Bill Veeck (16 page)

Landis retorted: “No, no. The announcement will have to be that it was considered—and my recollection now is that it was considered, and you gentlemen all remember that it was considered: you each participated in the consideration of it—and that no action was taken on it; that the matter is a matter for each club to determine in getting together its baseball team; that no other solution than that, in view of the nature of operations, is possible.”
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Rickey was not satisfied with this fabricated account. Clubs, he pointed out, were now beset with “a great many petitions and a great many visitations” from groups demanding integration. “That they become embarrassing is not the point: they become time-taking, and, from a publicity standpoint, they become important.” Rickey then pushed as hard as he could, asking if a club could now state that integration deserved the joint consideration of both leagues. “Is that the position? Is it permissible or advisable for us to make that statement?”

Landis thought not, noting that three major-league managers had stated in Negro newspapers that, but for the bar, there would be a “foot-race run by sixteen Major League managers to sign up Negro players.” Landis acknowledged he had “called in these three managers, and, while there was no admission that they had made those statements, I think it is a fair approach to the truth to say that, such was the unconvincing quality of their evasiveness in reply to my questions, they all did make the statement.”

Baseball's executives faced the dilemma of how to remove the color bar without admitting it had been in place all along. Landis reiterated the comment he had made at the time Leo Durocher had been pressured into denying his claim about the color bar. Addressing the assembled group of executives, he told them, “If any of you gentlemen want to hire a Negro player, you are as much at liberty to do that as you are to sign up any other player, be he in human form.”

The transcript of the meeting reveals that everyone in the room was silent until John Quinn, part owner and president of the Boston Braves, had the last word: “I have been going to these meetings for more than 40 years, and this is the first time I heard as much as I heard in here today.”
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Following the meeting, Landis issued an official statement on behalf of both major leagues: “Each club is entirely free to employ Negro players to any extent it pleases, and the matter is solely for each club's decision without any restrictions whatsoever.”
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The
Amsterdam News
noted soon after that only two of the ten local New York papers bothered to analyze the integration appeal. Stanley Frank of
the
New York Post
interpreted it as a brush-off. “In short,” he wrote, “the owners continue to evade important social problems behind a smokescreen of words no one believes, least of all those who give them lip service.” The other paper, the left-leaning daily
PM
(the initials stood for
Picture Magazine
), was content to withhold comment and wait for the big shots of baseball to answer for themselves.
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All but one of the owners were silent on the matter, leaving the impression that nobody wanted to be the first to sign a Negro player to a contract. The lone commentator was Yankees president Ed Barrow, who had been ailing and was unable to attend the meeting. He said he had no objection to hiring Negro players. When asked if the Yankees might hire Negroes for the 1944 season, he replied: “If we find it necessary to hire colored, we will.”
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In the end, no black players were on any roster in organized baseball in 1944, even though some minor leagues came close to disbanding because of the wartime depletion in the supply of players. The one-armed white player Pete Gray and other whites of advanced age and degree of inability made it to the major leagues during World War II, but no black players did.

The Winter Meetings produced one more stunning development that stole some of the thunder away from the Robeson testimony and must have aggravated Bill Veeck to no end. The previous February, the Philadelphia Phillies had been sold to a wealthy, thirty-three-year-old lumber broker named William Cox. Not only had Veeck's bid for the team been thwarted, but Cox had been suspended temporarily during the season on suspicion of betting on a Phillies game. Cox asked for a hearing to clear his name, and the seventy-seven-year-old Landis heard him out. Other evidence was presented at the hearing that convinced Landis of his guilt and earned Cox the distinction of being the first nonplayer ever to be banned from the game.
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Some forty-eight hours after the meetings were over, Pfc. Bill Veeck returned to Milwaukee, from where he departed in charge of seventeen other Marine recruits on their way by train to San Diego. Upon arrival, Veeck received a full induction physical that deemed him fit and ready for
service. He then endured four weeks of rigorous basic training. The Marine Corps did end up using him in its recruiting efforts, sending out wire photos of him working his way through basic training.

