Bill Veeck (4 page)

Determined to purge Cubs Park of gamblers, on May 24, 1920, police officers dressed as sailors, ice wagon drivers, soldiers, bootblacks, and farmers broke up a gambling ring in the bleachers, arresting forty-seven bettors. Each of those arrested was held on $25 bond, and though they were acquitted for lack of evidence, the point was made.

Three months later, prior to the August 31 game between the Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies, Veeck received a warning telegram from Detroit: “UNLIMITED AMOUNTS OF MONEY TODAY BY CHICAGO SHARPS TO BE WAGERED ON PHILADELPHIA WINNING TODAY'S GAME. SOMETHING PECULIAR.” It was signed by one W. H. Brown, a name unknown to Veeck, and was followed by five more telegrams and phone calls from Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago warning that the fix was in and informing Veeck that thousands of dollars were being wagered against the Cubs in several cities. Veeck immediately yanked the pitcher who was next in the rotation, Claude Hendrix, and in his place put the incorruptible Grover Cleveland Alexander, promising
him a $500 bonus if he won the game. Veeck positioned detectives around the ballpark, but nothing suspicious occurred even though Alexander lost the game 3–1.
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After the game, Veeck employed the Burns Detective Agency to investigate the telegrams and phone calls. Its operatives were unable to locate any of the senders, and Veeck began to suspect the communications might have been part of a reverse plot to have the Cubs switch to Alexander in the expectation he would win. Two days later, the Chicago
Herald and Examiner
broke the story that the game had been fixed and more than $50,000 had been bet on Philadelphia to win. Veeck called for an immediate investigation by a committee of three Chicago baseball writers, who would be given money to hire private detectives.
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“If the charges are proved, we will drive the guilty players out of baseball, even though it shatters the Cubs team,” he vowed.
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Because interstate commerce was involved, one of the wire services suggested that federal authorities might soon concern themselves with the issue of baseball corruption. That did not happen, but on September 7, a Cook County grand jury convened to investigate gambling in baseball. In addition to investigating the Phillies-Cubs game eight days earlier, presiding judge Charles McDonell recommended that the jury review the 1919 White Sox–Reds World Series. Evidence had suddenly come to light that Sox owner Charles Comiskey had held up the World Series bonus checks of eight White Sox players before finally mailing them out.

The closed hearings commenced on September 22, limiting the public to secondhand information.
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The curious Cubs-Phillies game was the first order of business, and Veeck testified as to what was at stake: “This scandal—whether true or untrue—is more than the mere business of the Chicago baseball club. Baseball belongs to the American people. For baseball to be unclean would not only be, in American life, a sporting calamity, but a moral calamity.” Suspicion fell on pitcher Hendrix and on Cubs first baseman Fred Merkle, infielder Buck Herzog, and pitcher Paul Carter.
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No
conclusive proof was uncovered against any of them, so the matter was dropped.”
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More significant, Veeck had sparked the investigation into the 1919 World Series, and later in the year eight members of the White Sox were indicted for their roles in the fix.
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More allegations were made of fixed games during the 1920 season. In September an apparent attempt was made to influence the betting odds in an upcoming series when a bogus report was circulated that Babe Ruth and other members of the New York Yankees had been killed or seriously injured in a car wreck. One of the private investigators working for Veeck helped disprove the report.
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Veeck made further news in January 1921 when he led a group of fellow executives in banning all clubhouse gambling, which was rampant, pledging to get rid of stars unwilling to follow the rule. In July 1922, Veeck had forty gamblers arrested who he claimed were betting openly and badgering the players to perform in a way that would favorably affect their wagers. A judge threw out the charges, but Veeck had underscored his determination to rid the sport of its persistent gambling problem.
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Following his promotional and business instincts, in late 1920 Veeck rented Cubs Park to George Halas, the player-coach of the Decatur Staleys, and A. E. Staley, the team's owner, to stage a professional football game on December 12, 1920. The Staleys, champions of the Western Division, played the Akron Steel, victors in the East, for the championship of the American Professional Football Association. Akron was led by its star halfback and co-coach, Fritz Pollard, the first African American to play in a professional sporting event at Cubs Park. The match was played before 12,000 fans and ended in a scoreless tie. Afterward, George Halas proposed a rematch, promising a crowd of at least 15,000, but Akron declined.

