindbergh did. (Mostly in dirigibles. A later, more careful count showed that the number was actually closer to 120.)

  At least 250 popular songs were written for Lindbergh and his flight. The most popular was “Lucky Lindy”—a term he hated—and was often played at dinners he attended, “much to my embarrassment and annoyance,” he later recorded. The Lindbergh hop became a popular dance—ironically since the virginal Lindbergh had never danced with a girl.

  Meanwhile in Paris, the delirium was no less intense. At Le Bourget on the morning after Lindbergh’s arrival, cleaners gathered more than a ton of lost property, including six sets of dentures. Under Herrick’s benign tutelage Lindbergh did everything right. Stepping onto the embassy balcony to greet the crowds after rising on his first full day in France, he waved a French flag, inducing delirious joy in the uncountable thousands who thronged the street below. Then he and Herrick visited Nungesser’s widowed mother in her tiny sixth-floor flat on the boulevard du Temple near the place de la République. It was two weeks to the day since the disappearance of her son. Although the visit was not publicly announced, ten thousand people filled the street for Lindbergh’s arrival. Also on that busy first day, Lindbergh called home on the new transatlantic telephone line (becoming one of the first private individuals to speak across the Atlantic as well as to fly it) and visited sick soldiers at Les Invalides.

  In the days that followed, he went to the Élysée Palace to receive the Légion d’Honneur from President Gaston Doumergue—the first time a French president had personally bestowed the nation’s highest honor on an American—addressed the Chamber of Deputies, was feted by the Aéro Club de France, appeared in a parade witnessed by up to a million people, and received the key to the city at the Hôtel de Ville. Whenever he spoke, it was with modesty and aplomb, and he never missed an opportunity to praise the accomplishments of French aviation or the kindness of the French generally. His achievement, he made clear, was merely a small part of a large collective effort. In weepy joy, France clasped Lindbergh to its bosom. They called him “le boy.”

  No foreign visitor to France had ever been so extravagantly honored. The American flag was hoisted over the Quai d’Orsay, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—the first time Old Glory had ever flown over that hallowed building. A striking feature of Lindbergh throughout this busy period was his appearance. Everything Lindbergh wore over the next few days was borrowed—and not too many people had clothes that would fit on such a tall and lanky frame. Though reporters were too tactful or overawed to remark on it, it was obvious that Lindbergh was going about Paris in jackets that fell short on his wrists and trousers that didn’t reach his shoes.

  Five days after his flight, crowds of a million people still lined the streets wherever he went. He smiled a good deal in those early days and waved whenever a crowd greeted him. That wouldn’t last.

  On Thursday, May 26, Lindbergh went to Le Bourget to check on his plane. It had been heavily damaged by the happy crowds but was now being painstakingly repaired. While he was at the airfield, Lindbergh borrowed a French Nieuport fighter plane and took it up for a spin. Although Lindbergh had never flown a Nieuport and could not be sure of its tolerances, he proceeded to execute a series of loops, rolls, corkscrews, barrel turns, and other aerial acrobatics. French officials watched in something like stupefaction as the most esteemed and treasured human being on earth swooped and rolled in the sky above them, pushing to its limits a plane he knew nothing about. With frantic gestures and much hopping they implored him to cease these dangerous maneuvers and return to earth. Eventually, good-naturedly, Lindbergh did. It was an arresting demonstration of the proposition that Lindbergh was very possibly both the best and luckiest pilot who ever lived.

  Lindbergh’s plan was to make a tour of Europe—he particularly wished to visit Sweden, land of his fathers—and then fly back to America. He was still undecided as to whether he would attempt a risky return crossing of the Atlantic against the prevailing winds or whether he should continue east, flying home across Asia and the north Pacific. In fact, Herrick informed him, he would do neither. President Coolidge had dispatched a naval cruiser, the USS Memphis, to bring him home so that America could honor him in person and in style. The president wanted to get the ceremonies over with so that he could start a vacation trip to the Black Hills.