Despite his reluctance to participate in publicity for recruiting, Veeck milked the issue of the Marines' mandatory necktie for all it was worth. He had vowed never to wear one again after prep school, but he was now forced to do so as part of his dress uniform. He joked that he had made the ultimate sartorial sacrifice to keep America safe. “My first tie almost choked me,” Veeck lamented. “I kept pulling at my collar as long as I had it on. You can guess how the shoes felt, and I have been wearing a garrison cap almost constantly. I fooled them in one place—the barber couldn't find much hair to cut.”

At the end of December, Veeck wrote that he had survived the first ten days of boot camp, expressing rare satisfaction in the experience. He described the obstacle course as a “dandy” and reported that passing his swimming test was easy.
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“There are some corking nice fellows here, and our drill instructors are all right, one in particular, Stan Green, who played football for Tom Stidham. Yo-Yo Epps [who played for Veeck in Milwaukee] came to see me the other day. He is a sergeant who looks like he is in the top pink of condition and says he has seen a great many really good-looking young ballplayers in his 20 months in the service.”
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On another occasion he ran into an old Chicago friend, Jack Brickhouse, who had worked as the announcer for both Cubs and White Sox games on WGN radio in Chicago before entering the service and who would serve as a Cubs broadcaster for decades following the war.
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Veeck quickly established himself as a special enlistee. He was featured in a short piece in
Leatherneck
magazine, the official magazine of the Marines, which began: “To the list of well-qualified men who snubbed swivel chair commissions to become enlisted Marines you may add the name of PFC William L. Veeck, Jr.” The article reported for the first time that Veeck had been offered commissions in both the Army and Navy but chose to be a private in the Marines instead.
Leatherneck
noted: “In boot camp, Veeck was ‘Honor Man' of his platoon, qualified as an expert swimmer and generally had a fine time of it.”
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However, one aspect of basic training challenged Veeck emotionally: the firing of a gun. Veeck claimed he had never before done so and in fact
loathed guns because of the accident that had claimed the life of the older brother he never knew. Forced to practice shooting, he overcame his reservations and ended up posting a score of 302 out of a possible 340—enough to officially qualify him as a sharpshooter.
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Coming out of boot camp, Veeck was sent to a replacement battalion at Camp Elliott, just north of San Diego, where he trained as an antiaircraft gunner. Soon, though, he petitioned to become a Marine Raider and requested a transfer to the Marine Raider Training Camp at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego. The Raiders specialized in amphibious light infantry warfare, particularly landing in rubber boats and operating behind enemy lines.
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However, his request was denied and Veeck's battalion was shipped overseas to Nouméa, New Caledonia, in March 1944, and then to Guadalcanal.

While there, Veeck continued to trade players for his team through war correspondents, who would convey his ideas back to audiences in Milwaukee. The reporters loved the idea that Veeck was conducting baseball business from a war zone. “A couple of Marines met today beneath the shade of the coconut palm and arranged a player deal probably unprecedented in the history of baseball,” began a dispatch on April 14, 1944. “Pfc. Veeck and Capt. Roscoe Conkling ‘Torchy' Torrance, vice president of the Seattle Rainiers had conducted a trade.” Veeck was reported to have dealt one of his three shortstops for cash.
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Torrance, with whom Veeck had done business before, had brought baseball into a war zone. Torrance ran forty teams in the South Pacific. At one undisclosed location, he had established three leagues of ten teams each, involving a total of more than 600 Marines. With the aid of Navy Seabees, he bulldozed jungle to construct twenty-one first-rate diamonds, which had to be trimmed by hand in the absence of lawn-mowing equipment.

Keeping an eye out for talent, Veeck at one point sent word back to Milwaukee that he had signed Homer Chapman, a hot prospect who would start in June 1945 with a Brewers affiliate in Middletown, Ohio, where he would lead the league with 50 stolen bases.

