A Look Back at Ruth’s Life

Before Pedro Martinez pops off again about wanting to drill Babe Ruth to exorcise the Curse of the Bambino, he might want to talk it over first with Julia Ruth Stevens, the Babe’s adopted daughter.

On this Father’s Day, Stevens would tell the Red Sox ace what a sweetheart Ruth was, the perfect poppa, far removed from wine, women and song and the other excesses he supposedly embraced.

Longtime major league coach Jimmie Reese once was asked what it was like to room with Ruth during their halcyon days with the Yankees.

Reese smiled benignly, remembering the bawdy Babe.

“I didn’t room with Ruth,” he confided. “I roomed with his suitcase.”

That said, it is not surprising to find a book with a dust-jacket photo of the Babe surrounded by females, one sitting on his knee, the other with her arm on his shoulder.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though. The Babe is innocent this time, doing nothing more outrageous than reading to his daughters, Dorothy and Julia.

The way Stevens tells it in her new book, “Major League Dad,” Ruth was an ideal father, the best a girl could ask for. And she offers evidence.

Julia was 12 when her mother, Claire, married the Babe on Opening Day of the 1929 baseball season. Then, in classic Ruthian fashion, he hit a home run and as he trotted around third base, he tipped his hat and blew kisses to his new bride.

This, young Julia had to think, is going to be good.

And it was.

Babe in the kitchen was a sight to behold. Stevens recalls her father cooking breakfast early in the morning, before setting out on hunting trips. He’d butter a slice of bread and brown it in a frying pan.

Next, he would cut a hole in the middle of the bread and drop an egg in that spot. Then he’d garnish the whole thing with some fried baloney. “Not bacon,” Stevens writes, “It had to be baloney.”

It was the breakfast of champions for a slugger apparently not worried about calories or cholesterol.

Then there was the matter of Julia’s private-school graduation when the Yankees were in St. Louis. That was during baseball’s railroad era, when players used a more leisurely and slower mode of transportation.

Ruth had promised to be at Julia’s big day. With no time to waste, the Babe caught a plane back home and swept into the school just in time, clutching a bouquet of flowers for his little girl.

Ruth’s graduation present to Julia was a trip around the world with stops in France, England, India and Japan. The Babe was leading a team of major league All-Stars that included the mysterious Moe Berg, who went around Tokyo snapping pictures while Ruth concentrated on hitting home runs.

Berg might have been on a spying mission. Babe’s business was strictly baseball and goodwill. That’s why Ruth was particularly outraged when, seven years later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Stevens remembers her father’s reaction to the attack, how he scooped up armfuls of souvenirs he had brought home from Japan and began pitching them out the window of his Manhattan apartment.

That would be his 14th-floor Manhattan apartment.

It was in that same apartment that Ruth liked to dance with his daughter, demonstrating a mean fox trot right there in the living room. The prime-time Babe might practice in a ballroom, but for dancing with his little girl, the living room was just fine.

And that was where, each December, the Babe also decorated the Ruth Christmas tree.

“He did it all by himself,” Stevens writes. “He didn’t want any help. He was meticulous about it. The icicles had to be put on one strand at a time.”

Then, when he was done, they would turn out all the lights in the room, turn on the tree lights and the Babe would just beam.

And Martinez wants to drill this guy? He’d probably throw at Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, too.