When Willard Met Babe Ruth - Softcover

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