Kelly Bennett's 'The House That Ruth Built' Is a Picture Book for All To Enjoy

It was Kelly Bennett’s love of baseball that led her on a yearslong mission to create “The House That Ruth Built,” one of her many picture books created for children. Due to the copious amount of fact-based information that is included in the book, it can, however, be enjoyed as well by fellow fans of the sport, the New York Yankees and/or Babe Ruth.

The strong and vibrant illustrations by Susanna Covelli, described by Bennett, a Westhampton Beach resident, as “a Norman Rockwellesque combination of both authenticity and vintage details,” go hand-in-hand with the lyrical story that celebrates Opening Day at the original Yankee Stadium and Babe Ruth’s first home run in the legendary ballpark, with its 100th anniversary just passing on April 18.

“The storyline is about 150 words, so this definitely works for an older child, especially nonfiction adult fans,” she said. “And with all of the vintage black and whites, this is really is a multigenerational reading experience.”

Bennett said “The House That Ruth Built” was nearly eight years in the making. It all started when she and a writing friend of hers did their “poem a day,” where they would take seven to 10 minutes a day to write a simple poem. One day, their self-engaged task was to write a poem in the style of a nursery rhyme. With the idea of “The House That Ruth Built” in the back of her head, she began writing in a style that mimicked “This Is the House That Jack Built.”

“This is the house that Jack built.
This is the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the rat that ate the cheese.”

The first few lines of “The House That Ruth Built” are,

“This is the crew who chalk the field.

These are the hands that ready the stands.

These are the keepers who post the score.

Here come the boys to stack the bats and shag the balls that first game in the House that Ruth Built.”

Bennett said it’s a cumulative poem all building to Ruth’s historic home run.

What was somewhat of a problem was getting the 32-page book published. Her agent went to two publishers, both in Massachusetts, who declined to publish the story for obvious reasons: not only was it about the former Boston Red Sox Babe Ruth, but a story in which Ruth hit a home run in a Yankees victory over those same Red Sox. They were not having it.

Other publishers loved the idea, Bennett said, but hated baseball. Eventually, Bennett met Christopher Robbins, co-founder and CEO of Familius, a trade book publishing company founded in 2012, who not only loved the idea, but also allowed Bennett to be a large part of the creative process, something that isn’t typically done with authors.

“I knew what I wanted to do, and I showed him a cover of a magazine that Babe Ruth was on, a vintage magazine called Baseball Magazine, and I knew what I wanted to do with the little sidebars. I had been collecting all this baseball info and he said, ‘Why don’t you lay it out in spreads?’” she explained. “Authors don’t usually have as much input. They very much keep the author and illustrator separate from the publishers. Like for me as an author, I never see anything until they sketch it and I’m often working from their minds and perception, so for me to be involved every step of the way, I was really excited. Also a little bit stressful, but just to have the input, it was really fun.”

While it took some time, Bennett said she very much enjoyed the process, from getting a personal tour of the current Yankee Stadium during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and meeting Yankees museum curator Brian Richards, to working with the National Baseball Hall of Fame, various baseball historians and those within the Library of Congress.

Bennett dedicated her book to her grandfather, Joe Silva, who through her research, was able to confirm what he had said for years, that he used to play with The Babe. Back in the early days of the sport, in the 1920s and 1930s, baseball was thought not to be played all that much west of the Mississippi and south of St. Louis. But Bennett’s grandfather was a native of Watsonville, California, where he played semipro ball, and there are specific reports of Ruth having played in Salinas, the next city south of Watsonville. The likelihood of the two sharing the field was very high.

“We’re a baseball family,” she said. “I used to keep stats for my kids’ baseball and softball teams. I think it’s really, for me, an underrated sport to a lot of people. With baseball you never know what’s going to happen. In basketball, you know everyone is going for that basket. In football, you know they’re going for that end zone. In baseball, you have no idea where the ball is going, yet everyone’s brain is going 100 miles per hour.”

Bennett is having a book signing of both “The House That Ruth Built” and one of her other published books, “Not Norman: A Goldfish Story,” at the Barnes & Noble in Riverhead on July 15 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. For more about Bennett and her books, visit kellybennett.com.