By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Spring training is the perfect time to pitch my nominee for best story about George Herman “Babe” Ruth. Almost a century ago, the baseball legend visited the St. Ann’s orphanage in Salt Lake City. It was a heartfelt tribute to Ruth’s similar formative years in a Catholic school for boys.
In 1891, Utah Bishop Lawrence Scanlan asked the Holy Cross Sisters to open a home for orphans in Salt Lake City. The Sisters accepted the challenge immediately, and initially opened the St. Ann’s facility in a small house previously occupied by Scanlan and his priests.
The number of children who needed assistance increased so rapidly, however, that Scanlan and the Holy Cross Sisters decided to build a new orphanage. One example of the ongoing pressing need came at the turn of the century when a horrific explosion occurred in Scofield, Utah, killing 200 minors and leaving many widows and fatherless children.
The Holy Cross Sisters found 15 acres of land just south of the city and in May 1899, Mrs. Thomas Kearns contributed the funds necessary to buy the land and build the new orphanage. The cornerstone of the new Kearns – Saint Ann’s orphanage was laid on August 27, 1899, and the building was completed the next year.
When work started on the new orphanage, the Deseret News editorialized: “Whether in Catholic or Protestant, in Jew or gentile, in saint or sinner, the love that prompts such deeds as those that establish institutions [such as St. Ann’s orphanage] for the benefit of our race, is divine in its nature and splendid in its display.” The Holy Cross Sisters continued to show that splendid love at the orphanage for the next half century until it became a parish school.
Ruth—who died seventy-five years ago this August—arrived in Utah’s capital city in late January 1927 on a promotional and good will tour. The owner of the Pantages Theatre on Main Street and Second South brought the Babe to town as part of a weeklong vaudeville show.
The Pantages—later the Utah Theatre—featured other celebrities like Abbott & Costello and Will Rogers, and then showed first run major motion pictures, before Salt Lake City razed the historic structure in 2022.
In 1927, the Bambino was in his prime as both an athlete and a national celebrity. A few years earlier, he hit a season record 59 home runs for the New York Yankees. Right after his Salt Lake tour, Ruth returned to California to make a movie with silent film star Anna Q. Nilsson.
Ruth shared the Utah stage with singers and acrobats. Local news reports called his appearance a “big hit.” Ruth talked about his life, batted a few balls, and brought some kids up on stage for autographs. The crowd loved it.
Ruth stayed busy off stage too. He greeted large crowds at the rail station, met with newsboys, talked with amateur baseball officials, wrote a column, and appeared on KSL radio. Former Salt Lake Tribune sports editor Bill Oram gave all the details in a July 11, 2011 commemoration.
The highlight of Ruth’s Salt Lake City trip, however, was his visit with the St. Ann’s children.
Ruth went to the orphanage unannounced on a school day, surprised the orphans in class, and gave them a talk. A January 29, 1927, Salt Lake Tribune news report said the all-star then “cavorted on the lawn with the hero worshippers for almost half an hour.” The Tribune noted, “It was a big day at the orphanage.”
A Tribune photo showed delighted girls and boys on the orphanage front steps watching a grinning Ruth demonstrate his batting swing. The caption elaborated, “There’s Babe with the bat. He’s showing the boys and girls at St. Ann’s just how he holds the bat when set to crack ‘em a mile.”
The visit generated good karma, for Ruth’s 1927 season was memorable. On September 30 at Yankee Stadium, the Babe hit his 60th home run of the year, setting a record that stood for three decades.
Ruth often visited local orphanages. The slugger explained why in a letter published in Norman Vincent Peale’s Guideposts magazine just after Ruth died in 1948. Ruth’s longtime friend—my great uncle Paul Carey—helped the Babe write that letter.
Carey married my grandmother Florence Duffy’s sister Kathryn in 1921. He was a World War II naval officer and his family owned the fleet of Cadillacs that served New York City’s Grand Central Station. Carey sat by Ruth’s deathbed, administered his will, and served as a trustee of the Babe Ruth Foundation.
Cancer afflicted Ruth for the last few years of his life. Before one serious surgery to treat the disease, Carey told the slugger, “They’re going to operate in the morning, Babe. Don’t you think you ought to put your house in order?” Ruth called for a Catholic priest, and later penned the poignant letter first published after his death.
Ruth grew up in a tavern, skipped school, ran unsupervised on the wild Baltimore waterfront, and got into a lot of trouble. His parents gave up on him. His 1948 letter bemoaned his “harum-scarum youth” and said he had “a rotten start in life.”
Ruth explained, “It took me a long time to get my bearings….St. Mary’s Industrial School in Baltimore, where I was finally taken, has been called an orphanage and a reform school. It was, in fact, a training school for orphans, incorrigibles, delinquents and runaways picked up on the streets of the city.”
“I was listed as an incorrigible. I guess I was. Perhaps I would always have been but for Brother Matthias, the greatest man I have ever known.” Ruth’s mentor, Matthias Boutlier, a Xaverian brother and teacher at St. Mary’s, was respected for his strength and fairness. Brother Matthias noticed his natural talent and introduced Ruth to baseball.
It was an unlikely but remarkable relationship. Ruth biographer Robert W. Creamer explained, “Matthias was in charge of making boys behave and Ruth was one of the great natural misbehavers of all time….the calm, considerable attention the big man gave the young hellraiser from the waterfront struck a spark of response in the boy’s soul.”
Unfortunately, after leaving St. Mary’s as a young man and beginning his pro baseball career, Ruth fell back into bad habits. His deathbed letter noted, “Out on my own…free from the rigid rules of a religious school…boy, did it go to my head. I began really to cut capers.”
The Babe gambled, womanized, and drank. His first marriage failed. He said, “I strayed from the church, but don’t think I forgot my religious training. I just overlooked it….once religion sinks in, it stays there–deep down. The lads who get religious training, get it where it counts–in the roots. They may fail it, but it never fails them.”
Ruth always remembered who helped him. “No one knew better than I what it meant not to have your own home, a backyard, your own kitchen and ice box. That’s why…I’d never forget St. Mary’s, Brother Matthias and the boys I left behind. I kept going back.”
With the advent of child protective services and smaller foster homes, institutional orphanages went away. St. Mary’s in Baltimore closed in 1950. Salt Lake’s St. Ann’s Orphanage transitioned into an elementary school in 1955.
Current St. Ann’s principal Dominique McCarthey Aragon also knows something about history. Her great-great-grandparents Jennie Judge Kearns and Thomas Kearns purchased the land and funded construction of the old orphanage that she now operates as a school.
Aragon was thrilled to learn about Babe Ruth’s historic connection to the place. Today, she and her St. Ann’s team—just like many other teachers in both Catholic and public schools—guide their students using the same basic method that worked for the great baseball star at his Baltimore Catholic school in the early 1900s. What is it?
Babe Ruth’s daughter knew. A news reporter once asked her why Brother Matthias had such an impact on her father. She replied, “When Babe was twenty-three years old, the whole world loved him. When he was thirteen years old, only Brother Matthias loved him.”
(A version of this article appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune on February 26, 2023.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
