Introduction

A Broken Home at Camden Yards:  Babe Ruth’s Early Life in Baltimore

     By Fred B. Shoken

                There are dozens of biographies about Babe Ruth.  Most sum up his youth in a few paragraphs.  His parents owned a saloon, worked long hours and couldn’t control their rambunctious child. Babe’s mother, Katie, was often sick; she had eight children but only two survived beyond infancy.   His father, George, sent Babe off to Saint Mary’s Industrial School, a live-in reformatory, when Babe was only seven years old.  Babe Ruth spent much of his childhood and teenage years in an institutional setting until he signed a professional baseball contract at the age of nineteen. 

His mother died when he was seventeen while he was at St. Mary’s.  His father lived to see the beginning of his baseball career, but was killed in a fight outside of his bar when Babe was 23.  Before the 1918 baseball season was over, Babe’s immediate family was gone except for one sister, Mary Margaret – known as Mamie.

                Once Babe Ruth became a great ballplayer, sports writers and later historians vainly searched for details of his youth, but Babe was always vague about his family background.  Robert W. Creamer describes Babe’s early years as follows in the classic Babe Ruth biography Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, “The first twenty years of Ruth’s existence are a shifting mélange of elusive facts, erratic data, supposition and unsubstantiated invention.  There are few hooks to hang things on, but mists of ignorance obscure concrete knowledge until late in February 1914, when he came out into the world and became a professional baseball player.”  Leigh Montville in his Ruth biography, The Big Bam, describes Babe’s formative years as a fog, “the biggest mysteries in the life of George Herman Ruth … are front-loaded and frustrating … There are no stories of a mother, none – good or bad or madhouse crazy … There are few stories of a father …”

                One vital fact of Babe Ruth’s youth has remained hidden for more than a century – Babe Ruth was the product of a broken home.  His parents divorced in 1906 when he was eleven years old.  The story of their divorce is one that no child would wish to tell.  The divorce and other aspects of his home life may help explain why a young Babe Ruth first roamed the streets of Baltimore and later lived life on his own terms outside of society’s norms.