“Besides having baseball and success in common they also had Claire Merritt Hodgson, a Georgia native and a Ziegfeld Follies girl who was Ruth’s second wife. In her autobiography, The Babe and I, Mrs. Ruth said she had known Cobb “very well” as a teenager back in Athens, before he married Charlie, and for what it may be worth, Al Stump, in his second book on Cobb, suggests they were young lovers.”