Encouraged by Staley, Halas sought a city larger than Decatur as home for the Staleys, and Staley agreed to support the club in a new location for one year. Halas then made a deal with Veeck for the 1921 football season, under which the Cubs got 15 percent of the gate (20 percent when the receipts
exceeded $10,000) and the concession receipts, while the Staleys retained all rights to the game programs. Halas took control of the Staleys after one year and in 1922 renamed them the Chicago Bears in deference to the Cubs. Halas loved baseball, having played in a dozen games as an outfielder for the 1919 New York Yankees, and felt the linking of the two names to be appropriate.
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Under Veeck as president, the Cubs came in a respectable third in 1919 (with a record of 75–65), then dropped to fifth in 1920 (75–79) and seventh in 1921 (64–89), and finished in the middle of the pack between 1922 and 1924. Nonetheless, attendance grew steadily, reaching the half-million mark for the first time in 1922. Veeck's improvements to the stadium were doubtless a big factor. Over the winter of 1922, seating was added to raise the capacity from 17,000 to 32,000, the foul lines were extended, and three feet of earth was scraped from the surface of the field. Veeck would add a second deck in 1927.
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At the 1924 league meetings in New York, Veeck made an unexpected announcement. “I haven't signed any players recently,” he said, “but I'll tell you what I have done that means much to our club. I have, or rather our board of directors has elected a new club secretary, a woman, the only woman secretary in organized ball. Her name is Miss Margaret Donahue and she has been in the club offices for seven years. John Seyes, the former secretary, will have charge of the clubs' concessions hereafter. We feel that in Miss Donahue we have added a real asset to our club organization.” Then, as though he thought the title might be underappreciated, he pointed out that the secretary was one of five jobs at the club that required annual reelection by the board of directors.
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Donahue—who had been the team's bookkeeper and had handled season tickets, press passes, cash receipts, and transfers for the Cubs and for all other Wrigley Field events—was the first female baseball executive who rose from the ranks.
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Donahue was present when Veeck taught his young son, then age eleven, a lesson that would guide him the rest of his life. Following a game in 1925, he took Bill junior over to Donahue's desk, which was covered with that day's gate receipts.

