[1][2] He was a friend and confidant of many celebrated sports figures such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Pepper Martin, and Dizzy Dean, as well as his many colleagues in the press box.
He signed into the New York National Guard on 27 April 1917 and was mustered in as a Private in the 29th Company, 8th Regiment, of the United States Army Coast Artillery Corps on 22 July 1917.
[1] In the latter year Rennie was hired at the New York Tribune as a general assignment reporter, often covering police cases and ship arrivals of notables such as Hollywood, Broadway, or sports stars.
His mother Christina Rutherford Rennie's last recorded employer was James J. Goodwin, banker and cousin to financier J. P. Morgan, and who died in 1915.
[4][14][15][16] The year he married, 1925, Rud Rennie became a sports reporter for the newly consolidated Herald Tribune, after the two newspapers were merged in 1924.
Shortly after transfer to the Herald Tribune sports desk, while attending the February 1926 New York Baseball Writers' Dinner, Rennie showed his easy, boozy, kidding friendship with Babe Ruth—as well as his lifelong musical predilection.
According to biographer Kai Wagenheim (Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend), Rennie "stood up…and, in a tremulous tenor voice, warbled a parody of little [Yankees manager] Miller Huggins (lyrics by Bill Slocum) that had the boys dripping tears of laughter into their fruit salad: I wonder where my Babe Ruth is tonight?
[19] In his stories and magazine features, Rennie was an early booster of the Yankees’ first baseman and slugger Lou Gehrig, who had joined the team in 1923 and enjoyed his breakout season in 1926.
[20][21][22] When in 1936 it was noted in the media that Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller was retiring from his long screen role as Tarzan the Ape Man in the Hollywood films memorializing the hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels, with urging by Gehrig's wife Eleanor (for whom Rennie had ghosted a magazine article),[23] as well as his agent, Rennie promoted his friend Lou Gehrig's cause in Hollywood as an actor.
The slugger himself was unenthusiastic about swinging from jungle vines and wrestling lions, but he told Rennie that he wouldn’t say no to a man-of-the-people role in a western or mystery picture.
The Tarzan effort fell as if from a high height with a thumbs down from producer Sol Lesser and a telegram from author Edgar Rice Burroughs to Gehrig, care of United Press, so the Yankee could read it in his morning newspaper: "Having seen several pictures of you as Tarzan and paid about $50 for clippings on the subject, I want to congratulate you on being a swell first baseman.
"[31][32] Rennie was steps away from Gehrig during his famous July 4 Yankee Stadium farewell, with the words, "Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
"[33][34] The article was reprinted in The New York Herald Tribune's commemorative collection of historic sports columns, Wake Up the Echoes, published by Hanover House in 1956.
[35] In May 1946, the 20-year veteran sportswriter on the Herald Tribune was covering the NY Giants’ football tour, then in Cincinnati, when informed by wire service reporters that he was named in a New York Yankees lawsuit against the Mexican Baseball League; it charged the league with conspiring to poach its players to walk on their contracts and join players south of the border; it aimed to restrain Rennie as an "agent" encouraging such a conspiracy, including recruitment of Rennie's friend Phil Rizzuto, the Yankees’ prize shortstop.
[36] Rennie, who had been merely sent by the Herald Tribune to cover formation of the Mexican League, finding both positive and negative aspects to the effort, was surprised to be named in the Yankees’ restraining order, and hastened back to New York to defend himself.
[38][39][40][41][42] Rud Rennie was in at the creation of another one of baseball's greatest news stories—though he didn't write it, and remained cloaked for decades, past his death.
Hyland confided that some Cardinals players objected to African-American slugger Jackie Robinson "breaking the color barrier" by signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
[44][45] "When I heard this from Doc Hyland," Rennie later told fellow Trib sportswriter Roger Kahn, "one word came into my mind.
The quashed players’ strike of 1947 deserved attention, too, Smith wrote, for its ugliness might have succeeded "…if Rud Rennie and Stanley Woodward hadn’t exposed their intentions in the New York Herald Tribune.
"[47] In his elegy-memoir in The American Scholar, veteran journalist and author William Zinsser recalled achieving his "boyhood dream" after World War II service when he joined the Herald Tribune sports department as an assistant editor.
"The Trib sportswriters were my Faulkner and my Hemingway, and now I was in the same room with those bylines-come-to-life: Rud Rennie, Jesse Abramson, Al Laney….sports editor Stanley Woodward, Red Smith, Joe H.
"[48] Rennie and his fellow Trib men on the sports beat were, according to Red Smith, "incomparably the most gifted company ever assembled in one playpen.
"[52] One such example, quoted often by others, followed the 20-year-old Oklahoman Mickey Mantle's stunning World Series win for the Yankees (their fourth in a row) against the Brooklyn Dodgers, a truly Olympian battle in 1952.
Then, brightening, "Anyways my father-in-law, Giles Johnson, says he's gonna name the baby ‘Homer.’"[53] After the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was founded in 1939, celebrating the centennial of baseball, in Cooperstown, New York, Westbrook Pegler, columnist of the Chicago Tribune and the Scripps-Howard and the Hearst syndicates, complained that Cooperstown was studiously ignoring the corps of sports journalists.
[57][58] Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, Phil Rizzuto, Joe McCarthy, George Selkirk, Lefty Gomez, Dizzy Dean, Jacob Ruppert, Tommy Henrich, Rogers Hornsby, Grantland Rice, Hank Greenberg, Pee Wee Reese, Leo Durocher, Red Smith, Al Huggins, Jim Kahn, and numerous others in action, from spring training in Florida to a year's Series, and everything in between, on and off the diamond.
His family photo albums cover more than 50 years of activities in New York, Southampton, Florida, New Orleans, St. Louis, Mexico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.
[59] His wife Cecilia died in 1954,[60] by which time Rennie's own condition of heart failure necessitated an end to the arduous travel routine following the Yankees.