The Last Great Place
A Hero for Any Time
By Michael Capuzzo

I  was standing on hallowed American ground, the spot where Babe Ruth once stood and accomplished something nearly miraculous in the history of baseball, aviation, and gravity, as applied to the flight of a ball. Well, to be honest, I was standing at home plate in Artillery Park in Wilkes-Barre, now the home field of Wilkes University’s baseball team. When The Sultan of Swat struck his epic wallop on October 12, 1926, he stood at a home plate some thirty feet behind the current backstop, now a spot of grass next to a pine tree that wasn’t there in 1926. There’s no plaque to mark the spot.

But there should be. Life hurtles along so fast, sometimes we forget to mark the spots—as a family, a man or woman, as a culture—where the Seneca once hunted and the elk trod, where the home runs flew. As a reader of Mountain Home, you know we love history, the history of our beautiful region, as much as you do. So it was a labor of love when I went to Wilkes-Barre to investigate this mysterious phenomenon of regional American history, this true Ruthian feat, that the national media is ignoring during the steroid-tainted hurrah for Barry Bonds, the new Home Run King. If you don’t follow these things, Bonds this summer passed both Hank Aaron (755) and Ruth (714) with 762 lifetime home runs and counting
First, let me say, I’ve got nothing against Bonds, and Hank Aaron is one of my heroes. A story I wrote about Aaron for Sports Illustrated was recently included, with stories by George Plimpton and others, in a book, The Hammer: The Best of Hank Aaron from the Pages of Sports Illustrated. But neither hitter could touch Babe Ruth, the Babe Ruth you’ve never heard of.

Bill Jenkinson, the baseball historian and consultant to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the country’s recognized authority on long home runs, agreed to meet me on the spot to discuss Ruth’s feats in northern Pennsylvania for our October cover story.  Turns out the Bambino loved the Pennsylvania countryside; it was a last great place for him, too. And he smashed 500-foot homers in barnstorming games in Williamsport and Elmira, longer home runs that almost anyone is even capable of hitting today. Bond’s longest-ever home run is 491 feet; Ruth surpassed that weekly, daily, in some stretches of his career. Everyone knows old-timers can’t measure up to modern athletes; distance and speed records in every sport fall like autumn leaves. There’s no explaining the towering superiority of a six-foot, two-inch, 230-pound, often poorly conditioned man, born in 1895, to today’s monstrously muscled and enhanced athletes. And as for that one afternoon in northern Pennsylvania, well, trust me, you truly won’t believe it. But it’s true.
Why does it matter, this breathtaking achievement in baseball, the distance of a home run?  John Updike, the Pennsylvania-born novelist, has an eloquent answer you’ll read in the story. What does it matter how the child does her homework, the woodsman turns his walking stick, the gardener builds his fence? Ruthian, seldom used today, is a word Babe Ruth gave us and it means a prodigious performance in any human endeavor, especially long home runs. When you spend an afternoon with Jenkinson, you see just how remarkable an individual has to be to get ‘em to cram a new word into the Oxford English Dictionary. In this age of tinny sports heroes, the Babe Ruth you never knew is inspiring and astonishing, and makes words like incredible and unbelievable ring (nearly) true, as these Ruthian feats really happened.

Check out the accompanying photo. On that historic day, Ruth scooped up four-year-old Frank Lavery, saving him from a crush of bodies, and mugged for the cameras. It’s a rare, classic photo that inspired our house artist, the renowned Tucker Worthington, to design and draw the cover as an homage to that moment. A few years ago, Jenkinson received a phone call from a Harrisburg woman, Joan Lavery, who introduced herself as Frank’s widow. The four-year-old in the photo had just died the year before. The photo was his most cherished possession. It hangs in the Lavery home today. I called Frank’s son, Mark, who is forty-five, the other day, and he told me, “Babe Ruth was my dad’s hero.” A good word, hero, worth dusting off and using again.