THE LAST DAYS OF BABE RUTH

It is a bold thing to declare but I think that Babe Ruth is one of the greatest athletes that this country has ever seen. From 1912 to 1935, Ruth was one the true greats of baseball. Sadly though a life of rough living cause his final years to be marred with health concerns. As early as the war years, doctors had cautioned Ruth to take better care of his health, and he grudgingly followed their advice, limiting his drinking and not going on a proposed trip to support the troops in the South Pacific. In 1946, Ruth began experiencing severe pain over his left eye and had difficulty swallowing. In November 1946, Ruth entered French Hospital in New York for tests, which revealed that he had an inoperable malignant tumor at the base of his skull and in his neck. The malady was a lesion known as nasopharyngeal carcinoma ] His name and fame gave him access to experimental treatments, and he was one of the first cancer patients to receive both drugs and radiation treatment simultaneously. Having lost 80 pounds , he was discharged from the hospital in February and went to Florida to recuperate. He returned to New York and Yankee Stadium after the season started. The new commissioner, Happy Chandler (Judge Landis had died in 1944), proclaimed April 27, 1947, Babe Ruth Day around the major leagues, with the most significant observance to be at Yankee Stadium. A number of teammates and others spoke in honor of Ruth, who briefly addressed the crowd of almost 60,000. By then, his voice was a soft whisper with a very low, raspy tone.

Around this time, developments in chemotherapy offered some hope for Ruth. The doctors had not told Ruth he had cancer because of his family's fear that he might do himself harm. They treated him with teropterin, a folic acid derivative; he may have been the first human subject. Ruth showed dramatic improvement during the summer of 1947, so much so that his case was presented by his doctors at a scientific meeting, without using his name. He was able to travel around the country, doing promotional work for the Ford Motor Company on American Legion Baseball. He appeared again at another day in his honor at Yankee Stadium in September, but was not well enough to pitch in an old-timers game as he had hoped.

The improvement was only a temporary remission, and by late 1947, Ruth was unable to help with the writing of his autobiography, The Babe Ruth Story, which was almost entirely ghostwritten. In and out of the hospital in Manhattan, he left for Florida in February 1948, doing what activities he could. After six weeks he returned to New York to appear at a book-signing party. He also traveled to California to witness the filming of the movie based on the book.

last known photo of Babe Ruth - July 28, 1948

Ruth made one final trip on behalf of American Legion Baseball, then entered Memorial Hospital, where he would die. He was never told he had cancer, but before his death, had surmised it. He was able to leave the hospital for a few short trips, including a final visit to Baltimore. On July 26, 1948, Ruth left the hospital to attend the premiere of the film The Babe Ruth Story. Shortly thereafter, Ruth returned to the hospital for the final time. He was barely able to speak. Ruth's condition gradually grew worse; only a few visitors were allowed to see him, one of whom was National League president and future Commissioner of Baseball Ford Frick. "Ruth was so thin it was unbelievable. He had been such a big man and his arms were just skinny little bones, and his face was so haggard", Frick said years later.

Thousands of New Yorkers, including many children, stood vigil outside the hospital during Ruth's final days. On August 16, 1948, at 8:01 p.m., Ruth died in his sleep at the age of 53. His open casket was placed on display in the rotunda of Yankee Stadium, where it remained for two days; 77,000 people filed past to pay him tribute. His funeral Mass took place at St. Patrick's Cathedral; a crowd estimated at 75,000 waited outside. Ruth was buried on a hillside in Section 25 at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York. An epitaph by Cardinal Spellman appears on his headstone. His second wife, Claire Merritt Ruth, would be interred with him 28 years later in 1976...

BORN ON THIS DAY: BABE RUTH

Usually when a profile a birthday on the blog, it is someone directly related to Hollywood. However, since my son is not addicted to baseball, I wanted to profile who I think is the greatest baseball player of all time - Babe Ruth. He would have been a young 111 today! George Herman Ruth Jr. was born on February 6,1895 at 216 Emory Street in Pigtown, a working-class section of Baltimore, Maryland, named for its meat-packing plants. Its population included recent immigrants from Ireland, Germany and Italy, and African Americans. Ruth's parents, George Herman Ruth, Sr. (1871–1918), and Katherine Schamberger, were both of German American ancestry. According to the 1880 census, his parents were born in Maryland. The paternal grandparents of Ruth, Sr. were from Prussia and Hanover, respectively. Ruth, Sr. had a series of jobs, including lightning rod salesman and streetcar operator, before becoming a counterman in a family-owned combination grocery and saloon on Frederick Street. George Ruth Jr. was born in the house of his maternal grandfather, Pius Schamberger, a German immigrant and trade unionist. Only one of young George's seven siblings, his younger sister Mamie, survived infancy.

