(Photo courtesy of the Babe Ruth Birthplace Museum)
People often talk about degrees of separation, or the number of people that stand between you and a certain person. Six is usually the number. But this past August there was just one between me and the greatest baseball player that ever lived: Julia Ruth Stevens, daughter of Babe Ruth.

Stevens was in Baltimore to pay her final annual visit to the home where her father was born in 1895, and throughout our 20-minute conversation she offered a perspective that was new to me. It was a collection of memories, not about Babe Ruth the Yankee slugger, but instead, George Herman Ruth, the father.

The first recollection she offered was more general but straight to the point. She loved growing up with a father who was a legend in his own time.

“I loved going out with Daddy because he was the center of attention, and it made me so proud of him,” says Stevens. “If he had to go some place and mother couldn’t go, he would take me along, so I got to see a lot of things that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen.”

These experiences included the 1935 Broadway premier of Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End at New York City’s Belasco Theatre, as well as the festivities celebrating the SS Normandie’s arrival in New York’s harbor on its maiden voyage that same year.

“There were just innumerable occasions when Daddy would ask me if I wanted to do this or that, and I would always say, ‘Sure!’” she recalls with a laugh. Something else that Stevens remembers about her father was how much he loved kids.

“One thing that really stood out about Daddy was his love for kids,” she says. “He would often visit sick children in the hospitals, and sometimes he would stop on his way to the ballpark for kids playing baseball in a sandlot and take some time to teach them how to hold a bat or throw the ball. They got a big kick out of that, and he did, too.”

Stevens also recalls with great clarity the more personal moments she shared with her father. On the mornings of his occasional hunting trips, Ruth would rise early for a good breakfast, which was always more complete when he had his daughter at the table with him.

“He would get up really early, knock on my door softly and ask, ‘Do you want to have breakfast with me?’” she remembers. “He would make eggs and fried bologna. He would take a piece of bread and butter one side, and then he would scoop out the middle of it and put it in the frying pan, put an egg in it, and flip it once. It may sound funny, but that is one of my fondest memories; Daddy making breakfast.”

And looking across the street from her room in Baltimore’s newly opened Hilton, Stevens can see a statue of a man standing casually in his uniform, cleats crossed, the palm of his right hand resting on the knob of a baseball bat. We know him as Babe Ruth, the greatest ballplayer that ever lived but, to her, he’ll always be Daddy.