Bill Veeck (12 page)

The ruse was staged in vain, however, as the Blues won the first game to clinch the pennant, and the second game was called off by mutual consent. Milwaukee finished with an 81–69 record. A few weeks later, at the annual winter meeting, Veeck's wary fellow magnates reworked the rules to foil him. His attempted “larceny” of the pennant resulted in a rule that lights had to be turned on to finish any game whose conclusion was threatened by darkness. Next, the owners agreed that if the lights went out for any reason, that game had to be resumed later at the same point and with identical lineups, as early as possible.

Fueled by his team's improved performance, attendance at Borchert Field had risen from 98,000 in 1941 to 280,000 in 1942. Veeck's clever promotions also played their part, among them a new tradition of giving away odd prizes that became more bizarre as the season progressed. Veeck and Schaffer would haul a gate man's box out in front of the stands to
draw tickets, inviting spectators holding the lucky stubs to report for their prizes. In one of the early lotteries, the first fan was presented with a fifty-pound block of ice thrust into his arms by Veeck himself. The next received a keg of nails and the third a stepladder. The crowd squealed with delight as they watched hapless patrons return to their seats to deal with their gifts.

Fruit and vegetable nights followed. A lady fan who won a basket of peaches returned several nights later with an oversized peach pie, which she presented to Veeck, who spoke about it for months to come. During livestock nights the prizes included turkeys, geese, rabbits, and pigs that often “escaped” onto the field, with the winners expected to chase them. The pigs, needless to say, were greased. One night, the fans were surprised to see an old, swaybacked draft horse on the field awaiting presentation to a lucky fan. The perplexed winner had no idea what to do with the animal, so he was advised to sell it back to the farm from which Veeck had purchased it, allowing the fan to pocket $15.
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At one game Veeck awarded a man two pigeons. “I can see that poor guy yet,” Veeck recalled later, “sitting there during the game, a pigeon in each hand. He couldn't let go and nobody would help him. And you know pigeons!”

Other promotions—free lunches, vaudeville acts, swing bands—helped keep the turnstiles turning during the season. On June 2, Veeck assembled a band made up of players and Milwaukee front office personnel, which included Veeck playing a cheap whistle, Grimm on banjo, and Rudie Schaffer playing a bass created from a three-gallon paint can, a broomstick, and a well-rosined cord. That an owner would be part of a serenade to his fans was big news: “Café de Veeck Wows 'Em in Milwaukee” was the headline in the
Chicago Tribune
.
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Veeck created even more publicity when he placed a chicken-wire screen above the right-field fence to turn opponents' home runs into singles. It was then rolled out of the way when the home team came up. The practice was immediately banned.

