Bill Veeck (10 page)

For the rest of his life, Veeck would remind listeners that he was dead broke and without personal resources when he took over the Brewers. However, in a matter of a few days he put together a syndicate of Chicago and Milwaukee businessmen who had come up with $50,000 for the club and were willing to assume $50,000 of the club's debt of $118,000. Veeck got help from Philip Clarke of City National Bank of Chicago and Lester Armour of the meatpacking family, both old friends of his father's, along with a sprinkling of Milwaukee investors.

Veeck needed a manager and asked Phil Wrigley to release Charlie Grimm from his first-base coaching duties.
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Wrigley agreed and Veeck offered Grimm 25 percent ownership in the club and a salary 25 percent higher than he had gotten from the Cubs.
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Wrigley not only gave Veeck his blessing but also loaned him some of the more expendable Cubs. Among them was Lou “The Mad Russian” Novikoff, the immensely popular but consistently inept slugger and subpar outfielder who had come from the Pacific Coast League's Los Angeles Angels. The most highly publicized rookie in National League history to that point, he been built up as the next Babe Ruth. Wrigley had paid $65,000 for him, but he was sitting on the bench, having failed at the plate and been a disaster in the outfield, which at least in part appeared to be caused by a fear of Veeck's ivy. He would stop well short of the wall, watching hits fly over his head. Trainer Bob Lewis first thought The Mad Russian feared spiders, then concluded that Novikoff believed the foliage was poison ivy. He walked Novikoff out to the wall and pulled down some vines, rubbed them on his face and hands, and even put some of the leaves in his mouth and chewed on them. Novikoff smiled politely and asked “what kind of smoke would they make,” but would not go near them to find out.
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Veeck and Grimm now had their star in Novikoff—and their own clown prince to boot. Grimm believed the affable Russian American needed some freedom to be himself and vowed to give him a microphone so that he could
sing for the fans in Milwaukee as he had done when he was ripping up the Pacific Coast League.
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Their prospects improved further when Wrigley also sent them Billy Myers, a shortstop with tremendous potential but almost no playing time in Chicago, followed a few days later by catcher Al Todd, who was under contract with the Cubs and playing for Montreal in the International League.
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Although Wrigley maintained that the Brewers were not a farm team of the Cubs, both parties had some of the advantages of such an arrangement. Columnist Edward W. Cochrane wrote that the working arrangement between the two clubs was a “splendid thing for both—the Brewers will get valuable players that the Cubs cannot use. The Cubs will get the pick of Milwaukee players.”
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On June 21, Veeck and Grimm arrived at the Milwaukee railroad station with a few dollars in cash between them. After taking a break at a tavern with some locals to toast the future of the club—then eighteen and a half games out of first place—they headed over to examine Borchert Field, a dilapidated, old-fashioned wooden stadium built in 1902 with seating for 8,000. Warren Brown of the
Chicago
Herald-American
observed that it looked like the home field of the Skid Row Tigers; “if anybody were to come out to see what was going on, it, it would be necessary to go through a fumigating plant after the visit.”
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Bob French of the
Toledo Blade
, who had seen many games at the park, noted in a column following the Veeck purchase that the park was “the only one in the world perhaps where no spectator, no matter where he sits, can see the entire field”—a problem, he argued, that was keeping fans away in droves.
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Money needed to be pumped into the facility immediately, and Veeck negotiated a $50,000 loan for that purpose with City National Bank. Many of the changes would be pedestrian but essential, such as painting the stadium and refurbishing the restrooms, especially a nice new one for the female patrons Veeck was determined to attract. Other moves were more inspired. To cut down on graffiti on the freshly painted men's rooms, Veeck installed blackboards, imploring those with anonymous messages to pick up a piece of chalk and “write it here.”

