Bill Veeck (17 page)

The Cubs had opened the 1944 season by losing their first thirteen games, occasioning the resignation of manager Jimmy Wilson. Grimm's Brewers, on the other hand, got off to a 10–2 start, after which Phil Wrigley offered Grimm the managership of the Cubs. At two o'clock the next morning, Sam Levy got a call from Grimm.

“I've been asked to come back to the Cubs as manager,” said Grimm. “What do you think I ought to do?”

Levy thought he should grab the opportunity.

“But what about my buddy Bill? He's in the South Pacific and I can't get in touch with him. I don't want to leave him at such a time.”

Levy reminded Grimm of the day in June 1943 when the Cubs were in deep trouble and Veeck suggested that Grimm be drafted as the new manager, but the Cubs declined.
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Grimm immediately called Casey Stengel, asking him to serve as his replacement at the Brewers helm. Stengel had resigned as manager of the Boston Braves the previous winter. He had been hit by a cab in Boston after the 1943 season and, having barely avoided amputation of his leg, had decided not to take a baseball job in 1944. When Grimm first called, he turned down the offer, but Grimm kept calling and Stengel finally agreed, taking the job without a contract so as to help an old friend. Grimm felt that Stengel would protect his as well as Veeck's interests in the team. Indeed, columnist C. M. Gibbs of the
Baltimore Sun
thought the swap of Grimm and Stengel would “ensure a continuation without a break in the hilarious wise-cracking brand of leadership.”
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The
Milwaukee Journal
believed the swap in managers would turn out to be a masterstroke.

“I didn't even know whether we still had a ball club,” Veeck later recalled. “It was three weeks before my mail arrived, telling me about [Grimm's] deal with the Cubs.”
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However, the news of Stengel's appointment is what upset Veeck the most. Veeck attacked him professionally and personally in a letter to those running the club, which was reprinted in both Milwaukee newspapers.

“I'd like to have a complete explanation of where Stengel came from,” Veeck wrote. “Who hired him? For how much and how long? I don't want anything to do with Stengel nor do I want him to have anything to do with anything I have a voice in. In my humble opinion, he is a very poor manager…. I don't believe Stengel is a good judge of players…. I have no confidence in his ability and rather than be continuously worried I'd rather dispose of the whole damn thing…. If these aren't reasons enough, I don't like him and I want no part of him. If Stengel has an ironclad contract and it will be expensive to break, I guess we'll have to be stuck with him. If not, replace him immediately.”
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Many years later, Veeck explained his outburst in his introduction to Joseph Durso's 1967 biography of Stengel: “Although I had known Stengel casually since early childhood, I still thought of him as a clown … a guy who didn't win. I had bought the then ‘public image.'”
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After receiving word a few weeks later by return mail of the team's good fortunes—Stengel had extended the Brewers lead in the standings—Veeck eased up on his insistence that Stengel be fired immediately, but he remained
steadfast about sending Stengel packing after the season. Veeck never wrote to Stengel, only to the front office staff. In one letter to the Brewers, he wrote: “Possibly you are right, I have misused him. However, I still contend that he is a poor manager.”

Milwaukee Journal
sports editor R. G. Lynch broke the news to Stengel that the Brewers didn't want him back, and Stengel responded diplomatically. “I took this job to help out my friend, Charlie Grimm, because he said he could not take the job with the Chicago Cubs unless I did. The understanding was that I would just finish up the season, and that would give them time to find a manager for 1945.” After Stengel's announcement, Lynch penned an open note to Veeck. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he wrote. “Stengel is a swell guy. He did a great job with your ball club, and you have not written him one line all season. Why don't you write the guy?”

The Brewers went on to win the American Association pennant by seven games, though they lost in the playoffs to Louisville, four games to two. Some fans tried to organize a “Bring Back Stengel” campaign, but Stengel declared he would not return as the Brewers skipper in 1945 “under any circumstances.”

