The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth Read Online Free PDF Page A

Solitary confinement up to a week was the punishment for some offenses. Reduced rations. The interesting thing is that a lot of the kids who came out of these places were still okay. Some of them led very successful lives.”
    St. Mary’s fit well into this picture out of the notebooks of Charles Dickens. As many as 200 boys were housed on each dormitory floor, their beds placed end to end in long, perfect rows. This was barracks living with shared lavatories, showers, and common areas. Privacy was nonexistent.
    Academics were not a principal consideration. When the Xaverians first took control of the school, only one brother was assigned to classroom teaching, the rest to vocational training. Students under 12 received five hours of academic instruction per day; the number was lowered to three and a half or four hours per day for students over 12. Classes overflowed with 40 or 50 students per brother, everyone working on lessons in chalk on individual slate boards. A fine white dust could be found on most sleeves at the end of classes after countless erasures.
    The rest of the day was devoted to work. The trades offered were floriculture, gardening, farming, tailoring, shoemaking and repairing, steam-fitting, woodworking, carpentering, baking, and glazing. Instruction also was offered in typewriting and instrumental and vocal music. The students maintained the grounds, cooked the meals, and sewed the very clothes they wore, all under the direction of the Xaverians.
    A renovation program in 1912 added a large water tank for the upper floors, a clock and a flagpole topped by a cross on the main building’s tower, and a redesigned entrance to the school. Students did all of this. They worked long hours and hard hours.
    “I operated 16 different machines,” one unnamed resident recalled about his days in the tailor shop. “On one of them, if the bobbin became empty, all 2,000 needles had to be rethreaded, a half-day’s work.”
    Meals were held in silence. The apprehended whisperer was marched to the front of the room, where he had to stand in disgrace until the meal ended. Then he was whipped. (“The whipping didn’t hurt so much,” the same resident says. “The worst part was just standing there, waiting to be whipped, thinking about it.”) The food, indeed, was rotten. Brother John Joseph Stern, CFX, a onetime St. Mary’s resident, described the diet in the foreword to
The Young Babe Ruth
, a book written by Brother Gilbert Cairns, CFX, and edited years later by Louisville attorney Harry Rothgerber.
    “The food was of the simplest and would probably edify a Trappist monk,” Brother John Joseph said. “Breakfast usually consisted of a bowl of oatmeal or hominy. If we received any milk, it would have to be in the oatmeal or in the thin coffee or tea served at all meals. For variety, there was a single pat of butter or oleo on Fridays and three hot dogs, which we called weenies, on Sunday morning. We surely looked forward to Sundays. However, during the week, many a lad would bet away his weenies or promise them in return for some other consideration. I’m sure [George] would have been involved in this ‘action.’
    “Lunch was a bowl of soup and bread. The bread was usually home-baked and heavy, our own students being the bakers. At times it was necessary to buy regular bread, which we called City Bread. That was before the invention of bread slicing. Supper usually was more soup and bread, though again on Sunday there was a change: three slices of baloney.”
    Oddly, religious instruction was not a major part of the curriculum. The students attended Sunday Mass and were baptized and received their first Communions and Confirmations, but the example of the Xaverian brothers was supposed to deliver most religious lessons. The brothers delivered daily, sometimes moment-by-moment instruction in right and wrong, yes and no.
    One favorite punishment was to send a disobeying boy into the yard to collect a pile of