Today is a notable double birthday. Ronald Reagan was born this day in 1911 in Tampico, Ill. George Herman “Babe” Ruth was born this day in 1895 in Baltimore — just 16 years older than Reagan, although we commonly associate the Babe with the 1920s and the Gipper with the 1980s.
Unlike George H. W. Bush, who met Ruth when Ruth was dying and Bush was captain of the Yale baseball team, I don’t believe Reagan ever met Ruth, who died in 1948. But their paths did cross, in a way. From 1933-36, Reagan broadcast Chicago Cubs home games for WHO radio in Des Moines. With radio stations not yet able to project a signal strong enough for Iowans to listen directly to Chicago radio, regional stations came up with a workaround: An announcer would recreate the games in progress from telegraphed play-by-play reports from Wrigley Field. Reagan had to devise sound effects, fill in some color to the bare bones of what the telegraph sent him, and occasionally improvise — he liked to tell the story later of how he had a batter fouling off pitch after pitch when the telegraph feed went down. He covered some college football games the same way, including a Michigan game in which the national champions’ center was Gerald Ford. It was a lesson in storytelling even before he ever set foot in Hollywood, let alone Sacramento or Washington. Reagan could little then have expected the additional benefits of making himself known to an audience in Iowa.
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