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JEFF KLINKENBERGFor 10 glorious springs beginning in 1925, Babe Ruth swaggered into St. Petersburg and made a small town big-time. And, boy, did he enjoy himself.
ST. PETERSBURG - Babe Ruth's ghost jaywalked across Central Avenue the other afternoon just in time for cocktail hour. He strolled into the Pink Elephant and ordered a boilermaker. The young bartender announced, "On the house. I want it said that I bought a drink for the Babe."
It was dusk when Babe stepped outside with a whiskey glow on that famous moon-shaped face. His eyes darted toward a tall platinum blond who sashayed past in a slinky red dress. You could tell Babe wanted to say something snappy, but he let her pass without a come-on. Instead, he climbed into his big black limousine and was gone. The limo must have been a ghost, too.
When major league baseball's Grapefruit League season commences in March, the ghost of Babe Ruth still haunts the streets of our city and our county. And why not? He spent 10 springs here beginning in 1925, when he was the most famous baseball player in the land and possibly the best-known athlete in the world.
Today it would be like having Tiger Woods in our midst for a couple of months. The difference is that Ruth was that rare celebrity comfortable among ordinary folks. He needed no body guards. He was friendly with the press. Joe Blow could buy him a drink. He showed up at a downtown barber shop every morning for a shave and a few jokes. He visited sick kids in the hospital. At the dog track, where he was a regular, he'd freely dispense gambling tips. You wanted an autograph, he gave you an autograph or posed for a photograph or let you use his name in your local-yokel advertisement.
St. Petersburg was a small town, but by staying here he helped make it important to the rest of the world. He was part of the boom that happened after the 1921 hurricane and before the Depression. As money discovered St. Petersburg, developers built grand hotels and spectacular golf courses. At the sparkling new Coliseum, international stars Rudy Vallee and Benny Goodman entertained. Over at Waterfront Park, near today's Bayfront Center downtown, Ruth drew huge crowds.
He loved it here. He loved our weather, especially when it was sunny, when he could sneak out in the morning before practice and play golf. He loved our courses, especially the wide fairways that could contain his mighty drives. He was a lousy putter; the man didn't know his strength and sometimes threw his club in disgust when the ball rolled past the cup. But he laughed afterward.
He loved the fishing, especially chasing grouper in bucking seas with stout tackle. Perhaps grouper reminded him of himself, corpulent, a little homely, yet athletic and appealing. He'd bring them in and have a cook at the hotel fix them for supper. No gourmet, he was as happy wolfing down a half dozen ball-park hot dogs or pickled eggs.
By all accounts, Ruth worked hard during spring training, but played just as hard away from the field. He was one of those people who didn't consider beer an alcoholic beverage. Alcohol meant whiskey. He drank a lot of beer and whiskey. He was married twice, though hardly a fanatic about his wedding vows, and usually found women willing to share his bed whether it was in the house he rented in the Old Northeast or rooms at the Don CeSar, the Flori-de-Leon, the Princess Martha or the Hotel Dennis, where he supposedly enjoyed staying in Room 310 because it was big enough to throw a party.
In the morning, recovering from the bacchanalia, he swigged bicarbonate of soda, then drove over to the New York Yankees' training facility, which is now called Huggins-Stengel Field, named after the club's two most famous managers. The Devil Rays practice there now. It's a green pool table of a park just west of Fourth Street N next to Crescent Lake. It's a good place to look for the ghost of Babe Ruth.
It's modern these days, but when Ruth was a Yankee the park lacked even an outfield fence. During one practice in 1925, Ruth unaccountably abandoned his rightfield position near the lake and retired to the dugout.
"What's going on?" roared Miller Huggins, the Yankee manager who treated Ruth as an incorrigible kid.
"I ain't going out there anymore," Ruth answered. "There's an alligator."
Somebody chased the gator back into the lake. Otherwise Ruth might have become a ghost even earlier.
A Babe biography
Before we tell you more about Ruth's notorious womanizing, his affection for strong drink, his gluttony, the spring-training battles with Yankees management, the off-hours high jinks involving smelly mackerel and snappish alligators - before we chase Ruth's ghost another iota - perhaps a little history of his youth is in order.
George Herman Ruth was born in Baltimore in 1894. He once told a biographer, "I was a bum when I was a kid." A habitual truant, he learned to cuss, drink and steal at an early age. His parents sent him to the Catholic brothers of St. Mary's Industrial School to straighten him out. Maybe they did and maybe they didn't. What is clear is that the troubled youth learned to play baseball very well.
