One Summer: America, 1927 Read online

  Closer to home, Coney Island reported a million visitors on July 3, the highest number ever recorded there, and the beaches of the Rockaways and Staten Island absorbed perhaps half a million more—though oddly, officials reported, Staten Island’s own residents were mostly boarding ferries for New Jersey, where Asbury Park, Long Beach, and Atlantic City all said they had larger crowds than they had ever seen before. At Atlantic City, the Boardwalk was solid with people from early morning to late night on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

  Those who couldn’t get out of the city did what they could to stay cool. Many went to picture houses that were pleasantly air-conditioned—though air-conditioned as a word didn’t quite exist yet. It would make its first recorded appearance, in the Reno, Nevada, Evening Gazette, the following month. For the moment, buildings that were artificially freshened were air-cooled, not air-conditioned.

  For the more thrifty, open-sided trolleys ran on Broadway, and for a nickel people could ride them for as long as they liked. Hundreds did. At night, many people lugged mattresses onto fire escapes or rooftops and slept there. Large numbers went to Central Park with blankets and pillows and camped beneath the stars. The playwright Arthur Miller, then an eleven-year-old boy growing up on 110th Street, years later recalled the surreal experience of walking through an open-air dormitory: “With a couple of other kids, I would go across to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, beside their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh by the lake.”

  Those who couldn’t sleep often went for long walks, or for drives if they had a car. On the night of July 3, ten people from a boardinghouse in South Orange, New Jersey—six adults and four children—packed into a car and went out for a drive “just to cool off,” in the words of the car’s owner, James De Cicco. One of the passengers, Mrs. Catherine Damiano, was just learning to drive and asked if she could take the wheel to practice. De Cicco readily yielded it to her. Unfortunately Mrs. Damiano stalled the car on railroad tracks just as a train from the Pennsylvania Railroad—one of those being hurried to the city to help shift all the extra travelers—barreled through. The train struck the car at 40 miles an hour. Mrs. Damiano and all four of her children were killed instantly. Two other adults also perished. Two more were seriously injured. Only Mr. De Cicco managed to jump clear. The seven deaths were thought to be the most ever in a one-car accident. Mrs. Damiano’s unfortunate husband, who had a night job and didn’t know that his wife and children had gone out, learned the next morning that he had lost his entire family.

  All this, it is worth noting, was with the nighttime temperature in the seventies. Before the month was out, both temperature and humidity would climb to far more punishing heights over much of the country, and many more would die.

  The warm weather and holiday spirits brought huge crowds to Yankee Stadium on Monday for a Fourth of July doubleheader between the Yankees and the Washington Senators. Seventy-four thousand people—more than had ever attended a regular season baseball game anywhere—packed into the stadium, and thousands more had to be turned away.

  The weeks of bad weather that had caused so many flight postponements at Roosevelt Field wrought similar havoc with baseball schedules that summer. The Yankees played 18 doubleheaders in 1927—4 in six days in June alone—but none would be more important than this Fourth of July matchup. The Yankees had hit their stride in June, going 21 and 6 for the month and opening up a lead of 9½ games over the rest of the league, but now the Senators were heating up, too. They were hitting the ball well—five of their starting lineup were batting over .300—and had just won ten straight to move into second place ahead of the White Sox. They arrived in New York in a buoyant mood, confident that the series could be a turning point in their season. It was—but in the wrong direction.

  The Yankees killed them. In the most humblingly lopsided doubleheader defeat ever meted out, New York won 12–1 and 21–1. The Yankees hit as if at batting practice, smacking 9 doubles, 4 triples, and 5 home runs—37 hits and 69 total bases in all. The team batting average for the day was .468. Every Yankee batter but one, pitchers included, got at least one hit, and six had four or more. Even the light-hitting, seldom-used rookie Julie Wera, who played in only 43 games in two short seasons in the major leagues, hit a two-run home run—the only one of his career. (“Julie,” incidentally, was short for Julian.) The only player who didn’t hit was pitcher Wilcy Moore, who was widely held to be the very worst hitter in baseball. He went 0-for-4 in the second game, but compensated by pitching nine complete innings, scattering ten hits and giving up one run. This followed a similarly assured performance by George Pipgras, who gave up one run on nine hits in a complete game in the opener—but who also went 2-for-4 at the plate. It was a good day for every player in pinstripes.

