Bill Veeck (14 page)

Veeck then took the Pennsylvania Railroad's eastbound Broadway Limited,
which arrived in North Philadelphia station at 8:03 a.m. the next morning: “I got on the train feeling I had not only a major league ball club but I was almost a virtual cinch to win the pennant next year. And because [black ballplayers were] the only really untapped reservoir of playing talent, it didn't matter to me whether they were pink with blue dots or black. Matter of fact I made arrangements for a strutting band.”
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Before reaching Nugent's office, however, Veeck discovered that the Phillies had been officially taken over by the National League the night before and that a new owner was being sought.
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Who scotched the deal has never been revealed. “I have proof,” Veeck said in later interviews. “When I was in [Landis's] office, I had them purchased. I always will believe Landis leaked our plans to Frick. Frick wouldn't talk business with us.”
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“His big mistake in trying to buy the Phillies was going to the Commissioner for permission,” said Negro league and major-league player Monte Irvin. “He should have just done it.”
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Veeck realized that an entire team of players from the Negro leagues would still be a form of segregation, but he knew it would not have stayed that way for long. “Other owners would have been forced to sign other Negroes, because the success of my club would have made it a necessity.”
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Veeck would always insist that his attempt to buy and recast the Phillies was a wholly pragmatic decision by a man who was color-blind. “In 1942 I really tried to break the color line and thought I had. It lasted for about 24 hours,” he recalled years later.
⁴⁴
Nonetheless, in its wake the struggle to integrate the game heated up, with the CIO leading the charge.

During the Winter Meetings in 1942, ten members of the CIO's leadership committee attempted to appear before the assembled major-league executives at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago. Nine of the union leaders were white. Landis had ignored their earlier request for an audience, so on December 3, the first day of the meetings, the union leaders told Leslie O'Conner, Landis's secretary, that unless they were admitted to the session, they would bring the issue of baseball's integration before the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), the agency created by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 to enforce his banning of racial discrimination in any defense industry receiving federal contracts. The order also empowered the FEPC
to investigate complaints and take action against any alleged employment discrimination.

The group was rebuffed nevertheless, and they repaired to the press room, where they announced a public campaign to open baseball up to blacks.
⁴⁵

Phil Wrigley decided that he would support the union. “When the CIO came to talk to Judge Landis at the meeting of the big leagues, I went down to talk to the committee and invited them to see me,” he later told the
Defender
. “I'm an honorary member of the CIO. When they attempted to organize all the stewards on my ships, I paid the initiation fee for all the men.” Wrigley encouraged the drive to integrate baseball, acknowledging that a gentlemen's agreement or color bar was indeed in place: “There are men in high places who don't want to see it.” The CIO would continue to push for racial integration, but not with the same vigor.
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Thwarted in his efforts to buy the Phillies, on December 6, 1942, Veeck teamed up with Rudie Schaffer to announce a deal with Abe Saperstein that would bring the two top Negro basketball teams in the country—the Chicago-based Harlem Globe Trotters and the New York Renaissance—to Milwaukee to play in a basketball doubleheader against Wisconsin's two professional basketball teams, both members of the National Basketball League (NBL), the white Sheboygan Red Skins and the Oshkosh All-Stars.

Fay Young of the
Chicago Defender
was in attendance, and when the timekeeper did not show up, Veeck turned to Young and handed him the controls to the game clock. As Young observed in his column years later: “The Negro fans were somewhat taken off their feet to see a Negro operating a time clock in a game between Negro teams and white teams.”
⁴⁷

