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President William Howard Taft was a large man with a big appetite for food and baseball. During a visit to St. Louis, he was treated to generous portions of both.

On May 4, 1910, Taft attended two big-league games that afternoon, watching an inning of a National League matchup, Reds versus Cardinals, at Robison Field before going to Sportsman’s Park to see some American League action between Cleveland and the Browns.

A month earlier, at Washington, D.C., Taft became the first U.S. president to attend an Opening Day baseball game. He threw the ceremonial first pitch to Walter Johnson, who then crafted a one-hit shutout for the Senators in their victory against the Athletics. Boxscore

Described by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a “jovial baseball fan,” Taft attended 14 big-league games during his term (1909-13) as president, according to the book “Baseball: The Presidents’ Game.”

Athlete and student

Born and raised in the Mount Auburn neighborhood of Cincinnati, Taft “loved baseball and was a good second baseman and a power hitter” as a youth, according to Peri E. Arnold, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Notre Dame.

At Yale University, Taft was intramural heavyweight wrestling champion as a freshman, according to the National Constitution Center. (In 1997, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Okla.)

However, on the advice of his father, Taft gave up sports to focus on his studies. He graduated second in his class at Yale. Taft went to law school at the University of Cincinnati, became an attorney and then a judge in Ohio.

Encouraged by his wife Nellie to get into national politics, Taft accepted an offer from President William McKinley in 1900 to lead a commission to oversee the Philippine Islands.

As Peri E. Arnold noted, “Out of the victory in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Islands had become a U.S. protectorate. McKinley wanted Taft to set up a civilian government. This entailed drafting and implementing laws, a constitution, an administration and a civil service bureaucracy.”

Taft improved the economy of the Philippine Islands, built roads and schools, and gave the Filipino people participation in government, according to the White House Historical Association.

In February 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Taft to the cabinet as secretary of war. “Taft became Roosevelt’s chief agent, confidant and troubleshooter in foreign affairs,” according to Peri E. Arnold. “He supervised the construction of the Panama Canal, made several voyages around the world for the president … and functioned as the provisional governor of Cuba.”

Taft served as secretary of war for four years before he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in June 1908. He won the election, defeating Democrat William Jennings Bryan, and was inaugurated in March 1909.

Motor man

President Taft’s main purpose for visiting St. Louis on May 4, 1910, was to address the Farmers Convention. His agenda for that Wednesday also included a businessmen’s luncheon, a dinner banquet with transportation leaders and the two baseball games.

The plan was to drive Taft from point to point during his stay. Taft was an automobile enthusiast. According to William Bushong of the White House Historical Association, “Taft believed in the future of the automobile and … was never happier than in the back seat of his touring car speeding through the countryside with the wind in his hair. Not required to observe speed limits or stop signs when driving the president, chauffeur George H. Robinson would blow the horn in advance of an intersection and fly through it.”

In 1910, most people didn’t have automobiles _ the number of cars in the U.S. then totaled 500,000 for a population of 92.2 million _ and driving laws still were being worked out.

For Taft’s drives through St. Louis, it was arranged for the fire department chief and four firemen with a chemical tank and hose to trail the president “on every foot of his journey,” the Post-Dispatch reported. “The police have agreed to waive the speed limit for one day and everywhere the president goes he will burn up the ozone at a terrific rate … There will be only one restriction on the president while here, and that is he must obey that part of the new traffic ordinance which directs automobiles to keep on the right side of the street at all times.”

Food for thought

Taft’s train from Cincinnati, where he attended the opening of the May Music Festival, arrived in St. Louis’ Union Station at 8:30 a.m. At least 1,000 uniformed St. Louis police officers, 75 plainclothes detectives and the entire 93-man mounted police force were called to duty, joining a Secret Service escort in providing protection for the president, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported.

From the train station, Taft was whisked to breakfast at the St. Louis Club on Lindell Boulevard. Taft weighed more than 300 pounds and he arrived in St. Louis hungry. For breakfast, he consumed two slices of corn bread, a portion of fish, two eggs on toast, three lamb chops, an olive, a radish, two pieces of celery and three cups of coffee, the Post-Dispatch reported.

