Bill Veeck (2 page)

Marty Appel, who knew Veeck when he served as head of public relations
for the New York Yankees, saw it in the starker terms of an upstart confronting an old-boy network: “They were wealthy Republicans and he wasn't.”
¹¹

If most of his fellow owners hated him, writers and sportscasters loved him. Veeck owned the writers because he was so accessible. He would be there game after game telling stories and answering questions. To the late Jim Murray of the
Los Angeles Times
, Veeck was “America's gadfly.” To Robert W. Creamer, who wrote Veeck's
Sports Illustrated
obituary, he was “more than anything else … a fresh breeze blowing through baseball.” The late William Barry Furlong wrote of him: “To the public, Bill Veeck … is a brashly clamorous individual who has fashioned a brilliant career out of defying the customs, conventions and crustaceans of baseball. It is an authentic yet one-dimensional view. For Veeck is also an intelligent, impetuous, whimsical, stubborn, tough-fibered, tireless individual with a vast capacity for living and a deep appreciation for humanity.” As Furlong's prose attests, Bill Veeck attracted adjectives the way others attract mosquitoes—he was also called imaginative, uninhibited, innovative, and fiercely independent, and, on the negative side, confrontational and contentious.
¹²
“Veeck is a genius, as rare as fragrant cheese,” wrote Wells Twombly of the
San Francisco Examiner
. Dick Victory, writing for the
Evening Star
in 1970, said that Veeck had at that point “probably been called a ‘maverick' more times than any other man associated with any sport.” Veeck loved the role of gadfly to the point where he felt snubbed when not singled out as an enemy of the establishment. “One of the most disappointing moments of his life,” his widow, Mary Frances Veeck, said, “was the moment he learned he was not on President's Nixon's famous enem[ies] list.”
¹³

Veeck was an everyman who believed his common touch was the secret of his success. Born into a life of privilege, he attended and quickly departed the finest schools and always chose to take the path that veered away from comfort. Mary Frances Veeck's favorite way of putting it was that Bill “was born on the right side of the tracks, and dragged himself to the other side—and then lived comfortably on both.”
¹⁴

Even as a team owner, he insisted on sitting in the bleachers, in part because of his belief that one's knowledge of baseball is in inverse proportion to the price of one's seat. His approach to management was to have the doors removed from his office because he believed that custodians and groundskeepers had as much right to his time as his coaches and players.

Bill Veeck's singular American life story is a multifaceted one, reflecting the changing face of America's favorite sport, the ability of the individual to
effect change, and the transformative power of sports in a postwar America just beginning to struggle with the next phase of its historical burden of racial prejudice and injustice. Many knew Veeck as the “Barnum of Baseball,” the guy who sent a midget to the plate in 1951, but few knew that he walked—on one leg—in Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral march in Atlanta or that he became a fervent antiwar and gun control advocate in the final years of his life. At the heart of Veeck's story is the conflict between a stubborn, iconoclastic individual and the entrenched status quo. He once said: “The athlete who catches the imagination is the individualist, the free soul who challenges not only the opposition but the generally accepted rules of behavior. Essentially, he should be uncivilized. Untamed.” He was alluding to such men as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, but he was also, of course, describing himself.
¹⁵

The first Bill Veeck—William L. Veeck Sr.—was born in Boonville, Indiana, a small village near Evansville, on January 20, 1876, the son of Dutch parents. The original family name had been Vander Veeck but later was shortened to Veeck. William became a telegraph messenger boy at age ten and then worked in a drugstore while briefly apprenticed to his father, who made wagons and cabinets. He was minimally educated, having to drop out of school after only three years because of the death of his father in 1886. Like most small-town boys of the time, he played baseball, but not as well as his older brother Ed, who caught for the semipro Evansville team.

