Lefty, page 22
The entry for October 14 gives a flavor of the trip. “We went to ten o’clock Mass in Rodeo. Mrs. Claeys invited us to dinner tomorrow night. We dressed in our riding clothes and went out to Claeys Ranch. Linus saddled the horses for us and we rode for 1½ hours. I enjoyed it immensely. I certainly love to ride in the hills. Linus roped a cow for me and I got quite a thrill seeing the horse hold the cow while the men rode it. We came home at 2:30 and boy did we feast on chicken. We could hardly move and Gomez made us go swimming. The water was freezing. Lefty threw water and mud at George and so I threw his dressing gown in. Was he mad! We went to visit Lefty’s cousin and Irene. Arrive home at eleven o’clock. I raided the chicken.”
Ten days later, Lefty and June left for Seattle; almost all of Rodeo came to see them off. Lizzie cried but promised to come to New York next summer for a visit. After a short trip by ferry, they arrived in Vancouver. Lefty and June were given a large stateroom between Babe and Claire’s and Julia’s. The voyage did not begin well. The sea was rough and stormy and there was no shortage of intensely seasick passengers.
Joe Cascarella, who was counted on to do a quarter of the pitching, wasn’t in shape to do much of anything when the ship finally docked. “I was sick most of the time. Lefty too, but he was better off than me. I lost twenty pounds. Connie Mack wanted to put me on a ship and send me home. I told him, ‘Another ship? I’m only going to get sicker going home, so I might as well stay.’ ”
Cascarella, who was single, was also unlucky in shared accommodations, drawing Charley Gehringer, one of the two other unmarried players on the tour. Gehringer was just as difficult for Joe as for Lefty, but for a different reason. “I hated him because he was always healthy. Charley was sort of a phlegmatic person, but every morning he got up, punched his chest, and said, ‘I feel great! I’m going down and eat a big breakfast.’ I’m sick and I can’t get up out of bed. That was Gehringer’s idea of humor.”
June was spared—she won a $5 bet with Babe that she wouldn’t get sick on the trip—as was Eleanor Gehrig, but Claire and Julia Ruth couldn’t get out of bed. The Ruth family did have one healthy member, as June noted. “Babe never gets sick. He smokes, drinks, and eats like a horse. Three steaks for breakfast, lunch, tea and a huge dinner. He is super-human, I think. I have never seen anyone like him.”
The seas eventually turned calmer, so except for severe cases such as Cascarella, most of the party began to enjoy the voyage. Julia recovered more energetically than most. “She dated Moe Berg and Frank Hayes on the trip, and from then on Julia and Frank were an item back in New York.”
Sometimes Babe would wake June and Lefty up at 7:00 or 8:00 a.m. to engage in whatever shipboard activity the big fellow favored that day. The Japanese crew did everything possible to see that the passengers enjoyed themselves. “The stewards wait on you hand and foot,” June wrote, “but it’s tough to get them to understand you. They say yes but don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lefty was also feeling better, as Julia Ruth attested. “After dinner, there was dancing to a swing orchestra. We all sat ringside … Daddy, Claire, me, and the other ballplayers and their wives. June, so elegant in her evening gown, and Lefty would be out in the center, cutting fancy dance steps, and June couldn’t understand why we were all laughing our heads off. She didn’t know that when Lefty spun her around, he pushed his upper plate out with his tongue, and gave us all a big toothless grin.”
One source of friction, however, had become apparent. “There was a little bit of an unsatisfactory situation with Eleanor Gehrig and Ruth’s wife, Claire,” Cascarella said. “It never flared out but was obvious to most of us.” After the trip, it was widely reported in the press that Babe and Lou were no longer speaking and the rift had to do with their wives. Subsequently, reports surfaced that Babe had become furious with Lou because Mom Gehrig had accused Claire of treating Julia better than Dorothy, the daughter Babe adopted with his first wife, Helen. Babe was reported to have told Lou never to speak to him again off the ball field, a dictum he maintained until July 4, 1939.