Decades later when Veeck was serving as a friendly witness in Curt Flood's 1970 lawsuit against major-league baseball, its lawyers used the moveable fence to question Veeck's character. “May I say about the fences, as a prelude, that at that time there were no rules forbidding the motion of fences because … I have tried always not to break any rules, but to test highly their elasticity, and I did put into Milwaukee a moveable fence that was on top of our normal 25-foot right field fence. Since I had more righthand
hitters, I put it in right field, made out of chicken wire and connected to a cable that was operated by a steam winch, and I did pull it out between innings when the opposition was batting and on the next day they had a league meeting and they declared it illegal, immoral, and I stopped.”
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Borchert field had long acted as a major venue for Negro baseball teams, both the barnstorming organizations and those associated with the Negro American League. Veeck's predecessor, Henry Bendinger, staged contests there as far back as September 19, 1932, when the Kansas City Monarchs met the bearded and roguish House of David in a night game billed as being between the two leading independent clubs in baseball.
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Such contests were all but invisible to
The Sporting News
and the nation's mainstream newspapers, even when white major leaguers faced black teams. Only the African American press reported on a game between the Monarchs and a white barnstorming squad led by major leaguers Dizzy and Paul Dean in late October 1934 at Borchert Field.
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By 1937, all but one of the teams in the Negro American League, the Memphis Red Sox, had played in Milwaukee to crowds averaging 2,000 a game. Two games of the Negro American League championship that year—between the Monarchs and the Chicago American Giants—were played at Borchert Field. Bendinger was so enthusiastic about the high quality of play that he offered the league all open dates for 1938, and the crowds continued to grow. A July 1 game between the Monarchs and the Giants drew 3,500, and a game two weeks later between the Giants and the independent Ethiopian Clowns, a nonleague game, drew 4,300.
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A year later, on Sunday afternoon, June 4, 1939, the Clowns beat the Madison Blues, a white semipro team that had been the 1938 tri-state league champions, 7–1. Some 4,541 fans turned out at Borchert Field to watch
“Schoolboy” Impo of the Ethiopians pitch against Alvin “Butch” Krueger, a former pitcher for the Brewers and a former state open golf champion who had a large following in the area.
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In both 1939 and 1940, the Satchel Paige All-Stars played at Borchert Field, and Paige pitched for the Kansas City Monarchs in a doubleheader there against the Ethiopian Clowns on the eve of Veeck's announcement in June 1941 that he had purchased the Brewers, and twice more in mid-August.
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Paige had been the subject of a June 1940 feature in
Time
magazine that not only lauded him but also ended with the observation that “many a shepherd of a limping major club has made no secret of his yearning to trade more than a couple of buttsprung outfielders for colored players of the caliber of Satchelfoots Paige.”
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Later that summer
The Saturday Evening Post
ran a feature on Paige, and on June 21, 1941, he was featured in a
Life
magazine pictorial that placed him on a pedestal with fighter Joe Louis and Olympic champion Jesse Owens; the piece quoted Joe DiMaggio calling Paige the greatest pitcher he had ever faced—all the more stunning because it appeared in the midst of DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak.

Veeck especially appreciated Paige's publicity and drawing power and arranged for him to pitch at Borchert Field on multiple occasions in 1942. At the first of these, on June 28, orchestrated with the help of Abe Saperstein, who was then booking the Negro American League teams out of his Chicago office, the question of Paige's age first became an issue of national significance. Saperstein told the
Milwaukee Journal
that Paige claimed to be thirty-four years old but that he thought Satchel was actually about thirty-eight.
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In August, Paige granted an interview to the Associated Press in which he said that he did not think Negroes could be successfully integrated onto white teams because of segregation. “You might as well be honest about it, there would be plenty of problems, not only in the South where the colored boys wouldn't be able to stay and travel with teams in spring training, but in the North where they could not stay or eat with them in many places. All the nice statements in the world from both sides are not going to knock out Jim Crow.” His alternative suggestion was that all-Negro teams could operate in each of the major leagues: “That would be something.” Paige admitted in the interview that he doubted he would ever be hired by the majors because no team could match the $37,000 he had earned in 1941.
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On September 1, 1942, outfielder Hal Peck, in the backyard of his modest home in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, shot himself in the foot with a
shotgun. It was officially reported as a hunting accident, though Charlie Grimm later said that the gun had discharged while Peck was chasing a rat. He lost two toes in the mishap. Grimm later wrote, “When Hal Peck shot off his toe in a hunting accident back in my Milwaukee days, I stayed at the hospital all night with him.” Peck had been sold to the Brooklyn Dodgers a few days earlier. “On the day of the accident, we were in the office, and when the phone rang we thought it was Larry MacPhail calling to close the deal for Peck,” wrote Grimm in his memoir. “But it was Hal's wife, hysterically reporting the shooting. I thought Veeck had suffered a heart attack when he fell out of his chair. Rudie, who already had marked up the sale in his ledger, lost his voice for about a week.” Veeck ultimately persuaded MacPhail to honor the deal, though when MacPhail joined the Army soon after, his replacement, Branch Rickey, tried unsuccessfully to squelch it.
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Veeck and Rudie Schaffer arrived at Yankee Stadium on October 2 to watch the three remaining games of the 1942 World Series—all won by the St. Louis Cardinals over the Yankees—before heading back to the Midwest. Veeck denied two rumors, according to Sam Levy of the
Milwaukee Journal
: first, that he was a candidate for Larry MacPhail's vacated post as president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and second, that he intended to buy the Philadelphia Phillies. A week later, Veeck acknowledged to Levy that he had in fact gone with Schaffer to confer with Gerry Nugent, president of the Phillies.
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Nugent's team was in deep trouble, having lost 111 games in 1941—still the most in franchise history—and drawn only 231,000 fans. The operating losses on the year were $60,000, which added to a note of $55,000 that was due to the bank. Early in 1942 National League president Ford Frick had called a meeting of his Executive Committee to reveal that the team was totally out of cash and unable to even send scouts out to look for new talent. The league, with great reluctance, paid off the loan and extended Nugent additional funds so he could take his team to spring training and open the season on schedule. At the end of the season the league pushed Nugent to sell the team. One strong potential buyer, the Philco Corp., got league approval but lost interest as it concentrated on government war contracts, making radio equipment and fuses for bombs.
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“So I called on Nugent and talked about his club,” Veeck told Levy. “He quoted some large figures, but that was all.” Had he been able to close a deal, Veeck said he would have remained in Milwaukee and sent Grimm to oversee Philadelphia. “The Phils have many potential stars among their
younger players who belong in the American Association at least for one season. Those players would win a pennant for us and then be ready for the majors.”
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What Veeck did not divulge at the time, and what did not become public for some time to come, was his bold plan to buy the Phillies and staff the team with stars from the Negro leagues.

