Stadium has special meaning for Babe's adopted daughter
by Greg Boeck, Special to FOXSports.com
2008 All-Star Game
"I think daddy would regret seeing the place where he hit all those home runs and became so popular go,'' Stevens told FOXsports.com in a telephone conversation from her summer home in Conway, N.H. "He felt very proud that they called it the House That Ruth Built.''
This will be the fourth and final All-Star Game played in Yankee Stadium, built in 1923 to accommodate the mushrooming popularity of the Yankees and their bombastic bomber and set to be razed after this season with a new stadium opening next door in 2009.
On her last visit to the Bronx earlier this season to present Alex Rodriguez with the 2007 Babe Ruth Home Run Award, which is given to the major leagues' home run leader, Stevens was driven around the new stadium twice.
"It looks like a beautiful stadium,'' she says. "I wish them well and hope they'll be very happy in their new surroundings.''
She says she will watch the All-Star Game on television, but with a touch of melancholy and maybe a tear or two. "It's kinda sad,'' she says. "I wish they could leave it as an historic landmark.''
It's where so much baseball history has transpired, where daddy ruled in his own personal playground, where the Yankees dynasty was born.
She had a box seat for it all.
Stevens, born in 1917, first met Ruth in 1923, when her mother began dating the Yankee superstar. Stevens was 12 when the two married. Still vibrant in her ninth decade, Stevens vividly recalls a childhood spent growing up in Yankee Stadium and watching "daddy'' boom home runs until he retired — as a Boston Brave — in 1935.
"Yankee Stadium brings back a lot of memories,'' she says. "I can remember the roar that used to go up when daddy hit home runs and then, of course, some of the time when he struck out and somebody would yell, 'You bum, you! Why didn't you hit a home run?'
"It was a lot of fun, just great.''
Stevens traveled with Ruth to games in Boston and Washington, and attended the 1932 World's Fair on a trip "west'' to Chicago for a series with the White Sox. She recalls Lefty Gomez, Tony Lazzeri, Bill Dickey and Lou Gehrig coming to the house for dinner and a story she still laughs about.
"Daddy was in the dugout and Mark Rolf, the traveling secretary, was pacing up and down. The game was tied and he was mumbling, 'Oh my Lord, we're going to miss the train.' Daddy said, 'Oh, well, I didn't realize that,' and went out and hit a home run to end the game.''
Her fondest memories of daddy, however, came when the two went bowling and dancing. "Daddy was a beautiful dancer. That was a thrill. I really enjoyed being his daughter, not because he was a famous baseball player, but because he was so good to me.''
Her biggest regret? That daddy and Gehrig, longtime teammates and fishing buddies, played their final years together not speaking to one another.
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| (Jim McIsaac / Getty Images) |
Baseball historians have speculated for years on what sparked the feud, some suggesting a clash of egos, others saying that Ruth made a pass at Gehrig's wife.
Stevens says she knows exactly what happened. "It was such a stupid thing,'' she says.
"It didn't need to happen.''
The incident, she says, happened in 1931 or 1932. "Lou's mother invited my little sister Dorothy (a Ruth daughter by another relationship) to spend a couple days in New Rochelle in the country.
"Dorothy packed her own bag and took what she wanted, clothes which weren't necessarily her best. But she was planning on climbing trees and things like that. But Mrs. Gehrig thought she was a poor little thing who had no decent clothes to wear.
"She mentioned it to Lou and said, 'She has nothing but rags to wear and Julia goes around in silks and satin.' Lou mentioned it to my mother and mother told daddy. She said, 'You tell him to tell his mother to keep her cotton pickin' nose out of my business.'
"Well, daddy told him and Lou said, 'Don't ever speak to me again off the ball field.'''
Ironically, Stevens spends her summers rooting for the Yankees' hated rival, the Boston Red Sox, and, because she winters in a Phoenix suburb, cheered for the Arizona Diamondbacks in their seven-game World Series victory against the Yankees in 2001.
What, in the name of Joe McCarthy, would daddy say about that?
Well, she says, "After all, daddy started out with the Red Sox. He started in Boston and ended in Boston (with the Braves). I don't think he'd have a problem with me rooting for Boston because the Red Sox have been so nice to me.''
She'd like a favor from the Yankees now. When the stadium is razed, she says she'd love a seat from the outfield bleachers as a souvenir. Why? "That,'' she says, "is where daddy hit his home runs.''
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