Whether or not Claire and Eleanor did or did not like each other, Lefty always insisted that the war between Lou and Babe was vastly overblown by sportswriters. “You keep hearing these stories about Babe and Lou not hitting it off. When you consider ballplayers are together from February until October, there are going to be squabbles. But Babe and Lou enemies? Not a chance. Babe was an extrovert in the extreme and Lou was an introvert. Babe threw his money around and Lou counted his pennies. Babe liked the high life and Lou enjoyed the opera and the philharmonic. Babe was glib with the press; Lou found it hard to come up with a snappy quip. There may have been comments here and there that caused temporary chagrin, but Babe and Lou were teammates and friends on and off the field. The press created a feud between Ruth and Gehrig that I never saw. Babe and Lou were both dear friends of mine as well as teammates, and I respected the fact that they lived life their own way. Nothing more, nothing less.”
An entry in June’s diary after the team had been in Japan for a week suggests the same. “Claire and I went by Eleanor Gehrig’s room laughing, so she called out and invited us in for a drink. We sat and talked until 1 a.m.”
The Empress of Japan docked in Yokohama on November 1. The next day, upward of 500,000 people lined the streets to welcome the Americans to Tokyo. Wide boulevards were shrunken to narrow alleys with barely enough space for the automobiles to pass through. The main attraction, of course, was Babe, who led the procession in an open limousine, waving and smiling to the adoring crowds.
“When we walked off the train at the Tokyo station,” Lefty recalled, “the Japanese spectators awaiting Babe’s arrival rushed forward, almost crushing him. Babe had to push his way through the crowds as they were running by, tearing at his clothes for souvenirs. The fans were desperate to have a memento of something that Babe was wearing. They pulled at his jacket, his pants, his hat, and the crowds and their passion about Babe never let up for one second wherever he went.”
The tour was not popular with everyone in Japan, a nation already simmering with ultranationalist fervor. In February of the following year, a young army officer attempted to behead Matsutaro Shoriki as he was leaving his home. But Shoriki, short and bald, was also a judo master and took only a glancing blow with the sword. He spent fifty days in the hospital, but recovered and lived until 1969.
The first game was played in Tokyo in front of 55,000 fans. To face the American juggernaut, Shoriki had assembled the best players in the country, the All-Nippon team, including eleven that would make the Japanese hall of fame. For the first game, however, the Americans played a team of former college players and won, 17–1.
When the All-Nippon team played, the results were little changed. The Japanese lost all eighteen games on the schedule by a combined score of 189–39. Still, on November 20, a seventeen-year-old pitcher named Eiji Sawamura lost 1–0, the only run scoring on a Lou Gehrig seventh-inning home run. Sawamura struck out nine, including a Hubbell-like streak of Gehringer, Ruth, Gehrig, and Foxx.2
“I pitched twice against Sawamura,” Lefty said. “He was young, but he instinctively knew how to take command when he was on the mound. He was fast with good location and a tantalizing curve ball.”
Connie Mack immediately offered Sawamura a contract, but Sawamura, still in high school, did not want to leave home. He died almost ten years later to the day, when his ship was torpedoed in December 1944. The Japanese equivalent of the Cy Young Award is named for him.
When a game wasn’t scheduled, Lefty and June got to experience Japanese culture, usually with Babe and Claire. June wrote of visiting a Meiji-era sacred shrine, where millions of visitors tossed coins; sitting on pillows shoeless as they ate sukiyaki served by geishas with pomaded hair; riding in rickshaws; and having massages. Then there were the toilets. “The funniest yet … a hole in the floor, and you have to practically lay down to go. Lefty was in one when a Japanese girl came in and asked him for his autograph.”
The cuisine was predictably exotic—a good deal of sushi and sashimi, of course, then virtually unknown in the States, but also some even more unusual items. “One dish that caused dismay among the wives was baked woodcock,” June said. “The little brown bird was served on a dish with its head still on. None of them would eat it, except me. I said, ‘Oh, I love that!’ so they dumped their birds on my plate and I sat there whacking their heads off and ate them all. But that was the exception. The Japanese food in ’34 was tasty and elegantly served. The geisha girls never let the sake cup be empty. Once we dined at the famous club which was known to only serve dignitaries like Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, and Charles Lindbergh.”