Many aspects of Ruth's childhood are undetermined, including the date of his parents' marriage. When young George was a toddler, the family moved to 339 South Woodyear Street, not far from the rail yards; by the time the boy was 6, his father had a saloon with an upstairs apartment at 426 West Camden Street. Details are equally scanty about why young George was sent at the age of 7 to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a reformatory and orphanage. As an adult, Babe Ruth suggested that not only had he been running the streets and rarely attending school, he was drinking beer when his father was not looking. Some accounts say that, after a violent incident at his father's saloon, the city authorities decided this environment was unsuitable for a small child. At St. Mary's, which George Jr. entered on June 13, 1902, he was recorded as "incorrigible"; he spent much of the next twelve years there

In early 1914, Ruth was signed to a professional baseball contract by Jack Dunn, owner and manager of the minor-league Baltimore Orioles, an International League team.Babe Ruth's first appearance as a professional ballplayer was in an inter squad game on March 7, 1914. Ruth played shortstop, and pitched the last two innings of a 15–9 victory. Arriving in Boston to play for the Red Sox from 1914-1919, Babe emerged as a great star of the sport. Playing with the New York Yankees from 1920 to 1934, cemented himself as an icon of the game. Many of his records have been broken, but he is still the Great Bambino to anyone who has a love of the game. Happy birthday Babe...

RECENTLY VIEWED: EVERYONE'S HERO

My son loves baseball movies. Almost any baseball movie he can watch. We have HBO free for a year for renewing our cable service, and I happend to flip around to catch the charming 2006 cartoon Everyone's Hero. My son has made me watch five times now with him so the magic of the movie has worn off, but I still like it.

Everyone's Hero is a 2006 Canadian–American computer-animated adventure sports comedy family film, written by Robert Kurtz and Jeff Hand and directed by Colin Brady, Christopher Reeve (who was working on this film at the time of his death), and Daniel St. Pierre, with music by John Debney. The majority of this film was produced by IDT Entertainment in Toronto with portions outsourced to Reel FX Creative Studios. It was distributed by 20th Century Fox, and released theatrically on September 15, 2006. Everyone's Hero earned $16 million worldwide during its theatrical run. The film stars William H. Macy, Rob Reiner, Brian Dennehy,Raven-Symoné, Robert Wagner, Richard Kind, Dana Reeve, Jake T. Austin, Joe Torre, Mandy Patinkin, Forest Whitaker and Whoopi Goldberg. Everyone's Hero was released on DVD on March 20, 2007 by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

In 1932, the dawn of the Great Depression, a young baseball fan Yankee Irving (Jake T. Austin), whose father Stanley (Mandy Patinkin) works as a janitor for New York City's Yankee Stadium, dreams of playing for the Yankees but can't even play sandlot baseball well enough to avoid being picked last. One day beside the sandlot, he finds a talking baseball he names Screwie (Rob Reiner).

While father and son are in the stadium, a thief steals Babe Ruth's famous bat Darlin' (Whoopi Goldberg). Yankee's father, who was working his shift at the time, is blamed and accordingly fired. The true thief is Lefty Maginnis (William H. Macy), a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs. Lefty works for Cubs owner Napoleon Cross (Robin Williams), who desires to see the Cubs defeat the Yankees during the 1932 World Series.

Stealing the bat back, Yankee decides to return it to Ruth—and thereby exonerate his father—by journeying across the country to Chicago, where the next World Series' games will be played. Darlin' is able to speak, as does her counterpart Screwie, who she constantly argues and bickers with (though near the end, they finally become friends). Much of the plot is driven by Lefty's comic attempts to retrieve the bat from Yankee, with slapstick results. Other scenes involve Yankee meeting others who will help him in his quest: several hobos (Ed Helms, Richard Kind, and Ron Tippe); Marti (Raven-Symoné), an African American girl; her baseball player father Lonnie Brewster (Forest Whitaker); and in Chicago, Babe Ruth himself (Brian Dennehy).

A series of improbable coincidences allows Yankee himself to bat for the Yankees, resulting in the archetypal home run (technically, a series of errors after an infield pop-up that allow him to round the bases). This restores the morale of the Yankees, who score 7 more runs to take the lead and win the World Series. Cross tries to talk Babe Ruth out of accepting the victory, saying that Yankee is too young to be a counting player. This leads to the arrest of Cross, and also Lefty. Yankee also successfully exonerates his father. Yankee returns home, now knowing what is truly important in baseball.

It is sad that Christopher Reeve died before this film was finished, because it is a great movie. It really captures what baseball meant to the country in 1932. This is before it became the business and cut throat industry it is today. My son still thinks baseball today is like baseball was in 1932, and upon watching this cartoon with him, I do not want to him to lose that innocence, at least yet...

MY RATING: 7 OUT OF 10

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HISTORY OF A SONG: TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME

Now that my son is getting older, the theme song for "Barney" has been replaced with "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" as the most popular song in our house. Even though the game of baseball is not the same as it used to be, there is just still something great about taking your son to see a game. It is one of my favorite things I have done with my son. With the song stuck permanently in my head, I had to do some research on where this anthem of baseball came from!

