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November 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 7
The Day I Saw Them All
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
Like every American boy in the twenties and thirties, I revered Babe Ruth as the greatest name in baseball. What made him come alive for me was a genuine American League baseball that my father brought home after one of his trips to New York. Ruth had fouled it off, and Dad had jumped up and caught it one-handed, “just for you,” he said. That was at Yankee Stadium, the “House that Ruth built.” Of course, I wanted to see Babe Ruth play too, but this wasn’t easy. Dad and I were Cub fans. Ruth was an American Leaguer with the Yankees, so when they came to Chicago, they played the White Sox in Comiskey Park on the South Side. In the fall of 1932 it became clear that Babe would be coming to Wrigley Field (the Cubs and Yankees had reached the World Series). It was beyond expectation that I would actually get to see those games; I hoped that perhaps I could sneak into the coach’s office in the high school locker room and catch a few plays on his radio before the bell rang for afternoon classes. One evening in September Dad came home in an unusually buoyant mood. I was doing a jigsaw puzzle at the family game table in the den. I watched him take off his suit coat and drape it deliberately over the back of his desk chair. As he unbuttoned his vest, he leaned forward and took a small envelope from his inside coat pocket. Inside the envelope was a pair of tickets to the October 1 home opener of the World Series—the Cubs and the Yankees at Wrigley Field. “Now you can see Babe Ruth,” he said. Our beloved Wrigley Field had been transformed for the Series, with red, white, and blue bunting draped everywhere. Temporary stands had been set up in the outfield to accommodate the huge crowd. Our seats were only six rows back from the playing field on the left-field side, between the end of the Cubs’ dugout and third base. “There’s your man,” Dad said, pointing to left field as we settled in. Sure enough, there he was warming up with his teammates, the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat, the Colossus of Clout, Babe Ruth, all six feet two inches and 215 pounds of him. When the players left the field, the announcer introduced President Hoover, who was in the stands for the big game. The applause was scattered, and I was shocked to hear boos. (As a Boy Scout 1 thought you didn’t do such a thing to a President.) When Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt was introduced, there was much more applause and fewer boos. Both men were on the campaign trail for the presidential election coming up that November. If I had been politically conscious, I would have known