ROANOKE, Va.

Sixty-nine years ago this month, Robert Garland got a pretty nifty wedding present — Babe Ruth’s autograph.

Garland was a soldier boy on his honeymoon with his new bride, Frances, in New York City, where they stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for $10 a night ($7.50 with the serviceman’s discount) and where he attended the first three games of the 1943 World Series between the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Garland, a Roanoke native who had recently been inducted as World War II intensified, was in his Army uniform when he scrambled down to the box seats where Ruth was sitting right before one of the games. Ruth, the great home run champion for the Yankees, had retired in 1935. Ruth chomped on a cigar — it should be noted that he would die of throat cancer five years later — and looked resplendent in his dark suit and striped tie as he signed autographs for the mob that had descended upon him.

Garland held up a pen and his address book, hoping to score a signature. Ruth spied him and hollered, “Let the soldier through!” Fans stepped out of the way as Ruth signed the address book while Garland snapped three quick photographs with his 35 mm camera.

Garland, now 89, recounted that story recently, just three days after he and Frances celebrated their 69th anniversary.

“I wish I’d had the sense to have my picture taken with him,” Garland said, as he looked at the blackand white photographs of the “Sultan of Swat” he keeps in a scrapbook, along with the autograph. The pictures are good, especially the one of Ruth turning toward the camera to hand the pen back to Garland.

Attending a World Series was old hat for Garland, whose family ran a chain of drugstores in Roanoke. His father, Walter Garland Sr., often received baseball tickets, even World Series tickets, from drug manufacturers he dealt with.

Robert Garland joined his dad for trips to see the Washington Senators play at Griffith Stadium in the 1930s. He attended the very first major league All-Star game in 1933 at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, a game christened by a home run from none other than the Babe. He even got a baseball signed at that game by more than a dozen Hall of Famers that included Lou Gehrig, Carl Hubbell, Bill Terry and Lefty Grove. His father made some 16 mm film of the All-Star game, which Garland believes a relative still has.

He and his older brother attended a couple of games of the 1933 World Series, which featured the New York Giants, his favorite team, against the Senators. That was the last time a Washington baseball team made the postseason until this year, when the Washington Nationals won the National League East Division.

As a boy, Garland was batty about baseball. In the summer months of the late 1920s and early ’30s, he and his older brother, Walter “Dickie” Garland Jr., kept up with the baseball scores that came across on ticker tape from a clattering Western Union machine inside his father’s shop, which sat on the corner of Campbell Avenue and what is now Williamson Road.

Dickie would read scores inning by inning from every game, then Robert would write the scores with chalk on a scoreboard that hung inside the shop. At the time, it was a high-tech way for store customers to keep up with the ball scores, like getting continuous updates on a smartphone these days.

After the war, which he spent working as a pharmacist at an Army post in Georgia, Garland returned to Roanoke to help with the family business and serve on the Roanoke City Council for 24 years. He ran Garland’s Drug Store on Grandin Road in Raleigh Court until selling the business in the 1960s. He was still working a few hours a week at Wonder Drug on Jamison Avenue until he injured his ribs in a fall on Sept. 1.

His love of baseball waned during the grown-up years of running a business and raising four children in the southwest Roanoke home where he and Frances still live. But he will never forget what it was like to look Babe Ruth in the eye and get his autograph.

“It was kind of an exciting time,” Garland said. “He was the most famous player then. He probably still is.”