One Summer: America, 1927 (50 page)

Miller Huggins, the Yankees manager, loved road trips, too, though for entirely different reasons. It wasn’t that he longed to be close to his players, or they to him—surprisingly little affection flowed in either direction—but that road trips gave him a chance to indulge his favorite pastime, which was to visit roller rinks and just sit and watch. Huggins didn’t skate himself, but his dream was one day to own a rink of his own. As far as anyone could tell, watching people roller-skate was the only thing in life that gave him pleasure.

Huggins was an oddity. He was for a start quite small—sources rarely agree on just how small, but in the region of five feet four or five—and so boyishly built that he was sometimes mistaken for the batboy. Forty-eight years old in 1927, he had grown up in Cincinnati. His parents were English immigrants; his father had been an excellent cricket player. Huggins studied law at the University of Cincinnati, where one of his professors was William Howard Taft, now the chief justice of the United States, who was at the present moment declining to intervene in the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

To the delight and pride of his parents, Huggins qualified as a lawyer in 1902; to their dismay, he then declined to practice. Instead he took up professional baseball, which in 1902 was only about two steps up from working in a brothel, or so at least it must have seemed to his parents. For the next dozen years Huggins performed competently if not outstandingly as an infielder for the Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals
before eventually becoming a player-manager and then just manager of the latter. When invited to take over the Yankees in 1917, he was skeptical and reluctant. The Yankees were a mediocre team, and he viewed the move as a demotion. But he won pennants in 1921, 1922, 1923, and 1926, and by midsummer of 1927 was clearly headed for another. Though not loved by his players, particularly Ruth, who fought with him endlessly and called him “the Flea,” Huggins treated them well and trusted them to make the right decisions on the field, unlike John McGraw of the Giants, who considered his players “incapable of thought.” With Ruth, his forbearance was at times close to saintly.

In New York, Huggins lived with his sister and an aunt in an apartment near Yankee Stadium. He never married. Nor did he ever realize his dream of owning a roller rink. Though no one could know it yet, in August 1927 Huggins was just two years away from death.

The poorer players of the team—which is to say most of them—looked forward to road trips because most of their expenses were covered and they received an allowance of $4 a day in road money, which meant they could either lead the life of Riley or live frugally and pocket the rest as savings. Over a season’s worth of road trips, that could mount up to a fair sum for a player like Julie Wera on $2,400 a year.

Trains in the 1920s had names, not numbers, which endowed them with a certain air of romance and adventure: Broadway Limited, Bar Harbor Express, Santa Fe De Luxe, Empire State Express, Texas Special, Sunrise Special, Sunset Limited. After Charles Lindbergh’s flight, the Pennsylvania Railroad relaunched its service between St. Louis and the East Coast and called it, all but inevitably, the Spirit of St. Louis. Sometimes, it must be said, the names were more romantic than the journeys. The Scenic Limited, from St. Louis to Pueblo, Colorado, was mostly across northern Kansas, which was not many people’s idea of topographical sumptuousness, even in Kansas. Some names were flatly misleading. The New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad didn’t actually go to the stated termini, but plied more modestly between Chicago and Buffalo. The Atlantic Limited
likewise never sniffed salt air, but confined itself to a daily run across northern Minnesota and Michigan.

Some trains were renowned for their lack of comfort—in California, the Gold Coast was familiarly known as the Cold Roast—but most made a reasonable effort at providing a quality service, and the best offered real splendor. The finest of all was the Twentieth Century Limited, which left Grand Central Terminal in New York at 6:00 p.m. each evening bound for Chicago. The Limited had a barber and a ladies’ hairdresser, bathrooms with hot baths, laundry facilities, an observation car with writing tables and complimentary stationery, even a stenographer for taking dictation. It was capable of covering the 960 miles in eighteen hours, but after several crashes, including one in 1916 in which twenty-six people died, a slightly more cautious trip of twenty hours became the scheduled norm. Even so, the Twentieth Century Limited was still the fastest and most comfortable form of travel not just in America, but anywhere on earth.

The most extraordinary feature of rail travel was how much choice there was. Although the Van Sweringen brothers had done much to consolidate the industry, it was still bewilderingly fragmented. A customer in 1927 could buy a ticket on any of twenty thousand scheduled services from any of 1,085 operating companies. Different companies frequently used different terminals, tracks, and ticketing systems, none of which necessarily coordinated with anyone else’s offerings. Seven different rail lines served Cleveland alone.

