One Summer: America, 1927

city in America (it has since slipped to twenty-first) and one of the roughest, and the roughest area of Baltimore was a district close to the Inner Harbor known without irony or affection as Pig Town.
    It was here, on 6 February 1895, that George Herman Ruth was born into a household that was moderately impoverished, emotionally barren and seemingly doomed. Six of his eight siblings would die in childhood, and both his parents would follow while George was still young, his mother of tuberculosis, his father in a knife fight outside his own saloon. This was not a family that had a lot going for it.
    The opening sentence of Ruth’s autobiography is ‘I was a bad kid,’ which is no more than partly true. A few lines later he adds: ‘I hardly knew my parents,’ which is much closer to the mark. Ruth essentially raised himself through his earliest years. His parents weren’t so much bad as distracted. His mother spent most of his childhood dying bleakly in a crowded apartment above the saloon. His father, deprived of a healthy partner, ran the business below single-handed – a job that consumed nearly all his waking hours. Perhaps nothing better reflects the detached and insubstantial nature of Ruth’s family life than that he grew up not knowing hisactual age. Until he saw his birth certificate for the first time when applying for a passport at the age of thirty-nine, he thought he was a year older than in fact he was. For his part, Ruth was not a terribly attentive son. In his autobiography he states that his mother died when he was thirteen. In fact, he was sixteen. He also got her maiden name wrong.
    The saloon where Ruth grew up is long gone. By happy chance, the site today lies just beneath centre field in Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles – not unfitting, since it was as a Baltimore Oriole that Ruth first played professional baseball and first got his nickname ‘Babe’.
    In the spring of 1902, while the infant Charles Lindbergh was gurgling in a plush bassinet in Minnesota, Babe’s father took young George to the St Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore – a large, dark, forbidding edifice on Wilkens Avenue about three miles west of his old neighbourhood – and left him there. St Mary’s was one of nearly thirty homes for orphaned or wayward children in Baltimore in 1900 – a reflection of the dire social conditions for many in the city at the time. This would be Ruth’s home for most of the next twelve years.
    St Mary’s was an unusual institution – part orphanage, part reform school, part private academy. Of the 850 boys enrolled at any one time, about half were tuition-paying boarders. Parents from across America sent their boys to St Mary’s, often as a last resort when other schools had failed them.
    The school was run by the Xaverian Brothers, a Roman Catholic order whose members embraced piety and celibacy but not full priesthood, and the conditions were rigorously monastic. Pupils had no privacy. Everything they did – sleeping, showering, dining, studying – was done communally. Beds, desks, shower stalls, all were set out in long regimented ranks, as in some grim Victorian penitentiary. But St Mary’s was not at all a bad place as these places go. The children were treated with dignity and even a kind of gruff affection, and they were rewarded for good behaviourwith 25 cents of weekly pocket money. Boys at St Mary’s received a sound basic education and were taught a vocation. Ruth trained to be a tailor and shirtmaker, and delighted years later in showing teammates how skilfully he could turn a cuff or collar.
    All the students had a history of behavioural problems, but the brothers attributed that to inadequacies of upbringing rather than any deficiency of character – a decidedly enlightened view for the time. They believed that any boy treated with decency, encouragement and respect would grow into a model citizen, and they were nearly always right. Ninety-five per cent of Xaverian boys went on to live normal, stable lives.
    Ruth as a boy was a large, bumptious, pug-faced, happy-go-lucky, rather endearingly tragic figure. He was always much larger than his classmates – so much so that once when charity workers were handing out Christmas presents he was mistaken for an attendant and passed over. When the mistake was realized, George was given his own giant box of chocolates. Instead of hoarding them – and bear in mind that never in his life would