He signed a professional contract with the minor-league Orioles in 1914. Before the season was over, he was a member of the major-league Boston Red Sox, a pitcher initially, but a budding slugger-outfielder. Teammates called him "Babe" because of his naivete off the field. On the field, there was nothing childish about him. He was hitting home runs by the tubful. In the dumbest deal of all time, the Red Sox sold him to the Yankees in 1920.
New York was Babe's kind of town. He wore flamboyant camel hair coats and drove a convertible. He was a big tipper, a bigger celebrity, a man-boy who was likely to say anything to anyone without much thought. On the steamy afternoon he met President Warren G. Harding, he felt the need to comment about the weather.
"Hot as hell, ain't it, Prez?"
Squirming at a formal dinner party, he stood up and gravely announced to the rest of the table: "I have to piss." When he returned, a friend quietly admonished him. Embarrassed, Babe apologized to dining companions.
"I'm sorry I said piss."
People who knew him claimed he was the slugger of all time when it came to flatulence. He actually won a trophy for a sterling performance. His hearty belches could rattle the bats stacked in the dugout. The sports writer Frank Graham once wrote: "He was a very simple man, in some ways a primitive man. He had little education, and little need for what he had."
One ritual of the St. Petersburg spring was the contract negotiation between the Yankees' skinflint owner, Col. Jacob Ruppert, and his star. In 1929, Ruth hit 46 home runs and batted .345. He wanted a $100,000 salary. Outraged, Ruppert battled Ruth through the press. After all, Lou Gehrig, who had hit 35 home runs and was nothing but well-behaved - he was so good to his mother! - was only making $8,000. Ruth threatened to quit. Then he signed for $80,000. A reporter pointed out that Ruth was now making a higher salary than President Herbert Hoover.
"I had a better year," Ruth sniffed.
The late sports writer Red Smith always doubted the veracity of Ruth's snappy reply.
"The Babe was not that well-informed on national affairs," he wrote.
Nor was Ruth a man of letters. One spring, the poet Carl Sandburg conducted a St. Petersburg interview with the most famous man in America.
"At least a million hot ball fans in this country, admirers of yours, believe in the Bible and Shakespeare as the two greatest books ever written," said Sandburg, "and some of them would like to know if there are any special parts of those books that are favorites of yours."
Babe Ruth didn't have to think long.
"A ballplayer don't have time to read," he declared.
Sports writers of his era usually hid character flaws from the public. In one spring-training story told now, but not then, Babe ran naked through a railroad car while being chased by a woman with a butcher's knife. Bigger than life, Ruth inspired tall tales. Some of them may have been true.
Ruth's first spring training as a Yankee was in 1925. With his first marriage failing, he was drinking, eating and chasing women in a Ruthian manner, too.
Finally, spring ended. The Yankees headed north by train.
By North Carolina, Babe was deathly ill and was taken off the train. He spent weeks in the hospital. Sports writers called his illness "the bellyache heard around the world" and blamed one too many hot dogs. But some suspected the Bambino actually was suffering from a terrible case of the clap.
"He liked to have fun"
So a couple of little people, who were then called midgets, show up at Waterfront Park. Of course the Yankees put them in uniform. Guess who poses with them for the photographers? At a nursing home, a woman known as Grandma Fenton celebrates her 104th birthday. Guess who shows up with roses? He attends weekly boxing matches and volunteers to referee. In the middle of baseball practice, representatives of the St. Petersburg Order of the Elks present him with his very own baby alligator. He lets it loose and players spill out of the dugout.
In a different time and in a different place, Babe Ruth could have gone for Ardith Rutland in a big way. Like him, she enjoyed hunting and fishing, laughing and having a good time. But, alas, she was a babe herself when she met the Babe. She was 5 when she sold him orange juice and peanut butter cookies.
As she tells the story in her Snell Isle home, Babe's ghost is sitting next to her on the couch.
Rutland's family lived in Clearwater, within walking distance of the famous Belleview Biltmore Resort golf course. She and her older brother set up their juice stand on the edge of the fairway. Every time Ruth played by, and he played by quite a bit, he stopped for refreshments.
"You know who I am?" he asked.
She had never heard of Babe Ruth, but she had heard of Baby Ruth candy bars. Did he have anything to do with candy? Actually, the candy bars had been named after President Grover Cleveland's daughter. Ruth found it all hilarious; next time he played golf, he had a Baby Ruth in his pocket for the little girl.
"My uncle always brings me two," the little girl pouted. Next time he brought a pair. Eventually, he was courting the child's favor with a box of Baby Ruths. The last time she saw him he paid his 25-cent juice-and-cookie bill with a $10 bill, no change required.
"He was always nice as can be," says Mrs. Rutland seven decades later. "Whenever I read something off-color about him, I always felt bad. He was so nice to kids. People around here really enjoyed him."
