Did You Know?
Role Reversal
And we thought Babe Ruth's only connection to BU was his playing days at both ends of what would eventually be the University's Charles River Campus: at Fenway Park when he played for the Red Sox from 1914 to 1919, and then at Braves Field (now BU's Nickerson Field) for the Boston Braves in 1935. Ruth also used to stay in Suite 818 at the Myles Standish Hotel (the University's Myles Standish Hall today) when he was with the Sox because he liked the view of the river.
Another Ruthian association with Boston University exists, however. It seems that BU possesses the only picture of the Babe in a dress.
The photo comes from BU's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. It was given to the center in 1994 by CAS Professor Emeritus Dean Edmonds, a member of the Friends of the Libraries at Boston University, who has also given the University his mother's collection of 150 books by and about French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal.
Clowning around with Ruth in the early 1920s photo is Oscar Nickerson, the grandfather of Edmond's wife, while on vacation at Pleasant Bay, near Orleans on Cape Cod. One can only speculate about why the Babe is all dolled up.
BU first published the photo in 2003, and it might have been just the nudge needed to realign cosmic forces a year later to reverse the Babe Ruth curse that supposedly haunted the Red Sox, who hadn't won a World Series since they sold him to the Yankees in 1920.