One Summer: America, 1927

how an usher tried to take the ball from a boy in the bleachers, but the boy wouldn’t yield it because he wanted to give it to the Babe himself, and that when Ruth learned of this he invited the boy to the clubhouse. There he graciously accepted the gift and gave the boy half a dozen shiny new autographed balls in return. ‘I had the story exclusive,’ Vidmer confided years later, ‘since I’d made it up.’
    Like nearly all sportswriters, he never wrote anything suggesting the least impropriety on the part of any player, which in the case of Babe Ruth meant suppressing a great deal. Apart from not wanting to imperil a good friendship, there was a practical reason for his tactfulness. Major league teams paid the expenses of travelling sportswriters, which had a powerful effect on their loyalty. They were in essence PR men for the team.
    No visiting team had ever been more popular than the Yankees were in the summer of 1927. Twenty thousand turned out on a Friday afternoon in Chicago to watch them play the White Sox, tentimes the number that came to watch the Sox play the fourth-place Athletics three days later. The Yankees drew 21,000 in Cleveland, 22,000 in Detroit, even 8,000 in lowly, fanless St Louis – all on weekdays. On Labor Day, in Boston as the Yankees’ long road trip finally drew to a close, an estimated 70,000 people turned up at Fenway Park – far more than it could hold – even though the hometown Red Sox were a magnificent forty-nine games out of first place.
    All the fans in all the cities were drawn by the same thing – the chance to see Babe Ruth in the flesh, and ideally to watch him swat a ball into the firmament. That Ruth was locked in a seesaw battle with the youthful upstart Lou Gehrig for the home run championship brought the kind of excitement that made people crush their hats in distraction. There really had never been anything like it. At mid-August, Gehrig – impossibly, unprecedentedly – led Ruth by 38 home runs to 36. But Ruth came back with towering clouts in Chicago on 16 and 17 August to draw level. Gehrig went one up again on 19 August against the White Sox, but Ruth matched that the next day in Cleveland to put them even again at 39.
    By now people were practically having heart attacks. On 22 August, Ruth hit his fortieth; Gehrig tied with him two days later. Ruth hit his forty-first and forty-second home runs on 27 and 28 August in St Louis. Gehrig came back with a three-run shot in St Louis on 29 August. Two days later, back in New York against the Red Sox, Ruth hit the last home run of the month for either player. As August ended, Ruth had 43 home runs, Gehrig had 41. Their 84 home runs compares with 28 all season for the Red Sox, 26 for the Indians. No team other than the Yankees had ever hit 84 home runs in a season before – and this was with the season only four fifths over.
    Ruth, it had to be said, was nowhere near on course to beat his record of 59 home runs from 1921, but he might with luck get to 50 – only the third time that he, or anyone, had reached that eminent milestone. If Gehrig stayed hot he might get to 50, too. So as August ended, September had the prospect of being a prettyexciting month for baseball. In fact, no one could begin to guess just how exciting it was about to get.
     
    As the Yankees proceeded from city to city through the Midwest at ground level, Charles Lindbergh covered much the same territory from the air. From Detroit, he went on to Chicago, St Louis, Kansas City, Wichita and St Joseph, Missouri, then back north to Moline, Milwaukee and Madison before at last heading to Minnesota for what was expected to be a triumphant homecoming. Alas, it didn’t work out quite that way. First, he received news that George Stumpf, his well-meaning but not very useful assistant at Roosevelt Field before the flight to Paris, had just been killed in a plane crash in Missouri. Stumpf had gone up as a passenger with a military pilot named C. C. Hutchinson, who was showing off to some people at a lake resort near St Louis when his plane clipped a flagpole and crashed. Hutchinson was thrown clear and not seriously injured. Stumpf was crudely garrotted by a wire that became twisted around his neck.
    In Minneapolis and St Paul, Lindbergh was rushed at such speed along the parade route that to most onlookers he was nothing more than an impassive blur. To people who had stood for hours with excited children, this was a matter of bitter