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

10,000 pebbles. If a brother found the pile at the end of collection to be too small, he kicked it, sending the pebbles everywhere. The boy then had to begin counting again. He probably gathered enough pebbles this time.
    One report estimated the number of severely retarded students in the school at 6 percent, adding that a greater number were “two to five years retarded” from a scholastic norm. The average stay at St. Mary’s was two years. Boys were sent back to their families whenever possible and sometimes were sent off to work on farms. The ages ran from 5 to 21, when a boy could check himself out of the institution and into the outside world.
    George Ruth, the newest boy, would be an exception to the average. He would wind up spending the best part of his next 13 years at St. Mary’s. The “home” truly would become his home.
     
    His nickname from the start was “Nigger Lips.” He would hear the word “nigger” infinitely more times in his childhood than Hank Aaron or Barry Bonds or any African American slugger who chased his records ever did. He would hear it more than Jackie Robinson did. The word was his name, often contracted from “Nigger Lips” to “Nigger” to “Nig.” Any of the permutations applied. He heard it 100 times a day.
    The school was filled with nicknames. Louis “Fats” Leisman, whose pamphlet “I Was with Babe Ruth at St. Mary’s” is the one student account of those days, mentions Congo Kirby and Ike Russie and Skinny McCall and Kid Mears and Loads Clark and Lefty Blake in his stories. Nicknames mostly were handed out for obvious physical characteristics, for mistakes or failings, a reach for closeness, a form of friendship through mutual embarrassment. Everybody had a nickname. The more a kid disliked his nickname, the better it fit.
    The new kid disliked his a lot.
    He had facial characteristics—the lips, the nose—that gave him a mixed-race look in a time and environment when a mixed-race look was not a good thing to have. His skin was “olive like our mother’s side of the family,” according to sister Mamie, who added that she was “lighter,” more like their father’s side. The new kid was a darker face in an all-white school.
    His size served him well. In an environment filled with troubled kids, confrontation and petty theft and matters of respect always were part of the package. Larger was much better than smaller. His temperament also helped. He was loud and physical and outgoing. Active. He was a boy with chronic ants in his pants.
    “He had ADHD, no doubt about it,” his granddaughter, Linda Tossetti, suggested years later. “That would be the diagnosis today. My brother had it. He was the same way. Never slept. Two hours of sleep, three hours, that was enough. He would wake me at three in the morning to play with his toys. We would play all night, no one to bother us.
    “That was the way my grandfather was. He always was moving. That’s how he could eat so much, drink so much, and not be affected. He needed the energy. He would just burn it all off. That’s why he would stay out all night. He couldn’t sleep, didn’t have to sleep.”
    “He was pretty big for his age,” Brother Herman, one of the Xaverians, once said in a description of the 12-year-old Nigger Lips. “Not fleshy, in fact more on the wiry side, he was still an outstanding-looking boy. He had a mop of thick dark-brown hair. He was livelier than most of the boys, full of mischief. There was nothing timid about him. He was an aggressive, shouting boy who was always wrestling around with the others. He held his own, too.”
    The fog again settles over a lot of his doings at St. Mary’s. One version has him in and out of the school a number of times. He would attempt to live with his parents at their latest address, the move would fail, and he would return. Some of the attempts would last months, some a year or two. Mamie’s memory from when he was in the school was that she and