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Babe Ruth earned the title of American baseball icon — but off the field, he was a hero to his two children.
The seven-time World Series champion was the proud father of two daughters: Dorothy and Julia. In 1921, he secretly welcomed Dorothy amid an affair with his mistress Juanita Jennings, although at the time, he told the public that her mother was his first wife, Helen Woodford, according to The New York Times. When Ruth later remarried to model Claire Hodgson, he adopted her daughter Julia as well.
While Dorothy’s early years were complicated amid Ruth and Woodford’s separation, she was eventually sent to live with her athlete father after her mother’s untimely death in a house fire in 1929. Around that time, Ruth married Hodgson, and the family moved into a grand apartment in New York City, per Dorothy’s book My Dad, the Babe: Growing Up with an American Hero.
While Dorothy and Julia remembered their upbringings in contrasting ways, they both championed Ruth throughout their lifetimes, calling him the best dad they could have asked for. The sisters spent the latter half of their lives sharing memories of his life and supporting the legacy of his career.
“As long as there is baseball, Daddy’s name is always going to be mentioned. He was one of a kind,” Julia once said, per the Associated Press. “My goal in life is to keep his name alive. He was a wonderful father and I remember him as that and just not as a baseball player.”
Ruth’s daughters did just that, acting as spokespeople for him and attending different events honoring his memory, including Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. Dorothy died at age 68 in May 1989, and Julia died at 102 in May 2019.
Here’s everything to know about Babe Ruth’s children: Dorothy and Julia.
Dorothy Ruth Pirone
In 1921, Ruth’s daughter Dorothy was born. While it wasn’t publicly acknowledged, the little girl was the product of an affair between Ruth and a woman named Juanita Jennings. At the time, Ruth was married to his first wife, Helen Woodford, and the couple took custody of the infant, per Dorothy’s book, My Dad, the Babe.
News about Dorothy’s arrival didn’t break until well into 1922, and the announcement caused a media frenzy, making front page news. Although questions surrounded her birth, Dorothy was raised by Ruth and Woodford, whom she grew up believing was her biological mother.
Ruth and Woodford separated about two years later, and Dorothy experienced instability, she recalled in her book. Although she initially lived with Woodford in Boston, Dorothy was sent to boarding school at the age of 7, where she felt lonely.
In 1929, Woodford suddenly died in a house fire, and Dorothy had to adjust to more change when she reunited with her father, who was planning to marry Claire Hodgson. After the couple’s wedding, Dorothy moved in with them and Julia, Hodgson’s daughter from a previous relationship.
Over the next decade, Dorothy revealed that she was treated unequally by Hodgson — mostly unbeknownst to Ruth, who was often on the road. Dorothy recalled Hodgson showing “favoritism” toward Julia, ranging from their education to basic necessities.
While Dorothy’s childhood was marked with negative memories, she also remembered the amazing times she had with her father when her stepmother allowed it.
“Babe was a good father, given the circumstances. He never deliberately neglected me, and I know he loved me very much. He was just uncomfortable showing it, for fear of repercussions from Claire,” Dorothy wrote in My Dad, the Babe.
She continued, “So not only was I deprived of many of the tangible objects that were normal, expected parts of most little girls’ lives – nice new clothes, a bicycle — but I also received little of the love and affection that any child needs while growing up.”
Dorothy eventually moved out when she was 18, walking away from the mistreatment she faced at home. Shortly after, she married a man named Daniel Sullivan, much to her father’s disapproval. The pair went on to welcome three children: Daniel Jr., Genevieve and Ellen. During this time, she admitted that she fell out of touch with Ruth.
“Dad and I had reluctantly drifted apart after my marriage, and I’m not sure who was to blame. I had my hands full with three children and a husband who didn’t make life any easier, and Dad was at his wits’ end with Claire’s tirades,” Dorothy wrote.
After Dorothy’s divorce in 1945, she worked to rebuild her relationship with Ruth. Eventually, she got married again to a man named Dominick Pirone and went on to welcome three more children: Donna, Linda and Richard.
“The children helped heal some of the old wounds, and my father and I were able to talk to each other more easily without Claire’s interference,” Dorothy penned. “One of our favorite meeting places was the barbershop at the Ansonia Hotel on the West side of Manhattan … He loved it when I brought along the children; he would make funny faces for them and bounce them up and down on his knee.”
