Customer Reviews

When Willard Met Babe Ruth

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This book is as leisurely paced as a day at the ballpark, with the same quality of time passing yet standing still. It traces three generations of baseball fans, growing with the game, and their encounters with George Herman "Babe" Ruth. Baseball changes more slowly than the events around it: war, the Depression, marriage, birth, technology.

The love of baseball is transmitted from father to son to granddaughter, and it is in that slow but certain transmission that the author conveys the beauty of the game. No other sport treasures its history so much. No other major sport is so unconstrained (at least, theoretically) by time.

Donald Hall has written an unhurried look at baseball, growth, and decline. We meet the young Babe Ruth as a star southpaw for the Red Sox, then follow (with the New Hampshire family portrayed here) repeated years of father-son baseball games, rooting for the Babe as he keeps breaking his own home run record, and then, briefly, the Babe's last, uncompleted year in baseball. Between the lines we see the dimmest outlines of a flawed man. The book is both a sentimental evocation of a New England family's enchantment with baseball, and an unstudied meditation on the passage of time.

Of course, the above is from an adult perspective. Elementary school kids (and older) will enjoy the depiction of times past, the two encounters with the young and the older Babe, and, most of all, the outstanding illustrations by Barry Moser. Like baseball, it can seem a little slow, but if you have the time and the inclination, the book will envelop you like an old familiar glove.

Master woodcutter Moser's brilliantly conceived watercolors recreate rural New Hampshire in 1917. It was a simpler time, when there was a baseball game between the single men and the married men. For young Willard Babson the game and ice cream were the highlights of his day.

When Willard and his father come upon a roadster that had slid into a ditch, the boy was amazed to find the driver was the most outstanding left-hander in baseball - Babe Ruth.

My 8 year old son, who normally hates to sit down and read, actually sat down and read this book cover to cover in one sitting. He is a big Babe Ruth fan, which I'm sure helped, but I would definitely recommend this book for any baseball fan.

It is 1917 on the Fourth of July in Wilmont Flat in New Hampshire. The characters in the story are Willard,his dad,his mother,Babe Ruth,and Sheridian. Babe Ruth comes to Willard's house and gives him his glove. Willard loves Babe Ruth and goes to all of his games. Willard grows up and has a daughter. Willard works for the Boston Post and writes about sports.