Babe & Me (2 page)

WHEN DAD CAME OVER THE NEXT DAY, I ALMOST DIDN'T
recognize him. He was wearing a dark brown suit that looked a little too big on him, a vest, and a tie. He had on two-toned shoes and a hat that looked like the kind gangsters wear in old movies.

“How do I look, Butch?” he asked when I opened the door. “Pretty snazzy threads, huh?”

He handed me a big cardboard box and told me to open it. Inside was a wool sports jacket, a flat cap with a very small brim, and a pair of navy wool pants. The pants weren't long enough to be long pants, but they weren't short enough to be shorts, either.

“What's up with this?” I asked, holding up the pants.

“They're knickers,” he replied. “If you want to fit in, you've got to dress the part. I did a little research to find out what boys wore in 1932.”

“They dressed like dorks,” I said, taking off my jeans and pulling on the knickers. I think even Mom would have gotten a laugh out of seeing me and Dad all dressed up. But she was out grocery shopping.

“Back in the 1930s, this was cool,” Dad said.

Dad took out a thick wallet and opened it for me. It was stuffed with bills. My dad doesn't have a lot of money. He must have taken his life savings out of the bank.

“There's more hidden in my sock,” he revealed. “And it's all old currency. I know a guy who collects the stuff.”

“Why do you need to bring along so much cash?” I asked.

“I worked out a plan, Joe. I figure if we're going to do this thing, we should do it right. Make some
serious
money. First, when we get to 1932, we're going to find a bank and deposit five thousand bucks.”

“What for?”

“Because if we deposit five thousand bucks, it will start earning interest in 1932. Then, when we get home and I go back to the same bank seventy years later, that five thousand will have grown. If it earns just five percent interest, in seventy years it will be worth more than
a hundred and sixty thousand dollars!
I figured it out on a computer.”

“Wow! That's pretty smart, Dad.”

“Oh, I'm just getting started,” Dad continued ex
citedly. “After we deposit the money in the bank, we're going to find a bookmaker.”

“Somebody who makes books?”

“No, somebody who takes bets. A bookie. I know the Yankees are going to win the 1932 World Series in four straight games. It's in the history books. I even know the final score of all the games. But they don't know this stuff in 1932 until after the games are played. I'll be able to place a bet on the Series and make a fortune.”

“Dad, you're a genius!”

“Finally,” he continued, “if we're lucky enough to get close to Babe Ruth at all, we're going to get him to sign as many bats, balls, and gloves as we can. That stuff is worth a pile of money in today's memorabilia market. One baseball signed by the Babe sells for about five thousand bucks.”

Even as I marveled at my dad's moneymaking schemes, they made me feel a little bad. I didn't think it was illegal or anything, but it seemed slightly dishonest to go back in time and use what you know about the future to make a lot of money.

What made me feel worse was that it was all my idea to begin with. Dad saw the look on my face.

“Joe,” he said, “I'm getting desperate. I've tried my hardest to make an honest living. I really did. It hasn't worked out. Think of this as a way we can help each other. You help me make a few bucks, and I help you go to 1932 to see if Babe called his shot. What's wrong with that?”

Nothing, I decided. Dad and I sat down on the
living room couch next to each other. I took the Ruth card out of its plastic holder.

“How do we do this?” Dad asked. “Do I hold the card, too?”

“The power isn't in the card,” I told him. “It's in
me
. To take you along, there has to be a connection between you and me.”

I hadn't held hands with my dad in years, but there was no other way. I put out my hand and he took it. His palm was sweaty. So was mine. I held the Ruth card in my other hand.

“Close your eyes,” I instructed. I closed mine, too. Almost immediately, I felt the tingling.

“Do you feel anything?” I asked.

“Yeah, a weird sensation,” Dad replied, “like my foot's asleep, but it's my hand.”

“Wait!” I said suddenly, dropping the card.

“What's the matter?”

“I forgot something.”

I ran up to my room and grabbed a new pack of baseball cards from my desk drawer.

“They have bathrooms in 1932, y'know,” Dad joked when I got back.

“I didn't go to the bathroom,” I explained. “A baseball card is like a plane ticket for me. The Ruth card will send us to 1932. But it won't get us back
home
. We need to bring a
new
card with us for that. If I didn't have one with me, we would have been stuck in 1932 forever.”

I slipped the new pack of cards into my pocket and sat on the couch again.

“Is there anything else you forgot?” Dad asked, a little annoyed.

