August 16, 1948: Babe Ruth Dies

The last known photo of Babe Ruth, taken July 29, 1948.

Steve Broidy of Allied Artists movie studio, which had produced

the recent film The Babe Ruth Story, presents Ruth with a check

for the Ruth Foundation for underprivileged children.

August 16, 1948, 75 years ago: Babe Ruth dies at 8:01 PM at Memorial Hospital, now Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, at 1275 York Avenue in the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The cause was throat cancer. He lived for 53 years, 6 months and 10 days.

This past June 29 -- the anniversary of my father's death, at 71 -- I surpassed the age that Ruth lived to be.

For the last few years of his life, Ruth lived at 345 West 88th Street, between West End Avenue (11th Avenue below Central Park West) and Riverside Drive. From there, there was a view of General Grant National Memorial, the final resting place of Ulysses S. Grant, the leading Union General of the American Civil War (1861-65), and the 18th President of the United States (1869-77). Grant and Ruth had the same cause of death: Too many cigars led to throat cancer.

In 1946, Ruth began experiencing severe pain over his left eye and had difficulty swallowing. In November, he entered French Hospital in New York for tests, which revealed that he had an inoperable malignant tumor, at the base of his skull and in his neck.

He wasn't told he had cancer, because the doctors and his wife, Claire, didn't want to depress him with what was then considered a sure death sentence. But he wasn't stupid. At one point, he was taken to Memorial Hospital, and he asked his doctor, who was with him, "That's the hospital for cancer, isn't it?" The doctor told him, "Cancer and allied diseases." It was a poor save, and he knew it. (The complex is now Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, or MSK for short.)

His name and fame gave him access to experimental treatments, and he was one of the first cancer patients to receive both drugs and radiation treatment simultaneously. Having lost 80 pounds, he was discharged from the hospital in February 1947, and went to Florida to recuperate. He returned to New York and Yankee Stadium after the season started.

Commissioner Happy Chandler proclaimed April 27, 1947, Babe Ruth Day around the major leagues. The Sporting News noted that the festivities represented only the second time in history that every major-league city simultaneously honored a single player. The 1st player was professional baseball pioneer Harry Wright, honored with preseason exhibition games on April 13, 1896, after he had died on October 3, 1895.

The plan was that the center of the day’s activities would be, fittingly, Yankee Stadium, and that other clubs would hold “appropriate ceremonies.” Japan also honored him that day, in ceremonies in Tokyo and Osaka. This was less than 2 years after Japanese troops, hearing American soldiers yelling, "To Hell with Hirohito!" yelled back, "To Hell with Babe Ruth!" (They had loved "Babu Rusu" on the 1934 MLB players' tour of Japan, and placing him on the same level with their Emperor was a mark of respect."

The most significant observance was at Yankee Stadium. A number of teammates and others spoke in honor of Ruth. Among those who spoke was the Archbishop of New York, Francis Cardinal Spellman. Ruth, who had been Catholic enough to never divorce his 1st wife (Helen Woodford died in a house fire in 1929), but not so Catholic as to never cheat on her, personally asked Spellman to come, as he hadn't wanted to. In his speech, Spellman called Ruth "a manly leader of youths in America."

Ruth briefly addressed the crowd of almost 58,339, addressing the day's sub-subject, the youth of America. But the treatments had left his voice a soft, raspy whisper:

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. You know how pained my voice sounds? Well, it feels just as bad.

You know this baseball game of ours comes up from the youth. That means the boys. And after you're a boy and grow up to know how to play ball, then you come to the boys you see representing themselves today in your national pastime, the only real game, I think, in the world: Baseball.

As a rule, some people think if you give them a football, or a baseball, or something like that, naturally, they're athletes right away. But you can't do that in baseball. You've gotta start from way down at the bottom, when you're six or seven years of age. You can't wait until you're fifteen or sixteen. You gotta let it grow up with you. And if you're successful, and you try hard enough, you're bound to come out on top, just like these boys have come to the top now.

There's been so many lovely things said about me, and I'm glad that I've got the opportunity to thank everybody. Thank you.

Around this time, developments in chemotherapy offered some hope for Ruth. They offered to treat him with pterolyl triglutamate (Teropterin), a folic acid derivative, telling him that it was experimental, and that he may have been the first human subject. He thought that if it helped him, it could help others, and so he tried it. He Ruth showed dramatic improvement during the Summer of 1947, so much so that his case was presented by his doctors at a scientific meeting, without using his name.

He was able to travel around the country, doing promotional work for the Ford Motor Company on American Legion Baseball. He appeared again at another day in his honor at Yankee Stadium, on the last day of the regular season, September 28. He was not well enough to pitch in an old-timers game as he had hoped, so he didn't put on a uniform. So, as on April 27, he wore his camel-hair coat, and posed for pictures, including one with Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, who did appear in uniform. (Ruth was 52 years old, Speaker 59, Cobb 60. That gathering became an annual tradition, and Old-Timers Day at Yankee Stadium was born, although, officially, Lou Gehrig Day in 1939 is considered the first such day.)