Trains went where each company’s tracks dictated, which meant they didn’t always take the shortest or fastest routes. The Lake Shore Limited from New York to Chicago traveled for its first 150 miles north toward Canada before abruptly turning left at Albany, as if suddenly remembering itself. Long-distance trains commonly divided or amalgamated en route in a complicated minuet that allowed them to connect with other services. The Suwanee River Special set off daily from St. Petersburg, Florida, bound for Chicago, but at various points along the way cars were unhooked and reattached to other trains heading for Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Kansas City. The Lake Shore Limited
paused at Albany to take on cars from Boston and Maine and again at Buffalo to collect cars from Toronto, while at Cleveland some cars were split off and sent south to Cincinnati and St. Louis while the main train continued west to Chicago. For passengers, the possibility of waking up in Denver or Memphis when one was expecting Omaha or Milwaukee added a frisson of uncertainty to every long journey, while the shuntings and recouplings in the wee hours meant that almost no one got a good night’s sleep. The romance of travel wasn’t always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.

To keep customers distracted, and to generate extra income in a crowded market, nearly all trains put a great deal of emphasis on their food. Although galleys had barely room to flip a pancake, the cooks turned out an extraordinary range of dishes. On Union Pacific trains, for breakfast alone the discerning guest could choose among nearly forty dishes—sirloin or porterhouse steak, veal cutlet, mutton chop, wheat-cakes, broiled salt mackerel, half a spring chicken, creamed potatoes, cornbread, bacon, ham, link or patty sausage, and eggs in any style—and the rest of the meals of the day were just as commodious. Overnight passengers on the Midnight Limited between Chicago and St. Louis could even partake of a lavish (and literal) “midnight luncheon” while rattling through the lonely night.

The Yankees traveled in special cars hooked onto the end of a regular train, partly to keep fans from disturbing the ballplayers, but also to keep the ballplayers from disturbing normal people, for the players’ car was easily the rowdiest on any train. Trains in the 1920s lacked cooling systems, and in hot weather the players generally sat around in their underwear. Babe Ruth had a private compartment, as did Huggins. The rest of the team shared curtained enclosures with upper and lower berths—“rolling tenements,” as they were drolly known. When Ruppert was with the team, an extra car was hooked on for him alone. On all road trips, there was a lot of time to talk, play cards, and fool around. Ruth played a great deal of bridge or poker, betting wildly on the latter. The more serious or scholarly among the players read or wrote letters. Benny Bengough practiced the saxophone.

The Yankees divided into two social sets on the road. There was the party set of Ruth, Bob Meusel, Waite Hoyt, and Bengough, and the quiet set (sometimes called the movie set) of those who behaved. These included Earle Combes, Wilcy Moore, Cedric Durst, Ben Paschal, Herb Pennock, and Lou Gehrig.

Also frequently joining the lively crowd was
Times
reporter Richards Vidmer. Ballplayers didn’t normally fraternize with reporters, but they always made an exception for Vidmer because he was an attractive, youthful, athletic person, much like themselves, but with a life and background more exciting and dashing than any five players could boast together. The son of a brigadier general, Vidmer had grown up all over the world and moved comfortably in high circles. It was Vidmer, it may be recalled, who watched President Harding urinate in a White House fireplace. Vidmer trained as an aviator in World War I, married the daughter of the Rajah of Sarawak, one of the richest men in the Far East, and played both golf and baseball professionally before taking up journalism. High-spirited and irresistible to women, he was the inspiration for a very popular novel,
Young Man of Manhattan
, whose author, Katharine Brush, was a former paramour.

