You can marvel at Babe Ruth’s home runs and appetites and enduring impact, but one of the things that most amazes Tom Derry is his apparent devotion to Michigan fish.
He liked Michigan’s Prohibition-era booze, too, along with whatever other sources of joy he came across. But Derry remains agog at the drive and dedication it took for Ruth to get cited for fishing without a license one morning a century ago.
Derry, 62, is the founder and commissioner of the annual y’all-come Babe Ruth Birthday Party, which will mark its 39th year Saturday, Feb. 7, at Nemo’s Bar in Corktown.
What began as a dozen of Derry’s buddies straggling into a long-gone tavern in North Rosedale Park in 1988 will attract a thousand or so revelers enjoying some of Ruth’s favorite activities, namely eating hot dogs and drinking beer.
Across the decades, Derry has collected Ruthian quantities of Babe’s photos, posters and quotes, enough that it takes weeks of sliding into the bar before it opens to mount them all. He has also assembled a wide enough base of Babe knowledge to confidently declare, “He really liked it here.”
Ruth enjoyed spending time in Detroit with his pal Harry Heilmann, the Tigers’ Hall of Fame right fielder. Derry has pictures of the two of them outside a barber shop on Chene Street, and at a crowded party on Hubbell.
The late Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley said Ruth was a regular at his dad’s Detroit speakeasy. Though it wasn’t always his style to seek forgiveness, he would also visit the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, along with the mineral baths in Mount Clemens. In a group photo from Woodland Beach in Monroe, the idol of every red-blooded child has an ecstatic boy perched on his lap.
Then there was June 11, 1926, an oddly cool 65-degree Friday. Ruth, presumably staying downtown with the New York Yankees, was tagged for illicit fishing at a lake in Howell, some 50 miles away.
He was arrested, released, and drove back in time for a day game against the Tigers at Navin Field, later known as Tiger Stadium, “and can you imagine what Grand River was like then?” Derry asked.
That was the year Grand River became the first paved road to reach across Michigan, so it was likely blacktop. Traffic lights were a relatively new concept, though, often manually operated. The number of lanes is uncertain, and any impeding tractors in rural areas would likely have been tugged by horses.
At the end of the road, Ruth hit a single and drew two walks in a 9-3 Yankees victory that completed a four-game sweep.
“He went out of his way to live life to the fullest,” Derry said.
Then he died, in 1948, at 53, which would make him 131 years old on Feb. 6 — reason enough for a blowout.
A not-so-dumb idea
Derry will hoist the first beer Saturday night at 7:14, in tribute to Ruth’s 714 career home runs.
That’s a number as familiar to sports fans as Ruth’s name and face still are to everyone else.
Red Grange was the most recognizable football player of the 1920s and Jack Dempsey the most famous boxer, and most people nowadays couldn’t tell them from Clyde Van Dusen, the chestnut gelding who won the 1929 Kentucky Derby.
Ruth endures, as does a party that was met with less than wild enthusiasm when Derry proposed it.
“I had a couple of my best friends tell me what a stupid idea it was,” said the retired letter carrier from Redford Township. “They told me, ‘He’s dead, you moron.'”
Derry, however, is a baseball history devotee. Years later, he created the Navin Field Grounds Crew, mowing and maintaining the hallowed grounds of the demolished Tiger Stadium before moving on to volunteer at historic Hamtramck Stadium. Back then, he could recite the birthdays of Ty Cobb (Dec. 18), Al Kaline (Dec. 19), Hank Greenberg (Jan. 1) and yes, the Bambino.
He stopped into a Hallmark store on his postal route, bought two dozen cards, sent them to an assortment of friends along with individualized Ruth quotes, and …
None of the louts RSVP’d. The location was Bar Thoms, owned by a foul-mouthed octogenarian named Ethel Thompson, and even she was saying sympathetic things as the clock ticked and Derry’s peanuts, Cracker Jack, Baby Ruth candy bars and birthday cake sat undisturbed.
Then people finally started showing up, and a tradition was born — kind of like Opening Day, but with free admission.
Finding Nemo’s
The party has migrated since Thompson died and the bar closed. At one point when he was still single, Derry upgraded to a two-bedroom apartment just to have more space and an extra bathroom one night a year.
There was a 15-year stretch at the splendidly ramshackle Tom’s Tavern on 7 Mile, and then in 2011, Derry and Nemo’s found each other.
Come Saturday there will be a heated tent, balloons, caricatures, throwback dogs from the closed-by-retirement Red Hots Coney Island of Highland Park, and an official T-shirt featuring a Jerry Lemenu drawing with the Bambino as a walking frankfurter.
Most of it remains underwritten by Derry, at a cost of “more than my wife knows.”
Not that Sarah would object, or most likely even shudder; their basement houses tubs of Ruth memorabilia 11½ months a year, and when they married at home plate at the Tiger Stadium grounds, she stood in the left-hand batters’ box where Ruth did his damage.
“I don’t gamble. I don’t smoke,” he said. The party is his cottage on a lake, or his snowmobiles.
“It’s an obsession,” he acknowledged, “but it’s worth it when everyone is there” — including one authorized vendor Saturday, selling his book.
Babe, beyond the textbook
That will be Ruth’s great-great grandson, Brent Stevens, an IT manager in from Atlanta, Georgia.
Heirs have been descending on the party for years. Stevens’ father, Tom, is almost a regular. Other guests have traced their lineage from Heilmann, Ty Cobb and Wally Pipp, the Yankees first baseman whose headache famously opened a spot in the lineup for Lou Gehrig, who played 2,130 consecutive games — before finally benching himself in Detroit.
Stevens will be signing copies of “Out of the Mouth of Babe,” a coffee table collection of quotes and photos curated last spring by children’s author Kelly Bennett and also credited to family friend Stu Dressler. It’ll be his fifth or sixth time at the Babe bash, starting in 2005 when he was with GM.
Stevens was aware enough of his renowned relative that he didn’t play baseball as a kid: “I absolutely did not want the pressure.”
Beyond that, his pre-high-school years were largely spent in Saudi Arabia, where his dad was a civil engineer and swimming was a far more appealing sport.
He grew more interested in his great-great-grandfather, whom he refers to as “Babe,” when his younger sister came home from high school one day in tears. A textbook had mentioned Ruth’s home runs, but otherwise dismissed him as an alcoholic and a womanizer.
He was not averse to either temptation, history shows, but it’s a passion of Stevens’ to point out his attributes.
Ruth was generous and loyal. He visited children in hospitals even when reporters weren’t tagging along. He barnstormed with Black players, and was the first Yankee to invite a Black friend into the locker room, dancer Bill (Bojangles) Robinson.
Shunted by his parents to a boys’ home for most of his childhood, Ruth was determined to live life to the fullest on the outside.
He probably would have stayed till the lights went out at his annual birthday party.
And, he’d go to any lengths to fish.
Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Happy Birthday to Babe Ruth – and enjoy the beer and Coneys at Nemo’s
Reporting by Neal Rubin, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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