When Willard Met Babe Ruth

Enjoying the annual baseball game between the married and single men in his community, twelve-year-old Willard Babson assists talented baseball star Babe Ruth when the latter's car accidentally slides into a ditch.

Grade 3-5?Hall pens a gentle tale of a time when both life and baseball were less complicated than they are today. In 1917, while 12-year-old Willard and his father are tending the sheep and geese near their New Hampshire farm, a roaring automobile slides into a ditch while trying to stop. The boy and his father use their ox team to pull out the roadster of the Boston Red Sox star pitcher Babe Ruth. Willard receives Ruth's glove as a gesture of appreciation and is forever a fan of the pitcher soon-to-turn slugger. The story follows the lives of Ruth on the ballfield and Willard as he matures into a man and raises a family. He meets the legendary star one last time in 1935 (he had a second meeting with him at Fenway Park in 1918), when he takes his daughter to Braves Field to watch the Bambino in one of his last games. Moser's graceful watercolor paintings are featured throughout the book and are similar in style to his works in Richard Wilbur's A Game of Catch (Harcourt, 1994) and Willie Morris's A Prayer for the Opening of the Little League Season (Harcourt, 1995). Shelve this title with the chapter books where it's most likely to get in the hands of its intended audience.?Tom S. Hurlburt, La Crosse Public Library, WI
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The national pastime gets a bit of much-needed luster from the poet's touch. Young Willard Babson makes the acquaintance of Babe Ruth one day when he and his father pull the young, just-married pitcher's auto out of a New Hampshire ditch. From there, Hall (Lucy's Summer, 1995, etc.) builds a beautiful story about the twining of two lives over 20 years: one a farm boy, rapt in the pleasures of baseball and mesmerized by Ruth's style; the other, ``the best who ever played the game of baseball.'' Hanging over every event is the penumbral melancholy of those years, from the end of the First World War through the middle of the Great Depression--when baseball helped anchor a storm-tossed population. That feeling is enhanced by Moser's nostalgic watercolors, each an achingly sentimental tableau. Hall salts the tale with fine historical tidbits--from the mention of ``Fibber McGee and Molly'' to Al Smith's run for office- -as he moves the story to its emotional climax when Willard's daughter, a baseball fan named Ruth, meets her hero. A heartfelt piece of Americana from two old pros. (Fiction. 7+) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 4^-6, younger for reading aloud. You hear a lot of twaddle about how baseball unites generations, but as with most cliches, there is a resonant truth in there somewhere, if only the speaker or writer or illustrator has the talent to reinvent it.

Hall and Moser have the talent to do just that. There is nothing remarkable about this story: a 12-year-old New Hampshire farm boy and his father, both avid baseball fans, are herding their geese across a country road one day when a slick roadster swerves to avoid the animals and winds up in the ditch. Yes, the driver of the roadster just happens to be Babe Ruth, star pitcher of the Boston Red Sox and young Willard's favorite player. The Babe gives Willard a baseball glove, and the family myth is begun. Years of Babe worship follow, extending even beyond the unfathomable trade of Ruth to the hated Yankees and encompassing a new generation, in the form of Willard's daughter, Ruthie (that's right, named after the Babe). What lifts all this beyond twaddle is Hall's ear and Moser's eye for detail. We feel and see the way the world was then--before television, before cyberspace--when the rhythm of the seasons had tangible meaning and when baseball talk was a good way to get through the harsh New England winter. Moser's nostalgic but never cloying full-page watercolors, characteristically sharp despite the abundance of earth tones, give Hall's carefully chosen words additional life. But despite the nostalgia, both words and pictures draw their energy from the sense of universality they bring to the experience of hero worship. We all need the power of myth to endure the dreariness of quotidian life, and for many of us, it is sports stars, from Achilles to Babe Ruth to Michael Jordan, who supply what we most crave. Bill Ott