  “Never have pennant challengers been so completely shot to pieces,” observed the New York World. “I wish the season was over,” said the Senators’ first baseman, Joe Judge. In fact, in any meaningful sense it was. The Yankees extended their lead to 11½ games with the two victories. They would beat the Senators again the next day and in six of their seven remaining games after that. No other team would come close to threatening the Yankees again.

  All this was quite unexpected. Nearly everyone forecast the Philadelphia Athletics to win the American League pennant in 1927. The Yankees, all agreed, were past their best. Ruth, for a start, was thirty-two years old and demonstrably paunchy, and the pitching staff was even older. Dutch Ruether and Herb Pennock were both thirty-three. Bob Shawkey and Urban Shocker were thirty-six. The average age of the team was over twenty-eight. Only five of the players on the roster had been born in the twentieth century. Shocker was in such bad shape that he would actually die before the end of the next season.

  Yet the 1927 Yankees would prove to be one of the greatest teams of all time—possibly the very greatest. Seven members (counting manager Miller Huggins) would be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, an extraordinary proportion for one team. Rarely has a team had such depth.

  It is generally futile and foolish to compare athletic performances across decades, but what can be said is that when such rash assessments have been ventured the baseball team that most often comes out on top is the ’27 Yankees. It is certainly fair to say that they were an exceptional bunch, both as players and as people. Among the more memorable were the following:

  Waite Hoyt, a right-handed pitcher, was called “Schoolboy” because he’d come to the big leagues when he was just seventeen. He was now in his tenth season in the majors, and he was having one of his best ever years. He would finish the season with a record of 22 and 7, and would be at or near the top of the league in five categories for pitching—wins, winning percentage, earned-run average (ERA), complete games, and innings pitched.

  Hoyt’s private life was no less memorable. He was the son of a well-known vaudeville performer, and was a talented singer and performer in his own right—good enough to have made a living on the stage had he chosen to. Hoyt’s father-in-law owned a funeral parlor in New Jersey, and Hoyt helped him out by fetching bodies from morgues in Manhattan and bringing them back to New Jersey to be prepared for burial. Sometimes, it appears, he would leave a cadaver in his car at Yankee Stadium during a game, then complete the delivery afterward. Hoyt himself was studying in the off-season to be a mortician.

  Urban Shocker, also a pitcher, had been born Urbain Jacques Shockcor to a French Canadian family living in Cleveland. He was something of a drunkard, but then many ballplayers in those days were. He had a permanent crook in one of the fingers of his throwing hand, owing to an injury in his younger years, which gave him an unusual grip and greatly improved his slow curveball. He was also one of the seventeen pitchers allowed to continue throwing a spitball after 1919. He was the third-highe
st-salaried player on the team, after Ruth and Pennock, at $13,500.

  Shocker pitched thirteen years in the major leagues and never had a losing season. In 1927 he had a record of 18 wins and 6 losses. He had the second-best-winning percentage in the league, second-fewest walks per batter faced, and third-best ERA. What is truly extraordinary about all this is that he was dying as he did it. Shocker lived with a heart condition so severe that he had to sleep sitting up. (Some books say standing up, but that seems unlikely.) Photographs of him from 1927 show an ashen figure looking at least ten years more than his age. By the early fall, he would be too ill to keep his place in the starting rotation. Within a year he would be dead.

  Herb Pennock, pitcher, came from a wealthy Quaker family in Philadelphia and was known to his teammates as the Squire of Kennett Square. In the off-season he hunted foxes, bred chrysanthemums, and collected antiques. A left-hander, he spent twenty-two years in baseball, but by 1927 he was coming to the end of his career. After a game, he was often so sore that he couldn’t raise his arm to comb his own hair. In 1927, Pennock was the second-highest-paid player on the team, with a salary of $17,500. He was later elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  Wilcy Moore, pitcher, was the most cheerfully improbable member of the team. A rookie, he was at least thirty years old, though possibly considerably older: no one knew, and he wouldn’t say. A farmboy from Hollis, Oklahoma, he had been a journeyman pitcher in the minor leagues for years, but in 1925 he broke his wrist and that somehow changed his delivery for the better. Although he occasionally started (as on the Fourth of July), he served mostly as the team “fireman”—a relief pitcher who came in and closed down the opposition with men on base and the situation precarious. The team called him Doc because he specialized “in treating ailing ball games,” as one reporter put it. In 1927 he was brilliant at it, with an ERA of 2.28 in 213 innings. He never had another year like it.