Fortified, Taft was driven to the St. Louis Coliseum at Washington and Jefferson avenues for his 11 a.m. speech at the Farmers Convention. The Coliseum was a state-of-the-art entertainment and convention venue. Italian tenor Enrico Caruso performed there in April 1910 with the Metropolitan Opera Company.

After delivering his speech before a gathering of 8,000, Taft was driven to the Southern Hotel for a noon luncheon with the Business Men’s League. The menu featured soft shell crab, milk-fed chicken breast and strawberry melba.

Taft enjoyed a bowl of soup before the crab course was presented. He “took one bite of the crab and then put it aside,” the Post-Dispatch reported. “He refused to even look at the crab and for several minutes showed no interest in the meal. He glanced at a cucumber sandwich and bestowed an equal favor on some asparagus. The president’s eyes brightened considerably when he was brought a breast of milk-fed chicken. Seizing his knife and fork, he proceeded to show what a hungry man can do to a well-cooked chicken. Taft had his chicken finished before the others near him had fairly begun on theirs.”

Big fan 

The end of lunch signaled it was time for baseball. In his remarks to the luncheon crowd, Taft said, “I attend baseball games for two reasons: First, I enjoy the game, and, second, I want to encourage it.”

On his way to Robison Field for the 3:30 game between the Reds and Cardinals, Taft stopped at the YWCA headquarters at Seventh and Olive streets and pledged support for the organization’s $400,000 building fund campaign.

At the ballpark, Taft took his place in a special box seat section built for him next to the Cardinals’ bench, the Globe-Democrat reported. He received a rousing reception from most of the 4,500 spectators, according to the newspaper.

It was pre-arranged that Taft would leave the game at 4 p.m.

After the Reds went down in order against hard-throwing Bob Harmon, the Cardinals teed off on a former teammate, Fred Beebe. Miller Huggins, whom the Cardinals acquired for Beebe, led off with a walk. Sending 10 batters to the plate, the Cardinals used four singles, three walks and some shoddy fielding by the Reds to score five runs in the first.

Then it was time for Taft to depart. He didn’t miss any suspense. The Cardinals scored seven runs in the third and cruised to a 12-3 triumph. Boxscore

The Browns led, 1-0, when Taft entered Sportsman’s Park in the third inning while Terry Turner was at bat for Cleveland. The game was halted and the players lined up to greet Taft as he walked past. Ten box seat sections were reserved for Taft and his entourage. Taft was provided a special chair, with ample width, on which to sit, the Globe-Democrat reported.

Most of the 4,200 spectators gave Taft an ovation before he settled in to watch the game. The Browns’ pitcher was Joe Lake, a Brooklyn native and former dockworker. Cy Young, 37, pitched for Cleveland.

The score still was 1-0 when Taft prepared to leave after the top of the fifth. As the president was exiting, Browns pitcher Rube Waddell, the eccentric former Athletics ace described by the Society for American Baseball Research as having “the intellectual and emotional maturity of a child,” ran to Taft and offered his hand. “Taft shook it heartily,” the Globe-Democrat reported.

Taft was in his suite at the Hotel Jefferson by 5 p.m. Meanwhile, the Browns kept playing. With the score tied, 3-3, the game was halted after 14 innings because of darkness. Boxscore

At a banquet in the hotel that night, Taft feasted on lake trout, filet mignon and frozen pudding before addressing members of the Traffic Club, mostly railroad executives and representatives of other transportation industries.

When he finished, printed copies of songs were placed at every plate and guests were encouraged to sing along as the orchestra played popular tunes. “The president sang with especial gusto when ‘Has Anybody Seen Kelly?,’ ‘Take Me Out To The Ballgame,’ ‘I’ve Got Rings On My Fingers, Bells On My Toes,’ and ‘Sun Bonnet Sue’” were rendered, the Globe-Democrat reported.

Then Taft was driven to Union Station, where he boarded his private railroad car attached to a Baltimore & Ohio train. When the train departed for Washington, D.C., at 1:45 a.m., Taft was sound asleep.

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In the fall of 1931, President Herbert Hoover had two strikes against him. The nation was in the throes of the Great Depression and alcoholic beverages were outlawed under Prohibition. To many Americans, Hoover wasn’t doing enough to improve the economy and was an obstacle to ending the ban on booze.

