NEW YORK -- Could it have been 40 years ago -- yes it was - when precisely at 8:01 p.m. on Aug. 16, 1948, these words went out to a world that dreaded to see them:
FLASH -- New York -- Babe Ruth died tonight.
The pages of history aren't all that far back and yet no adult today who was in kidhood then, could have known the Babe or have seen him play.
In fact only those who are 53 or older had the opportunity or privilege of ever having been in a Major League ballpark when Babe Ruth was in the lineup. The Babe's last year as a player was in 1935.
Yet, somehow America knows him today as one of its truly authentic folk heroes, a man whose death on that sultry summer night so long ago, plunged the nation into mourning.
These were the words that went out over the clattering teletypes on that occasion, by this writer who had know the Babe as a fan and as a friend but only by legend and the record books as a player.
'The big and the little people of a great nation paused today to mourn the passing of Babe Ruth, one of the most beloved Americans of all time.
'His big heart, the fighting heart that put the hearts of a million kids into the great American game of baseball, stopped beating last night.
'And so in a dimly-lit ninth floor room of Memorial Hospital ended the success story of George Herman Ruth, the dirty-faced little Baltimore urchin who not only became baseball's all-time home run king, but the most fabulous fiqure in the history of sport.'
There was more -- much more -- as tributes flowed in from throughout the world, and there began a remarkable vigil on the following night, right in Yankee Stadium only yards away from the home plate where he had swung his mighty bat for so many homers.
Never before and never again, has there been such a ceremony. It was decided, most fittingly, by the Yankees that the Babe should lie in state, home again so to speak, in 'The House that Ruth Built' where thousands of fans in a slow procession could go slowly by the flower-bedecked casket to pay their last respects.
Before the gates were open at 5 p.m. as though for a regular ballgame, the throng of mourners reached entirely around the vast stadium with a circumstance of about eight good-sized city blocks. The Yankees of '48, by a fortunate circumstance, were away on a road trip.
No one on the sports beat that year could have been unmindful of the impending moment when this unlikely hero would be no longer with them. They knew -- and he knew -- that he had terminal cancer that months before had so ravaged his throat that he could speak only in a hoarse whisper. There was a myth that persisted at the time that no one had told the Babe what really ailed him, and it was true that none of the stories written during his long illness had mentioned that dread word - cancer.
Still it was a shock and the end came with unexpected suddenness. In fact on the day before, Ruth had regained sufficient strength so that he was able to walk around briefly in the corridor near his room.
The New York and Brooklyn Baseball Writers annually held a big summer outing on a Major League off-day, an excursion to nearby Bear Mountain where they themselves played ball and drank beer. The United Press sports staffers reluctantly by-passed the outing on the sage advice of a friendly nurse who noted that the Babe's condition actually was worsening by the hour and that he surely could not survive more than a day or two.
The late Milton Richman, who later distinguished himself as one of baseball's all-time great writers and reporters, had been at the hospital for an endless number of hours and was there when the end came. He was one of the last of Babe's writer friends to be with him.
The funeral itself at St. Patrick's Cathedral on New York's Fifth Avenue, brought a multitude of the great and near-great, notables of baseball and the sports world, and hundreds of prominent Americans in government, the entertainment world, and business tycoons. There were 57 honorary pallbearers including Joe DiMaggio and Frank Crosetti, Yankees of that day who left immediately after the service by plane for an afternoon game with the Senators in Washington.
There was no extensive formal eulogy and no written text, but Francis Cardinal Spellman, head of the Catholic diocese of New York, who conducted the service, departed from the prayers of the ritual at the finish.
'May the blithe spirit which motivated Babe Ruth to overcome hardships and win the battle of life, prompt generations of American youth to play their positions loyally on the All-American team,' he intoned.
John Griffin, the only staffer who knew short-hand, quickly transcribed the words of Cardinal Spellman, who spoke eloquently, but with a slight lisp.
It was notable that in the stories that appeared that night and the next day, there was a difference of one word. Another respected writer, Dan Daniel of the New York World Telegram, carried in his account that Cardinal Spellman had referred to a divine spirt. No one knew for sure and no one was asking -- but the phrase 'blithe spirit' for the one and only Babe Ruth seemed so very fitting.
Finally in a drenching summer shower that broke the heat and humidity of that particular August dog night, there was a funeral cortege through city streets and on for 28 miles to the Gates of Heaven cemetery in suburban Valhalla, a town notable in literary history for the tales of Washington Irving in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
And on that day they made room for another legend.
adv weekend, Aug.
