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Sports of The Times; A Babe Ruth Myth Is Stirred Up Again

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April 7, 2002, Section 8, Page 2Buy Reprints
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IF only the Babe knew, there would surely be a mighty rumble of his tomb.

The manufacturers of the Baby Ruth candy bar issued a news release stating that they plan to ''celebrate not only the beginning of another year, but also the 75th anniversary of the Babe's record-setting 60-home run season.''

It goes on to say: ''Baby Ruth, 'America's Baby,' embraces its heritage and association with baseball.''

It adds that there will be a Babe Ruth Traveling Museum carrying Babe Ruth artifacts like gloves, balls and bats to 18 minor league ballparks this season.

This is clever, in that the Baby Ruth brigade says it ''embraces'' the ''association with baseball'' but is careful to avoid saying that it embraces its association with Babe Ruth himself.

Because there was no embrace.

There was no association between the Babe and Baby Ruth. The opposite is true. Rather than an embrace, the Babe would most assuredly like to have given a knuckle sandwich to the executives of that candy corps. Or hit them over the head with his 42-ounce bat.

He would conceivably have seen it as a swindle, a fraud, literally an illegal pitch, like a scuffed ball.

The fact, according to records of the ''heritage,'' is that when the Curtiss Candy Company of Chicago introduced the candy bar, in 1921, it denied having named the nutty confection bar for Babe Ruth. After the candy company began a ''strong promotion,'' as recalled in ''The Life That Ruth Built,'' by Marshall Smelser (Times Books, 1975), Ruth challenged it. ''Ruth's protests were rebuffed,'' Smelser wrote, and ''he countered by founding the George H. Ruth Candy Company.'' Ruth tried to register the phrase ''Babe Ruth Home Run Bar'' for his candy. But the Curtiss company opposed it, and the patent office turned down the Babe's application.

The candy company said that it had named its chocolate bar for the daughter of President Grover Cleveland. Cleveland served his two nonconsecutive terms at the end of the 19th century, and Ruth Cleveland died at the age 12 in 1904, some 17 years before Baby Ruth, the comestible, appeared on the national scene.

Nonetheless, the patent office decreed that granting a trademark to the Bambino ''would cause confusion among candy buyers.''

So, as the manufacturers of the candy bar then would have had people believe, there was no more association with Babe Ruth than he had with Hershey's Kisses, or Tootsie Roll. They'd have you believe the premise that such an association with the Babe was worth nothing more than a Snicker. You'd have to be from Mars to swallow that one.

The Curtiss company's official position on the name Baby Ruth was this: The candy bar first appeared in 1921, and this was ''some years before Babe Ruth, the ballplayer, became famous. The similarity of names, therefore, is purely coincidental.'' The current Web site for Baby Ruth, the ''chewy nougat,'' reiterates the same.

The history books belie this. Babe Ruth was already one of the most famous people in America by 1921. The year before the Baby Ruth candy bar began getting stuck in people's bicuspids, Ruth set the sports world on its ear with his record-shattering 54 home runs, in 1920. The year before that, in 1919, he hit a then-amazing and record-shattering 29 home runs. By 1921, the reference book ''Urban Legends'' states, Ruth's name ''was featured more prominently on the front pages of afternoon newspapers in America than President Harding.''

The company also said its founder had a sentimental attachment to Ruth Cleveland because she visited its plant. Since Ruth Cleveland died in 1904, ''Urban Legends'' continues, ''no amount of bad record-keeping can place her in a factory of a company that wouldn't exist until more than a decade after her death.''

After several corporate changes, Baby Ruth was absorbed by the Nestlé company in 1990. If you call the Nestlé office in Glendale, Calif., and ask for information regarding Baby Ruth, the telephone receptionist sweetly -- naturally -- replies, ''Let me give you to someone in chocolate.''

It may or may not be true that the sins of the father are visited on the son, just as the sins of Curtiss may not be visited on Nestlé, but there should be greater truth in advertising. And in their not-so-subtle fashion, the Nestlé people are trying to sell America on the idea that the Babe and Baby Ruth went together like, well, like caramel and tooth decay.

Another fact is that while the Babe was a big eater, not to say glutton, and enjoyed his occasional marzipan, he was better known for his tendency to slake his gargantuan thirst.

There is the story of his funeral in St. Patrick's Cathedral on a sweltering Manhattan afternoon in August 1948 when two of Ruth's pallbearers and former teammates, Waite Hoyt and Joe Dugan, carried the coffin out of the church. They were sweating profusely.

''I'd love a cold beer right now,'' Hoyt said to Dugan.

''So would the Babe,'' Dugan replied.

Nothing about a candy bar. For Ruth, that subject had become totally distasteful.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 8, Page 2 of the National edition with the headline: Sports of The Times; A Babe Ruth Myth Is Stirred Up Again. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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