Joseph Wallace is the author of the novel Diamond Ruby.  He has been blogging over the last week for Jewcy on 3 subjects we asked him to expound upon.  The first one was on the topic "Old Time Brooklyn," then he discussed making the transition from non-fiction writing to fiction, and today he wraps it up with baseball and our cultural history. 

One of my favorite photographs resides in the collection of the Baseball Hall of Fame. It shows a youthful Babe Ruth standing beside the grandstand railings of a ballpark. He is grinning down at a girl of perhaps twelve, who is wearing a simple dress and looking back up at him. A sign the Babe is carrying identifies the locale as Los Angeles, which Ruth visited in 1923. On the surface, there’s nothing special about this image. Babe Ruth may have been the single most-photographed person in history, and the Hall of Fame possesses countless shots of him with the public. He loved interacting with his fans, especially children. Two things make the photo stand out. First is the expression of frank adoration on the girl’s face. Even at a distance, she seems almost dazzled by what her eyes are beholding. The second is the date and location of the photograph. Living in L.A., the girl would almost certainly never have seen Babe Ruth in person before. In the age before television, when movies were still young, she likely would never even have glimpsed him on film. To her-to nearly everyone who lived outside New York-the great Babe Ruth was an almost-mythical figure, a creature of sports reports and grainy black-and-white photos. Seeing him in person would have been akin to seeing a Greek god in the flesh. It wasn’t until I started writing Diamond Ruby, my first novel, that I truly understood exactly how large baseball loomed in the public imagination before the age of television. Babe Ruth was a colossus, and though he may have been the biggest of all, he was far from alone. All the big stars of the era-from Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson to Nap Lajoie and Honus Wagner-were part of the nation’s daily currency in a way that no individual athlete could possibly be today. So it finally made sense to me how nearly every cultural upheaval was reflected in-or even led by-changes in baseball. For example, the arrival and gradual assimilation of waves of immigrants showed up early on the diamond, where ballclubs saw influxes of Irish, Italian, Polish and others, who gradually went from being unwelcome in nice hotels to being the celebrities they’re since remained. Obviously, baseball and race relations are inextricably woven together, together forming a huge part of our collective memory of the twentieth century. For decades before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, the presence of the Negro Leagues, which featured ballplayers who were clearly as good as the white stars, served as a daily reminder of the injustices of racial prejudice. It is also impossible to understate the importance of Hank Greenberg, not the first Jewish ballplayer but the first true star, to Jews in the United States. He was theirs in a way that no previous slugger could have been, slaying stereotypes just as Jackie did. Less well known is the clash between baseball and women’s rights, but it’s there too. The true story that inspired Diamond Ruby concerns Jackie Mitchell, a teenage girl with enough pitching talent to be signed by a (male) minor league team in 1931, to get the chance to face Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game, to strike them both out…and to get banned from baseball (along with all women) by the commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, just days later. If that doesn’t serve as an object lesson in women’s attempt to break through various glass ceilings, nothing does. Today, the world of sports, and of entertainment in general, is so fragmented and omnipresent that nothing can have that sort of impact. But we should never forget that it wasn’t always so. For better and sometimes worse, baseball was gigantic, and so were its players. They meant something. They helped set America’s course in the last century. And you can see it all in the face of the girl looking up at Babe Ruth in Los Angeles in 1923.

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Joseph Wallace is the author of the novel Diamond Ruby.  He will be blogging over the next week for Jewcy on 3 subjects we asked him to expound upon.  The first one was on the topic "Old Time Brooklyn," and today he will be discussing making the transition from non-fiction writing to fiction.