Two days after their war-zone meeting, Veeck told Torrance that he wanted to be reassigned to the Third Division, because he had found out he was being sent to Bougainville as part of the defense battalion while the others were going to invade Guam. “I told him I was a lowly captain and probably couldn't do much about it, but I'd try,” remembered Torrance. “I went over to see Col. David M. Shoup at Corps headquarters about the possibilities of getting Veeck reassigned. He asked me if I thought he would make a difference in
the landing in Guam, and I told him of course not, but that he was an old baseball friend and was anxious to go.”
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The colonel explained that all orders and personnel records had already been cut for the invasion and that there was nothing he could do. But the next day, he called to say that he had worked a deal so that Veeck could change units. Torrance hurried over to Veeck's unit, but it had already been removed to the other end of the island. “I tried all afternoon to get a communication through to his outfit, but with preparations for departure and all the activities going on, I was never able to reach him. The next day, we shipped out, and Bill wasn't in the unit.”
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Torrance and his unit left for the invasion of Guam in late summer, after Veeck's Third Defense Battalion was moved on April 27, 1944, to Bougainville Island, then part of the British Solomon Islands, where he would spend some three months. The island had been partially occupied by the Americans in 1943, but it was still mostly controlled by the Japanese when Veeck's unit arrived. The Marines set up a perimeter to protect the U.S. airstrip at Torokina, along the western side of the island.

Bougainville was a tropical hellhole. From the time of the invasion, the impenetrable jungle and relentless rain produced many non-combat-related casualties from filariasis, elephantiasis, diarrhea, and “jungle rot,” all of which took their toll. One survivor of the Bougainville campaign described his tropical nightmare: “Your feet began to rot, your clothes were stinking, you would get skin ulcers between your legs to the point where you ran around with Kotex [feminine sanitary pads used to absorb the fluid oozing from the ulcers] on and were downright miserable…. Bugs, spiders, an ungodly number of insects [were] biting on you.”
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Veeck noted later that during his time on Bougainville, he served as an ammunition passer, gunner, and searchlight operator. One or two Japanese planes came over every night heading for the airstrip. “Our battery did get a couple of bombers. They provided the most thrilling moments I can remember.”
Veeck's unit got shelled most every night by Japanese artillery. “I was scared plenty,” Veeck recalled, “and so was everybody else, but they never did get close enough to our area to do any real damage.”
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During the early days on the island, the unit was sometimes no more than fifty yards away from enemy snipers. Veeck delighted in shouting insults concerning Japanese prime minister Tojo, which brought angry, heavily accented slurs about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—and the occasional zinging bullet. During much of the deployment, Veeck handled the 90 mm heavy antiaircraft gun shells, which each weighed more than twenty-three pounds and had to be moved with speed and dexterity, as the gun could handle twenty to twenty-five rounds per minute.

“Veeck was a great Marine, gung ho all the way,” recalled Don Fordham, who was Veeck's sergeant and immediate commander. “He volunteered for everything he could. At first, I was concerned with getting somebody like him: ‘He's going to want special privileges. Why do I get him?' It was just the opposite. He was always the first to volunteer.”
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Later on, when their portion of the island was well secured, Veeck discovered the unit's lack of baseball equipment. Working through a clandestine network, he got word to a friend in the States, and in a matter of a few weeks, he said, “we had more balls, bats, and gloves than we could handle.” Decades later, Fordham still didn't know how Veeck pulled off getting all that baseball equipment into a remote combat zone.

Early in May 1944 Veeck overheard a newscast from the States coming from the recreation tent: “… and Charlie Grimm lost his first game as manager of the Cubs.” Veeck recalled later that the report continued: “Charlie Grimm, manager of my Milwaukee Brewers, has been signed to replace Jimmy Wilson of the Chicago Cubs. Then the announcer says Casey Stengel is taking over as manager of the Brewers. That's all I hear, but it's enough. I'm stunned.”
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