“Veeck dropped me a note the other day expressing his appreciation for the work I did here this summer,” Stengel calmly declared, “and I merely sat down and wrote him about the season. Everything is fine between us.”
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Although Veeck's initial account of his time on Bougainville was upbeat and true to his constant urge to put a positive spin on events, his reality was different. A notation in his service records shows that on Bougainville and after his return to Guadalcanal, he had multiple admissions to the sick list for the treatment of abscesses under his arms, on his hands, around his waist, and on his buttocks, legs, and face. While still on the island, an ulcer on his right leg became infected. Much more seriously, Veeck's foot was injured just before his active duty was coming to a close.
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According to Veeck at a much later date, an artillery piece had fired prematurely and recoiled into Veeck's already compromised right foot (originally injured at Kenyon College), cutting a ragged gash to the bone. The
injury was patched by Navy medics and Veeck was quickly returned to duty. A short time later, Veeck reported in with a swollen right foot; his arch had collapsed and the foot pointed outward.

He was evacuated on September 19 to a Navy field hospital on Guadalcanal and subsequently transported to San Francisco, where he arrived on October 21. “That Golden Gate coming into view was the most wonderful sight I have ever seen. I've been overseas just nine months, but this was like coming back from another world,” he wrote at the time. “The two things I wanted most when I arrived were to talk to my wife Eleanor and to drink as much fresh milk as I could hold.” He went directly to the Oak Knoll Navy Hospital in Oakland, where, according to an announcement from the Brewers, he was being sent for treatment of his ankles, which were infected with “jungle fungus.”
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With the aid of a Marine combat correspondent, he penned a small memoir of his experiences overseas, which appeared in
The Sporting News
. The article was remarkably positive given that he was returning injured from a combat zone. He was especially effusive about his fellow servicemen: “I met some really fine boys out there. I went first to New Caledonia, last February, and since then I've come across more good people than I ever knew existed. That's the thing that has impressed me the most.” A sidebar accompanying the article, written by a private named E. J. Williams, attested to Veeck's popularity. “I read of his exploits in Milwaukee and expected to run into a prime egoist, but Veeck is a regular guy all the way.”

Veeck also praised the Navy doctors who attended to him in medical facilities on Guadalcanal and Espiritu Santo. “They sent me back because my right ankle collapsed, and I couldn't get around very well. I broke it years ago playing football at Kenyon College … and it has never been right since. Also, I have a few ‘jungle sores' on my legs, which I picked up in Bougainville, but everybody got them there.”

A few days after his arrival in San Francisco, a reporter for the
Milwaukee Journal
found Veeck on the hospital grounds moving around with the aid of a cane. He was gregarious and raring to get back to the ballclub, pleased with what the Brewers had achieved in his absence despite (and because of) the signing of Stengel. “I think we set some kind of a record in that of the nine fellows, excluding the pitcher, who opened the season with us all have been sold in the majors. In making these deals, we obtained from 14 to 15 players, giving us something to build around for next season.”

He added that while overseas he had signed two pitchers—Tony Jacobs
and Lefty Stevens—who would join the team when the war was over and they were discharged. As for baseball after the war, Veeck said: “I believe we will see the biggest boom ever.”

Soon thereafter, however, Veeck's injuries necessitated that he be moved to a hospital in Corona, California. There doctors confronted the full range of his maladies: a severely injured ankle and foot, multiple sebaceous cysts on his left ear, an abscess with two draining sinuses, an infected ulcer on the surface of the upper third of his left leg, and a right leg scarred from multiple previous ulcers. Veeck was a mess and an immediate candidate for penicillin, which had come into use with the military only months earlier.

