User:GhostRiver/steinhagen

Ruth Ann Steinhagen (born Ruth Catherine Steinhagen; December 23, 1929 – December 29, 2012) was an American woman who shot and wounded Eddie Waitkus, a professional baseball player with the Philadelphia Phillies, on June 14, 1949. The incident became the inspiration for Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel The Natural, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 1984.

Early life

Ruth Catherine Steinhagen was born in Cicero, Illinois, on December 23, 1929, to German immigrants. Her father Walter was a die setter and her mother Edith a homemaker; both had immigrated to the United States from Berlin in their early 20s. She began using the middle name "Ann" sometime in her youth. She attended public school, at one point receiving a double grade promotion. Steinhagen spent two years at Waller High School in Chicago before graduating from Jones Commercial High School. Steinhagen developed obsessive tendencies throughout her adolescence: she became nervous around crowds, was frequently concerned with the state of her hair and fingernails, and would insist that the insects that came into her family's home had to be captured and released unharmed.

Shooting of Eddie Waitkus

Initial obsession

As a young adult, Steinhagen was infatuated with several famous men that she had never met, including actor Alan Ladd and Chicago Cubs baseball player Peanuts Lowrey. She and her family lived in an apartment in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, near DePaul University. She frequently took her younger sister and her friend Helen to Cubs games at Wrigley Field, where they would wait for the players to emerge after games for autographs and other forms of interaction. Steinhagen became obsessed with Eddie Waitkus when he became the Cubs' first baseman in 1946, and she first saw him at Wrigley Field on April 27, 1947, when the Cubs played the St. Louis Cardinals at home. Waitkus did not play in that game, which the Cubs won 3–0, but Steinhagen later said that she got her "first good look at him" when another girl in attendance shouted "Hello, funny face!" to the dugout and Waitkus looked back at the crowd.

For the next two years, Steinhagen developed an obsession with Waitkus and his life. Because Waitkus had been raised in Boston by Lithuanian parents, Steinhagen ate baked beans and taught herself the Lithuanian language. She purchased phonograph records recorded in 1936 as a tribute to his jersey number, 36. She would keep pictures of him around her family's apartment, including under her pillow, and would sit at the dinner table across from an empty chair reserved for Waitkus. Around this time, she became obsessed with the film The Snake Pit, about a young girl in a mental institution, because one of the actors reminded her of Waitkus. After graduating from high school, Steinhagen was employed as a typist for the Continental Casualty insurance company, where she made $37.50 weekly (equivalent to $440 per week in 2022), and although she wished to be a model, she worried she was too nervous for the job.

After telling her mother that she was "going to get a gun and shoot Eddie Waitkus, and then shoot myself", Steinhagen was made to go to a psychiatrist, who she stopped seeing after only two appointments. On December 14, 1948, Waitkus was the centerpiece of a trade between the Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies. Steinhagen was distraught by the trade. She moved out of her family's home "to be closer to Eddie", and her new apartment included hundreds of photographs, newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, scorecards, and other memorabilia. In May 1949, Steinhagen, who could not obtain a revolver without a permit, purchased a .22 caliber rifle and two boxes of ammunition from a pawn shop.

Shooting incident

On June 14, 1949, Waitkus returned to Wrigley Field as a member of the Phillies, who were there to play the Cubs.

Later life and death

On March 26, 1952, Steinhagen was declared sane and discharged from Kankakee State Mental Hospital. She was subsequently transferred to a cell in the Cook County Jail, pending criminal assault charges. After her release, she wrote to the Chicago Herald-American during this time, saying that she no longer possessed "any desire to see [Waitkus] or write to him". On April 17, 1952, on the testimony of criminal behavior expert William Haines, a jury ruled that Steinhagen was insane at the time she shot Waitkus but had since recovered, and she was released free of charge after 10 minutes of deliberation. After her release, Steinhagen told reporters she planned to return to Kankakee as an occupational therapist.

In popular culture

In 1952, Bernard Malamud published a novel titled The Natural, in which the fictional baseball player Roy Hobbs is shot near-fatally in a Chicago hotel room. Although Malamud refused to speak about his work and its influences, reporters widely assumed that Steinhagen's shooting of Watkus was his inspiration for The Natural. In 1984, The Natural was made into a film of the same name, with Hobbs played by Robert Redford and his shooter portrayed by Barbara Hershey.