The NBL teams beat the Negro teams by large margins, but the bigger story was that 4,000 fans had paid to see the contest, filling the Milwaukee Auditorium. Even more significant, earlier in the NBL season two of its teams had integrated. The Toledo Jim White Chevrolets and the Chicago Studebakers had between them signed ten black players for the 1942–43 season, including several former Globe Trotters. Veeck staged games with these integrated teams: on January 11, 1943, the Chicago team played the Zollner Pistons of Fort Wayne (later to become the Detroit Pistons), and a few days later opposed Oshkosh in Cicero, Illinois, with five African Americans in the starting lineup.
⁴⁸
The NBL, a forerunner to the National Basketball Association,
became the first major professional league of the modern era to integrate racially.
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On December 30, 1942, Veeck was named minor-league executive of the year by
The Sporting News
, then the official house organ of baseball. He was singled out by editor Edgar G. Brands for his ability to keep the game alive through the fall and winter by making personal appearances on the “mashed potato circuit.” But his constant focus on sporting issues took its toll on his young family. A month later, in response to this award, R. G. Lynch of the
Milwaukee Journal
wrote that Eleanor Veeck, not Bill, deserved an award. Lynch's item in
The Sporting News
was entitled “Propose Medal for Mrs. Veeck” and revealed the challenge of being married to Bill.

When Veeck first moved to Milwaukee, he rented a home some ten miles away from Borchert Field. After gasoline rationing was instituted during the war, Bill, perversely, moved some twenty-five miles farther out to a 160-acre farm. According to Lynch, they moved into a summer home on a razor-back ridge overlooking a small lake. There was no place to turn a car on the ridge; the only way out was to back down the hill. “The ridge is so sharp that the Veecks have to be very careful stepping out the back door.”

It snowed the day the movers delivered the Veecks' furniture to this outpost, and the road was impassable. A few days later, expected in St. Paul for an old-timers dinner, Veeck had to hike six miles to West Bend in subzero weather to catch a train, then six miles back to get home.

Lynch implored his readers not to feel sorry for “Fuzzy” but to think of his wife. “At first, she had to get two small boys to and from school, but she no longer has that problem. Bill, Jr., has the measles and his brother Pete fell off the ridge the other day and fractured his collarbone. So there is Mrs. Veeck, snowbound on a hilltop about a half mile from the nearest house with the two boys to care for and the fireplace to stoke with maple chunks all day
because in this zero weather this week, the oil burner Fuzzy installed would not heat the windward side of the house.”

Veeck was apparently in residence only when it suited him. “During the winter, Bill invited his baseball friends out to see his wonderful home,” recalled Charlie Grimm in his memoir, “… but his main motive was to get help in chopping wood.” At one point the pump froze, and for several weeks a farmer hauled water in milk cans to the Veeck home with a team and bobsled. A few weeks later, with the 1943 season drawing nigh, Bill managed to reach Milwaukee. There were big drifts around Borchert Field, but during a snowstorm, he put up a big sign on the front wall. It read: NEXT GAME, MAY 5.
^aj

Over the winter, the U.S. government's Office of Defense Transportation demanded less travel by baseball teams as an austerity measure, and accordingly the Brewers staged spring training in 1943 close to home. Veeck decided his preseason would open April 6 in Wisconsin at Waukesha's Frame Field, the home for Waukesha's entry in the industrial Land O' Lakes League.

In early February, Veeck, Rudie Schaffer, radio announcer and vice president Mickey Heath, and Charlie Grimm went to Waukesha to meet with local officials and make final arrangements for the venue. As the group left a luncheon meeting for an inspection of the frozen, snow-covered field, it was attacked from behind by Veeck, who had circled around them with an armload of well-packed snowballs. Retaliation ensued, and once the snowball fight was over, a photographer from the
Journal
asked the Brewers officials to pose for a picture on the snowy field. They obliged by creating an impromptu baseball scene, with a stick for a bat and a snowball for a baseball.

