Babe Ruth memories live on in Chester

The Sultan of Swat liked to kick back with the locals, By Ginny Privitar Chester — Old-timers remember him. Some have personal stories, photos or mementos. But newcomers may be unaware that the Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, considered one of the greatest sports heroes of all time, made regular visits to Chester. Back in the late 1930s and ‘40s, Ruth would stay at the American House downtown or at one of several local private homes, including those of the McCormick and Tuthill families. Richard McCormick supposedly met the Babe at a barbershop in New York City. He invited him up here to his place, the American House, which was a bar and hotel. Photos on the walls of the ice cream parlor currently occupying the ground floor show Ruth posing with local folks. The present Dick McCormick has a number of photos of the Babe: in his fur coat, by his convertible roadster, holding Dick as a baby. Dick’s oldest cousin, Bill Smyth, now 90 and living in Florida, recently recounted some family stories. Bill was in high school when he first got to know Ruth. He hunted with him and his uncle Pete — Pierre McCormick, also known as Perry. “He was still playing with the Yankees then and came up and hunted and went to Robert Goelet’s place,” which is now the Glenmere mansion bed and breakfast. Glenmere had 5,000 acres where they hunted for birds and pheasants stocked by the gamekeeper, he said. “One time they came back with a bunch of pheasants, and they all had their necks wrung — probably by the gamekeeper,” he recalled. “So that the Babe could show his friends back in the city, they strung the pheasants up on a line and told Dick’s mother, Mary McCormick, to fire away” with her shotgun. Now the birds would have pellets in them so that they looked as if they were genuinely hunted. Another descendant, living in the McCormick house, said, “Oh, yes, I remember it,” and pointed out the kitchen window to the spot in the backyard where the shooting took place. The drinking life The Babe, it seems, liked to tipple. Bill remembers a time when “Ruth came up and was supposed to return to New York City that evening for some kind of dinner or affair, but he blew it. His wife came up to get him and was taken up to the Babe’s bedroom in the American House. She was looking out the window and lamenting how he had embarrassed her. Babe was snoring in the bed, but he looked at Pete, winked at him and resumed snoring. He stayed at American House for another night then.” Bill said the Babe always brought up baseballs, bats and gloves with him for the kids, and was happy to sign them. Another resident, Bart Tuthill, said Ruth used to call him “Butch.” “He called all kids Butch,” he said. Tuthill recalls, Ruth was “looking for some good old boys to drink with and stuff. He got to downtown Chester and he met my father and the McCormicks, and they all liked to hunt and fish and do what he did, and they were soon teamed up. He stayed at our house quite a bit. Wanna know how stupid I am? I gave one thing away — it was my baby picture with him. I gave it away! I can’t get it back — it’s gone. And balls — he signed balls all over Chester. Guess what we did when we needed a baseball?” They used the signed Ruth balls, of course. “And you never thought that — well, he’s not going to die — you’d keep getting baseballs,” he said. Tuthill went duck hunting as a little boy with his father (also known as Bart), Perry McCormick, and Babe Ruth, all in a blind. “And the ducks are coming, and they went and they shot some ducks, and now it’s cocktail hour,” Tuthill said. “There was a bar in Campbell Hall near Sarah Wells Trail called Ma Betcher’s. And Ma was open in the morning, I guess, and they’re going to have a few beers now they’re done duck hunting and they had me with them — the kid. And there they had a machine [game] with bears that went back and forth, and you could hit ‘em with a toy gun with a light, for a nickel, then. So to keep the kid — me — quiet, they put nickels in the thing. And I’d hit the bear once in a while, you know, and I managed to catch my finger in the trigger mechanism and it was bleeding.” The men all cursed. “Now they ride me in to Dr. Keys in Goshen, 10 o’clock or 11 o’clock in the morning,” Tuthill continued. “And they had the doctor probably put a band-aid on it — whatever was wrong, it wasn’t that bad. And they said, ‘All right, don’t tell this happened at Ma Betcher’s. It happened in the duck blind.’ So that made me one of the boys, then. I lied to the females.” Ruth also loved to fish. Tuthill’s grandmother, Mae Ryerson, would tell Bart her own stories. “They liked Greenwood Lake, and they used to ice fish,” Tuthill recalled. “And there was a bar there called Herbie and Gertie’s. And now you got the McCormicks, my father, Perry, Babe Ruth, and my mother, and I guess whoever Perry’s girlfriend was...it was a party of ice fishers. So, Pathé News found out that Ruth was there. You know how they used to have newsreels at the movies? Any place Ruth was, was news, right? Here they come. The women were fishing, the men were in Herbie and Gertie’s. So they fished Ruth out of there to take pictures of him ice fishing. They re-hooked some fish they had, and had him pulling them out. And they had pictures and cameras. Everybody was all excited” at the prospect of being in the movies. “My grandmother said they were all waiting for the newsreel to come to Goshen, where they had a movie theater,” he continued. “So here it comes, and now everybody’s going to the movies. I guess Pathé News had cut it so much all they saw was Ruth catching a couple of fish. Perry McCormick had a plaid jacket on. They saw him go by and they said, ‘That’s Perry! There’s Perry!’ They all thought they were going to be movie stars.” But only Babe and the plaid jacket made it to the reel. Others who lived in Chester at the time have fond memories of Ruth, too. If you have a Babe Ruth story, let us know, so we can share it. Although Babe Ruth is long gone, memories of his visits linger still. If you look hard enough, maybe you can imagine him sitting in his favorite spot, on the left-hand side of the second-floor porch on the outside of the American House, drink in hand, cheering on his beloved Yankees.

And they said, ‘All right, don’t tell this happened at Ma Betcher’s. It happened in the duck blind.’ So that made me one of the boys, then. I lied to the females.” Bart Tuthill