A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (7 page)

While FDR was a Hudson Valley patrician, Cermak had been born in 1873 in Bohemia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, about twenty miles from Prague. The day he turned one year old, he was on Ellis Island. His family found its way to Illinois, where, as a boy, he worked in coal mines near Joliet. When he was sixteen, he moved to Chicago and rose through the ranks of the city’s Democratic machine, earning the nickname “Tough Tony” and throwing large picnics for supporters, at which he illegally sold one-dollar mugs of beer from one hundred barrels donated by a North Side bootlegger. He was elected mayor in 1931. Cermak had opposed the nomination of FDR, preferring the candidacy of another up-from-nothing ethnic
politician, New York’s former governor and FDR rival, Al Smith, the party’s 1928 nominee. Cermak would, however, again be with FDR 137 days after witnessing Ruth’s home run.

At about nine-thirty
P.M
. on February 15, 1933, in Miami, Florida, FDR, now the president-elect, stepped off a yacht on which he had been fishing in the Bahamas. He delivered a short speech to onlookers, among whom was Cermak, who was in Miami to talk patronage with James A. Farley, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Then FDR gestured for Cermak to join him at his open touring car. Also in the crowd was another immigrant, Giuseppe Zangara from Italy, who had a boiling hatred of politicians. He was only five feet, one inch tall, but he stood on a bench, drew an eight-dollar pistol, and fired five shots toward the car. A woman in the crowd hit his gun hand and the crowd overwhelmed him, but not before his bullets struck Cermak and three other bystanders.

The assumption is that Zangara’s target was Roosevelt, and there is no contrary evidence. Chicago being Chicago, however, there are rival theories. One turns on the fact that on December 19, 1932, the mayor sent two detectives to the office of Frank Nitti, who had become ascendant in Chicago crime when Al Capone was sent to prison on charges of tax evasion. Nitti had no gun but was shot three times by the detectives, one of whom supposedly shot his own hand and then claimed that Nitti shot him and the detectives fired back in self-defense. Nitti survived. Cermak headed for Florida.

Cermak died on March 6. Just fourteen days after that—the wheels of Florida justice did not grind slowly—Zangara was electrocuted.

As Cermak was rushed to the hospital in FDR’s car, he supposedly said, “I’m glad it was me and not you.” Isn’t it pretty to think so. Cermak’s noble words, which are about as plausible as Ruth’s called shot, are on a plaque in Miami’s Bayfront Park, where the shooting occurred, and are carved on the wall of the marble mausoleum in which Cermak is buried, in Chicago’s Bohemian National Cemetery, about five miles from Wrigley Field.

What became of Violet Valli? For a while, in a theater near the Loop, she starred as “the Girl Who Shot for Love” in a show called “Bare Cub Follies.”

Before we leave the subject of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, it should be mentioned that this was not the only time an aggrieved and armed woman had consequences at Wrigley Field.

The headline on the obituary in the
New York Times
of March 24, 2013, read, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer.” She had actually died the previous December 29, but no public attention was paid until a staffer at the
Chicago Tribune
, while researching an unrelated article, stumbled upon a notice of her death.

Hers was a story of the peculiar melancholy of madness.

Born in the South Side suburb of Cicero, by the time she graduated from a Chicago high school she had a pattern of falling in love with famous men from a distance. Her fixations included the movie star Alan Ladd and the Cubs’ outfielder Peanuts Lowrey. Her interest in Eddie Waitkus, the Cubs’ first baseman, became an obsession. Because he was the son of Lithuanian immigrants, she studied the Lithuanian language and listened to Lithuanian radio broadcasts. Because he was from near Boston—he graduated from high school in Cambridge and attended Boston College—she began craving baked beans. With a calm lucidity unique to a lunatic, she said, in a court-ordered autobiographical essay, “As time went on, I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy.”

When the Cubs traded Waitkus to the Phillies following the 1948 season, Steinhagen suffered a breakdown. Although she held a job as a typist for an insurance company, she moved into a small apartment less than three miles from Wrigley Field, and in this apartment she built a shrine to Waitkus that included scorecards, newspaper clippings, photographs, and fifty ticket stubs. And there she decided to kill the object of her veneration.

When the Phillies came to Chicago in June 1949, she took a room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, where the team stayed, and paid a bellhop five dollars to deliver a note inviting Waitkus to her room. Having fortified herself with two whiskey sours and a daiquiri, she admitted him to her room around eleven-thirty
P.M
. “For two years, you’ve been
bothering me and now you’re going to die,” she told him. Waitkus, who had survived two years with the army in the Pacific during the Second World War, and who had won four bronze stars, might have died if Steinhagen had fired a weapon more powerful than a .22-caliber rifle. She called the hotel’s front desk, said she had shot a man, and waited by Waitkus’s side until the police arrived.

He was back with the Phillies later that year. In 1950, he hit .284 for the pennant-winning “Whiz Kids” and was named Comeback Player of the Year. In 1952, the novelist Bernard Malamud, who was not a baseball fan but knew a good story when he saw one, and who perhaps had noticed that early in Waitkus’s career sportswriters had referred to him as a “natural,” published
The Natural
, the story of Roy Hobbs, who is shot by a woman.

Three weeks after the 1949 shooting, a judge declared Steinhagen insane, and she was institutionalized in Kankakee State Hospital, where she underwent electroconvulsive therapy to alter the chemistry of her brain. Released after three years, she lived in quiet anonymity until her death at home on the Northwest Side. Waitkus had died in 1972, at age fifty-three.