Vidmer was also perhaps the most memorably dreadful sportswriter ever. In an interview given many years after he retired, Vidmer cheerfully admitted that he rarely turned up at a ballpark before the third or fourth inning of a game, and sometimes not till the fifth or sixth. He wrote text that was at once excruciating and unreliable. Here he is describing a day in which Gehrig hit two home runs while Ruth had none: “Whereas Ruth and the other Yanks left the field after five hours of baseball in varying degrees of dejection, the laddie that’s known as Lou pranced off in high glee, kicking his heels hilariously and whistling a merry tune.” Among the many demonstrative acts in which Lou Gehrig never indulged we can comfortably number prancing in glee and kicking his heels. In Vidmer’s hands, a Ruth clout wasn’t a home run, it was a “sapient sock,” and the ball in flight wasn’t a ball in flight but “animated leather.” The Tigers became “the Jungle Cats,” the left arm “the port turret.” The Yankees were always “the Hugmen” (after Miller Huggins). When Ruth hit his 400th career homer Vidmer wrote a moving piece about how an usher tried
to take the ball from a boy in the bleachers, but the boy wouldn’t yield it because he wanted to give it to the Babe himself, and that when Ruth learned of this he invited the boy to the clubhouse. There he graciously accepted the gift and gave the boy half a dozen shiny new autographed balls in return. “I had the story exclusive,” Vidmer confided years later, “since I’d made it up.”

Like nearly all other sportswriters, Vidmer never wrote anything suggesting the least impropriety on the part of any player, which in the case of Babe Ruth meant suppressing a great deal. Apart from not wanting to imperil a good friendship, there was a practical reason for his tactfulness. Major league teams paid the expenses of traveling sportswriters, which had a powerful effect on their loyalty. They were in essence PR men for the team.

No visiting team had ever been more popular than the Yankees were in the summer of 1927. Twenty thousand turned out on a Friday afternoon in Chicago to watch them play the White Sox, ten times the number that came to watch the Sox play the fourth-place Athletics three days later. The Yankees drew twenty-one thousand in Cleveland, twenty-two thousand in Detroit, even eight thousand in lowly, fanless St. Louis—all on weekdays. On Labor Day, in Boston as the Yankees long road trip finally drew to a close, an estimated seventy thousand people turned up at Fenway Park—far more than it could hold—even though the hometown Red Sox were a magnificent 49 games out of first place.

All the fans in all the cities were drawn by the same thing—the chance to see Babe Ruth in the flesh, and ideally to watch him swat a ball into the firmament. That Ruth was locked in a seesaw battle with the youthful upstart Lou Gehrig for the home run championship brought the kind of excitement that made people crush their hats in distraction. There really had never been anything like it. At mid-August, Gehrig—impossibly, unprecedentedly—led Ruth by 38 home runs to 36. But Ruth came back with towering clouts in Chicago on August 16 and 17 to draw level. Gehrig went one up again on August 19 against the White Sox, but Ruth matched that the next day in Cleveland to put them even again at 39.

By now people were practically having heart attacks. On August 22,
Ruth hit his 40th; Gehrig tied him two days later. Ruth hit his 41st and 42nd home runs on August 27 and 28 in St. Louis. Gehrig came back with a three-run shot in St. Louis on August 29. Two days later, back in New York against the Red Sox, Ruth hit the last home run of the month for either player. As August ended, Ruth had 43 home runs and Gehrig 41. Their total of 84 home runs compares with 28 all season for the Red Sox and 26 for the Indians. No team other than the Yankees had ever hit 84 home runs in a season before—and this was with the season only four-fifths over.

Ruth, it had to be said, was nowhere near on course to beat his record of 59 home runs from 1921, but he might with luck get to 50—only the third time that he, or anyone else, had reached that eminent milestone. If Gehrig stayed hot, he might get to 50, too. So as August ended, September had the prospect of being a pretty exciting month for baseball. In fact, no one could begin to guess just how exciting it was about to get.

As the Yankees proceeded from city to city through the Midwest at ground level, Charles Lindbergh covered much the same territory from the air. From Detroit, he went on to Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Wichita, and St. Joseph, Missouri, then back north to Moline, Milwaukee, and Madison before at last heading to Minnesota for what was expected to be a triumphant homecoming. Alas, it didn’t work out quite that way. First, he received news that George Stumpf, his well-meaning but not very useful assistant at Roosevelt Field before the flight to Paris, had just been killed in a plane crash in Missouri. Stumpf had gone up as a passenger with a military pilot named C. C. Hutchinson, who was showing off to some people at a lake resort near St. Louis when his plane clipped a flagpole and crashed. Hutchinson was thrown clear and not seriously injured. Stumpf was crudely garroted by a wire that became twisted around his neck.