Just as the shot was about to be taken, Veeck yelled, “Wait a minute—who ever heard of playing baseball in overcoats?” All but Grimm shed theirs. “I just got up from Missouri—do you want me to get pneumonia?” he said. Schaffer at this point had removed his clothes and was standing in his underwear in the snow, prepared to play umpire for the staged show. R. G. Lynch of the
Milwaukee Journal
had previously called Schaffer smart and pleasant but “mousey withal”; now he said the accountant had been transformed. “The metamorphosis was complete; the mouse had become a shameless exhibitionist just like his boss.”
¹

Before the month of February was over, Veeck announced that he would schedule morning games during the upcoming season, having listened to fans' concerns during off-season meetings at local factories. The facilities were working at full tilt to accommodate the needs of wartime production, and night-shift workers told him they weren't able to attend games because of their schedules. Veeck therefore changed the start time of certain games to 10:30 a.m., explaining that this would give the workers on both the early and late-night shifts a chance to get to the ballpark. “Those who work from four to midnight will have plenty of sleep before game time, and those on the midnight to eight a.m. shift can have their breakfasts, come out the park, and then go home for their rest.”

“Morning baseball? I think it's a pretty darn swell idea,” said eighty-year-old Connie Mack, who for all of his reputation as a starched-collar baseball conservative found Veeck's iconoclasm and spirited approach to the game appealing.
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The first of these morning games was on May 7. Tickets were sold at local factories, and when fans showed up at the ballpark, they were treated to coffee and donuts and could buy cereal in wax packets at a bargain price. A seven-piece swing band, dressed in nightgowns and stocking caps, entertained the fans, and Veeck doled out Corn Flakes. As it turned out, the train bringing the St. Paul team was late, so the game did not start until noon, and Veeck had to refund the price of 2,000 tickets. The Brewers pounded four St. Paul pitchers for 24 hits and 50 total bases, setting a new American Association record. In posting his 20–0 complete-game three-hitter, Wes Livengood, the Brewers rookie right-hander, hit two doubles and a single.

Veeck's morning game garnered national publicity.
Look
carried an image of Veeck and Schaffer dumping coach Red Smith out of a prop bed that had been placed on the field so that he would be ready for the ten-thirty game. Another photo showed Veeck serving a young boy milk and cereal at the game.
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A new cadre of fans included “lady riveters.” Veeck observed, “Ten of these riveters used to come in as a body, and two of them were among the finest umpire baiters it has been my privilege to meet.”
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Almost everything Veeck decided to do to promote his club became a national news story. He joked that he was “out for blood” when he announced later in May that every pint of blood given at the Milwaukee Red Cross Procurement Center would win the donor a weekly pass to the ballpark. Other ball clubs were quick to adopt this simple means of promoting their teams while supporting the war effort.

Without Hal Peck in the lineup and with no left-handed pull hitter to replace him, Veeck announced the return of the thirty-seven-foot “spite fence” atop the right-field wall.
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People came to see the fence, but just as often they showed up to see Veeck himself. He had become a drawing card. “It is two hours before game time at the Milwaukee Brewers baseball park,” reported Arthur Bystrom of the Associated Press on Veeck's oft-repeated public ritual. “On the mound is a well-built, bare-headed young man, clad in shorts and sport shirt tossing baseballs to batters for practice. Twenty minutes later, he quits, dashes to an office beneath the stands, takes a shower, changes into a pair of slacks, and drinks a ‘black cow'—root beer with ice cream. An hour before game time, a swing band begins ‘giving out' from its perch high in the grandstand and the young man is at the main entrance shaking hands with fans as they enter.”
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That summer, Veeck tried in vain to obtain Pete Gray from the Memphis Chicks. Gray had lost an arm in an automobile accident but was nonetheless batting .300 and was one of the top outfielders in the Southern Association. He was also by any measure the Chicks' biggest drawing card. With an eye on the box office potential of a player who lacked a limb, Veeck offered a large sum for Gray. The deal was never made because the Chicks, instead of money, wanted four of Veeck's top players in exchange.
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If he could not get Gray, he did get a damaged Hal Peck back in mid-August. Peck had not played for Brooklyn since spring training, and Veeck grabbed him on an option.