  Tony Lazzeri, second baseman and occasionally shortstop, was only in his second season but was already considered possibly the best middle infielder in the majors. Though he weighed only 165 pounds, Lazzeri was a formidable slugger. He hit 60 home runs and had 222 runs batted in (RBIs) for Salt Lake City in the Pacific Coast League in 1925 before breaking into the majors with the Yankees in 1926.

  Lazzeri was a particular hero to Italian Americans. It is a little surprising to think of Italians as rarities in professional baseball, but in 1927 they were. Italians were associated in the popular mind with either gangsters like Al Capone or anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti, so an Italian who did well at the most American of sports was treated with almost godlike reverence in the Italian community. Lazzeri’s great secret was that he had epilepsy—this at a time when epileptics were still frequently confined in institutions—but in fourteen years in the majors he never had a seizure on the field. He was also a future Hall of Famer.

  Bob Meusel, left fielder, was known as “Silent Bob.” He often went days without speaking, was aloof even with his own teammates, never acknowledged the cheers of the fans, and seemed impervious to both praise and criticism. Meusel had a career year in 1927, batting .337 with 174 hits and 103 RBIs. He and Ruth got along very well, largely because Meusel liked to party. He just partied in silence.

  Earle Combs, center fielder, was quiet and well liked. He had been a country schoolteacher in Kentucky before he came to professional baseball. He didn’t smoke, drink, or swear, and he spent much time reading the Bible. He was probably the best-liked player on the team, both among players and sportswriters. He was a solid and dependable center fielder and one of the best leadoff hitters of all time. In 1927 he would have the best season of his career: he led the league in singles, triples, and total hits, and batted .356. His 231 hits set a Yankees record. He was one of those elected to the Hall of Fame.

  Benny Bengough, reserve catcher. Though not much of a player—he appeared in just 31 games—Bengough was one of the most popular members of the team. He had been born in Liverpool, England, but grew up in Niagara Falls, New York, and had studied to be a priest before deciding instead to be a ballplayer. Bengough was completely bald. He went to bed one night with hair and woke up the next day with none. As a joke he would often pretend to run his fingers through his hair. Ruth in particular was very fond of him.

  Also worthy of note was Eddie Bennett, the team batboy. Bennett was a hunchback, and the players rubbed his hump for luck before games. Bennett had an almost uncanny reputation for bringing teams good fortune. He was batboy for the White Sox in 1919 when they won the pennant. Then he moved across to the Dodgers in 1920, and they won a pennant, too. In 1921 he came to the Yankees just at the time they started their dynasty and won their own first pennant. By 1927, he was one of the most valued figures in baseball. Some accounts suggest that he was as much a kind of bench coach as a batboy.

  Finally, and above all, came Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, the most formidable double act baseball has ever produced. Gehrig was doing something no human had ever done before: he was hitting home runs as well as Ruth did. Together in 1927 they would hit a quarter of all home runs in the American League.

  On the face of it, Gehrig possessed every quality a hero could require. He was gracious and good-looking, with a winning smile, deep blue eyes, and a dimpled chin; was immensely talented; and had a physique that seemed to be hewn from granite. But he suffered from an almost total absence of personality and a crippling shyness, especially around women. At the age of twenty-three, he had never had a girlfriend and still lived at home. He claimed once in a magazine interview that he smoked sometimes and liked to drink a little beer, but hardly anyone ever saw actual evidence of that. Feeling sorry for him, his teammates Benny Bengough and Mark Koenig once had him up to their apartment so he could meet some girls. Gehrig arrived in a good suit, neatly pressed by his mother, and sat mutely on the sofa, too terrified to speak. He didn’t utter a word the whole evening.