At the age of fourteen, William became a printer's apprentice and then a pressroom helper at the
Boonville Standard
, where he worked for six years. He also sold the paper on the streets. Despite his lack of a formal education, Veeck read and wrote constantly, and he had a brief but failed career as a traveling photographer with a friend named Frank Snyder. Veeck moved to Louisville, eventually finding a job at the
Louisville Courier-Journal
, where he spent most of his four years at the paper as a police reporter. While working at the paper, he returned home on October 17, 1900, to marry Grace DeForest, his childhood sweetheart. Her father was the area's only doctor and one of its largest landowners, and he was outraged that his daughter was marrying an itinerant journalist not only younger than she but also poorly educated. However, Gracie, as she was called, was a woman of strong will and determination.
¹

The couple might have stayed in Louisville had it not been for a
record-setting heat wave in July 1901.
²
The ordeal was so trying that Veeck determined to embark on a bold plan he had been turning over in his mind for many months: to move to Chicago. In 1902, he took a job with the Chicago
Inter-Ocean
and then shifted to the hotel beat at the Chicago
Chronicle
, covering in particular the Congress Hotel and its many celebrity guests.

Editor Ed W. Smith discovered Veeck's interest in baseball and assigned him a new beat. “He broke in at a fine time, in the days of the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance dynasty, the 1906 days of the White Sox Hitless Wonders, days of murderous N.Y. Giants, poisonous Pirates, deadly Athletics—what days!” Smith recalled at the time of Veeck's death.
³

With the sudden collapse of the
Chronicle
in 1907, Smith and Veeck moved to William Randolph Hearst's
Chicago Evening American
, where Veeck worked as a reporter and rewrite man. He was soon given a regular column on sports, which he wrote under the alliterative pseudonym Bill Bailey. Known as the “madhouse on Madison,” the Hearst paper feasted on scandal and violence, fueled by tobacco and whiskey. Veeck worked at the
American
for the next dozen years covering both the Cubs and the White Sox.
⁴

The Veecks lived on Lexington Avenue in the Woodlawn section of Chicago, where their first child, Maurice Forest Veeck, had been born shortly after their arrival in 1902. On September 30, 1909, at the age of seven, Maurice was killed while playing “warrior” after school with a friend named Preston Lavin. The boys had been close since they could walk, and they had always gone to and from school together. On the evening of the accident, their teacher had walked the boys home to pay a call on the Lavins, and shortly after she left, the boys went to the Lavins' library to play with wooden guns. However, Lavin picked up a loaded Colt .38 revolver that his father had left on the table. The gun was usually unloaded, but a few nights earlier, the elder Lavin had been awakened by a noise in the basement and had loaded the gun and gone downstairs to investigate. Upon finding nothing, he returned to the library, where he carelessly left the loaded gun on the table. The boys had played with the unloaded gun before. Preston told his mother that he was showing Maurice how the gun worked when it discharged, hitting the Veeck boy under the eye.
⁵

The death was ruled accidental, and the body was taken to Boonville for the funeral and burial. The account in Veeck's newspaper contained a picture of Maurice and a paragraph that could only have been informed by his father: “The little Veeck was an only child, and his parents built their lives
around him. He was a particularly handsome and manly little fellow, sturdy and strong and more quiet than most children and greatly beloved by a great many people.”
⁶

Maurice's mother never really got over the tragedy, becoming much less social and given to long, solitary walks. For his part, William Veeck threw himself even more deeply into his work as a sportswriter, becoming one of Chicago's best-known and most popular baseball writers and part of a corps that included Ring Lardner, Hugh Fullerton, and Gus Axelson. Veeck was respected enough to be invited with Lardner and a select group by White Sox owner Charles Comiskey to spend time with him at his wooded retreat in Eagle River, Wisconsin, and to drink with him at the stadium in a small group known as the Woodland Bards Association. Their clubhouse at the ballpark was known as the Bards Room.
⁷

Anonymity became a dilemma for Veeck, since few people knew that he was Bill Bailey. Even when Maurice was killed, the names were not linked in any of the newspapers reporting the death. Veeck asked repeatedly and with increasing frustration to be able to write under his own name, but he was denied by a managing editor who felt the public might think the great Bill Bailey had left the paper and been replaced by a new man.
⁸