Veeck and Grimm inherited Rudie Schaffer, the Brewers secretary, who was also a certified public accountant. A small, vivacious man—Grimm described him as “pixyish”—he had worked for the Brewers for six years for little compensation, but he was motivated by what Veeck called “his
boundless love of baseball.” As formal personally as Veeck was not, Schaffer agreed to stay on and help bring about the rebirth of baseball in Milwaukee.
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Veeck immediately established himself as a new kind of owner, and created a template for his early days in ownership situations to come. He was in the stands and bleachers for almost every game, talking to fans about the club and what they liked and disliked about the stadium. Grimm watched as Veeck worked the crowd for that first half season: “When it was over, I'm sure that Bill, who roamed the stands during every game, had mitted every fan who came to the park. He stood at the main exit as they left the park, in the manner of a preacher at the church door. He invited suggestions and complaints. He and the fans congratulated each other on victory and exchanged sympathies after defeat.”
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To keep the sportswriters happy, Veeck built a new press box stocked with an unlimited supply of beer and cold meat and made himself available for interviews at all times of the day or night. When he wasn't at the ballpark, he was out speaking to any group—no matter how small—about his team and how it would soon be in contention.
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Yet despite early tinkering by Veeck and Grimm, the team continued to slip in the standings. On July 21, Bob French, a columnist for the
Toledo Blade
, noted that the Brewers were now deeper in the cellar than they had been when the Veeck-Grimm team had taken over four weeks earlier. They had won only a third of their games in that time and found themselves thirteen games behind the seventh-place St. Paul Saints, with a won-lost record of 24–66. French noted that attendance at Brewers games had peaked with the advent of new ownership but was dwindling again.”
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Veeck realized that if he could not yet give the fans a winning team, he could give them entertainment, so he began adding music and other sideshows to the proceedings. Promotional efforts in baseball were rare and often limited to Ladies' Day and doubleheaders. There were no mascots in the modern sense, and music at the ballpark was uncommon, save for opening day and the World Series. Veeck and the ever-playful Charlie Grimm were thus working with a blank canvas.

On August 13 some 5,000 fans paid to watch Satchel Paige and his Monarchs in action in an official Negro American League game. The Monarchs dropped the game 1–0 to the Birmingham Black Barons, but the real attraction was Paige, an established star who in the month of August alone packed
stadiums from Massachusetts to California. The long friendship between Veeck and Paige began when they met that night.
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A “family party” night in late August drew more than 4,000, which seemed to be the turning point for attendance in terms of a regular league game. In town for a game a few days later, league president Trautman said: “Two months ago, I wouldn't give you a quarter for Milwaukee's baseball future. Look at it today. Why, this town is the talk of baseball.”
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Meanwhile, Veeck shuttled players in and out on almost a daily basis. In fewer than three months, he bought, sold, or exchanged a record fifty-one players, allowing him to boast of running “three teams—the one that left yesterday, the one playing today, the one coming in tomorrow.” Even if only for a few days, the players for the 1941 Brewers were treated well by Veeck, who, for example, provided them with unlimited soft drinks and beer between games of a doubleheader.

Veeck also established an emotional attachment to the team that made him euphoric after a win and gloomy after a defeat. “Bill was a hard loser,” Grimm testified. “Often, after we lost, he'd be in bed when I arrived back at our hotel.” Others observed that after a defeat he would go to bed without eating. The Brewers cost Veeck a lot of dinners, because they remained in last place to the end of the 1941 season.

The bright spot was Novikoff, who claimed the American Association batting title with a .397 average for the 90 games he played for the Brewers, ensuring that the Cubs would reclaim him for the following season. Veeck and Grimm had catered to his every whim, including allowing him to sing and play the harmonica as part of a pre-game ritual. Recognizing his slugger's inability to field grounders, Veeck kept the grass in left field so long that a ball hit there would quickly slow to a dead stop, allowing Novikoff to easily pick it up.
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Veeck's improvements prompted Sam Levy, a young sports reporter for the
Milwaukee Journal
who covered the team as his beat, to describe the Brewers as the best-looking eighth-place team in the history of the American Association. Levy concluded after the Brewers last game of 1941, “The experts will be cautious in making their 1942 guesses—ours is ready: no lower than fourth place.”
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The 1941 season also netted Veeck a partner in Rudie Schaffer, who immediately assumed the role of Veeck's right-hand man and would remain essential to him for decades to come. “Rudie and I complement each other
perfectly,” Veeck later observed. “I'm the one who takes the bows, and he's the one who does the work.”

