 This is Jimmy Powers coming your way with another Grantland Rice story. There, this is Jimmy Powers bringing you the colorful life of the late and great Granny Rice based on his best-selling autobiography, The Tumult and the Shouting, published by A.S. Barnes and Company. Previously, we journeyed with Granny through the early days of his life, his birth in Tennessee in 1880, his boyhood in Nashville, his college days at Vanderbilt, and his subsequent breaking in as a sportswriter for various papers in Tennessee and Georgia, to Cleveland, home again to Nashville, and finally to New York for his first big shot at fame with the evening mail in 1910. After Teddy Roosevelt and after the First World War, before the Depression and the WPA, there was an era that's come to be known as the Roaring Twenties and also the Golden Age of Sports. In those days, a few lucky ones donned ear phones, huddled over their crystal sets, cursed the static and screamed as Tony took the long count. But most avid sports fans had the long wait until the next morning's newspapers hit the street to find out who won and just what had happened. Even though 135,000 people contributed to the first $2 million gate at the Dempsey Tunny Fight, another 25 million sport fans had to know what happened blow by blow, and the newspaper writers told them. And even though 74,000 could jam into the house that Ruth built to see Ruth mince his way around the bases, another 25 million could hardly wait for the late addition to learn if Babe had slammed another one. Today brings Granny face-to-face with a young and truly great Southpaw pitcher for the world champion, Boston Red Sox, George Herman Babe Ruth. So once again with a sincere bow to the spirit of Grantland Rice, I turn the page and in first person continue for your enjoyment, the tumult and the shouting. The first time I saw Babe Ruth was in the spring of 1919 at Tampa, Florida. I'd been with our troops in France the previous year, so Ruth was news to me. Babe blasted a batting practice pitch clear out of the park into a plowed field. I gauged that hit as about 500 feet. While Ruth hit, I watched, and Ed Barrow, the Red Sox manager, talked. Ruth was our main holdout, said Barrow. He's been signed to a three year contract. At 24, this fellow can become the greatest single thing that's happened to baseball. Babe, I said, I was watching your swing. You swing like no pitcher I ever saw. With my swing, it's all or nothing at all, replied Babe. I copied it after Joe Jackson's. His is the perfectest. Of all the sluggers spawned by the advent of the lively ball, Babe remains the only one I ever knew who never shortened or choked his grip when the count reached two strikes. He gripped his bat at the very end with the knob of the handle palmed in his right hand. Babe liked plenty of lumber in his war clubs. Many of his bats weighed 42 ounces. That's about a half pound more than the average. That spring, the Red Sox and McGraw's Giants played an exhibition series. I hung around for several games to watch Ruth being converted from a pitcher to an outfielder, slug and play left field. In the first game, he hit the loftiest shot I ever saw, some six miles over the right field fence. Bill McGee and then sports editor of the New York Tribune who didn't impress easily wrote, The ball sails so high that when it came down, it was coated with ice. Shortly after, I turned out a bit of verse entitled Son of SWAT Babe Ruth. When you can lean upon the ball and lay the season bash against it, the ballpark is a trifle small, no matter how far out they've fenced it. In January 1920, Colonel Jake Rupert paid Red Sox owner Harry Frazee $125,000 outright for Babe, plus a $350,000 loan. That transaction remains baseball's all time bargain. Matter of fact, not only did Rupert buy a team named Ruth, it remained for this big overgrown youngster from the Baltimore slums to lift baseball on his back and return it to the aura of respectability. You see the Black Sox scandal occurred during the 1919 World Series. I'll touch on that later. But let it be said that if a slugger of Babe's magnitude hadn't come along to capture the imagination of the crowd by socking the ball clean out of the lot where it couldn't be tampered with, baseball might well have gone down the drain of mediocrity. Some years later, I was with Colonel Rupert at St. Petersburg, Florida, after he had signed Babe to a two-year contract for $80,000 a year. And Rupert commented, Who are we kidding? I could pay Ruth $200,000 a year and he wouldn't be overpaid. Somehow things didn't just happen. They exploded when the Babe was my sidekick. I once had him on a