Still, a vegetarian on the trip might have had a difficult time. “Then there were the ‘honey-wagons,’ horse carts carrying pails of human manure that the Japanese used to fertilize their plantings. When the ballplayers and their wives became aware that all the vegetables were fertilized by human manure, nobody wanted to eat them.”
On November 10, a cold, damp day in Tokyo, Lefty struck out nineteen in a 10–0 victory in front of 65,000 fans, including an imperial prince. Lefty wasn’t supposed to pitch that day. He had gone nine innings just two days before. But Joe Cascarella still had trouble standing up for nine innings, let alone pitching them, so Lefty stepped in.
Sometimes the Americans went to the dignitaries instead of the other way around. Cascarella reported on a sumptuous banquet at the royal palace. “Emperor Hirohito was the ‘Son of Heaven,’ a god, and mere mortals like us were not supposed to cast an eye on him. Most Japanese had never heard or seen him. And yet, here are the ballplayers and their wives in his presence in a magnificent reception hall, exchanging pleasantries through an interpreter. Protocol demanded that we be respectful and stand facing the Emperor and there was a lot of bowing. Suddenly, we heard Moe Berg conversing with Hirohito in Japanese, and the Emperor was hanging on his every word. I don’t know what Moe said, but the Emperor’s face broke into a smile.” Berg was famously known as a man who could speak ten languages but was unable to hit a curveball in any of them.
When the players made trips to outlying cities, the wives remained in Tokyo. Once away from the capital, both the crowds and the conditions deteriorated. Spectators sometimes numbered as few as 5,000 and Lefty remembered playing games in pelting rain. In some cases, a layer of snow ringed the field.
Joe Cascarella remembered the conditions as well. “The dugouts were freezing. We sat on the benches, huddled together, shivering in the overcoats we wore over our uniforms. On the dirt in front of us were braziers, little boxes of fire, the length of the bench.”
Players slept on straw beds in primitive hotels, four to a room, and had beer for breakfast. “In Hakodate, we stayed at a hotel that was so cold, we had to keep our overcoats on in our rooms. I remember sitting up all night playing bridge with Earl Whitehill, Charley Gehringer, and Jimmie Foxx because it was too cold to sleep.”
“The games were mostly one-day trips,” Lefty said, “and the only one who had a bed on the train was Babe. The rest of the players sat up at night or slept on the floor. Babe’s portable bed was set up next to the toilet. The toilet was just a hole in the floor, so of course it stunk, and Babe complained about the smell. The rest of us just laughed at him, ‘Babe, you’re complaining? You’re the only one with a bed.’ ”
On November 28, in Kyoto, Lefty pitched for the seventh time in the series. June remembers him being ecstatic. “He won 10–1 and he also got three hits and two walks. A perfect day. He told Mr. Mack he had found his league at last.” But although Lefty made light of it, the overwork had become palpable. On one occasion, two days after pitching a complete game in cold, damp weather, he pitched again, this time finishing by pitching the ninth inning for both teams. But Lefty kept going out there every time Connie Mack called on him.
And all the time Lefty was pitching, he was also eating. For the first time in his life, he gained weight, eventually twenty pounds’ worth. “They were giving us two banquets every morning, then you’d go out and play a game and there’d be two more banquets before you’d get to bed. And you had to eat if you wanted to be polite … everybody is polite in Japan. I guess I was too darned polite for my own good.”
The tour ended with as much pomp as it had begun with, and after one last banquet the Americans sailed from Yokohama on December 2. The event had been such a success that Matsutaro Shoriki kept the All-Nippon team together and renamed them the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. The following year, he organized a league and professional baseball in Japan was born.
The team headed south for stops in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Manila, where they would play four more games. Shanghai was a teeming, boisterous city, and June regretted leaving. “It’s a shame we couldn’t stay at least one night and take in all the clubs. The nightlife is very wild.”
Manila presented a new brand of exotica, as Lefty noted. “The steward told us today that in the Philippines they eat dog. They starve it for days and then feed it rice and roast it alive. Claire won’t eat meat in Manila. And I’ll never forget the hotel. I woke up and heard a noise like squack-squack, something like a frog. I jumped out of bed and turned on the lights, and on the ceiling were lizards about six inches long. I was afraid of them so I ran into the bathroom and soaked a towel in water and began heaving it at the ceiling. I hit about three of them. Next morning I told the hotel manager about it, and he said not to tell anybody else or nobody would want my room because the lizards killed the mosquitoes.”