“No, let's do it.”

I picked up the Ruth card again and grabbed Dad's hand. We closed our eyes. The tingling sensation started right up again. I visualized Babe Ruth and the 1932 World Series.
If only I could go there
, I thought.

“Feel it?” I asked Dad.

“I feel it,” he replied. “It's working….”

And then everything faded away.

WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, WE WERE NO LONGER SITTING
on the living room couch. We were sitting outdoors on a hard bench. A big car whizzed by, spraying a cloud of exhaust over us. It was a big, boxy old car, with the spare tire mounted right outside the passenger side. The tire had a bunch of spokes in it, like a bicycle tire.

“It worked!” marveled Dad. “It really worked!”

I looked up. The building across the street stretched up and down the block. More boxy old cars streamed down the street. It felt chilly out, much colder than it had been back in Louisville.

“We must be in Chicago, Joe,” Dad said excitedly. “Chicago in 1932. Look at the cars! There's a 1931 Bentley Tourer. And a 1929 Pierce-Arrow.”

We got up and started walking, staring at the buildings and the cars rushing past. Louisville was
a big city, but it was nothing like
this
. I had never been to Chicago.

On the corner was a boy about my age. He was holding up a newspaper.

“Yanks beat Cubs in Game Two!” he shouted. “Read all about the World Series!”

Dad picked up a paper from the pile on the newsboy's wooden box.

“Hey, why are you selling the
New York Journal?
” he asked the boy.

The kid looked at Dad suspiciously. “Faw da fun of it, Mac. I'm really a millionaire. Ya wanna paper or not?”

“Are we in New York City or Chicago?” I asked the newsboy.

He gave me the same look he gave to Dad. “If you don't even know where you are, buddy, ya got big problems.”

“How much for a paper?” Dad asked.

“Two cents, Mac.”

Dad flipped the kid a quarter.

“Keep the change,” he said.

The newsboy looked at the quarter as if it were a piece of gold.

“Thanks, mister!” Suddenly he was a lot friendlier.

Dad hustled me away, and I could see the growing anger in his eyes.

“What are we doing in New York?” he complained. “Ruth called his shot in Chicago, at Wrigley Field.”

“I don't know!” I was mad, too. “It's not like in the movies! It's not like I can turn a dial on some time machine and land exactly where I want to go. I got us to 1932, didn't I?”

“All right, all right, let's both calm down,” Dad said, still angry.

He started flipping through the paper, looking for the sports section, I guessed. There was no sepa
rate sports section the way newspapers have today. Finally, Dad found the few pages of the paper that were devoted to sports. Most of the sports coverage was about the World Series.

This is what the lead article said…

“You must have messed up somehow,” Dad said, barely disguising his disgust. “We have to find a way to get to Chicago for Game Three on Saturday.”

“Maybe we can fly,” I suggested quietly.

“I doubt that they had regular flights in 1932,” Dad said. “And I'm not sure I'd want to get on one of those old planes anyway. The Wright brothers only invented the airplane about thirty years ago.”

A sign at the corner said 12
TH STREET
. We started walking, looking for a taxi or a subway train that would take us to Grand Central Terminal. That was the famous train station in New York, Dad told me.

We walked past a store with a big
PENNY ARCADE
sign on it. It was like a video game arcade, but there were no video games inside. They had simple pinball games, a shooting gallery, and these big wooden boxes where people could drop in a penny, turn a crank, and peer into a tiny window. Dad said they were called nickelodeons, like the TV channel. I wanted to try it, but Dad didn't seem to be in the mood for stopping.

As we walked past other stores, I couldn't help but notice the signs
—MEN'S SHOES:
$8.50.
MEN'S SUITS:
$25.
BREAKFAST:
25
CENTS
. Somebody was renting an apartment for $50 a month. Dad's mood seemed to brighten.

“Look at
this
, Joe,” he said excitedly. “In 1932, you could go to the movies for just fifty cents…and see a double feature!”

We walked silently. I had an idea what might be going through his head. Back home, he had no job, no wife, no life, and big bills. With his life savings, he could live like a king in 1932.

I didn't say anything. If he wanted to stay in 1932, it was fine with me. I hardly ever saw him anyway.

It would have been easy for the two of us to part company right there. I could have used my new baseball cards to go back home, and Dad could have started his life over again in 1932.

But suddenly we heard a commotion down the street, around the corner. People were yelling and chanting. Something was going on.

