In the area surrounding Lot No. 126, Section G of Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery, dozens and dozens of headstones and grave markers rise from the ground. For an insect, it's a skyline that would match that of any great city. For Paul Harris, however, it has been the source of great consternation.
You see, while the surrounding area is filled with marble tributes and commemorative granite, Lot No. 126, Section G is bare, save the yellowed grass that has covered this area for decades.
Harris, a retired attorney, first visited the site in 1995 and just couldn't shake the idea from his head.
"It preyed on me," he says. "Every time I thought about her being buried over there, it just hurt me. I woke up one night, and it just hit me: No one has visited her grave since 1912. Not a single soul. No one even knows that she's there."
Today, Harris will correct a grave injustice. On Babe Ruth's 113th birthday, it's the slugger's mother who's receiving the gift. Harris and the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum are buying a headstone for Katie Ruth, who died in near-anonymity 96 years ago.
"It's the saddest thing I can imagine. I had never seen or heard of a woman more neglected - and she was the mother to a world-famous man," says Harris, 81, whose father played with and against the Babe on Baltimore's fields and sandlots nearly a century ago.
For Harris, it's a chance to honor a woman whom history has mostly forgotten. But it's also an opportunity to revisit a most curious slice of Ruth's most curious life.
Ruth is one of the most documented figures of the 20th century. As if his real life weren't incredible enough, Ruth inspired folk stories, legends and tall tales. Lost somewhere amid the fact and fiction is Katie Ruth.
More than two dozen books have been written on Ruth, and none offers more than a cursory glance at the woman who brought him into this world - probably not because the authors didn't want to, but they simply couldn't.
"There are no stories of a mother, none - good or bad or madhouse crazy," Leigh Montville wrote in his 2006 book, The Big Bam.
Even Ruth swung and missed. He had two ghost-written autobiographies. The first, published in 1928, didn't specifically mention either parent. The second one, in 1948, did. But Ruth got the facts wrong. He said his mother's maiden name was Schanberg and she lived until he was 13. Actually, she was born Catherine Schamberger, and she died in 1912, when the Babe was 17. The mistakes are hardly surprising. It's not really clear what the slugger knew about his mom - in life or in death.
When he was just 7, Ruth was famously dragged to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys for the crime of being "incorrigible and vicious." His parents couldn't keep the young Ruth in school or out of trouble. So, as the story goes, father took son by trolley to St. Mary's and an incredible baseball journey began.
But what of his mother?
"The mother has kissed the boy goodbye at the front door of 426 West Camden Street, a tear rolling down her cheek. Or has she said nothing. Or she was relieved. Or maybe she wasn't even there," Montville wrote in his version of Babe's story.
We don't know. And that's part of what bothers Harris so much.
Harris stumbled into his fascination while researching his family's records. He accidentally unearthed some Ruth paperwork and decided to keep digging. He ended up with a box of Ruth paperwork - from birth certificate to death notices - and made it his mission to piece together the life of the most forgotten part of baseball's most celebrated hero.
Just seven months after marrying George Herman Ruth Sr., Katie gave birth to the Babe at her parents' home on Emory Street. Ruth's father is listed on the birth certificate as a lightning rod worker.
The ensuing years were not easy for the young family. Katie, just 4 feet 10, gave birth to seven more children, but only Ruth and a sister lived past infancy. According to The Life That Ruth Built, Marshall Smelser's lengthy and well-researched 1975 account of the Babe's life, "Kate was not usually well, and her first child was left alone to run the streets and piers ..."
After Ruth was sent to St. Mary's, Smelser reported, Katie visited her son once a month. Finally, on Aug. 1, 1912, Katie was admitted to Municipal Tuberculosis Hospital, where she died 10 days later. She was 39. The official cause of death: exhaustion and lung disease.
Curiously, her death notice in newspapers mentioned her sister, but no husband and no children. Still more peculiar, on the death notice that Harris found, Katie is listed as a widow, even though her husband outlived her by six years. George Herman Ruth Sr. was later buried in Loudon Park Cemetery, where his headstone mentions his second wife, but not Katie.
For Harris, these details were underscored by a 1995 visit to Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery, off Belair Road. When he realized that Babe Ruth's mother spent all of these years in an unmarked grave, his pursuit suddenly had purpose. He would do what neither Katie Ruth's husband nor famous son ever did.
"It got to the point where I got nothing to do and I thought ... 'I'm going to give her a marker,'" says Harris, who eventually compiled his research in a self-published book, Babe Ruth: The Dark Side.
Just last month, Harris drafted a letter soliciting donations and almost immediately received a call from Michael Gibbons, executive director of the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum.
"When I got the letter from Paul, I just thought it was a really a compelling request and something the Babe Ruth Museum needed to get on immediately," Gibbons says. "We needed to respond."
Museum staff and board members are presenting a check today to Harris for $1,200, the cost of a headstone. In a couple of months, Harris says Lot No. 126, Section G will finally have something that has been missing for far too long, her life and death finally inscribed for all too see.
RUTH Catherine 1873-1912 Mother of George Herman "Babe" Ruth, Jr. rick.maese@baltsun.com