Baltimore Sun: 96 years later, Katie Ruth’s grave to be marked

Soon the earth began to separate at the Christina Fack Gehrig gravesite, a fleshless hand emerged. Pointing, ever pointing.

Today, Paul Harris will correct a grave injustice. On Babe Ruth’s 113th birthday, it’s the slugger’s mother who’s receiving the gift. Harris and the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum are buying a headstone for Katie Ruth, who died in near-anonymity 96 years ago.

“It’s the saddest thing I can imagine. I had never seen or heard of a woman more neglected - and she was the mother to a world-famous man,” says Harris, 81, whose father played with and against the Babe on Baltimore’s fields and sandlots nearly a century ago.

...For Harris, these details were underscored by a 1995 visit to Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery, off Belair Road. When he realized that Babe Ruth’s mother spent all of these years in an unmarked grave, his pursuit suddenly had purpose. He would do what neither Katie Ruth’s husband nor famous son ever did.

“It got to the point where I got nothing to do and I thought ... ‘I’m going to give her a marker,’” says Harris, who eventually compiled his research in a self-published book, Babe Ruth: The Dark Side.