  Lindbergh was allowed to make brief visits to Brussels and London to honor promises made earlier. Remarkably, he was permitted to fly himself. More than a hundred thousand people were waiting for Lindbergh at Croydon Aerodrome in London—so many that the police couldn’t keep the runway clear. Twice Lindbergh had to abort landings as the excited crowds surged forward onto the grass—a sight that must have been deeply unnerving to Lindbergh without any forward visibility. Then the car carrying Lindbergh was mobbed. The police were able to force it through the crowds only by getting Lindbergh to lie down under a coat and telling people that the car was carrying a seriously injured woman.

  Eventually he made it to Buckingham Palace, where the king famously startled Lindbergh by asking him how he had peed during the flight. Lindbergh explained, a touch awkwardly, that he had brought along a pail for the purpose.

  The king, not to be deflected from a full understanding of this aspect of his flight, asked how many times Lindbergh had employed it.

  Coming from the family he did, Lindbergh may never before in his life have discussed his evacuations with anyone, and now here he was doing it with the king of England.

  “Twice,” he whispered hoarsely, looking as if he might faint.

  “And where was that?” the king persisted.

  “Once over Newfoundland and once over the open ocean.”

  The king nodded thoughtfully, satisfied.

  Three days later Lindbergh was in Cherbourg, boarding the USS Memphis for the trip home. He waved to the crowds and they cheered him in adoration. Many threw flowers. The French newspapers all wrote warm tributes and wished the young American bon voyage.

  Then life in France returned to normal. Within a day or so, American tour buses were being thumped with stones again and visitors on the Champs-Élysées were finding it awfully hard to catch the waiter’s eye. As it turned out, this was only a prelude. Before the summer was over, millions of French would hate America as they never had before, and it would actually be unsafe to be an American on French streets. The summer of 1927 would not only be the most joyous in years for America, but quite an ugly one, too.

  • JUNE •

  THE BABE

  He was bigger than the President. One time, coming north, we stopped at a little town in Illinois, a whistle stop. It was about ten o’clock at night and raining like hell. The train stopped for ten minutes to get water, or something. It couldn’t have been a town of more than five thousand people, and by God, there were four thousand of them down there standing in the rain, just waiting to
see the Babe.

  —RICHARDS VIDMER,

  New York Times sportswriter

  8

  In the late nineteenth century, Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in America (it has since slipped to twenty-sixth) and one of the roughest, and the roughest area of Baltimore was a district close to the Inner Harbor known without irony or affection as Pig Town.

  It was here, on February 6, 1895, that George Herman Ruth was born into a household that was moderately impoverished, emotionally barren, and seemingly doomed. Six of his eight siblings would die in childhood, and both his parents would follow while George was still young, his mother of tuberculosis, his father in a knife fight outside his own saloon. This was not a family that had a lot going for it.

  The opening sentence of Ruth’s autobiography is “I was a bad kid,” which is no more than partly true. A few lines later he adds: “I hardly knew my parents,” which is much closer to the mark. Ruth essentially raised himself through his earliest years. His parents weren’t so much bad as distracted. His mother spent most of his childhood dying bleakly in a crowded apartment above the saloon. His father, deprived of a healthy partner, single-handedly ran the business below—a job that consumed nearly all his waking hours. Perhaps nothing better reflects the detached and insubstantial nature of Ruth’s family life than that he grew up not knowing his actual age. Until he saw his birth certificate for the first time when applying for a passport at thirty-nine, he thought he was a year older than in fact he was. For his part, Ruth was not a terribly attentive son. In his autobiography he states that his mother died when he was thirteen. In fact, he was sixteen. He also got her maiden name wrong.

  The saloon where Ruth grew up is long gone. By happy chance, the site today lies just beneath shallow center field in Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles—not unfitting since it was as a Baltimore Oriole that Ruth first played professional baseball and first got his nickname “Babe.”

