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Babe Ruth was Big Hit with Daughter
Julia Ruth Stevens, Babe Ruth’s last surviving child, passed away on March 9 at age 102. A decade past, I interviewed Stevens – more accurately, had the great joy of listening to stories about her “Daddy.” With the Major Leagues season now underway, it seems the perfect time to share some of her tales. This is the second in a series.
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“Daddy always rose to the occasion, whether it was hitting the ball out of the park when he said he’d do it or making it to my graduation,” Julia Ruth Stevens told me, with marvel. “When he made a promise, he always came through. You could count on it.”
Never more so than in 1929. That was the year – on Opening Day! – Babe Ruth married his second wife, Claire Hodgson, at Saint Gregory’s Church in New York City. That day’s game was actually rained out, but the next afternoon as a wedding gift, Ruth belted a home run and while rounding third base tipped his cap and blew a kiss to his new bride.
He came through and did something far more remarkable later that year. He not only adopted Julia, but from Day 1 he always made her feel like she was as much his birth daughter as was Dorothy (born during Ruth’s first marriage to Helen Woodford).
“No daughter ever had a more caring and loving natural father than my adoptive father was to me,” shared Julia, who never knew her own birth father. It wasn’t long before Ruth further rose to the occasion to make his adopted daughter feel like a true blood relation.
“When I was a teenager I had a very serious strep throat infection,” Julia shared. “They of course didn’t have penicillin at that time and I wasn’t getting better. The doctor said I needed a blood transfusion to get me on the road to recovery. Daddy immediately wanted to be tested to see if he was compatible – and he was.
“The next thing you know, Daddy was right beside me on a gurney giving me a direct blood transfusion. From that moment on, I always felt like we were blood relatives because I had some of Daddy’s blood in me. I felt like that really made me more his real daughter than ever.”
In truth, Ruth made Julia feel like his real daughter through his daily actions.
“One of my favorite things was when Daddy would go hunting or fishing,” she recalled. “He liked to leave the house by 5 so he would get up really early and stick his head in my bedroom and ask softly, ‘Want to have breakfast with me?’
“I’d always say, ‘Absolutely!’ It was a chance to spend some special time alone with him. It was such fun. I just loved talking to him. We’d go to the kitchen and Daddy would fix ‘The Babe Ruth Special’ – he’d brown a piece of buttered bread in a frying pan and then cut a hole in the middle of it. Then he’d put an egg in the hole and put fried bologna on top. It was his original creation and he loved it.”
While she never went hunting or fishing with her famous father, Julia accompanied him plenty of other places, from annual spring training trips in Florida to a winter all-star tour in Japan to bowling alleys and the boxing gym where he taught his little girl to box.
Recalling a photograph of her playfully landing a right hook to Ruth’s jaw, Julia said, with an exclamation mark after every other word: “We always! Had so! Much fun!”
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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.
Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …
- Personalized signed copies are available at WoodyWoodburn.com