When Hoover attended Game 3 of the 1931 World Series between the Cardinals and Athletics at Philadelphia, spectators in the bleachers voiced their displeasure with him, booing when he arrived and when he departed.

The reaction was significant because it demonstrated how unpopular Hoover became. Three years earlier, when elected president in 1928, Hoover got 65.2 percent of the votes in Pennsylvania. Now he was being jeered there.

Orphan to president

Born in West Branch, Iowa, Hoover was 6 when his father, Jessie, a blacksmith and farm equipment salesman, suffered a heart attack and died. Three years later, the boy’s mother, Huldah, developed pneumonia and also died. Hoover moved in with an uncle, Dr. John Minthorn, in Oregon, according to University of Kentucky associate history professor David E. Hamilton.

Hoover eventually enrolled at Stanford and majored in geology. (He married the school’s lone woman geology major.) Hoover briefly was a shortstop for the Stanford baseball team, according to the White House Historical Association. Then he became a student manager for the university’s baseball and football teams.

Hoover used his geology degree to make a fortunate in mining.

The outbreak of World War I brought Hoover into public service. He organized the Committee for the Relief of Belgium, raising millions of dollars for food and medicine to help war-stricken Belgians. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, chose Hoover to run the U.S. Food Administration, leading the effort to feed America’s European allies. After the war, Hoover headed the European Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. “In this capacity, Hoover channeled 34 million tons of American food, clothing and supplies to Europe, aiding people in 20 nations,” according to historian David E. Hamilton.

Hoover then served as secretary of commerce in the administrations of President Warren Harding and President Calvin Coolidge.

In 1928, Hoover was the Republican nominee in the presidential race against Democrat Al Smith. A campaign circular proclaimed Hoover would put “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” according to historian David E. Hamilton.

At a September 1928 game in Washington between the Yankees and Senators, a photographer asked Hoover to pose with Babe Ruth. Hoover agreed, but Ruth didn’t. According to the New York Times, Ruth barked, “I’m for Al Smith.”

Not even an endorsement from the popular Bambino, though, could save Smith. With the economy booming in the Roaring Twenties of the business-friendly Coolidge administration, voters overwhelmingly opted to keep a Republican in the White House. Hoover won, with 444 electoral votes to 87 for Smith.

Dark days

Hoover took in plenty of big-league baseball games as president. He threw the ceremonial first pitch on Opening Day at Griffith Stadium in Washington during each of his four years in office. Video

Hoover also became a good-luck charm for the Philadelphia Athletics. From October 1929 to July 1931, he attended five of their games and the A’s won every time. The first of those was the finale of the 1929 World Series at Philadelphia on Oct. 14. When he entered Shibe Park to see the Cubs and A’s, Hoover “received a rousing welcome … from the thousands of fans who crowded every corner of the stands,” the New York Times reported. Boxscore

Ten days later, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression followed.

In 1930, Babe Ruth sought an $80,000 salary from the Yankees. Told that was more than Hoover made, Ruth responded, “I had a better year than he did.”

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica website, “Hoover’s reputation as a humanitarian _ earned during and after World War I as he rescued millions of Europeans from starvation _ faded from public consciousness when his administration proved unable to alleviate widespread joblessness, homelessness and hunger in his own country during the early years of the Great Depression.”

In his book, “My Florida,” Ernie Lyons, editor of The Stuart (Fla.) News, told the story of the “Hoover chicken” to illustrate the hardships residents of his community experienced.

“Back in the closing days of the Hoover administration, the promise of ‘a chicken in every pot’ had fallen through so dismally that anything edible in the countryside was substituted,” Lyons wrote. “In our part of South Florida, the gopher tortoise, an edible land turtle, was a life-saver for genuinely poverty stricken families … The Hoover chicken resided _ and still does _ in long tunnels slanted back into the spruce terrain of high, dry backwoods sections … During the Great Depression, the gopher tortoise hunter was a common sight in our woods as he prowled with a long, limber hook-pole over his shoulder, carrying a croaker sack and a shovel. When he found a gopher tortoise hole, he would push the pole down the tunnel and fiddle around, sometimes for half an hour, to hook the tortoise by the carapace and haul it out.”