  In the spring of 1902, while the infant Charles Lindbergh was gurgling in a plush bassinet in Minnesota, Babe’s father took young George to the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore—a large, dark, forbidding edifice on Wilkens Avenue about three miles west of his old neighborhood—and left him there. St. Mary’s was one of nearly thirty homes for orphaned or wayward children in Baltimore in 1900—a reflection of the dire social conditions for many in Baltimore at the time. This would be Ruth’s home for most of the next twelve years.

  St. Mary’s was an unusual institution—part orphanage, part reform school, part private academy. Of the 850 boys enrolled at any one time, about half were tuition-paying boarders. Parents from across America sent their boys to St. Mary’s, often as a last resort when other schools had failed them.

  The school was run by the Xaverian Brothers, a Roman Catholic order whose members embraced piety and celibacy but not full priesthood, and the conditions were rigorously monastic. Pupils had no privacy. Everything they did—sleeping, showering, dining, studying—was done communally. Beds, desks, and shower stalls, all were set out in long regimented ranks, as in some grim Victorian penitentiary. But St. Mary’s was not at all a bad place as such places went. The children were treated with dignity and even a kind of gruff affection, and they were rewarded for good behavior with 25 cents of weekly pocket money. Boys at St. Mary’s received a sound basic education and were taught a vocation. Ruth trained to be a tailor and shirtmaker, and delighted years later in showing teammates how skillfully he could turn a cuff or collar.

  All the students had a history of behavioral problems, but the brothers attributed that to inadequacies of upbringing rather than any deficiency of character—a decidedly enlightened view for the time. They believed that any boy treated with decency, encouragement, and respect would grow into a model citizen, and they were nearly always right. Ninety-five percent of Xaverian boys went on to live normal, stable lives.

  Ruth as a boy was a large, bumptious, pug-faced, happy-go-lucky, rather endearingly tragic figure. He was always much larger than his classmates—so much so that once when charity workers were handing out Christmas presents he was mistaken for an attendant and passed over. When the mistake was realized, George was given his own giant box of chocolates. Instead of hoarding them—and bear in mind that never in his life would he have had something this special to call his own—he immediately shared them all around. This was a kid who deserved a happier childhood. From 1912 to 1914 not a single person visited him.

  The brothers at St. Mary’s were exceedingly devoted to baseball. The school fielded no fewer than forty-four teams, all fully equipped and with uniforms. No amount of money could have bought Ruth better preparation for a career in baseball. It was through baseball that Ruth “met and learned to love the greatest man I’ve ever known”—Brother Matthias Boutilier. Of French stock from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Matthias was a gentle, kindly giant. He stood six feet six and weighed 250 pounds but always spoke softly. He was a wonderful baseball player, too, as well as a gifted coach—and in Babe Ruth he had a youngster who was both more talented and hardworking than anyone he had ever come across. At eight, George was playing with twelve-year-olds; at twelve with sixteen-year-olds. By early adolescence he could play every position on the field better than anyone else at the school—even catcher, where he had to use a right-handed mitt because the school didn’t own a left-handed one. As a batter, he was incomparable. In interschool play, he hit .537. By his teenage years, he stood six feet two, weighed nearly two hundred pounds, and was immensely strong.

  Hearing about an amazing kid at St. Mary’s, in 1914 a scout for the Baltimore Orioles, then a minor league team in the International League, came to have a look. When George came to the plate, the scout was surprised to see that the right fielder left his normal spot and trotted to a position much farther out—so far out, in fact, that he stood on another playing field. Ruth still lofted the ball over his head. It was one of three long shots he hit that day. Surprisingly, the scout was not particularly captivated by Ruth’s power. Hitting baseballs a great distance in 1914 was an interesting talent but not one worth cultivating. It was pitching that the Orioles needed, so it was as a pitcher that they signed him.

