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Boston, Massachusetts What is it with this pot-bellied, moon-faced guy Babe Ruth? What makes him remembered so vividly to this day? It was summed up best by an old teammate reminiscing years ago about the Babe. "He was a constant source of joy," the old man said. Robert Creamer - HallOfFameMagazine.com How a rare image of Babe Ruth landed on a prestigious wall the Carnegie Abbey Club near Newport, Rhode Island is less a tale of the enduring game of baseball and more the story of the enduring mystery of friendship. The moment captured on an old negative froze time on a warm March day in 1936, when The Babe cracked a long tee shot at the Bobby Jones Country Club in Sarasota, Florida. His swing was magnificent, effortless in driving the ball out of sight, all eyes fixed on the frame of the man who saved the national pastime. The game that morning was golf. But when Babe Ruth did anything - whack one into the Yankee Stadium bleachers, wolf a dozen hot dogs, or whisper goodbye to baseball, his throat already seized with cancer - he was the center of the universe.  Randy Gillis and Kerry Easley frame their rare discovery of Babe Ruth. And so The Babe in his magic way has become the center of the universe for two Louisiana friends. While in New England in January, the pair forged new friendships, built their first snowmen, and ate a Godzilla of a lobster. Their northern itinerary, however, was put in motion a long, long time ago. No one definitively knows the name of the photographer who clicked the shutter back in 1936 in same month Nazi troops occupied the Rhineland. But the image hid in an envelope with other Ruth negatives for half a century in a box in shed on the outskirts of Sarasota, Florida until the spring of 1985. Marty Gueli, a handyman working his way through college, cleaned out the shed for a widow for $20. She was adamant. Keep what you want; off to the dump with rest. Save for the envelope, the rest went to some landfill. Marty's gut knew the negatives were precious. But his first thought was not commerce, but his lifelong friend Randy Gillis, a former officer in the US Army, just back from Germany, whose love of baseball was eclipsed only by his love of country. Marty plotted. At the right time, The Babe would be Randy's. The right time was Randy and wife Tammy's wedding day in Oklahoma in 1986, at which Marty stood aside him as best man. Again the image of Babe Ruth found dark seclusion in an envelope. "I just put the package away and really never considered doing anything with Marty's gift, except save it for my son, because I wanted to someday give him something of value," says Randy, who now lives in Springhill, Louisiana. "I'm just a plumber, I knew I would never make a fortune to leave for my son. But I could leave him the great Babe Ruth." In 2004, shortly after the Red Sox won the World Series and broke Babe Ruth's 86-year "curse," Randy answered a cold call to do some plumbing at the home of Kerry Easley, a full time registered nurse and part-time photographer. The talk soon turned to baseball and inevitably, the negatives of The Babe. "They were large format, degrading rapidly, I could see that," says Kerry, "But the image, that swing, just like one of his tape measure homeruns, it stunned me."
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