More on …..Babe Ruth!

Babe Ruth about to swipe at a huge ball in 1927. Photo: Getty Images

The son of a saloon owner in a seedy section of Baltimore, as we mentioned yesterday, Ruth was sent to the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys at age 7 to keep him out of trouble.

He developed his formidable baseball skills at St. Mary’s, playing upwards of 200 games per year between classes, but the no-nonsense Catholic monks in charge required each boarder to learn a useful vocation. And we bet you cannot guess what Babe’s “useful vocation” was!

The Babe displayed a talent for shirt making, and he was good enough to earn an apprenticeship at a tailor shop located in the school’s laundry building. Of course, he was better at throwing and blasting a baseball to the high heavens, so when he left St. Mary’s for good in 1914, it was to join the minor leagues.

Both Ruth’s father and mother had German roots, and as a kid, he was surrounded by his Pennsylvania Dutch paternal grandparents, so he was immersed in the language at an early age. In his seminal 1974 biography Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, Robert Creamer related a tale of how baseball historian Fred Lieb once attempted to converse in German with New York Yankees co-star Lou Gehrig, only to find Ruth continually butting in!

Professional baseball uniforms were made of wool until the 1940s, rendering most players a sweaty, wobbly mess during the midsummer months. As such, Ruth introduced to his teammates an unusual technique for keeping cool: he pried the leaves off a head of cabbage and spread them over the ice in a cooler, and when they were sufficiently chilled, a leaf under the cap would supply much-needed relief for a few innings before needing to be replaced. A large man with an extra-large noggin, Ruth was said to require two leaves for the method to be fully effective. 

Thanks, biography.com, for these fun facts!

More to come!