For the first twenty years of my writing career, I wrote nonfiction articles and books. Sometimes they were about nature and the environment, sometimes medicine, sometimes baseball, but the thread that tied them together was my enthusiasm for history. I loved the "treasure hunt" aspect of finding a fascinating, revealing, or just plain strange story from the past, rescuing it, and sharing it with a new audience. Of course, while I got to add context and choose to include or leave out details, the basic rules were always the same: I had to tell the truth. Leave it to others to embroider or make things up. Leave it to others to write novels. Until I found out about Jackie Mitchell, the central character in a piece of history I felt compelled to rewrite because I didn’t like the way the truth turned out. I had to tell the story that way it should have happened, and that required fiction. In 1931, seventeen-year-old Jackie Mitchell was such a baseball phenom that she signed to pitch for the Chattanooga Lookouts, a (formerly all-male) minor-league team. The mighty New York Yankees then stopped in Chattanooga to play an exhibition game. The express purpose: to see how the girl pitcher would do against two of the greatest sluggers of all time, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. How did Jackie do? It took her just seven pitches to strike out the two Hall of Famers. The best stories, true or not, are the ones that make you ask, "So what happened next?" The problem with Jackie’s story is that the answer is: "Not much." Just days after her feat, she-and all women-were banned from playing professional baseball by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. To all intents and purposes, Jackie Mitchell’s career ended right there. I was infuriated by this outcome, and not only because of the obvious injustice done to Jackie Mitchell and other aspiring female ballplayers. As a storyteller, I crave tales with an arc, a beginning, middle, and end. This story had just a beginning. And as a baseball fan, I wanted to know where Jackie would have ended up on her own merits, not because of some dictatorial decree. So I rewrote history. Ruby Lee Thomas, Diamond Ruby‘s heroine, is not Jackie Mitchell. The book is set during the Roaring Twenties, not the Great Depression, and mostly in Brooklyn, not Tennessee. But the two teenage girls share the ability to throw a baseball, and the desire to prove themselves to a suspicious, unwelcoming world. Only by making my story fiction could I give Ruby the opportunity that Jackie never had. The chance to fight back, to try to outsmart the commissioner, to strive to keep on doing what she was best at. In addition, I was able to give the story the beginning, middle, and end it deserved in reality. I still love rescuing and retelling true stories. Sometimes, however, the truth is simply not good enough.

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As time passes, every era gets boiled down to a few essential images. The Roaring Twenties, for example, today call to mind glittering lights, full champagne glasses, and flappers showing more than just "a glimpse of stocking."

Perhaps this shorthand is inevitable. As I discovered while writing my first novel, Diamond Ruby (which is set largely in 1923), however, too much is lost when we forget the richness and complexity of each era in exchange for just those obvious details.

Researching the 1920s in New York City, I did find a world of movie stars and socialites and spotlights illuminating the skies. But I also learned about something more interesting: the desperation that lay behind the decade’s roar.

The 1920s were a direct outgrowth of two cataclysmic events of the late 1910s, both of which hit New York (and especially Brooklyn) hard: Brutal, bloody World War I and the rampaging influenza epidemic of 1918.

New York was both a departing point for men and material heading towards war-stricken Europe and a place where soldiers’ bodies returned. Then, just as the war was winding down, influenza entered New York from a cruise ship docked in Brooklyn. Thousands died in the city alone during the next few weeks as people hid in their homes and coffins piled up unburied.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the end of the Great War and the waning of the epidemic led to the Roaring Twenties, with its focus on celebrity and embrace of partying even in the years of Prohibition. (There were dozens of terms for being drunk, one sillier than the next: spifflicated, zozzled, owled, fried to the hat.) But the darkness was inescapable: Almost everyone had either lost someone in the war or the epidemic, or knew people who had. No one felt immortal: they just pretended they did.

Thus we got not just dance parties but dance marathons, complete with frequent news reports of competitors being dragged off to hospitals in a state of physical collapse. Thus it was simultaneously an extraordinary period for women’s rights-the richest before the 1960s-and a time when the Ku Klux Klan was flexing its power, even infiltrating Brooklyn’s police department. Thus the famous filled brand-new Yankee Stadium and ambled along the new Coney Island Boardwalk, while the poor risked their lives in unregulated factory jobs, too often dying unnoticed and unidentified. Thus President Warren Harding passed away in office and was widely mourned even as the first whispers of his administration’s rampant corruption began to circulate.

What a fascinating, dizzying time it must have been to live in New York City. Even by immersing myself in that world-by hitching a ride with Diamond Ruby- I felt ensnared by both its fierce appeal and its dangers. In the absence of a time machine to carry me back there, I couldn’t have found a better time or place to set a novel.    

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