He had a deep voice with a hint of a Southern accent, which must have endeared him to locals. And like many of them, he couldn't get enough of fishing. Spring training often coincided with a run of migrating king mackerel in the gulf. After one trip, Ruth left a dead mackerel on the lawn of a house rented by a colorful Yankee pitcher, Vernon Gomez.
Ruth was incapable of remembering names so he relied on nicknames based on physical characteristics. Gomez threw the ball with his left hand and so he was forever Lefty. The chunky pitcher Urban Shocker was "Rubber Belly." The sharp-featured catcher Pat Collins was better remembered as "Horse Nose." Everyone else he called "kid."
Mike Mastry, one of those kids, is 84 now.
As he scoops live shrimp from the tank at Mastry's Bait and Tackle on Fourth Street S his eyes light up when he thinks of 1933 and the Babe. He'd skip school and pedal his bike over to Kress, the dime store on Central Avenue, and buy a dozen baseballs for a quarter each. He'd ride his bike to the ballpark, wait for his chance and approach Ruth for autographs.
"He signed my baseballs and after the game I'd sell them for a dollar each. That was a fortune back them. I thought I was rich."
It became a daily ritual.
"He never turned me down, not even once. Oh, he knew exactly what I was doing. But you know, I think he got a kick out of a kid who was willing to hustle for a buck. He even posed for a picture signing an autograph so I could use it for a prop when I sold the balls."
Baseballs autographed by Babe Ruth are worth a fortune these days. Bidding starts at $2,000.
"I wish I had kept one," Mike Mastry says sheepishly. "But wait a minute, I want to show you something."
Limping from arthritis, he hobbles behind a counter covered by hooks and lures and line and reels and fishes an old photo out of a drawer. In the photo the Babe is standing next to a handsome, athletic kid.
"Can you believe it's me with Babe Ruth?"
Penthouse player
Babe Ruth smoked, chewed tobacco and dipped snuff. He died in his sleep of throat cancer on Aug. 16, 1948. He was only 54. No wonder his ghost is restless. Baseball fans should pay attention, keep their eyes peeled. Liable to see him anywhere.
He slept here, at 346 16th Ave. NE in St. Petersburg, in a fine house that recently sold for $350,000. He slept at the Princess Martha, the hotel built in 1924 at 401 First Ave. N. He stayed at the Don CeSar, on the beach, and at the Jungle Country Club Hotel, now gone, on Park Street. He stayed at the Hotel Dennis, built in 1925 at 326 First Ave. N, across the street from Williams Park.
He loved the Dennis, especially Room 310, which was customized for parties and practical jokes. There was a skeleton in the bathtub. One chair was rigged to collapse. Another zapped sitters with electricity. It was the Babe's idea of a great hotel. Now it's called Kelly's and rooms rent for $150 a week.
Ruth often rented a penthouse at the Flori-de-Leon, built in 1925, at 130 Fourth Ave. N. He stayed one season in Apartment 701, though he preferred 702. Teammate Gehrig often took 701. A reserved man, Gehrig prized the private elevator. It didn't matter to Ruth. He wasn't afraid of encountering a fan.
"Gehrig was supposedly very quiet," says Ron Adams, who lives at the apartment complex now and has been learning the history. "Ruth was boisterous. His neighbors complained about the smell of hot dogs and sauerkraut." Richard and Eleanor Simmons live in Ruth's old apartment now. In their 60s, they moved here from New York in 2002. They don't follow baseball, but they like the idea of living in Babe's old place. It no longer smells of hot dogs and sauerkraut.
It has one of the grandest views in the city. It has fine hardwood floors. It has a nifty fireplace. Above the fireplace hangs a painting of a naked woman. The Babe would have approved.
He was known as a tireless sexual athlete. One night, according to an often-told story that may not be true, but probably should be, Ruth brought a woman into the hotel suite he shared with the outfielder Bob Meusel. Meusel, half-asleep in his own room, tried to ignore the great commotion coming from Babe's room. Finally it stopped. Then Meusel smelled cigar smoke. Minutes later, the yells and cries returned, followed minutes later by more cigar smoke. Between noise and cigar smoke, Meusel slept badly that night.
In the morning, Meusel asked his roommate how many times he had been romantic.
"Count the cigars," Ruth said.
Seven butts lay in the ash tray.
- Times librarians Mary Mellstrom and Karen Baird contributed to this report.
Special thanks to the St. Petersburg Historical Museum.
Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com
Further reading
Babe: The Legend Comes To Life by Robert W. Creamer, Fireside Books
St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream, by Raymond Arsenault, University Press of Florida
Babe Ruth in Florida, by Kevin M. McCarthy, Infinity Publishing
St. Petersburg: An Oral History, by Scott Taylor Hartzell, Arcadia Publishing