  Thus it was in early March 1914 that George Herman Ruth, just turned nineteen, bade farewell to Brother Matthias and his St. Mary’s friends, and boarded a train and headed south to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for his first spring training and a new life as a professional baseball player. It was the first time he had been on a train, first time he had been out of Maryland, first time he had seen small towns and open countryside, first time he had stayed in a hotel or ordered from a menu. He could not have been greener. He didn’t even realize that the majors consisted of two leagues. The nickname his teammates gave him now, “Babe” (on account of his innocence and youthfulness), could hardly have been apter. Ruth was in every sense but the physical one a little boy. With his first paycheck he bought himself a bicycle. In hotels when there was nothing else to do, he rode the elevators for hours. His years of communal living left him wholly innocent of modesty when naked or on the lavatory, and with virtually no sense of private property. His first roommate, Ernie Shore, was dismayed to discover weeks into the season that throughout that period Ruth had been sharing his toothbrush.

  Almost at once Ruth displayed the outsized appetite for which he became famous. The notion of being able to order whatever he wanted in hotel dining rooms was a treat he never got over. He also quickly discovered sex. He had no shyness there either. A teammate named Larry Gardner recalled walking into a room and finding Ruth on the floor having sex with a prostitute. “He was smoking a cigar and eating peanuts and this woman was working on him,” Gardner said in a tone of understandable wonder.

  “When they let him out,” another teammate recalled, “it was like turning a wild animal out of a cage.” Neither then nor later was Ruth terribly picky. Marshall Hunt of the New York Daily News once remarked of Ruth’s women that generally they “woul
d really only appeal to a man who was just stepping out of a prison after serving a 15-year sentence.”

  The Orioles in 1914 were a team in trouble. Their fans were deserting them in droves for the Baltimore Terrapins of the new (and short-lived) Federal League. At one point the Orioles played before an audience of just seventeen people while the Terrapins entertained a full and roaring house across the street. Unable to meet their payroll, the Orioles began selling players. In July of his rookie season, Ruth found himself abruptly dealt to the Boston Red Sox. He hurried north and on the day of his arrival in Boston, July 11, was sent out to pitch, which meant that the first major league game he ever saw was one he played in. He scattered eight hits and won 4–3.

  So, just four months after leaving St. Mary’s, without ever having lived independently in the outside world, Babe Ruth was a major league baseball player. During that summer, Ruth frequently ate breakfast at a coffee shop called Lander’s. There he chatted to a pretty waitress named Helen Woodford. One day, if Ruth’s own account is to be believed, he said to her: “How about you and me getting married, hon?” After a few minutes’ reflection she accepted, and they were wed in the fall of 1914. He was nineteen, she was possibly no more than fifteen. It was not a hugely successful pairing. In his autobiography, Ruth got her name wrong.

  From the perspective of our own age, it isn’t easy to grasp just how central to American life—how culturally and emotionally dominant and unchallenged and saturating—baseball was in the time of Babe Ruth. It was the nation’s joy and obsession. It was called the National Game, with capital letters. In sporting terms, it was all that much of America thought about for a good part of the year.

  For big events like the World Series, newspapers in every major city erected giant scoreboards outside their offices, and these unfailingly attracted large crowds. In many cities, impresarios hired theaters or other grand spaces (Madison Square Garden, for instance) to provide paying audiences with simulated games. One version employed a large diagram of a baseball diamond with colored lights to show balls, strikes, and outs, bells for hits, and white footprints tracing a path around the base paths. An announcer on the stage would relate—and sometimes creatively embellish—developments on a distant playing field from fragmentary information supplied by ticker tape while the scoreboard lit up, clanged, and traced footsteps in support. Another system used live boys, each representing a real player, who took up positions on a baseball field on the stage, where they pitched, batted, and fielded an imaginary ball and ran from base to base as distant reality required. As one observer marveled, no crowds in ballparks were “more loudly appreciative of every fine play than those millions jammed into the various halls or thronging the streets in front of newspaper offices.”