"Don't ever forget two things I'm going to tell you. One, don't believe everything that's written about you. Two, don't pick up too many checks." -- Babe Ruth
For just $1,331, it could have been yours -- a genuine mounted alligator skin shot by none other than Babe Ruth. The auction is closed, but there is a story, and it happens to involve my family.
Go back 84 years to St. Petersburg, Fla. The Babe was in town for spring training for the New York Yankees, and he needed to shoot something. Besides women and baseball, George Herman Ruth's favorite pastime was hunting. Deer, turkey, antelope, quail, duck, the Babe enjoyed all of it, but on this cool day in February 1937, he was going after something a little different: alligator. And for that he needed the services of one Angus Lawrence Nash.
Angus was born in 1875 in Clearwater, Fla., which was just north of St. Petersburg. His father was a veteran of the Civil War who had suffered a debilitating injury when the ramrod of his rifle accidentally discharged into his left arm. Leaving war-torn Georgia, he moved south in search of better opportunities and started a large family in St. Pete. The Nash boys learned quickly how to hunt and fish the bountiful area around Tampa Bay. Angus moved to the Gulfport area of St. Pete as a young man and made his livelihood as a fisherman. With the real estate boom of the 1920s in Florida, Angus soon started making a nice side-living as a fishing and hunting guide to all the rich tourists that would come down during the balmy winter months. That's when he got the call from the Rolyat Hotel where the Babe was staying: The Bambino wanted to go gator hunting. Could Angus arrange it?
My family was already acquainted in a fashion with Ruth, and it wasn't necessarily a good one. My grandmother, who was Angus' niece, was married to Frank Rhoads, who worked for the telephone company there. Once, in 1927, Frank got a call to go up to the hotel where Ruth was staying and install a private line in his room. When he arrived, he found the Babe sitting with a friend on the second floor balcony of the hotel. To his dismay, they were chewing tobacco and spitting the remnants every so often off the balcony to the sidewalk (and people?) below. "I found him very uncouth!" my grandfather would later remember. Now, for the historical record, my grandfather was a man who enjoyed his drinking, carousing and other type pursuits, if you catch my drift, so this was really saying something!
Back to Angus: He collects the Babe and two of his friends that morning at the hotel and takes them down to Lake Maggiore, where he has his small jon boat waiting. Slipping along the shoreline, he spots a gator and pulls close by so Ruth can level his single shot 30.06 rifle at the unsuspecting target.
Lashing their prize to the front bumper of their car, Angus and the Babe pose for a triumphant photograph before heading back to the hotel, their trousers still dripping wet from the clear water of the lake. Looking back, I'm struck by how small the alligator Angus found for the Babe actually is, but I guess a paycheck is a paycheck. And hey, to whoever bought his gator skin last month for $1,331, I'm available to autograph it for a slight fee. Thanks, Uncle Angus.