  Like Lindbergh, Gehrig was not a great mixer, but whereas Lindbergh was happily self-contained, Gehrig was almost unnaturally solitary. He would often go to an amusement park and ride the roller coaster alone for hours. He paid little attention to his appearance and was notable for refusing to wear a coat or other outerwear; even in the most frigid weather he walked about in shirtsleeves. He hated to make a fuss, which was why Jacob Ruppert was able to pay him no more than he paid many reserve players. Gehrig always accepted whatever salary Ruppert offered him, so Ruppert always offered a poor one.

  Gehrig was a native New Yorker, born in 1903 to poor German immigrant parents in Yorkville. At his birth, according to some accounts, he weighed a whopping fourteen pounds. (His mother was a block of a woman.) Gehrig grew up speaking German. His father rarely worked and was probably an alcoholic. Mrs. Gehrig had three other children, but all died in infancy, so Lou grew up not only as an only child, but as the only surviving child, which made his mother even more clinging and fretful.

  Gehrig was extraordinarily devoted to his mother. Where other ballplayers took their wives to spring training, Gehrig took his mother. On road trips, he wrote to her daily. Before departure, they would kiss and hug for ten minutes, to the acute discomfort of teammates nearby. On an exhibition tour of Japan, Gehrig spent nearly all of his free time, and much of the money he earned, buying gifts for his mother.

  Gehrig was powerfully built from childhood and was a natural athlete. By the time he got to Commerce High School, he could hit a baseball harder and farther than any high school player any New York City coach had ever seen. In 1920, Commerce was invited to Chicago to play the best high school team there, Lane Tech, at Cubs Park. In the ninth inning, with the bases loaded, Gehrig hit a home run that flew over the back wall of the park and bounced into Sheffield Avenue—a feat that would have been astounding in a major leaguer. Gehrig was seventeen years old.

  That autumn he enrolled at Columbia, where his mother worked as a cleaner and cook at the Sigma Nu fraternity house. Not the most outstanding of scholars, Gehrig flunked
introductory German even though it was his first tongue. He flunked English as well. He did pass trigonometry, however. His patchy performance almost certainly owed more to a demanding schedule than to any mental shortcomings. Each day he had to rise at dawn and hurry to the dining hall to bus tables for two and a half hours. Then he spent the day in classes. That was followed by baseball or football practice, depending on season. After a shower and a quick dinner, he returned to the dining hall to clear tables and wash dishes until late.

  In 1923, he signed with the Yankees and two years later became a regular member of the team. On June 1, 1925, he pinch-hit for a player named Wally Pipp, then did not miss another game for fourteen years, until May 1939, a total of 2,130 consecutive games—a record of continuity that stood for sixty-four years.

  Ty Cobb, the most unstable man in baseball, decided from their first meeting that he disliked Gehrig intensely—for his meekness and lack of wit, and above all for his fixation with slugging. He never passed Gehrig without insulting him. If Gehrig was on base near him, Cobb crept as close as he could and rode him mercilessly. “Keep your foot on the bag, Wiener Schnitzel. Go on back there, you thick-headed Dutch bum,” he would call. When Gehrig was playing first base, Cobb would keep up a string of insults from the bench. Eventually, Gehrig could take no more and charged into the Tigers’ dugout to get him. As Cobb prudently found someone bigger to stand behind, Gehrig smacked his own head against a supporting stanchion and fell down senseless. Cobb was so impressed that he never insulted Gehrig again.

  Now, in his third year in the majors, it was becoming evident that Gehrig might very well top Ruth’s excellent 1921 season. There was even every likelihood that he would beat Ruth’s home run record of 59. In the last 21 games—which is to say, since about the day that Lindbergh had failed to turn up at Yankee Stadium—Ruth had hit 5 home runs, a more or less normal pace for him. Gehrig in the same period had hit 14, including 3 in one game at Fenway Park in Boston—something that no one had ever done before. Gehrig’s pace in those 21 games would, if sustained, produce over 100 home runs in a full season.