For a moment, Mike Gibbons blocks out the rattling noises all around him, the moving of boxes, the hammering of vagrant nails, the shuffling of network television crews, and he considers, for maybe the 714th time (this morning) the eternal question:
What is this hold that George Herman Ruth still has on the American imagination?
"I should be able to answer that one, I've rehearsed it enough," says Gibbons, director of the Babe Ruth Museum, which is sprucing up to celebrate the great man's hundredth birthday, even though the weather experts, at week's end, are predicting snow. Game called on account of snow? It's as inappropriate as The Babe drinking Diet Fresca with a pinkie up and squelching an urge to belch.
Gibbons glances at blown-up photos of Ruth hanging from a wall. Upstairs, a CBS television crew, which has practically established squatter's rights here for several days, is readying for a Monday morning broadcast. NBC's "Today" show is scheduling a full five minutes for tomorrow. ABC has made inquiries, and so have CNN and ESPN. It's an alphabet soup of overtures to honor the most dominant figure in the history of American sporting life.
"The Babe?" Gibbons says. "He'd probably have a laugh at the whole thing."
At the hoopla, he means, at all the Great American Figure talk, the recent public reference from President Clinton ("Like the Babe, I'm a little overweight and I've struck out a few times," Clinton said during a weekly radio address), though Ruth would love all the attention, and even the ghostly sentiment, of the moment.
The actor Stephen Lang's been in touch. He played Ruth in a TV movie and tells Mike Gibbons there were inexplicable, haunting traces of Ruth on the set: cigar smoke everywhere, though no one in the cast or crew smoked. Ruth did, between home runs.
Then there was the unexpected echo, several days ago, of Ruth's final trip to Baltimore. It was July of '48, a month before he died. He came in from New York for a ballgame here, to give a trophy to a kid named Paul Geppi, the top athlete at St. Mary's Industrial School, where Ruth had legendarily grown up. But it was raining when he arrived here, the game was canceled, and Ruth turned around and took a plane back to New York.
Now, all these years later, who walks unexpectedly into the Babe's birthplace at 216 Emory Street last week but Paul Geppi, all grown up, and holding the trophy Ruth was to give him on that long-ago rainy day. The trophy's now on display at the museum, along with artwork, old videos, autographs, trophies, mementos of all manner of this superman.
A century after his birth and nearly half a century after his death, Babe Ruth still holds his niche in the popular imagination. How so? Gibbons mentions the American dream, the kid growing up with nothing at all who came to be adored by the whole wide world.
That's part of it, only the Babe made it better yet. He held onto the kid inside, the one that mere mortals are forced to abandon as responsibility is forced down our adult throats. He not only created the grandest party ever seen, but had the good sense to enjoy it more than anybody there.
He met Calvin Coolidge and famously declared, "Hot as hell, ain't it, Prez?" He made more money than President Hoover and said, "I know, but I had a better year than Hoover." He said over the radio, "As Duke Ellington once said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton."
He was trying to quote Wellington's line about the battle being won on the fields of Eton. Asked about it later, Ruth said, "About that Wellington guy, I wouldn't know. Ellington, yes. As for that Eton business -- well, I married my first wife in Elkton. It musta stuck."
Actually, it was Ellicott City, but never mind. That was the Babe, zipping through life a little too carelessly to check all the details. We not only chuckle, but envy his freedom. We imagine ourselves not only hitting the grand home runs, but having his ability to appreciate the moments for what they were. We read about him caring for sick children and tell ourselves that, given the chance to be another Babe, we'd do the same, we'd be magnanimous, too, just give us the chance. And we imagine the kind of universal love he must have felt.
The Babe was no innocent, though he lived in a more innocent time. Today, instead of chuckling indulgently over his excesses, we'd probably be exposed to some self-righteous type in a public pulpit bemoaning his sinful ways. They'd find a way to edit all the fun out of his life.
There's not enough unscrutinized fun today. Maybe that's why we still marvel at Ruth and recycle the old tales. He grew up in an orphanage. He was unloved by his family. He died pretty young, 53, and very painfully. But he had a hell of a time through it all.
He hit his homers, and he hugged his ladies, and he slugged back booze beyond imagining. And that's why the rest of us, sitting off in the shadows, raise our little Diet Frescas, delicate pinkies up, and salute him.