One Summer: America, 1927 (32 page)

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.

In the Fourth of July doubleheader against Washington, Gehrig hit 2 more, including a grand slam. At the end of the day, he had 28 home runs to Ruth’s 26. No one had ever pushed Ruth like this before. The baseball world was about to experience its first great home run race, and the excitement this would generate was almost uncontainable.

Remarkably, despite the rivalry and the fact that their personalities could not be more different, Ruth and Gehrig were the best of friends. Gehrig often had Ruth to his home, where Babe enjoyed Mrs. Gehrig’s hearty cooking and, according to several biographies, speaking German. (In fact, according to Ruth’s own sister, Babe spoke no German at all.) “I came to love that big Dutchman like a brother,” Ruth recalled, with every appearance of sincerity, in his autobiography. Ruth was as excited as any fan by Gehrig’s success, while Gehrig for his part was happy just to be allowed to play in the same ballpark as Ruth. He was especially touched by Ruth’s generosity of spirit. “It would be almost impossible to feel envy for a man who is as unselfish as Ruth,” he told reporters.

That warmth wouldn’t last, alas. By the 1930s, Gehrig would hate Ruth about as passionately as it was possible to hate a person. The fact
that Ruth reportedly had by that point slept with Gehrig’s wife would seem, not surprisingly, to have had something to do with that.

Out west, the good weather was the best possible news, for the waters of the Mississippi were finally receding, if slowly. One and a half million acres were still underwater as July began, but the worst was over and Herbert Hoover was at last able to leave the day-to-day running of relief efforts to others.

For Hoover, the Mississippi flood relief was a personal triumph. He was especially proud that the federal government had provided no financial assistance at all. All the money for relief efforts came in the form of donations from private citizens and organizations like the Red Cross and the Rockefeller Foundation. “But those were days,” Hoover noted with a certain misty fondness in his memoirs thirty years later, “when citizens expected to take care of one another in time of disaster and it had not occurred to them that the Federal Government should do it.” In fact, the support provided for those trying to get back on their feet was hopelessly inadequate. Hoover helped push through the creation of a $13 million loan fund to help flood victims, which sounds reasonably generous, but worked out to just $20 per victim, and was, for all that, only a loan, hardly useful to even the poorest person who had lost everything.

The great Mississippi flood of 1927 had two lasting legacies. First, it accelerated the movement of blacks out of the South in what is known as the Great Migration. Between 1920 and 1930, 1.3 million southern blacks moved north in the hopes of finding better-paying jobs and more personal liberty. The movement transformed the face of America in a decade. Before the Great Migration, only 10 percent of blacks lived outside the South. After the Great Migration, half did.

The other important effect of the Mississippi flood was that it forced the federal government to accept that certain matters are too big for states to handle alone. For all Hoover’s proud reminiscence of how relief efforts were entirely private, it was widely recognized that government could not stand by when disaster struck. In 1928, Calvin Coolidge
reluctantly signed into law the Flood Control Act, which appropriated $325 million to try to avert future disasters. It was, in the view of many, the birth of Big Government in America. Coolidge hated the idea and refused to have any kind of ceremony to celebrate the passing of the act. Instead, he signed the bill in private, then went to lunch.

Meanwhile, back in the flood zone, not quite everyone was benefiting from the receding waters. In Morgan City, Louisiana, Ada B. Le Boeuf, wife of a prominent local businessman, had a good deal of explaining to do when the body of her husband, bearing obvious gunshot wounds, was found bloated and glistening on a newly exposed mudbank nine days after she reported him missing. Under questioning, Mrs. Le Boeuf confessed that she had formed an attachment to another prominent Morgan City citizen, Dr. Thomas E. Dreher, who was a doctor and surgeon and, not incidentally, her husband’s best friend. The devious Dreher had invited Mr. Le Boeuf out for a day’s fishing, shot him, weighted the body, and dumped it overboard.

Nineteen twenty-seven was a memorable year for foolish murders, and this was certainly one of those, for it seems not to have occurred to Dr. Dreher that it’s never a good idea to dump a body in floodwater, because the water will eventually go away whereas the body may not. Dr. Dreher and Mrs. Le Boeuf were tried, convicted, and hanged side by side.

For Charles Lindbergh, July did not start at all well. Although he had nobly resisted the crasser of the commercial blandishments waved before him, he did agree to two moneymaking propositions and it was now time to make good on those. One was to undertake a three-month tour of America in the
Spirit of St. Louis
. The idea was to visit every one of the forty-eight states, partly to satisfy the national craving to see him in the flesh but also to help promote aviation. The Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics would pay him $2,500 a week during the trip, a generous sum. The tour details would be arranged by Herbert Hoover’s ubiquitous Department of Commerce. The tour was scheduled to start on July 20.

At the same time, Lindbergh contracted with the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons to produce a quick autobiography. Putnam appointed a ghostwriter, Carlyle MacDonald of the
New York Times
, who came up with a first draft, but Lindbergh couldn’t stand his folksy tone and insisted on writing the book himself—a matter of alarm to his publishers since he had only about three weeks to do it, and that included time off for a trip to Canada to attend that country’s diamond jubilee celebrations as a guest of the prime minister.