national radio hookup with Graham McNamee in charge. At the last minute, the Babe's carefully rehearsed script became scrambled. Before I could throw a hauler on him, he was off and running. McNamee was frantic. The orchestra leader was frantic. The producer with his stopwatch mind was frantic as Babe rambled on and on. At one point, the Babe was supposed to refer to the Duke of Wellington's historic remark that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eaton. The Babe came out with this gem. As Duke Ellington once said, The Battle of Waterloo was one on the playing fields of Elkton. Later I asked Babe how he could louse up one short statement so completely. Well, Grant, he said, About that Wellington guy, I wouldn't know. Ellington, yes. As for that Eaton business, well, I married my first wife in Elkton, Maryland, and I always hated the place. It must have stuck. But perhaps for Ruth is most embarrassing and at the same time as most hilarious moment, occurred on the evening we dined on the outskirts at St. Petersburg during spring training. It was quite a dinner. Among the guests I had invited were the Walder Lipmans. The dinner was a huge success until the dignified Mrs. Lipman asked Ruth to describe the famous home run he called in the 32 series against the Cubs. It's like this, boom, Babe, bigger than a freshly laundered barn in white gabardine and puffing on a huge cigar. I'm riding the stuffing out of the Cubs, telling them they're the cheapest pack of crumb bums for what they did to our guy, little Mark Koenig, a next Yankee who shortstopped them down the homestretch and then was cut in for a measly half share of the series swag. Well, I pack one into the stands in the first inning, but in the fifth it's tied four to four when I'm up with nobody on base. The Chicago fans are giving me the works. Charlie Root, the Cubs pitcher, breezes those first two pitches by both strikes. The mobs tearing down Wrigley Field. I shake my fist after that first strike. I know it was good. And after the second, it was in there too. I wave my bat at those bellerin' bleachers right where I aim to park the ball. Ruth throws it and I hit that blankety blank ball on the nose right over the fence. How do you like those apples, you so and so's? I yell at Ruth as I start around the bases. By the time I reach home, I'm almost falling down. I'm laughing so hard, and that's how it happened. The babes erudite explanation finished. A battered Mrs. Lipman mumbled that they'd have to be leaving. Why did you use that language, I asked Babe. What the heck, Grant, he snorted. You heard her ask me what happened, so I told her. And that's how the most famed of home runs happened. Ruth may not have been at his best before the mic or in the drawing room, but he was the greatest single magnet sports has ever known. Six months a year from 1919 until his final game in 1935, Babe packed the stands from New York to Tokyo. I've ridden in cars with him all over the map. Everywhere the mobs would wave or call his name, and the babe would answer, how are you mom? Hello pop. And then he'd turn to me and ask, Grant, how can they miss this silly mug? Children loved him perhaps because his love for kids was completely sincere. I dined with him on the eve of the World Series in Chicago in 32. He always ate in his room before games to avoid mob scenes. I've got to go for a short trip, Grant, he said. Where are you going on the night before a World Series game? I'll tell you, but if you print it, I'll shoot you. I'm taking this baseball to a sick kid on the other side of town. I promised his mother and father I'd come. Well, their flat was 20 or 30 miles away. The babe spent two hours on the road that night, and there was no publicity. Babe, you see, was a sucker for parents who loved kids because as a kid, babe never knew what real parents were. For the 30 years I knew him, I never saw him really saw it anybody. Deeply hurt, yes, particularly when he finally realized the Yankees had no managerial birth for him. But in his remarks and actions, the babe was kind. That's why I hope that the babe's home run record of 60 will never be eclipsed. Many of his countless other records have since tumbled, but that mark of 60. Well, babe, wherever you are kicking your heels around on some king-sized cloud, I hope it remains yours for eternity. Well, that's about it for today. In our next chapter, I'll tell you about Grantland Rice's first long look at Man of War, King of Racehorses, and an interview with the King of Jockeys who rode big red and never forgot the thrill, Earl Sandy. Until then, this is Jimmy Powers transcribed saying, so long for now.