When he was just 7, Ruth was famously dragged to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys for the crime of being "incorrigible and vicious." His parents couldn't keep the young Ruth in school or out of trouble. So, as the story goes, father took son by trolley to St. Mary's and an incredible baseball journey began.
But what of his mother?
"The mother has kissed the boy goodbye at the front door of 426 West Camden Street, a tear rolling down her cheek. Or has she said nothing. Or she was relieved. Or maybe she wasn't even there," Montville wrote in his version of Babe's story.
We don't know. And that's part of what bothers Harris so much.
Harris stumbled into his fascination while researching his family's records. He accidentally unearthed some Ruth paperwork and decided to keep digging. He ended up with a box of Ruth paperwork - from birth certificate to death notices - and made it his mission to piece together the life of the most forgotten part of baseball's most celebrated hero.
Just seven months after marrying George Herman Ruth Sr., Katie gave birth to the Babe at her parents' home on Emory Street. Ruth's father is listed on the birth certificate as a lightning rod worker.
The ensuing years were not easy for the young family. Katie, just 4 feet 10, gave birth to seven more children, but only Ruth and a sister lived past infancy. According to The Life That Ruth Built, Marshall Smelser's lengthy and well-researched 1975 account of the Babe's life, "Kate was not usually well, and her first child was left alone to run the streets and piers ..."
After Ruth was sent to St. Mary's, Smelser reported, Katie visited her son once a month. Finally, on Aug. 1, 1912, Katie was admitted to Municipal Tuberculosis Hospital, where she died 10 days later. She was 39. The official cause of death: exhaustion and lung disease.
Curiously, her death notice in newspapers mentioned her sister, but no husband and no children. Still more peculiar, on the death notice that Harris found, Katie is listed as a widow, even though her husband outlived her by six years. George Herman Ruth Sr. was later buried in Loudon Park Cemetery, where his headstone mentions his second wife, but not Katie.
For Harris, these details were underscored by a 1995 visit to Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery, off Belair Road. When he realized that Babe Ruth's mother spent all of these years in an unmarked grave, his pursuit suddenly had purpose. He would do what neither Katie Ruth's husband nor famous son ever did.
"It got to the point where I got nothing to do and I thought ... `I'm going to give her a marker,'" says Harris, who eventually compiled his research in a self-published book, Babe Ruth: The Dark Side.
Just last month, Harris drafted a letter soliciting donations and almost immediately received a call from Michael Gibbons, executive director of the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum.
"When I got the letter from Paul, I just thought it was a really a compelling request and something the Babe Ruth Museum needed to get on immediately," Gibbons says. "We needed to respond."
Museum staff and board members are presenting a check today to Harris for $1,200, the cost of a headstone. In a couple of months, Harris says Lot No. 126, Section G will finally have something that has been missing for far too long, her life and death finally inscribed for all too see.
RUTH Catherine 1873-1912 Mother of George Herman "Babe" Ruth, Jr. rick.maese@baltsun.com
