GEORGE UHLE: We all liked to have a good time now and then. Different towns, where you'd have really good company. We all had friends like Dr. Ross in Boston, who was a great friend of all the ball players. He was a marvelous fellow. He knew Ruth real well, and players like myself and Heilmann. When the clubs were in town, he'd have us out golfing. There was another dentist in Washington who had all the connections for the boys.

Ruth had good connections. Everybody liked him. He liked a lot of fun. And of course, the places that were cheating, the speakeasies, they were tickled to death to have Babe Ruth come there. They'd put us in a side room so the public wouldn't know he was drinking there. There was a place in New Jersey, for instance, that had an upstairs room where they served good beer and had really good food. Babe would invite a player or two from the other ball clubs and take them over.

He loved to eat. One time at the end of the season I had Speaker and his wife and Ruth and his wife over my house for dinner. Babe was crazy over pig knuckles and sauerkraut. Every time I'd go over to his apartment for dinner, it'd be pig knuckles and sauerkraut. So I had it for him. He ate so many, it looked like he was throwing them over his shoulder. This was during Prohibition, so the local brewmeister brought a keg of beer over the house. Babe really enjoyed all that. My daughter Marilyn, who was only about seven or eight at that time, got together all the kids in the neighborhood and charged them each a dime to look through the window and see Babe Ruth. She didn't let her two brothers in on it, though.

Back in Prohibition days, the baggage handlers would test your luggage with stethescopes. If they heard any gurgling, why, they'd open up your trunk. I'll never forget once in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where we used to go for the mineral baths. You couldn't buy any beer down there. It was a case of having some moonshine fixed up with either some grenadine syrup or Coke to disguise the taste. Right after we got there, Ruth said, "I'll give you guys a good drink. Come on up to my room."

So we went up to Ruth's room. Babe got the hotel boy to give him a claw hammer to open this crate that he'd had shipped over. But when Babe opened it up, instead of the twelve bottles of booze that were supposed to be inside, there was one broken bottle sitting there. The rest had been stolen. Somebody else had opened it up.

I know over in Pennsylvania, where Stan Coveleski came from, they made real good moonshine. They'd bury the kegs and everything to age it. Covey always used to have a couple half-gallon bottles in his trunk for road trips. He'd pack chewing tobacco all around them so they couldn't move and gurgle around.

Of course, you could go across to Canada and go to a roadhouse, have your beer, a highball, whatever you wanted. And you could bring a bottle back across the Ambassador Bridge in your car, if the guys didn't want to take it away from you. But you'd get to know those fellows pretty good, so you could bring a bottle back.

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