On his way to Yale Field to meet a 24-year-old future president, Babe Ruth was worried about the rainy weather. Would it ruin the day’s festivities, when he was going to donate the black-bound manuscript of his new autobiography to the university library?
“In coming here this afternoon, on the way out it looked terribly damp and I was very disappointed,” Ruth said, referring to the rain that had cleared just in time for the Saturday afternoon college baseball game, 75 years ago this month.
Ruth, 53, both physically and audibly diminished, made the remarks during a pregame ceremony June 5, 1948, to 5,000 people in New Haven, Conn., as he delivered the manuscript to Yale’s first baseman and team captain, George H.W. Bush.
Eight days later, Ruth made his final appearance at Yankee Stadium, a ballpark so indelibly linked to him that it was known as “The House That Ruth Built.” Those two visits, on consecutive weekends about 75 miles apart, would be baseball’s poignant send-off to its most dominant figure, a man who had revolutionized the game with prodigious home runs and outsize personality. He died that August of cancer.
“I am here to present the original manuscript of ‘The Babe Ruth Story’ to Captain Bush of Yale,” Ruth said on the Yale baseball field. “It has lots of fun and a lot of laughs and a lot of crying, too.” (The book was written with journalist Bob Considine.)
“You know,” the former New York Yankees star added with a smile, “in a story you can’t put everything in, so I left out a few things.”
The Associated Press reported that “grown-ups in the crowd, familiar with some of the episodes in Babe’s youthful days, smiled with him. A few wiped tears from their eyes.” Ruth spoke in a “husky whisper,” added the AP story, which The Washington Post ran under the headline, “Author Ruth Makes Comeback at Yale Field — With Original Manuscript for Eli Library.”
A photo of Ruth and Bush shows their starkly different stages of life — Ruth, hunched over and dying of cancer, standing next to the strapping Bush, in the prime of his life and a baseball uniform.
Some 40 years later, Bush recalled the meeting with sadness.
“He was hoarse and could hardly talk,” he told Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe in 1989, his first year as president. “He kind of croaked when they set up the mic by the pitcher’s mound. It was tragic. He was hollow. His whole great shape was gaunt and hollowed out. I remember he complimented the Yale ballfield. It was like a putting green, it was so beautiful.”