As the season drew to a close, Veeck and Schaffer looked for an additional source of revenue to keep themselves and the team afloat during the winter of 1941–42. The answer came from his old Chicago acquaintance Abe Saperstein. In the fall of 1941 Saperstein gave Veeck and Schaffer the right to promote the Chicago-based Harlem Globe Trotters in the upper Midwest.
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Wendell Smith, sports editor of the
Pittsburgh Courier
(then regarded as the most popular black newspaper in the country), who would become a close friend to Veeck and Saperstein, later wrote that Veeck was in a financial hole when Saperstein stepped in and “probably saved Veeck's baseball career, as well as the Milwaukee franchise.” Veeck added: “We made money on those Globe Trotter promotions, and as a result, Abe and I have been the best of friends ever since.” On another occasion almost twenty years later, Veeck claimed that the Globe Trotter bookings had allowed him to make enough money to keep the Brewers going.
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Although best known for his basketball promotions, Saperstein was also a major promoter of Negro baseball during the summer months. He was perhaps best known for his handling of the second Negro league's East-West All-Star Game in 1935, which drew more than 50,000 to Comiskey Park.

The other bond to come out of the 1941 season was Veeck's strong relationship with a cohort of writers—Sam Levy, R. G. Lynch, and Ray Grody in Milwaukee, and in Chicago the likes of Warren Brown at the
Chicago Herald-Examiner
and Arch Ward of the
Chicago Tribune
, who seemed to mention Veeck in his “Wake of the News” column at least once a week. Sam Levy nicknamed Veeck “Sport Shirt Bill,” which fit his determinedly nonconformist appearance. Veeck was rarely seen in anything other than a white sport shirt, never wore a hat, eschewed overcoats save on the coldest of days, and wore moccasins, which he tended to slip off, allowing him to walk around in his stocking feet. He turned being tieless into an article of faith in a day when male working-class patrons showed up to watch the game in neckties, hats, and lace-up shoes.
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Veeck in essence created himself as a brand, allowing him to get easy
publicity. Even in the off-season, he attracted ink on the thinnest of premises. On November 5, for instance, he revealed that Grimm had been offered the managership of a major-league team but had turned it down. He also noted that he himself had turned down a major-league offer for Brewers catcher Charlie “The Greek” George. Whether these were bona fide offers or simply rumors, Veeck clearly could get wire service reporters and editors to carry a story with few specifics.
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At the end of the 1941 season, with Saperstein's payments in hand, Veeck prepared for his next round of transactions during the Winter Meetings in Jacksonville, Florida, in December. Veeck obtained a few new faces for his club before the meetings ended on Friday the fifth. Two days later, the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, and America's involvement in World War II commenced.

The military draft had been instituted earlier in anticipation of war, and a few major leaguers had already served. Hank Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers slugger, had been drafted the previous May, having hit two home runs the eve of his induction. He had served his required time in an Army antitank unit, where he was promoted to the rank of sergeant and was released two days before Pearl Harbor. He wrote to Jack Cuddy of the United Press at the beginning of January 1942 to report that he had, at age thirty-one, reenlisted in the Army a few days after his discharge.
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The son of Orthodox Jewish immigrants, Greenberg maintained throughout the late 1930s that he was hitting home runs in defiance of Hitler.
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Greenberg was not the only star player to serve. Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians, the leading pitcher in the American League, enlisted in the Naval Reserve and was sworn in by Lieut. Cmdr. Gene Tunney, former world heavyweight boxing champion.