Dorothy continued to be involved in her dad’s life and was by his side when he was later diagnosed with cancer. She was there when he died at age 53 from esophageal cancer on Aug. 16, 1948, a devastating moment in her life.
It wasn’t until 1980 that Dorothy found out the truth about her upbringing and the real identity of her mom. Her biological mother, Jennings, was someone she had known her whole life, who had become a close family friend. In fact, by that time, Dorothy had spent nearly the past two decades acting as a caretaker for Jennings, who had lost her husband and struggled to live on her own.
While Jennings had previously declined to tell Dorothy the truth, at age 86, she finally confessed to two of Dorothy’s daughters. When Dorothy confronted Jennings, angry that she had kept the secret for so long, Jennings explained that Ruth had told her never to share it and convinced her that he was the only one who could raise Dorothy.
“My father made Juanita swear on her life and mine that she would never tell the truth. He also said that if she tried to fight him, she would never be able to see me again. Juanita told me she never forgave him for what he did,” Dorothy wrote.
Dorothy spent the final decade of her life as a spokesperson for Babe Ruth Baseball, traveling to attend sporting events and award ceremonies as a representative for her father. She published her memoir in 1988.
“I think I did it more for myself and to show my father was not the kind of person he was portrayed,” she told the New Haven Register (via UPI). “I was very defensive of my father and I can’t help it.”
Dorothy died at 68 on May 18, 1989, following a “brief illness.”
Julia Ruth Stevens
In July 1916, Claire Hodgson and her then-husband Frank welcomed their daughter Julia. Their marriage was short-lived, and they separated when Julia was still an infant. Hodgson and Julia relocated to New York shortly after, where Hodgson met Ruth in 1923, and the pair began an affair.
“I have this vague image of this huge man, who was really nice, coming to visit Mother, and he’d pick me up and set me on his lap and ask me little questions about how I was,” Mrs. Stevens told The Arizona Republic in 2001 (via The New York Times). “If Mother and I went out with him, people just crowded around.”
After Ruth and Woodford separated, he continued to see Hodgson. Following Woodford’s untimely death, Ruth and Hodgson married. They wed in an early morning ceremony on opening day of the 1929 baseball season.
The family then moved into a 14-room apartment in New York, where Hodgson’s mother and two brothers joined them. Several months later, Ruth’s younger daughter Dorothy also began living with the family.
Julia and Dorothy have since shared drastically different accounts of their upbringing, with Julia mostly sharing happy memories in her memoir, Major League Dad: A Daughter’s Cherished Memories. She reflected on holidays spent with family, learning to dance with her father and traveling to baseball games across the world — including Ruth’s 1934 trip to Japan with his Major League All-Star Team.
“I delighted in gliding around our living room with him while a record … played on our phonograph machine,” she wrote in Major League Dad. “He had a superb sense of timing on the dance floor, maybe the same timing that made him such a great pitcher and hitter. I just loved to dance with him.”
In 1934, Julia graduated from Tisne Institute, a small private French school in New York. Afterward, Ruth gave Julia the option to go to college or take a trip around the world. Julia chose to travel, and the father-daughter duo embarked on a worldwide adventure, visiting countries like France, England and India.
“It was any seventeen-year-old girl’s dream … I told myself the whole experience was much more of an education than I would have received in a college classroom. I got to see the world the way it used to be and never will be again,” Julia wrote in Major League Dad.
She later married her first husband, Richard Flanders, and they operated a New Hampshire ski lodge, per The New York Times. After his death, she married Grant Meloon while running a general store. Their marriage ended in divorce. She eventually tied the knot with her third husband, Brent Stevens, and the pair ran a poultry farm over the course of their 49-year marriage. They welcomed one son.
In the 1980s, CMG Worldwide began representing the Ruth estate, and Julia became more involved in upholding her father’s legacy, attending events, writing books and championing the Babe Ruth League.
Even well into her 90s, Stevens was an ambassador for her father. In 2008, when she was 91, she made her final trip to Yankee Stadium to say goodbye to one of her father’s favorite places, accompanied by her son and two grandchildren.
She continued to throw out first pitches at baseball games around the U.S., went to Hall of Fame induction ceremonies and attended the annual Babe Ruth Little League World Series.
In her later years, Stevens relocated to Nevada to be closer to her son, Tom. There, she was a resident at Prestige Senior Living at Mira Loma, where others say she was a “bright and vibrant” addition to the community. She died at age 102 on March 9, 2019.
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