The consequences of the economic collapse took its toll on Hoover. In the book “The Powers That Be,” journalist David Halberstam wrote, “As the Depression grew worse, Hoover turned inward. He had been unable to deal with the terrifying turn of events. Immobilized politically by his fate, he grew hostile and petulant.”

Hoover attended Game 1 of the 1930 World Series between the Cardinals and Athletics at Philadelphia, but unlike the reception he got the year before, “it was a very quiet, undemonstrative crowd and … the entry of (Hoover) drew only a modest cheer,” The Sporting News reported. Boxscore

Philly flop

By 1931, the Great Depression had reached “panic proportions,” according to the book “Baseball: The Presidents’ Game” by William B. Mead and Paul Dickson. “More than 2,200 banks had failed in 1931 alone, stripping families of their savings. Unemployment was continuing to rise … Hoover was now a president besieged, his name part of the vocabulary of the Depression: shantytowns of the homeless were known as Hoovervilles.”

Hoover had committed to attend Game 3 of the 1931 World Series between the Cardinals and A’s at Philadelphia on Oct. 5, but he wasn’t in the mood. On Oct. 4 in Washington, he’d met late into the night with banking officials, but made no progress. In his memoirs, Hoover recalled, “I returned to the White House after midnight more depressed than ever before.”

Traveling to Philadelphia in the morning for a ballgame had no appeal. “Although I like baseball,” Hoover wrote in his memoirs, “I kept this engagement only because I felt my presence at a sporting event might be a gesture of reassurance to a country suffering from a severe attack of jitters.”

A few minutes before the start of the game, Hoover and his entourage were escorted onto the playing field at Shibe Park through a private entrance and proceeded through a lane of policemen to their box seats.

Light applause from the grandstand greeted his arrival, but then boos came from the bleachers. “Out of the first spontaneous applause there comes an unmistakable note of derision and this note is taken up by more timid souls until ultimately it becomes a vigorous full-rounded melody of disparagement,” Joe Williams of the New York World-Telegram reported.

As Paul Gallico of the New York Daily News put it, Hoover “entered the ballpark to the low, snarling rumble of popular disapproval.”

In “Baseball: The Presidents’ Game,” authors Mead and Dickson noted, “The booing became almost a roar.” Joe Williams wrote, “The catcalls and boos continue until Hoover and his party have taken their seats.”

Then a chant came from the bleacher sections: “We want beer.”

Prohibition was in its 12th year. It started in 1919 through an act of Congress, which overrode President Wilson’s veto. By 1931, many wanted the alcohol ban to end. Hoover, who supported Prohibition, was unmoved by the calls from Shibe Park spectators. “He sat there with his hands folded across his tum-tum and smiled, as if to reply, ‘Try and get it,’ ” Joe Williams noted.

Hoover was seated just as the Cardinals were finishing fielding practice. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Cardinals owner Sam Breadon, manager Gabby Street and equipment manager Butch Yatkeman went over to greet him. Street asked Hoover to autograph a baseball. Yatkeman brought three balls to autograph.

Then it was time for Hoover to throw the ceremonial first pitch from his box seat to A’s catcher Mickey Cochrane on the field. “He took a straight Republican windup, but he threw like a Bolshevik,” John Kieran wrote in the New York Times. “The ball went yards over Mickey Cochrane’s head and fell among four umpires.”

It was that kind of a day for Hoover. He didn’t even provide his customary good luck for the A’s. Burleigh Grimes held the A’s hitless for the first seven innings. Boxscore

With the Cardinals ahead, 4-0, after eight, Hoover decided to leave. A ballpark announcer bellowed over the loudspeakers, “Silence, please!” and requested that all spectators remain in their seats until Hoover and his entourage exited.

“This was the signal for another rousing shower of razzberries,” Joe Williams reported. Paul Gallico described the booing as “determined and violent.”

“A polite pattering of applause” from the grandstand was countered by “an undercurrent of growling” from other sections of the ballpark, Gallico observed.

In his memoirs, Hoover recalled, “I left the ballpark with the chant of the crowd ringing in my ears: ‘We want beer!’ ”

A year later, Franklin D. Roosevelt (472 electoral votes) thumped Hoover (59 votes) in the 1932 presidential election. The only large state to go for Hoover was Pennsylvania, with its 36 electoral votes.

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