Not surprisingly, he continued to conduct Brewers business from the hospital, signing a new manager in late November. His choice was the popular Nick “Tomato Face” Cullop, who was as enamored of Veeck as Veeck was of him.
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Having admired the way Cullop got along with his players as pilot of the Columbus Red Birds in 1943, Veeck considered him a worthy successor to Grimm and Stengel.”
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Veeck was released from the hospital—in retrospect, prematurely—in late November 1944, just at the time Kenesaw Mountain Landis passed away. His contract as baseball commissioner had recently been extended to January 1953, when he would have been eighty-six.

Clearly ailing and in pain, a pale Veeck showed up at the minor-league meetings in Buffalo from December 5 to 8 with the ever-ruddy Cullop in tow. Cullop observed him in action and told
The Sporting News
: “I've never seen a guy do business like Veeck. I'm not used to seeing a club president spend money so freely. I heard a lot about him while I managed at Columbus, but man, you have to be around Veeck to believe what you've heard and read about him. He's a big leaguer in the double-A circuit.”
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His deteriorating physical condition notwithstanding, Veeck quickly renewed his public feuding with his fellow American Association owners and club presidents, upbraiding Al Banister, president of the Red Birds, for prematurely leaking news of Cullop's release from the Red Birds to take the Milwaukee job. It was a small matter, perhaps, but one that got him the kind of press coverage he was used to.
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Veeck next traveled to New York City for the Major League Winter Meetings beginning on December 12 to see and be seen. Writing about him in the
New York Times
, Arthur Daley described Veeck as easily the “most striking” figure at the gathering. “Young Bill leaned on his cane, his face lined and drawn, but the usual cheery smile on his lips.” Veeck joked that due to a pay glitch, he had only received $40 from the Marines so far, so he took the money and blew it at Toots Shor's.
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Casey Stengel was at the meetings as well, angling for a major-league team to manage, but he settled instead for the Yankees Class AA farm team in Kansas City.

On the night of December 18, a testimonial dinner was held in Veeck's honor back in Milwaukee. Wearing his dress uniform, Veeck, usually a man of many words, was too emotional to talk when called upon to speak. Tears filled his eyes, and after several pauses, he finally had to give up.
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After spending Christmas in West Bend, Veeck left for California with his wife and family in tow to see him through his first days of treatment. On New Year's Eve he reentered the Corona hospital, where he would stay until August 15, 1945. His condition had worsened during the thirty-day furlough and was becoming more severe. The bones were now clearly infected, and he was faced with the possible amputation of one or both legs. On January 12, Veeck's right leg was operated on, and three of the bones in his ankle were surgically fused. An ulcer on his left leg was also operated on in January but became progressively worse, and on March 8 he was given a skin graft. He was housed in the amputation ward, being given as many as twenty-four penicillin shots a day for five months while lying in traction—often for both legs at the same time.
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One day shortly after the ankle surgery, Casey Stengel, who lived in Glendale, California, dropped by the hospital unannounced to cheer him up and talk baseball. Still limping badly from his injury in Boston, Stengel thought he could help Veeck deal with his injuries. His comic “Ol' Perfessor” act included clowning and conversing with Veeck and others in the mangled form of English that came to be known as “Stengelese.” “Here I was feeling sorry for myself as I am sure were a great many of the men in the amputee ward at Corona. Here comes this old man. He was bouncing around that ward doing nips and knee bobs. He did more for morale than all of the psychologists and psychiatrists that the government will ever find,” Veeck recalled in a late-1960s radio broadcast, adding, “He is one of my all-time heroes.”
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The men were pleased with the attention, and Stengel returned periodically
over the course of the winter and spring, launching a friendship that would survive even during the years when Stengel managed the Yankees and Veeck was at deep odds with the men who owned that team.

Other than recalling Stengel's visits, Veeck seldom talked about his time in Corona. In a rare 1968 interview with a reporter from the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, Veeck remembered a moment in the amputation ward in Corona:

“I had both legs in traction and I was staring straight at the ceiling feeling sorry for myself. A fellow comes up to me and says, ‘You wanna play rummy?'

“Still looking at the ceiling I said, no thanks.