Julia Ruth Stevens, the last surviving child of Babe Ruth, died early Saturday morning at an assisted-living facility in Henderson, Nev., of complications after a pulmonary embolism, said her son, Tom Stevens. She was 102.
Stevens wrote "A Daughter's Portrait" and other books about her father, and appeared at countless events on his behalf at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and elsewhere around the country. She was always proud to represent Ruth, Tom Stevens said.
"With the passing of Julia, it's kind of the end of the line for Babe Ruth, of people who knew him firsthand," said Mike Gibbons, director emeritus of the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore.
The elder of Ruth's two adopted daughters, Stevens was born July 17, 1916, in Athens, Ga., to Claire Hodgson, a fashion model, and her husband, Frank, a Southern aristocrat nearly 20 years her senior.
After the marriage ended, Hodgson moved with her daughter to New York in 1920 and met. Ruth through a mutual friend, actor Jim Barton.
Their romance was an open secret for five or six years, but Ruth was already married to Helen Woodford, a coffee-shop waitress he met in Boston while playing for the Red Sox. A Catholic, he refused to consider divorce, but about three years after Woodford's death in a 1929 fire, he married Hodgson and adopted her daughter, Julia. Hodgson adopted Ruth's other adopted daughter, Dorothy Pirone.
As a young woman in the 1930s, before the development of antibiotics, Stevens spent weeks in the hospital for strep throat and needed a blood transfusion, Tom Stevens said.
Ruth, whose blood type matched hers, stepped up.
"As far as I'm concerned, I have his blood and he adopted me," she would say, according to her son. "That makes me his daughter."
"She was very proud of the fact that he had adopted her," Tom Stevens said.
Hodgson Ruth died in 1976. Pirone died in 1989.
Stevens met her first husband, Richard Flanders, on a golf trip with her father to North Conway, N.H., and joined him at the Cranmore Mountain Lodge, a ski lodge he owned and operated, according to a family obituary.
When he died in 1949 from hypertension, she became the owner and postmaster of the general store in Eaton Center, N.H., where she met her second husband, Grant Meloon.
After a divorce, she married a third and final time, to Brent Stevens, a poultry farmer, Mrs. Stevens the nickname "the egg lady" throughout the Mount Washington Valley.
Stevens relished her role as the daughter of the legendary seven-time World Series champion pitcher and slugger. Despite the 86-year World Series drought that befell Boston after trading Ruth to the rival New York Yankees in 1919, Stevens didn't believe in the "Curse of the Bambino," arguing that her father had loved baseball too much to put a curse on any team, her son said.
Stevens threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park before Game 5 of the 1999 American League Championship Series and returned to do so on other occasions, the final time to celebrate her 100th birthday in July 2016.
A Red Sox fan who lived in New Hampshire for many years, Stevens rooted for the "curse" to be broken. But she loved hearing Ruth's name mentioned long after his death Aug. 16, 1948.
"He's still relevant today as he ever was," she said, according to her son.
In retirement, Stevens often visited the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum and liked to go out for steamed crabs after appearances, said Gibbons, who was the museum's executive director for 36 years.
During a visit to Baltimore on the weekend of the 1993 All-Star Game at Camden Yards, she and Gibbons realized that several of the National League players were dining in another room of the crab house and decided to introduce themselves.
"Before we could get up, the All-Stars come into our room," he said. "They lined up to get Julia's autograph. It was like, 'Wow, we are in the midst of baseball royalty.' "
Gibbons said he interviewed Mrs. Stevens a dozen times in front of crowds of who would pack the museum to hear her recollections of her round-the-world trip to see "Daddy" play with other American All-Stars in Japan in 1934, or listening to their favorite radio program, "The Lone Ranger," with him in their New York apartment.
"She always had time for one more autograph, even as she got older and older," he said. "She never stopped being an ambassador for her father, baseball and the museum."