DAD AND I TURNED THE CORNER OFF FIFTH AVENUE, AND
there, in the middle of New York City, was a park. It surprised me, and I think it surprised Dad too. A small sign read
UNION SQUARE PARK
.

But there was no playground or anything. Nobody was playing ball or lounging in the sun in this park.

One side of the park had a row of rickety shacks made out of packing cases and sheets of scrap metal. One of them was painted with the words
WELCOME TO HOOVERVILLE
. Inside one of the shacks, a lady and two kids were warming their hands over a fire they had made in a metal garbage can.

As soon as we entered the park, a couple of guys with scraggly hair and worn clothing surrounded us. They held out their hands and asked politely, “Got any spare change?” Dad gave each of them a nickel, which made them extremely happy.

“We sure ain't gonna find Babe Ruth here,” Dad said, annoyed.

As we walked into the park, I saw people selling pencils and old ladies selling fruit from baskets. Guys were sleeping on the grass, wrapped in overcoats.

As we walked into the park, I saw people selling pencils and old ladies selling fruit from baskets.

Some people were just wandering around with nothing to do. They had dazed, hopeless looks on their faces, like they had survived an earthquake and didn't know what to do next.

“I completely forgot,” Dad said, staring at some men who were washing their clothes in a fountain. “The Depression—1932 was the worst of it.”

I had heard about the Depression, but didn't know much about it. Dad told me that in 1929 the stock market crashed, sending America—and the whole world—into a Depression. Rich people became penniless overnight. Thousands of companies went out of business, and millions of people lost their jobs.

People had no money. Farmers stopped growing crops because nobody could afford to buy them. Factories shut down because people weren't buying any goods. Hundreds of people waited in lines to apply for a single job or get a loaf of bread. There was no welfare back then, no help for people who were in need.

Kids starved. A lot of people just gave up and killed themselves. It went on like that for years.

Half of me wanted to get out of the park, but the other half was fascinated by it all. We walked around. At the corner of the park on the sidewalk a row of six or seven people stood on wooden crates, each crate about twenty feet apart. They were making speeches, and small groups of people gathered around them to listen. From a distance, the voices of the speakers blended into one another, but as we got closer, I could see that each one had his own message.

“I fought in the Great War!” a man shouted. “Now I can't buy corn to feed my family.”

“My brother's a farmer in Iowa,” a guy yelled back. “He can't make a living selling corn for just eight cents a bushel!” Some people booed, and
somebody threw a rock at the guy whose brother was a farmer.

“Tell your brother to plow his corn under!” somebody hollered. “Tell him to show the government he won't stand for it.”

“If the government won't give us food, I say we just take it,” an angry man yelled. “We've waited long enough.”

“We've got to unionize,” another speaker shouted. “That's the answer.”

“God is the answer,” a lady commented.

“Roosevelt is the answer,” an old man hollered.

“No, Communism is the answer,” said somebody else.

“Let's march on City Hall!”

“It's all President Hoover's fault. The sooner we get him out of the White House, the sooner the recovery will begin! A vote for Roosevelt is a vote for America.”

“A vote for Roosevelt is a vote for the rich!” said somebody else.

Two policemen came along and tried to calm people down. They had the opposite effect. Somebody threw a rock at one of them, and it bounced off his helmet. The cop pulled out a nightstick and hit a guy with it.

“Leave me alone!” the guy yelled, holding the side of his head. “I'm just exercisin' my freedom of speech.”

“Your freedom of speech ends at my ears,” the cop replied.

“That ain't right,” a lady said.

The people in the crowd began to hiss and boo and throw things at the cops. The second cop pulled out his pistol and fired it up in the air. The boom echoed off the buildings at the sides of the park. That shut everybody up, at least for a moment.

“Dad,” I whispered, “I'm afraid.”

“We'd better get out of here before we get killed,” Dad said, pushing his way through the crowd. I was right behind him, tightly holding on to the back of his coat so we wouldn't be separated.

I was feeling scared and guilty. I never meant for us to see all this. All I wanted was to see Babe Ruth hitting his called-shot home run. What had gone wrong?

We were making our way through the crowd when a roar went up at the other end of the park. I tried to see what it was, but I wasn't tall enough to look over the heads of all the people around me.

“What is it, Dad?”

“I can't tell,” Dad replied. “A big car just drove up.”

A teenage boy had climbed a tree near us and he was squinting his eyes, peering toward the commotion.

“Hey, look!” the boy shouted. “It's Babe Ruth!”