Wednesday Night, July 20, 1927: On the Train to Chicago
Heat Waves And Summer Nights
Nights at the House of the Good Shepherd, Ruth’s favorite brothel, are full of sweat, and short on sleep. Nights at the Buckingham Hotel in July and August are also full of sweat and short on sleep — though not nearly as much fun.
The Buckingham is a first-class joint, but no matter how many windows you open up in your room, there’s not even a hint of a breeze this time of year. The Buck was built around the turn of the century, and since then everybody has complained about it being a furnace. But like Mark Twain said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.”
And that was true about the heat at the Buck, until the summer of 1921, when Silent Bob Meusel checked out, and took a big part of his room with him.
“We were here in St. Louis in late August of ’21, and Meusel was in a slump and having a lousy series,” Schoolboy tells me, as we’re lying out on the hotel lawn late at night, smoking cigars and blowing smoke rings up at the stars. “That was the one year that Silent Bob and I roomed together, which is a story unto itself, ’cause neither one of us spent much time in our room at night, though we travelled with different packs.”
1921 was Schoolboy’s first year with the Yankees, and Meusel’s second. They were both young and gifted. That was also the year Schoolboy became a star. During the regular season he was 19–13 with an ERA of close to 3.00. Then in the World Series against John McGraw’s Giants, he started three games and pitched 27 innings without allowing an earned run, winning the love of the fans and the respect of the writers.
“Rooming with Silent Bob was like playing on a team for the deaf. He’s basically mute. I mean, if you ask him a direct question, he’ll answer it — especially if it’s a yes or no question, ’cause he’s at ease with single syllable words — but, I’m telling you, that entire season, he never once spoke first.”
I’ve always wondered about Silent Bob. “It’s not like he’s got a speech impediment or anything,” I say, thinking out loud.
“No,” says Schoolboy. “His elocutionary skills are completely intact. He just doesn’t have a lot to say.” Hoyt sits up to look across the lawn to make sure no one can hear us. “And unlike Dugan or Ruether, who have nothing to say but still run their yaps all day and night, Meusel keeps his few thoughts to himself.”
I tell Schoolboy that I think Meusel likes the fact that his silence makes him an intimidating presence. Whenever there’s a fight on the field, no one goes anywhere near him. During the ’21 World Series, when the Babe challenged the whole Giants team to a fist fight — after McGraw had his players, including Meusel’s brother, spend the entire first game calling Ruth a n*gg*r and a coon — the Babe took Silent Bob into the Giants locker room with him. And that shut them up for the rest of the series.
Schoolboy returns to his story.
“It’s August of ’21, it’s as hot as a bitch in heat, and Silent Bob’s having a lousy series against the Browns. At the time, St. Louis is about 15 or 20 games behind us in the standings, and their pitching stinks like a rotting corpse — except for Shocker, who won 27 games for them that year — but none of that matters because Meusel’s in a slump. He’s going so bad that the Brownies’ Billy Bayne puts the collar on him, 0–4, and for good measure strikes him out two times. After the game, we get back to our hotel room, and it’s just an oven — like tonight, only hotter. Every couple of hours, you had to get out of bed and jump in the shower to cool off. It was torture.”
I’ve already taken two showers tonight.
“And that’s when Silent Bob checked out of his room. Around 2:30 in the morning, he finally puts more than two words together for the first time all season and says, rather succinctly, ‘Fuck this heat.’ Then he pulls on his underwear, drags his mattress into the elevator and across the lobby, and finally plants himself on this hotel lawn. I take another shower, and then I haul my mattress down, too. The next day, Silent Bob hits a home run and drives in four or five runs. And ever since then, on hot nights in St. Louis, well, here we are.”
With that Schoolboy throws his arms out wide, like a magician at the end of a trick, revealing the other thirty players and coaches sleeping out on the Buckingham lawn with us. We’re also joined by a dozen other hotel guests. “Tomorrow,” says Hoyt, “they’ll all go home and tell their friends that they slept with the New York Yankees.”
St. Louis is not the only town that’s baking this summer.
The mail caught up with us today, and when I got back to the hotel after the game, the boy at the front desk handed me a letter from Stanwyck. Along with her note she sent me a collection of newspaper clippings and articles about the heat wave back in New York. As a nice dramatic touch, after cutting the stories out of the papers, she burnt the edges, so that when I got upstairs to the room and opened up her envelope, chars came fluttering onto my bed.
Unlike in St. Louis, which is a much less dense city, complete craziness boils over in New York every summer when the temperature hits the 90s for three or more days in a row. In the concrete canyons of Manhattan, the sidewalks become thermal mirrors and it’s almost impossible to escape the heat — the streets of the city hold onto it and won’t let it go, not even after the sun has gone down. When the mercury hits the 90s and stays there for a few days, the heat of the city fries minds and frays nerves. Suicides and shootings rise dramatically, as do incidents of death by acts of simple stupidity.
In the articles Stanwyck’s sent, adults and children are falling asleep on fire escapes and on rooftops — desperate to escape the heat trapped inside their tenement apartments — and then rolling off and tumbling to their deaths.
“I honestly think my biggest piece of advice for anyone who has the misfortune to be in New York during a heat wave,” Stanwyck writes to me, “is never, ever, ever walk under a fire escape.”