The improvement was only a temporary remission, and by the end of the year, Ruth was unable to help with the writing of his autobiography, The Babe Ruth Story, which was almost entirely ghostwritten. In and out of the hospital in Manhattan, he left for Florida in February 1948, doing what activities he could. After 6 weeks, he returned to New York to appear at a book-signing party. He also traveled to California to witness the filming of the movie based on the book.

On June 5, 1948, a "gaunt and hollowed out" Ruth visited Yale University to donate a manuscript of The Babe Ruth Story to its library. There, he met with future President George H.W. Bush, then the Captain of the Yale baseball team. On June 13, Ruth visited Yankee Stadium for the final time in his life, appearing at the 25th-anniversary celebrations of "The House that Ruth Built." Introduced along with his surviving teammates from 1923, Ruth used a bat as a cane.

On July 26, Ruth left Memorial Hospital to attend the premiere of the film The Babe Ruth Story, with William Bendix in the starring role. There have been a few movies about Ruth, who played himself in The Pride of the Yankees, the 1942 tribute starring Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig. Another movie about Gehrig was made in 1983. As broadcaster Bob Costas put it, there is one place where Gehrig is not in Ruth's shadow: The movies about Gehrig are good, while the movies about Ruth range from mediocre to awful, and The Babe Ruth Story, with Bendix looking nothing like him, is awful.

Shortly thereafter, he returned to the hospital for the final time. He was barely able to speak. Ruth's condition gradually grew worse, and only a few visitors were permitted to see him, one of whom was an old friend, Ford Frick, once a sportswriter, then President of the National League, and from 1955 to 1965 the Commissioner. He said, "Ruth was so thin it was unbelievable. He had been such a big man and his arms were just skinny little bones, and his face was so haggard."

With thousands of New Yorkers, including many children not old enough to have seen him play, standing vigil outside the hospital during his final days, the last person from baseball to see him was Philadelphia Athletics owner-manager Connie Mack. Both he and Ruth had youth baseball organizations named for them. This was on August 15, 1948, and, in what may have been his last words, Ruth told Mack, "The termites have got me." Writing in his memoir, My 66 Years in the Big Leagues, Mack took this to understand that Ruth knew what they weren't telling him: It was cancer.

The next day, at 8:01 p.m., Ruth died in his sleep at the age of 53. His open casket was placed on display in the rotunda of Yankee Stadium, where it remained for two very hot days, and 77,000 people filed past to pay him tribute. Grown men who had been the kids he so loved walked by. Some of them lifted their own kids up to see him, so that they could truthfully say that they saw Babe Ruth.

His Requiem Mass was celebrated by Spellman at St. Patrick's Cathedral. A crowd estimated at 75,000 waited outside -- in pouring rain.

Claire Ruth died in 1976. She was buried next to the Babe at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, Westchester County, New York. Among the other baseball figures buried there are Billy Martin, Mike Tiernan, Ralph Branca, Sal Yvars, and umpire John McSherry. Also laid to rest there, from sports: New York Giants football team founder Tim Mara and his son and heir Wellington Mara, Los Angeles Rams owner Dan Reeves (no relation to the later NFL coach of the same name), and sportswriters Heywood Broun and Bob Considine.

Show business figures buried there: Comedian Fred Allen, actors James Cagney and Sal Mineo, journalist and What's My Line? panelist Dorothy Kilgallen, and novelist Mary Higgins Clark. Political figures: New York Mayors John P. O'Brien and Jimmy Walker, longtime Bronx Borough President James J. Lyons, Postmaster General James Farley, union leader Mike Quill, Congressman Mario Biaggi and Governor Malcolm Wilson. Also, notorious mobster Dutch Schultz.

Next-door to Gate of Heaven, but in the adjoining town of Valhalla, is Kensico Cemetery. Lou Gehrig and his wife Eleanor are buried there. And Yogi Berra and his wife Carmen are buried in a different Gate of Heaven Cemetery, in East Hanover, Morris County, New Jersey.

Babe Ruth died on August 16, 1948. Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977. Each man had royal nicknames. Each man had a lot of "hits." Each man was considered the greatest ever at what he did. Each man was especially popular among young people. And each man got fat, and each man died as a result of his excesses. And neither man lived to see a 54th birthday.

One significant difference, though: Among people who didn't know him, Elvis' death was a shock. Ruth took nearly 2 years to die, and everyone knew it was coming.

The Babe's only known biological child, Dorothy Ruth Pirone, was the result of an affair with Juanita Jennings, and was adopted by the Babe and his 1st wife, Helen Woodford. Dorothy wrote a book, My Dad, the Babe. She married twice, had 2 sons and 3 daughters, and died in 1989.

Julia Ruth Stevens was Claire's daughter from her previous marriage. She and Dorothy were raised together, and they appear to have gotten along well. She married 3 times, and had 1 son. Between Dorothy and Julia, the Babe had 14 grandchildren, and his genetic line continues today.

In 2008, at the age of 91, Julia was invited to throw out the ceremonial first ball before the last game at the original Yankee Stadium, "The House That Ruth Built." In 2016, the Boston Red Sox, her father's original team, invited her to Fenway Park to throw out the first ball on her 100th birthday. She died in 2019.