Save for being mentioned in radical papers such as the Communist
Daily Worker
, until 1940 the issue of integrating black players into the major leagues had remained largely dormant since white columnists had first brought it up in 1933. That spring, with both Philadelphia teams faring poorly in the standings and at the box office, the
Philadelphia Record
ran a sensational article headlined “Stars for A's, Pep for Phils—in Negro Ranks,” arguing that the time had come to bring Negro leaguers onto the local teams. The previous summer Phils manager Doc Prothro had stated that all his troubles would be over if he could get permission to sign “colored stars.” The
Record
quoted a number of managers and players with a “high opinion” of Negro talent and asserted that several managers and owners would sign Negro players in a moment were it not for the “most inflexible unwritten law of the game.” The paper agitated for the Jim Crow laws to be broken by the two local teams, adding, “There is even a chance—and a whole lot more—that a few thousand fans that have been staying away from the A's and the Phils might come out to see what Paige and Gibson and a few more like them might do in the major leagues.”
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Less than a year later, H. G. Salsinger of the
Detroit News
attended a doubleheader in Briggs Stadium between the Homestead Grays and the Baltimore Elite Giants. Not only did he deem the level of play equal or superior to that of the majors, but he said that black players had more verve and a keener spirit of competition. Salsinger also observed that the 27,949 fans, most of them black, who had paid to see the doubleheader were, in his words, “beautifully behaved” and “understood baseball and did not miss a single point of excellence in nineteen innings of play.” If there was an unwritten rule keeping blacks off the field, there was also an unwritten fear in the minds of whites about unruly black fans, a fear Salsinger did much to undermine: “For once Briggs Stadium housed customers who refrained from littering the fringe of the outfield with waste paper.”
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By 1942 Phil Wrigley had decided to host black-versus-white contests and all–Negro league events at Wrigley Field, which added one more roll to the drumbeat for putting blacks and whites on the same field as equals. The
stadium had been de facto off-limits to blacks in competition for more than twenty years, since the 1920 championship game of the American Professional Football Association.
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On May 24, 1942, the Kansas City Monarchs defeated Dizzy Dean's All-Stars 3–1 before a Wrigley crowd of 29,775 in a game billed as “Zeke Bonura Day,” aimed at raising money for the Navy Relief Fund by honoring local favorite Bonura, who had played for both the Cubs and the White Sox and was now in uniform. Members of the Armed Forces were allowed in free if they were in uniform. Dean's team was composed of major and minor leaguers in the service who were on furlough from their respective military bases. Cleveland Indians phenom Bob Feller was supposed to relieve Dean after an inning, but he sent his regrets earlier in the day, as he had been called back to duty by the Navy.