The Big Fella by Jane Leavy

Author:Jane Leavy
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

October 23 / Bay Area II

HOME-RUN KING AND RUNNER-UP DO STUFF HERE

—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

BABE RUTH, "SULTAN" OF SWAT ARTIST, JUST A BIG "KID" WITH ZEST FOR PLAY

—SAN FRANCISCO CALL

I

Two San Francisco boys, Rinaldo Ardizoia, known as Rugger, and Jack Stuart, known as Whitey, awoke on Sunday morning with the same American ambition: to see the Great Bambino hit a home run.

They had little in common except for the opportunity the day presented. Jack had status, thanks to his father, a city cop who moonlighted for the San Francisco Seals. Rugger had moxie, a quality acquired through independence and derived from the name of the president’s preferred soft drink. Jack knew baseball; Rugger knew his way around town. But they had everything in common with the millions of boys—thousands in the Bay Area heading for the ballpark—who would hang from rough-hewn outfield fences trying to catch a glimpse of the Babe, and maybe even catch his eye; who darted across infield dirt to attach themselves to his arms, legs, bat, so he had no choice but to carry them home; who joined forces to hold him hostage in a sea of knickers and bandit caps. Boys for whom, as big as the Babe seemed to them on that Sunday, he would only grow bigger in meaning and memory.

Rugger was two years old when he and his mother, Annunziata, arrived in New York aboard the S.S. Colombo on December 6, 1921, from Oleggio, a small town in northwest Italy. His father had emigrated a year earlier, having gotten a job in a Port Costa brickyard. By the time Rinaldo was six, his mother was dead from double pneumonia. His father, Carlo, was working six days a week—“eight hours a day, almost ten hours coming and going”—boiling animal by-products into glue in a factory in a windblown part of the city known as Butchertown, where decades later someone had the misbegotten notion to build a ballpark. “I lived by myself since I was six,” he would say.

He spent his days in a park across the street from their home at 145 Arkansas Street watching the big boys play baseball at Jackson Playground. Some of them would go on to play in the Pacific Coast League; a few, Eddie Joost and Walt Judnich, would even make it to the bigs. They called him Rugger in admiration for the ruggedness he showed ducking through the thistles that surrounded the park.

He took Joseph as his middle name upon confirmation and took his meals at the Connecticut Yankee, a neighborhood joint owned by the Salvotti brothers, who didn’t need encouragement to look after a motherless boy.

Jack Franklin Stuart was eight years old, the son of Harry F. Stuart, a special officer attached to the Southern District of the San Francisco Police and to the city’s first bloodhounds, King and Lady. Harry and his boss, George Merchant, who trained the dogs to track the scent of missing children and miscreants, preferred the more dignified Scottish term sleuthhounds. “Just don’t call them meathounds,” Merchant told the press.

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