“You know, Bill,” Veeck said, “it's a very interesting thing. You can look at that money and it all looks exactly the same, doesn't it? You can't tell who
put it into your box office. It's all exactly the same color, the same size and the same shape. You remember that.” This story became the younger Veeck's answer for decades to come when he was asked why he seemed to be totally without racial or religious bias.
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Donahue inaugurated the practice of selling season tickets prior to the 1929 season, which was an immediate success. On February 25, Veeck announced that demand for tickets had broken all Cubs records, with thousands of “pasteboards” sold more than a month before the season began. “It's the greatest pre-season rush in Cub history,” he said.
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Donahue had arranged for tickets to be available at any Western Union telegraph office, rather than only at the box office, and after a three-year battle she succeeded in instituting a reduced price for children under twelve.
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Ever open-minded, Veeck understood that the presence of women at the ballpark meant that whole families were more likely to attend, increasing the club's profits. One of Veeck's early notions was to revive a momentary innovation of the 1890s, Ladies' Day, and bring it into the twentieth century. Beginning with the 1919 season, a few Fridays were announced as Ladies' Days.
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Full-page newspaper advertisements offered free tickets for women, many of whom decided to pay an additional fee to upgrade to the box seats, of which Wrigley Field had proportionally more than any other ballpark in the major leagues.
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The number of women at games increased gradually until on Friday, July 6, 1930, 30,476 women jammed Wrigley Field, causing late-arriving patrons with tickets to be turned away at the gate. On that day, 51,556 people packed themselves into a ballpark that normally accommodated some 40,000. “I'll never forget it,” Veeck recalled. “The biggest mob of women I ever saw in one place in my life. We got in all we could: thousands were left outside. Regular patrons couldn't get to their seats. There was no room for the men who paid. The streets were blocked all around the park: traffic was at a standstill.”
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A new plan was initiated the next day and announced in the newspapers: beginning with the next Ladies' Day, the following Friday, women could send a self-addressed stamped envelope with a request for no more than two tickets, with the number of such tickets limited to the first 17,503 requests. Those who did not get in received a note wishing them better luck next time. Veeck hired a staff of six to handle these tickets, and 40,000 requests were received for the August 1 game. When two weeks later there were 50,000 requests for the August 15 game, Veeck limited the mail-in requests to one ticket rather than two. The day after the game on the fifteenth, the
Chicago American
carried this notice: “The demand for ladies' day tickets for next Friday has been as heavy as heretofore. There just aren't any.”
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The elder Veeck publicly played the onslaught for all it was worth, terming it a hand-wringer and a “nightmare” of logistics, but then admitted: “However, every time I get sick of it all I go to the game and see the women—schoolgirls, grandmothers, working women and society matrons—enjoying themselves. That makes up for everything and makes it all seem worth while.” He also wondered aloud—and within the earshot of reporters—why the women of other cities did not share the sophistication of their Chicago counterparts, a comment that gained him and the Cubs national attention. Veeck proclaimed that female Cubs fans were not satisfied with only free games but insisted their husbands and sweethearts bring them to other games, “and as a result Chicago leads the league in paid attendance figures.”
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The attraction held even into the Great Depression. In 1930, Veeck estimated that 25 percent of all paying fans on Sundays were women.

Cubs games also offered fans the vicarious opportunity to see some of the most notorious criminals of the twentieth century. The Eighteenth Amendment, which established Prohibition in the United States, was ratified on January 16, 1919, and went into effect a year later, creating a new criminal class. The Cubs' faithful fans included Al Capone and Bugsy Moran, who frequented the boxes along the first base line. First baseman Charlie Grimm would later observe, “They used to come out and watch us practice and used to sit right behind us. There was never a peep out of them. Ted Newberry, Bugsy Moran and Capone.” John Dillinger was known to slip into the left-field bleachers for a couple of innings.
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Even after Capone's imprisonment in 1932, his North Side gang continued to attend. Bill
Veeck Jr. remembered, “Whenever I saw a $100 bill (in the box office till), I knew Ralph Capone (Al's brother) and his boys were at the game.”
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(He would later maintain with a wink that for years he thought “C-note” stood for “Capone-note.”)
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Only four years old when his father took control of the Cubs, young Bill Veeck grew up immersed in baseball. Among many others, the legendary New York Giants manager John McGraw visited the house for dinner several times each season when Bill was a schoolboy. These evenings were filled with good-natured banter as well as serious talk on such topics as maintaining a strong fan base even while losing ballgames. One night after the Cubs had emerged from a five-year slump that had begun in 1919, during which period the Giants had dominated the league, McGraw said to the elder Veeck after dinner, “We could have beaten you even with our batboy in the lineup.”
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In his youth, Bill junior was as pugnacious as he was small. “Whenever he got into a fight, he'd always end up on the bottom, but he'd never give up to the guy on top,” his childhood friend Marsh Samuel remembered. “The big guy would get up, but Bill would go right back after him and keep it going. The only way the fight would end was if the big guy just got bored or tired of fighting and walked away.” Bill was fearless and carefree to the point of recklessness. “One day,” Samuel recalled, “we attached a bobsled to the back of a car. Bill got at the front of the sled as the car was going down a snowy country road at about 40 mph. Then Bill lifted the front end of the sled up off the ground to put on a show. He could have been killed, but Bill never thought of that.”
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