One Summer: America, 1927

demotion. But he won pennants in 1921, ’22, ’23 and ’26 and by midsummer 1927 was clearly headed for another. Though not loved by his players, particularly Ruth, who fought with him endlessly and called him ‘the Flea’, Huggins treated them well and trusted them to make the right decisions on the field, unlike John McGraw of the Giants who considered his players ‘incapable of thought’. With Ruth, his forbearance was at times close to saintly.
    In New York he lived with his sister and an aunt in an apartment near Yankee Stadium. He never married. Nor did he ever realize his dream of owning a roller rink. Though no one could know it yet, in August 1927 Huggins was just two years away from death.
    The poorer players of the team – which is to say most of them – looked forward to road trips because most of their expenses were covered and they received an allowance of $4 a day in road money, which meant they could either lead the life of Riley or live frugally and pocket the rest as savings. Over a season’s worth of road trips, that could mount up to a fair sum for a player like Julie Wera on $2,400 a year.
     
    Trains in the 1920s had names, not numbers, which endowed them with a certain air of romance and adventure: Broadway Limited , Bar Harbor Express , Santa Fe De Luxe , Empire State Express , Texas Special , Sunrise Special , Sunset Limited . After Lindbergh’s flight,the Pennsylvania Railroad relaunched its service between St Louis and the east coast and called it, all but inevitably, the Spirit of St Louis . Sometimes, it must be said, the names were more romantic than the journeys. The Scenic Limited , from St Louis to Pueblo, Colorado, was mostly across northern Kansas, which was not many people’s idea of topographical sumptuousness, even in Kansas. Some names were flatly misleading. The New York, Chicago & St Louis Railroad didn’t actually go to the stated terminals, but plied more modestly between Chicago and Buffalo. The Atlantic Limited likewise never sniffed salt air, but confined itself to a daily run across northern Minnesota and Michigan.
    Some trains were renowned for their lack of comfort – in California, the Gold Coast was familiarly known as the ‘Cold Roast’ – but most made a reasonable effort at providing a quality service, and the best offered real splendour. The finest of all was the Twentieth Century Limited , which left Grand Central Station in New York at 6 p.m. each evening bound for Chicago. The Limited had a barber and ladies’ hairdresser, bathrooms with hot baths, laundry facilities, an observation car with writing tables and complimentary stationery, even a stenographer for taking dictation. It was capable of covering the 960 miles in eighteen hours, but after several crashes, including one in 1916 in which twenty-six people died, a slightly more cautious trip of twenty hours became the scheduled norm. Even so, the Twentieth Century Limited was still the fastest and most comfortable form of travel not just in America, but anywhere on earth.
    The most extraordinary feature of rail travel was how much choice there was. Although the Van Sweringen brothers had done much to consolidate the industry, it was still bewilderingly fragmented. A customer in 1927 could buy a ticket on any of 20,000 scheduled services from any of 1,085 operating companies. Different companies frequently used different terminals, tracks and ticketing systems, none of which necessarily coordinated with anyone else’s offerings. Seven different rail lines served Cleveland alone.
    Trains went where each company’s tracks dictated, which meant they didn’t always take the shortest or fastest routes. The Lake Shore Limited from New York to Chicago travelled for its first 150 miles north towards Canada before abruptly turning left at Albany, as if suddenly remembering itself. Long-distance trains commonly divided or amalgamated en route in a complicated minuet that allowed them to connect with other services. The Suwanee River Special set off daily from St Petersburg, Florida, bound for Chicago, but at various points along the way cars were unhooked and reattached to other trains heading for Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit and Kansas City. The Lake Shore Limited paused at Albany to take on cars from Boston and Maine and again at Buffalo to collect cars from Toronto, while at Cleveland some cars were split off and sent south to Cincinnati and St Louis while the main train continued west to