At 30, weighing 254 (no steroids), he thought it was over

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Posted By: Gary Cieradkowski

How about this one?


White Sox Spring Training, Tuscon, AZ February, 2002

We had a guest book that went along with the exhibit that people could write in and say things like "nice exhibit" etc, but sometimes people would leave much more.

Leafing through it one afternoon at a game Charlie (my partner for the trip) saw that a woman left the message "Babe Ruth save my brother's life". We had no idea what that message meant or even if it was true but my Charlie and I had to find out. The PA announcer asked for the woman to please go the the exhibit and a few minutes later an older woman approached us.

Turns out her family emigrated to the US from Russia in 1945 and her little brother had a bad heart. Being poor immigrants they had no chance of a life-saving and expensive operation. The little boy was going to die. Then somehow a rich donor found out about them and they received the money for the operation in Florida as well as weekly plane fare back and forth from Brooklyn for the kids mom while he recouperated. The donor who asked for no publicity was George Herman "Babe" Ruth. The boy was saved by the heart operation and grew up to have a family. No word if he was a baseball fan.

I believe The Babe was dying of cancer himself at the time and the fact that he would still be so generous to another person speaks so much to his expansive nature. Imagine that.