Most of the group then headed home. Some members of the tour, however, decided to make other arrangements. As June wrote on December 13, “I stayed in bed until 8:30, then dressed and went to Claire’s to talk about the next trip. We decided to take it.” The Ruths, the Hillerichs, and the Gomezes decided, strictly on impulse, to instead head south, to Java, Bali, and Sumatra, and from there to continue west until they had circled the globe. Lou and Eleanor had also decided to extend the trip to a world tour but would travel by themselves.
“June and I were like schoolchildren let loose to run around the world,” Lefty said. “We were in our twenties and there was nothing but laughter every moment of every day. Because our trip took place before airplane travel and computers brought the world to your back door, June and I were fortunate to experience life as it had been lived for centuries in these countries.”
After a calm, relaxing voyage south, the first stop was Bali. They arrived the day after June’s twenty-second birthday. She described a setting far removed from the island paradise of today.
“The women wear skirts but nothing from their waists up and carry huge bundles on their heads. The men and women chew something red and black like our tobacco. The little boys run around in the nude with enormous stomachs. They are so emaciated and the women are so wrinkled from the sun. Very few are attractive.
“It was excruciatingly hot and Lefty got deathly sick after eating a can of sardines imported from Monterey, California. He was doubled over with cramps and couldn’t even keep water down. The very same day, the guide told us that a famous one-legged Balinese dance would be performed in the temple that night. ‘Lefty,’ I said, ‘no matter how sick you are, you’ve got to come to the show. How many one-legged dancers do you know?’ ‘Not many,’ he groaned, and he dragged his body to the temple. It’s a wonder he didn’t die right there.”
For the next two weeks Lefty and June island-hopped through what was then the Dutch East Indies and made it as well to Singapore, still under British rule and steeped in the prewar colonial mood that would disappear forever a decade later. They saw the world’s largest orangutan in Surabaya, drank champagne and danced on Christmas Day in the Des Indes Hotel in Java, drank at Raffles, visited the sultan’s home in Sumatra (complete with ten wives, one of whom was German), and visited the temples of a variety of Eastern religions. In an era when travelogues were by and large restricted to grainy black-and-white film, the Asia that Lefty and June experienced was utterly beyond the reach of most Americans.
Their steamship made its way across the Bay of Bengal to Ceylon, then through the Arabian Sea toward the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal. They were sailing toward Marseilles but had no formal plans once they landed. The Ruths decided to head to St. Moritz to ski, then to London and Paris. June and Lefty had met a Dutchman on the ship who had traveled extensively and suggested a different itinerary that the Gomezes and the Hillerichs found irresistible.
“Rosie and Bud Hillerich were the perfect traveling companions,” June said, “peppery, with the same ‘Do it now!’ attitude. Rosie was fifty-five, tall and angular, with auburn hair, and Bud sixty-seven. Lefty and I were twenty-six and twenty-two, and Lefty’s an athlete and I’m a dancer, and the Hillerichs ran us ragged. What vitality.”
Passage through the Suez Canal took twelve hours, and the ship’s fee was £5,000. To arrive at the south end, the ship passed Mount Sinai and the biblical location of where the Red Sea parted. Camels, Arab fishing boats, and villages dotted the route. At the north end of the canal was Port Said. “One of the worst places in the world,” June wrote. “Criminals and thieves who think nothing of taking you sightseeing and then robbing you. The streets are so dirty and they can’t grow any flowers. Also, the veiled women won’t pose for you and it was maddening.”
Two days later, the ship docked in France. “Lefty made all the travel arrangements once we left the ship. He took care of the train tickets, the hotel reservations, the meals, the foreign exchange, and the sightseeing junkets. Plus, he took care of the daily hassles that always crop up with traveling from one country to another. It was a masterful job and Lefty was just off the Rodeo ranch with a few years of New York living under his belt.”
The north coast of the Mediterranean was more appealing to June than the south. “Monte Carlo and Nice are the two most beautiful places I have ever seen. The southern coast of France is for me.”
