Holding A Bit Of The Babe Yankees Slugger Autographed Ball For Spokane Girl
Babe Ruth’s 100th birthday was Monday, but he was in his homer-hitting prime when a Spokane girl, not yet 5, taught the big palooka a thing or two about manners.
“You’re not supposed to chew gum in public places,” Patsy McGrath told the slugger 68 years ago during his vaudeville appearance at the old downtown Pantages Theater.
“He just laughed and put the gum behind his ear. Then he signed baseballs for us kids,” recalls Patsy McGrath Lukens, now 73, of Edmonds, Wash.
Little Patsy didn’t know it at the time, but public exhibitions of gum-chewing were the least of Ruth’s concerns.
When he wasn’t circling the bases in his Yankee pinstripes, Ruth was smoking, drinking, eating and womanizing his way into the kind of legend that doesn’t wait for historians.
“Folks! He’s Here. Today. The Home Run King. Babe Ruth. In Person. The Greatest Star in the History of Baseball,” declares a theater advertisement in the Nov. 14, 1926, edition of The Spokesman-Review.
It was Ruth’s second trip to Spokane.
On Oct. 17, 1924, he and fellow Yankee outfielder Bob Meusel, a former Spokane Indian, entertained 1,700 locals by slamming home runs during an exhibition game.
Two years later, Ruth spent the middle of November in Spokane, including a week at the Pantages, later known as the Orpheum Theater, N118 Howard.
A Nov. 7, 1926, sports story began, “Spokane entertained Queen Marie last week and this week more royalty is coming, for none other than George Herman (Babe) Ruth, king of swat and monarch of the diamond, will be here for a 10-day visit.”
Another story five days later proclaimed, “Why say anything about Babe Ruth? Every boy on the most remote sandlot on the North American continent could write an eloquent essay on the home-run king, the sultan of swat, the bambino, (manager Miller) Huggins’ bad boy who became good and the man with numerous other loving nicknames.”
On Nov. 19 and 20, 1926, Ruth invited a few children to join him on the Pantages stage and autographed Spalding & Bros. League Junior baseballs for each of them.
On one of those days, Patsy McGrath of 29th Avenue bounded to the rostrum as her father, Great Northern Railroad engineer Jim McGrath, beamed.
Jim McGrath was a pioneer among Spokane sports fans. The visit to see Babe was more for him than his daughter.
“Babe just kind of clowned around,” Patsy recalls. “He seemed very happy-go-lucky and to enjoy what he was doing. He was chewing gum, and my mom wouldn’t let me chew gum on the street. And he was wearing a uniform.”
Was it a Yankees’ uniform?
“I don’t think so. It had stripes,” Patsy says.
Not everyone is expected to know the Yankees’ wardrobe.
In the early 1980s, Patsy gave the Ruth-autographed baseball to her son, KXLY-TV sportscaster and feature reporter Rick Lukens, 37.
Soon after, Lukens met home run champion Hank Aaron during a Big Brothers fund-raiser at the Spokane Interstate Fairgrounds and asked him to autograph the same ball.
Aaron matter-of-factly signed his name just above Ruth’s.
The baseball is virtually priceless - signed by two men of two races from two eras, each among the best at the most American of pastimes.
The Babe’s last Spokane trip was on Aug. 21, 1947, less than a year before his death from cancer at age 53.
Ruth spent 20 minutes on a layover at Geiger Field.
He was traveling from Billings, Mont., to Seattle and then to Los Angeles to promote American Legion ball.
A Spokesman-Review story said, “Recuperating from his illness of 11 months, Babe’s throat seemed to still bother him, his voice being quite low and scratchy at times.
“His nurse, who accompanied him on the trip, seemed annoyed at the Babe’s standing out in the cold wind shaking hands and talking to people whom he had never seen before and probably will never meet again - and endangering his health in the chilly climate.”
A witness on the plane said Ruth was “considerably worried” about the health of a child on the plane, the article said.
The Babe always was partial to children.