Then there are the water hazards of living on an island.
The percentage of people in New York who know how to swim is surprisingly small. But that doesn’t stop them from trying, especially during a heat wave. And it doesn’t take deep water to do the trick. Stanwyck’s also sent along clippings of children and adults attempting to escape the heat by diving head first into the rivers around Manhattan — literally diving head first — without first checking the depth of the water. Among the victims is a young woman who fractured her skull, apparently unable to master the concept of low tide. Last year, an unfortunate teen drowned after diving into shallow water and planting his head in the mud of the Hudson River.
As a bonus, Stanwyck included in her letter clippings about thunderstorms last week that teased the city with the false promise of some relief when they rolled into town. At first, the rain was a respite from the heat, but before the day was done, four people were killed by lightning, radio stations were knocked out, the subways were shut down, streets were flooded, and one poor soul in the basement of a Brooklyn building drowned in a flash flood.
In an attempt to brighten up her correspondence, Stanwyck drew a series of blue fish along the margins of those articles, and signed her note, “Fish you were here.”
For those trapped on the island of Manhattan, just about the only way to escape the heat — ever since they closed the indoor pool at Madison Square Garden — is to head for one of the movie palaces, which are the only buildings with air conditioning. The Rivoli in Times Square was the first to install it, the summer before last, and it was so popular that now all the movie theaters have it.
“It doesn’t matter if the Rivoli is playing ‘It’ or shit,” Stanwyck writes me in her note, “every day by noon there are lines of overcooked people waiting to escape the heat. And people are walking up and down the ticket-holders line, offering to buy tickets for double their face price, just to get out of this inferno.”
To try to keep New Yorkers’ tempers cool, Mayor Walker bends a few rules during heat waves. The fire department opens up hydrants during the day, so kids can cool off in the water, and in the evenings he has the police department send out a hundred or so extra cops to patrol Central Park to watch over the people sleeping there. On those nights the lawns of Central Park are blanketed by whole families.
Last summer, during a heatwave, Stanwyck, Steven and I took a walk through the park around 3:00 a.m. With a full moon out, we could see hundreds of people lying around the boat pond, and thousands more lying out on Sheep Meadow. Almost everyone was asleep at that hour — but as we walked across the meadow, every hundred yards or so we would see one woman after another walking slowly through the night, alone. Each one was a mother, singing softly to an infant in her arms, trying to get her baby back to sleep so she could finally lie back down with the rest of her family, and try to get a few hours of rest before the summer sun came back up.
Hundreds of thousands of people also take the subway out to Coney Island and the Rockaways and sleep on the beaches out there. By the second or third day of a heat wave, it’s not at all unusual to see someone on a Manhattan street corner take off his shoes and shake them to get the sand out of them.
In St. Louis, the Buckingham Hotel staff now brings out mattresses for us when we’re ready to call it a night. Almost everyone on the team is on the hotel lawn by midnight, an hour before curfew. It’s just too damn hot for anyone except the Babe to be out catting.
Now, with the rest of the team asleep, Schoolboy and I are still up, trading stories at 2:00 a.m. There is no moon, the sky is crystal clear, and unlike New York with its bright lights that never fully dim, at this hour the lights of St. Louis have all been shut off — the town is pitch black — so every star is visible and as bright as I’ve ever seen.
Except for the Big Dipper, the stars have always been just a random patchwork of flickering lights to me, but Hoyt, even though he’s a Brooklyn boy, knows all of the constellations. He’s able to point them out in a way that makes sense — thanks to him, I can make out Orion’s Belt for the first time — and Schoolboy knows their stories. Every one of them.
“My father had a telescope that he would bring up to our roof on clear, moonless nights like this, even in the winter. And my mother, when I was young, every night would read ‘Bulfinch’s Mythology’ to me,” he tells me as we engage in a competition to see who can blow the most concentric smoke rings before our last cigars of the night go out.
“We’re tied at four apiece,” says Schoolboy, who always keeps score.
Perhaps best of all, at this late hour, filled with the proper beverage and smoke, Schoolboy is able to make up his own constellations:
“See the way those stars form that line? The way they form a baseball bat?”
I actually do, as he points to the bottom of the Dipper and three other stars aligned not too far away.
“That’s the Hornsby.
“And this great cluster of stars, over here, that looks almost like a cloud,” he says, pointing to what even I know is the Milky Way. “That massive group of stars is called the Babe.”
“And see that little star up there, all by itself?”
“That faint one?”
“Yes. None of the other stars will go near it. It’s a dying star. It’s fading. That is the evil bastard star. McGraw.”
Schoolboy blows five smoke rings in a row up at McGraw. Then he blows one last one. It forms a perfect circle that rises above us, hanging in the air.
And then it slowly fades away into the heat of the night.
- “Bulfinch’s Mythology”
- NEW YORK TIMES, July 16, 1927: “Heat Clings To City, Killing Five More; Likely To Continue.”
- NEW YORK TIMES, July 17, 1927: “Storms Break Hot Wave, Kill 4, Cripple Transit; Heat Toll Here Goes to 29.”
- 1921 World Series
- “It” (1927)
- August 21, 1921: “Yankee Bats Idle; Browns Win Twice”. New York Times article and Box Score.