On April 27, 1911, Margaret Ann Veeck was born in Chicago, followed by a brother, William Louis Veeck Jr., on February 9, 1914. “After the death of Maurice,” says Fred Krehbiel, Margaret's son, “my grandmother really didn't want to have children—or at least that's the impression she gave—but my grandfather prevailed.” When young Bill was a year old, the family moved to Hinsdale, west of Chicago, an eighteen-mile train ride from the Loop.
⁹

Shortly after Bill's birth in 1914, Smith, still sports editor of the
American
, and the elder Veeck sought to buy the Denver Bears of the Western League. As Smith recalled later, they “would have done so but for the outburst of the Federal League,” whose teams were signing key players from Denver and top minor-league clubs. Smith observed that Veeck had long aspired to be a baseball executive, an urge that seemed to get stronger as his family got larger and the newspaper business became more precarious.

Young bill Veeck made his debut in print as an infant when his father wrote a column for the
Evening American
on the sad state of the Chicago
Cubs as an offensive unit: “My new son can throw his bottle farther than the team can hit!” During the 1918 season, when his son was four, Veeck wrote a series of especially pointed columns about how badly the Cubs were managed both financially and on the field.
¹⁰

The White Sox had been the dominant force in Chicago baseball, but despite their deficiencies, the Cubs won the 1918 National League pennant in a war-shortened season. When the Boston Red Sox beat the Cubs four games to two in the World Series, Veeck's criticism was renewed, suggesting that an outside force had prevented them from winning.
^a

Information obtained and made public by the Chicago History Museum in 2008 suggests that gamblers may have gotten to the 1918 Cubs. Eddie Cicotte, a pitcher and one of the eight White Sox outcasts from the 1919 World Series, which in fact was fixed, said in an affidavit he gave to the 1920 Cook County, Illinois, grand jury that the Cubs influenced the Black Sox. Cicotte said the notion of throwing a World Series first came up when the White Sox were on a train to New York with the Cubs, presumably in May 1919, when both teams were playing on the East Coast. The team was discussing the previous year's World Series, which had been fixed, according to players Ciccote did not identify in his statement. A few members of the White Sox then tried to figure out how many players it would take to throw a Series. From that conversation, Cicotte testified, the most famous sports scandal in American history was born.

Cicotte's sworn testimony was reinforced by another piece of information unearthed in 1963. Fred Krehbiel, then a White Sox employee at Comiskey Park, stumbled upon a long-lost ledger book and legal pad with two dozen pages of handwritten notes, including allegations of game fixing from four decades earlier. The documents were remnants of a diary kept by Harry Grabiner, a longtime deputy to White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and a confidant of Commissioner of Baseball Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
^b
After the game had been hit by a series of gambling allegations in the lateteens
and early 1920s, Grabiner provided Landis with a list of twenty-seven “dirty” players. The complete diary and list have never been recovered and remain the subject of much speculation. But the papers unearthed in 1963 included a scribbled notation next to the name of former Cubs pitcher Gene Packard: “1918 Series fixer.” Packard had not pitched for the Cubs since 1917, but he knew most of the team's personnel.
¹¹

Baseball columnist Hugh Fullerton—a close friend of Veeck's and the man who eventually blew the whistle on baseball's gambling problem—also suggested that something was afoul in 1918.
^c
Fullerton's accounts of the 1918 World Series repeatedly point out bizarre baserunning mistakes and defensive flubs.
¹²

The 1918 series was played under the dark cloud of World War I, the United States having recently entered the conflict. The national “Work or Fight” order, decreeing that anyone of draft age who was not employed in war-related work—shipbuilding, farming, manufacturing—would be subject to immediate conscription, deemed baseball to be nonessential and forced the premature end of the regular season on September 1. The World Series that year remains the only one played entirely in September, and owners worried that there might not be a 1919 season.