The most remarkable Cubs career of Wrigley Field’s prewar years made up with gaudy numbers what it lacked in
longevity. Like the country itself, Lewis Robert “Hack” Wilson’s career roared in the intoxicating, and intoxicated, 1920s. And like the country, it crashed spectacularly in the 1930s. He was born with the twentieth century but would not live to see its second half. Yet one record he set will probably survive into the twenty-second.

It is not certain how Wilson came to be called Hack. Some say it was because his first major league manager, John McGraw, thought he resembled a taxicab, which back then was commonly called a hack. Others say it was because he brought to mind Cubs outfielder Hack Miller, supposedly the strongest man in baseball. The most common and plausible explanation, however, is that Wilson looked like a popular wrestler and strong man of the day, George Hackenschmidt. Whatever the derivation of Wilson’s nickname, he was one of baseball’s stranger sights.

He stood five feet, six inches and weighed at least 190 pounds even when in tip-top shape, which he rarely achieved because he never was a martyr to the strictures of sensible living. He had an eighteen-inch neck, an ample belly, and wore size 5½ or 6 shoes. He has been described as a mixture of “suet and swat.”
He was a human fireplug whom Arthur Daley described as built like “two men sitting down.” Another sportswriter said Wilson resembled a beer keg, the contents of which Wilson was all too familiar with. His flat face is a characteristic correlated with fetal alcohol syndrome. So is a problem with impulse control.

He was born on April 26, 1900, in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania,
a town of hard men doing hard work in steel mills and locomotive works about forty miles north of Pittsburgh. His mother, who never married his father, was sixteen when he was born. Both parents drank too much, and his mother died of appendicitis at age twenty-four, when her son was seven. He left school in the sixth grade to toil as a printer’s apprentice and ironworker until, in 1921, the lure of baseball brought him to Martinsburg, West Virginia, in the Blue Ridge League. By 1923, he was with John McGraw’s New York Giants. McGraw, a martinet, was not amused by Wilson’s fast living off the field, and when Wilson struggled on the field in 1925, the Giants sent him down to the Toledo Mud Hens. For some reason—McGraw blamed a clerical error—the Giants did not renew their option on Wilson, and the Cubs acquired him on waivers for $5,000. He and the toddling town took to each other.

In his second month playing there, on May 24, 1926, wielding the forty-ounce bat he called “Big Bertha,” he hit one of the longest home runs in Wrigley Field history to that point. That night he was arrested while trying to escape through a rear window when police raided a saloon that thought, as much of Chicago did, that Prohibition was optional. In 1928, he ignited a Wrigley Field riot when fans poured onto the field after he plunged into the stands to attack a heckler. In 1929, he ran into the visiting team’s dugout to punch a Cincinnati Reds pitcher. At Union Station that evening, as the Cubs and Reds were boarding separate
trains to different cities, Wilson got into a fight with another Reds player.

An often-told story, probably too good to be true, but certainly too delightful not to tell again, is that Joe McCarthy, the Cubs’ manager from 1926 through 1930, tried to scare Wilson into sobriety, or at least moderation. McCarthy filled one glass with water and another with whiskey and dropped a worm into each. The worm in the water moved around without noticeable ill effects; the one in the whiskey promptly died. “So,” said McCarthy to Wilson, “what does that teach you?” Wilson replied, “If you drink whiskey, you’ll never get worms.”

Wilson said, “I never played drunk. Hungover, yes, but never drunk.”
But Bill Veeck remembered one instance when Cubs trainer Andy Lotshaw had to resort to heroic measures to get Wilson ready to go out to center field:

Andy had Hack in one of those big, high old tubs, sobering him up. In the tub with Hack was a 50-pound cake of ice. Well, what would you do if a 50-pound cake of ice jumped into your tub with you? You’d try to jump out, right? That was precisely what Hack was trying to do. Enthusiastically but not successfully. Every time Hack’s head would bob up, Andy would shove it back down under the water and the cake of ice would come bobbing up. It was a fascinating sight, watching them bob in perfect rhythm, first Hack’s head, then the ice, then Hack’s head, then the ice.

That afternoon, Wilson hit three home runs. Some baseball executive might have been tempted to say something like what Abraham Lincoln said about General Ulysses S. Grant’s drinking: Find out what he drinks and send some of it to my other generals. In 1926, Wilson batted .321, drove in 109 runs, and hit 21 home runs, which may not seem very impressive by today’s standards but was good enough to lead the National League. The next year he tied for the league home-run lead with 30, and in 1928 his 31 again tied for the league lead. In 1929, Wilson batted .345 with a league-leading 159 RBIs and the Cubs won their first pennant since 1918. The Cubs lost the World Series to Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, partly because in Game 4, with the Cubs leading 8–0, the Athletics scored 10 runs in the seventh inning when Wilson lost two fly balls in the sun.
After the game, when a boy asked Cubs manager Joe McCarthy for a ball, McCarthy supposedly replied, “Come back tomorrow and stand behind Wilson and you’ll be able to pick up all the balls you want.” The following year would be better.

It is unclear why baseball went haywire in 1930. That it did so is written in numbers that are, strictly speaking, incredible. They are to be believed because the events they recorded really happened. They are, however, to be disbelieved because they are so aberrant, so discontinuous with seasons before and since, that they must be taken as evidence that for one year something was done to the ball. Some say it was wound differently—tighter, presumably. Others say, mysteriously, that it was wound with yarn made
from Australian wool, although it is unclear why that wool would have made such a difference. Never mind. These are the indisputable facts: