Roly and the Alderman: A Small Boy and the Black Sox

In search of his 50th home run, Babe Ruth arrived in Chicago behind a fifty-piece brass band.¹ For three straight days in front of huge crowds, some of whom paid as much as $4 for scalped tickets, Ruth tried his best to get number 50.² On a 1-1 count in the third game, he got "partial hold" of an Eddie Cicotte pitch and "lofted it far into the corner of right field." He had already rounded second base before the ball finally dropped at the foot of the Comiskey Park flagpole, "several yards foul."³ On the next pitch Cicotte struck out Ruth, and the "Tarzan of the green diamond," as the newspapers were calling him, left town still in search of number 50.

Babe Ruth's departure from Chicago meant fans had nothing to distract them now from daily allegations in the newspapers that baseball was crooked. For a year rumors of a 1919 World Series fix between the Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Indians had been everywhere. Now fresh rumors had surfaced that a game between the Chicago Cubs and the Phillies had been fixed. The failure of baseball officials to investigate the allegations was irritating. "Scandal talk has spread... all over the country," Chicago newspapers reported.⁴ The rumors placed baseball in a bad light. Fans everywhere were anxious, losing patience, and "wondering if there [was] truth to the rumors."⁵

Nobody was more upset than ten-year-old Roland Gehre in the north Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. Born in 1910 into a German family of singers and musicians, "Roly" was a small child but restless and willful. His father, who played piano for silent pictures, liked to bring little Roly with him into the dark theaters. But it was a struggle for his father to keep up with the melodramatic screen action of stagecoach robberies or swashbuckling pirates, and he often stopped playing so that he could just watch the action. Once, when the piano had fallen silent, Roly jumped to his feet and shouted in German "Spiel, Papa! Spiel, Papa!"⁶ Keep playing! Not yet three years old, the boy already wanted life to have some measure of entertainment and song to it.

One day not long after, Roly spiked a fever, turned clammy, and could not find the energy to get out of bed.⁷ None of his mother's home remedies had any effect. Finally, his mother summoned her brother Eugene Nusser, who was a handsome and influential Chicago alderman from the 34th ward. Tall and thin, with deep-set dark eyes, thirty-three-year-old Alderman Nusser was a staunch Republican who had once been a cigar maker in Wisconsin. He was never without a stogie smoldering in the V of his fingers, especially when he hosted huge political gatherings in the basement of his big house on North Avers.⁸ His height, his good looks, and his cigar gave him the appearance and aroma of power and decisiveness. He would know exactly what to do now about little Roly's fever.

Polio

By the time Uncle Eugene arrived, Roly was beset with convulsions. Uncle Eugene swept his nephew up in his arms and rushed him to the hospital. The diagnosis was polio. It was weeks before he could come home. Then there were months of treatment, during which the whole family took turns applying hot compresses and massaging Roly's limbs.

Roly had to learn how to walk again. But the only lasting effect of the disease was one reedy leg, which made him limp slightly and limited his speed and agility. Meanwhile, with the eventual arrival of six siblings, the refrain among the Gehre and Nusser families became, "Roland will haben!"⁹ Whatever Roland wants, he gets! It wasn't just a reference to the entitlements of his...