"Take Me Out to the Ball Game" is a 1908 Tin Pan Alley song by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer which has become the unofficial anthem of North American baseball, although neither of its authors had attended a game prior to writing the song. The song (chorus only) is traditionally sung during the middle of the seventh inning of a baseball game. Fans are generally encouraged to sing along, and at some ballparks, the words "home team" are replaced with the team name.Jack Norworth, while riding a subway train, was inspired by a sign that said "Baseball Today – Polo Grounds". In the song, Katie's (and later Nelly's) beau calls to ask her out to see a show. She accepts the date, but only if her date will take her out to the baseball game. The words were set to music by Albert Von Tilzer. (Norworth and Von Tilzer finally saw their first Major League Baseball games 32 and 20 years later, respectively.) The song was first sung by Norworth's then-wife Nora Bayes and popularized by many other vaudeville acts. It was played at a ballpark for the first known time in 1934, at a high-school game in Los Angeles, and researchers think it made its debut at a major-league park later that year.

Norworth wrote an alternative version of the song in 1927. (Norworth and Bayes were famous for writing and performing such smash hits as "Shine On, Harvest Moon".) With the sale of so many records, sheet music, and piano rolls, the song became one of the most popular hits of 1908. The Haydn Quartet singing group, led by popular tenor Harry MacDonough, recorded a successful version on Victor Records.

The most famous recording of the song was credited to "Billy Murray and the Haydn Quartet", even though Murray did not sing on it. The confusion, nonetheless, is so pervasive that, when "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America as one of the 365 top "Songs of the Century", the song was credited to Billy Murray, implying his recording of it as having received the most votes among songs from the first decade. The first recorded version was by Edward Meeker. Meeker's recording was selected by the Library of Congress as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry, which selects recordings annually that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

BASEBALL MEETS HOLLYWOOD

Springtime is here, so the baseball exhibition season is in full swing with the regular season soon to follow.

Baseball has been a rich subject for movies since the game's (and cinema's) earliest days. On occasion, baseball players themselves took a swing at being Hollywood stars themselves. Most were strictly minor league as actors, but a few nearly hit a home run.

Here's a lineup of baseball giants who tried their luck in front of the camera:

BABE RUTH

The Sultan of Swat was the subject of a dreadful 1948 biopic, "The Babe Ruth Story," starring a totally miscast William Bendix, but the real Ruth appeared in several films and shorts during his years with the New York Yankees. Babe was just 25 and a recent acquisition from the Boston Red Sox when he made his film debut — billed as George Herman "Babe" Ruth — in the 1920 film "Headin' Home." The comedy offers a semi-fictitious look at how the Babe became a baseball player. The white-pancake makeup the Babe wears in the movie gives him almost a zombie-esque quality. Though the film isn't much, he has charm to spare.

But he's even better in the 1928 Harold Lloyd silent comedy "Speedy." He's one of the passengers in Lloyd's taxi cab, and he plays himself to perfection. In 1942, the Babe was funny and poignant as himself in "The Pride of the Yankees," the wonderful true story about his Yankees teammate Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper).

LOU GEHRIG

Speaking of the Iron Horse, the Yankees' star first baseman went Hollywood in 1938, the year before ALS felled his career, in a contemporary western called "Rawhide." Gehrig was tall, muscular and just as handsome as Cooper, who would play him in "The Pride of the Yankees." But he isn't much of a thespian — his New Yawk accent is pretty strong — and "Rawhide" isn't much of a movie, but any Gehrig fan will want to check it out. Ironically, the film's producer, Sol Lesser, had signed Gehrig to play Tarzan, but Lesser later said that "when [Gehrig] stripped his Yankee uniform for a leopard skin, two things became apparent. Both were Gehrig's legs: pillars of strength befitting baseball's iron man, their piano construction was functional rather than decorative."

JACKIE ROBINSON

The Brooklyn Dodger created history when he broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947. And three years later, he starred as himself in the low-budget but moving biopic "The Jackie Robinson Story." Dodgers President Branch Rickey insisted that Robinson be cast as himself. Though he had never acted before, Robinson isn't too awkward in front of the camera, and having a young Ruby Dee play his wife, Rachel, probably aided his performance. The Hollywood Reporter stated that though "the film is choppy, episodic … director Alfred E. Green and his star maintain a serene dignity throughout it all."

MICKEY MANTLE and ROGER MARIS

The New York Yankees stars appeared in two films in 1962, not long after Maris broke Ruth's home run record by hitting 61 in 1961. In the Cary Grant-Doris Day sex comedy "That Touch of Mink," Mantle and Maris play themselves and interact briefly with Grant and Day, who have dugout seats for the game at Yankee Stadium. They're pretty stiff in the cameo, but in the family film "Safe at Home!" they are as rigid as a 10-day-old piece of dried-out chewing tobacco. Bryan Russell plays a motherless boy who tells his Little League team he is great friends with the Yankees' sluggers, then heads out to persaude them to come meet his team. William Frawley in his last film role, playing the Yankees manager, is the best thing about it.

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