One Summer: America, 1927

Chicago. For passengers, the possibility of waking up in Denver or Memphis when one was expecting Omaha or Milwaukee added a frisson of uncertainty to every long journey, while the shuntings and recouplings in the wee hours meant that almost no one got a good night’s sleep. The romance of travel wasn’t always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.
    To keep customers distracted, and to generate extra income in a crowded market, nearly all trains put a great deal of emphasis on their food. Although galleys had barely room to flip a pancake, the cooks turned out an extraordinary range of dishes. On Union Pacific trains, for breakfast alone the discerning guest could choose among nearly forty dishes – sirloin or porterhouse steak, veal cutlet, mutton chop, wheatcakes, broiled salt mackerel, half a spring chicken, creamed potatoes, cornbread, bacon, ham, link or patty sausages, and eggs in any style – and the rest of the day’s meals were just as commodious. Overnight passengers on the Midnight Limited between Chicago and St Louis could even partake of a lavish (and literal) ‘midnight luncheon’ while rattling through the lonely night.
    The Yankees travelled in special cars hooked on to the end of a regular train, partly to keep fans from disturbing the ballplayers but also to keep the ballplayers from disturbing normal people, for the players’ car was easily the rowdiest on any train. Trains in the 1920s lacked cooling systems and in hot weather the players generally sat around in their underwear. Babe Ruth had a private compartment, as did Huggins. The rest of the team shared curtained enclosures with upper and lower berths – ‘rolling tenements’, as they were drolly known. When Ruppert was with the team, an extra car was hooked on for him alone. On all road trips, there was a lot of time to talk, play cards and fool around. Ruth played a great deal of bridge or poker, betting wildly on the latter. The more serious or scholarly among the players read or wrote letters. Benny Bengough practised the saxophone.
    The Yankees divided into two social sets on the road. There was the party set of Ruth, Bob Meusel, Waite Hoyt and Bengough, and the quiet set (sometimes called the movie set) of those who behaved. These included Earle Combs, Wilcy Moore, Cedric Durst, Ben Paschal, Herb Pennock and Lou Gehrig.
    Also frequently joining the lively crowd was New York Times reporter Richards Vidmer. Ballplayers didn’t normally fraternize with reporters, but they always made an exception for Vidmer because he was an attractive, youthful, athletic person, much like themselves, but with a life and background more exciting and dashing than any five players could boast together. The son of a brigadier general, Vidmer had grown up all over the world and moved comfortably in high circles. It was Vidmer, it may be recalled, who watched President Harding urinate in a White House fireplace. Vidmer trained as an aviator in the First World War, married the daughter of the Rajah of Sarawak, one of the richest men in the Far East, and played both golf and baseball professionally before taking up journalism. High-spirited and irresistible to women, he was the inspiration for a very popular novel, Young Man of Manhattan , whose author, Katharine Brush, was a former amour.
    Vidmer was also perhaps the most memorably dreadful sportswriter ever. In an interview given many years after he retired, Vidmer cheerfully admitted that he rarely turned up at a ballpark before the third or fourth inning of a game, and sometimes not till the fifth or sixth. He wrote text that was at once excruciating and unreliable. Here he is describing a day in which Gehrig hit two home runs while Ruth had none: ‘Whereas Ruth and the other Yanks left the field after five hours of baseball in varying degrees of dejection, the laddie that’s known as Lou pranced off in high glee, kicking his heels hilariously and whistling a merry tune.’ Among the many demonstrative acts in which Lou Gehrig never indulged we can comfortably number prancing in glee and kicking his heels. In Vidmer’s hands, a Ruth clout wasn’t a home run, it was a ‘sapient sock’, and the ball in flight wasn’t a ball in flight but ‘animated leather’. The Tigers became ‘the Jungle Cats’, the left arm ‘the port turret’. The Yankees were always ‘the Hugmen’ (after Miller Huggins). When Ruth hit his 400th career homer Vidmer wrote a moving piece about