Hawthorne, N.Y.-- To a hillside 20 miles north of Yankee Stadium, fans still come to see the Babe. They park their cars by the curb in section 25 of the Gate of Heaven Cemetery and climb a gentle slope to the grave, where a sculpted block of gray granite rises 10 feet from the ground, surrounded by low bushes. Winter, autumn and especially spring and summer, they come to stand for a moment, indulge their nostalgia, perhaps leave behind a baseball cap, bat, ball or pennant.
" You see grandfathers bringing grandsons," says Bill Lane, supervisor of outside employees at the cemetery in Westchester County operated by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. " Sometimes people make a special trip. But a lot of times they' re here visiting somebody else. They find out he' s buried here, and they say, ' Let' s go find out what it looks like.' "
The tall arched stone, sitting on a base with the name RUTH carved into it, bears an image of Christ with his hand on the shoulder of a little boy in a baseball uniform. On the right are carved the years of birth and death of Ruth, 1895-1948, and his second wife, Claire, 1900-1976. On the left is a quotation from Cardinal Francis Spellman, who officiated at Ruth' s funeral at St. Patrick' s Cathedral: " May the divine spirit that animated Babe Ruth to win the crucial game of life inspire the youth of America."
In the falling sun of a bright December Sunday afternoon, a 5-year-old boy scrambles up the hill into the shadow of Ruth' s gravestone. Jeffrey Layne is followed by his father, John Layne, and the boy' s maternal grandfather, Harold Classon. The boy doesn' t yet know much about Ruth, only that he was a famous ballplayer. During the course of his visit to the grave, he asks more than once, " Was he rich?"
John Layne, 42, an electrician who lives in Westchester County, says he grew up in the Bronx rooting for the Yankees. He expects to pass the loyalty to his son.
" I' m looking forward to taking him to the ballpark," says Layne.
Every year since the 1960s, he has visited the graves of relatives and family friends at Gate of Heaven around Christmas and Easter, always with a quick stop at Ruth' s grave. Once, he left a Yankees cap at the grave.
" It' s like a shrine, you know. People leave an offering," says Peter Manoleas, of Berkeley, Calif., who has relatives buried at Gate of Heaven and family living in the area.
His 9-year-old son, Joseph Manoleas, races up the slope, drops to his knees before the Ruth monument and executes several deep bows, his head nearly touching the ground. Asked why he and his father visit the Ruth grave, the boy reacts as if it' s the dumbest question he' s ever heard.
" Do cows moo?" he responds.
After a few minutes, they drive off, leaving nothing behind. The base of the monument already looks like a small souvenir stand.
There are three Yankees caps, one Atlanta Braves cap, a red, white and blue Yankees pennant stuck in the soft earth, a baseball with the inscription in red ink: " Dear Babe, Merry Christmas, You' re the best. Kevin Sullivan, 1994."
The ball sits alongside two Little League baseball cards, a Polaroid snapshot of two men taken elsewhere, a string of clear glass rosary beads, three American flags stuck into the earth near several scarlet roses, a withered red carnation and a bouquet of artificial flowers. There is also a soggy rain check from Yankee Stadium, tier box section 1, for a Toronto game that had been scheduled Aug. 12, 1994, the first game to be canceled by the players' strike.
At the grave, there is much fond talk about baseball in Ruth' s day, when the team owners were the only ones getting rich.
" When I was growing up, the ballplayers were ballplayers that wanted to play ball," says Joe Russo, 63, of Valhalla, N.Y. " Today, all they want to do is make money. There' s a difference."
Russo stops by on a cold, drizzly Saturday afternoon with Michael Collucci, a man in his early 30s whom Russo knows from work at a steel plant in New Jersey. Russo never saw Ruth play, but he remembers that, as a teen-ager, he met Ruth at Al' s Restaurant in Ramsey, N.J. Ruth stopped to talk baseball for a few minutes with a young fan.
" As a [teen-age] kid, you met Babe Ruth, you were in awe all the time," says Russo.
As Russo remembers, Ruth was already in failing health by then. He died of throat cancer on the evening of Aug. 16, 1948. On Aug. 19, after the funeral at St. Patrick' s Cathedral, his body was brought to Gate of Heaven and placed in a receiving vault, where it lay for two months while the family selected a plot.
The funeral in Manhattan attracted tens of thousands to the cathedral, but the burial in October was kept quiet to curb the crowd. Eventually, however, word did leak out and a few news photographers appeared, but only about 100 people were at the grave to see Ruth buried, says Ed Boelsen, who worked at the cemetery at the time. About two years later, the stone was put up, says Boelsen.
From the Ruth grave, one can see a panorama of the east side of the 250-acre cemetery, one of four managed by the Archdiocese of New York. These are first-class accommodations for tens of thousands buried since the cemetery opened in 1918. Among the villages of mausoleums and the meticulously groomed grounds lie the remains of actors James Cagney and Sal Mineo, New York Mayor Jimmy Walker and Bob Considine, who co-wrote " The Babe Ruth Story" with Ruth. About 60 yards up the hill from Ruth' s grave lies another Yankee, Billy Martin, who died on Christmas Day, 1989. He is the only other ballplayer buried at Gate of Heaven. The cremated remains of Lou Gehrig are interred across the road at Kensico Cemetery.
Mario Mingoia, raised a Yankees fan and still a Yankees fan at 72, visits his relatives first on a Sunday afternoon, then stops at the Martin grave, then steps down the slope to the Ruth grave with his wife, Anna, and daughter, Joann. And with memories of Ruth as a player.
Mingoia, a retired garment worker, figures he was 9 or 10 when his older brother, Charles, took him to his first game at Yankee Stadium. He remembers two men getting on base, then Ruth being walked intentionally. The next batter, Gehrig, cracked a home run into the right-field bleachers, one of 23 grand slams Gehrig hit in his career, a major-league record.
Years later, Mingoia went to Christ Church in Riverdale, N.Y., to pay his respects to Gehrig, who died in June 1941. As the 19-year-old Mingoia walked into the chapel, the crowd was pushed back to make way for a bulky, 46-year-old retired Yankee. That was when Mingoia saw Babe Ruth cry.
" I seen him with tears in his eyes in the church," says Mingoia. " He was crying, had his handkerchief out. His head was bowed."
Mingoia, of Elmsford, N.Y., says he has not been to a Yankees game since the mid-1980s. He has stopped many times, though, at the Ruth grave, for the sake of his youth and the memory of Ruth rounding the bases yet one more time.