In the area surrounding Lot No. 126, Section G of Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery, dozens and dozens of headstones and grave markers rise from the ground. For an insect, it's a skyline that would match that of any great city. For Paul Harris, however, it has been the source of great consternation.
You see, while the surrounding area is filled with marble tributes and commemorative granite, Lot No. 126, Section G is bare, save the yellowed grass that has covered this area for decades.
Harris, a retired attorney, first visited the site in 1995 and just couldn't shake the idea from his head.
"It preyed on me," he says. "Every time I thought about her being buried over there, it just hurt me. I woke up one night, and it just hit me: No one has visited her grave since 1912. Not a single soul. No one even knows that she's there."
Today, Harris will correct a grave injustice. On Babe Ruth's 113th birthday, it's the slugger's mother who's receiving the gift. Harris and the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum are buying a headstone for Katie Ruth, who died in near-anonymity 96 years ago.
"It's the saddest thing I can imagine. I had never seen or heard of a woman more neglected - and she was the mother to a world-famous man," says Harris, 81, whose father played with and against the Babe on Baltimore's fields and sandlots nearly a century ago.
For Harris, it's a chance to honor a woman whom history has mostly forgotten. But it's also an opportunity to revisit a most curious slice of Ruth's most curious life.
Ruth is one of the most documented figures of the 20th century. As if his real life weren't incredible enough, Ruth inspired folk stories, legends and tall tales. Lost somewhere amid the fact and fiction is Katie Ruth.
More than two dozen books have been written on Ruth, and none offers more than a cursory glance at the woman who brought him into this world - probably not because the authors didn't want to, but they simply couldn't.
"There are no stories of a mother, none - good or bad or madhouse crazy," Leigh Montville wrote in his 2006 book, The Big Bam.
Even Ruth swung and missed. He had two ghost-written autobiographies. The first, published in 1928, didn't specifically mention either parent. The second one, in 1948, did. But Ruth got the facts wrong. He said his mother's maiden name was Schanberg and she lived until he was 13. Actually, she was born Catherine Schamberger, and she died in 1912, when the Babe was 17. The mistakes are hardly surprising. It's not really clear what the slugger knew about his mom - in life or in death.
