Bill Veeck (42 page)

“Such big people,” Veeck scoffed, “and they're disturbed by such little things.”
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At the end of June 1961 the American League paid tribute to Veeck in a statement signed by league president Joe Cronin. It was with “deep regret that the owners noted his departure and wished for his speedy recovery and return to good health and personal vibrancy.” No mention, however, was made by his fellow owners of his return to baseball, which was neither welcomed nor anticipated.
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On July 22, 1961, the Veeck family left their home in Chicago in a station wagon emblazoned with the White Sox logo. Veeck was in the front seat with his driver and Mary Frances, who was holding their three-week-old daughter, Juliana (the scoreboard at Comiskey Park had been fired off to celebrate her birth). In the backseat were Mike, ten (nicknamed “McGillicuddy” after Connie Mack); Marya, six; Greg, five; Lisa, two; and their nurse, Patricia O'Brian.
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The Veecks were on their way to a nineteen-room brown shingle home on a seventeen-acre wooded estate in Easton, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay. The property sloped toward the banks of Peachblossom Creek and sat on a circular driveway. The estate, which the Veecks immediately dubbed “Tranquility,” included a five-room guesthouse and a series of outbuildings, including a greenhouse.

The move had been instigated by Veeck's friend Jerold C. Hoffberger, brewer of National Bohemian, a local Maryland beer that Veeck avidly consumed. The beer cans sported a label alluding to Maryland as “the land of pleasant living.” Thereby drawn east, Veeck asked Hoffberger to look for a
place in Maryland where he and his large family could enjoy the promised tranquility. Hoffberger came up with several possible properties.
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“I hadn't ever been to the Eastern Shore and the doctors gave me a day off, and so we came here and looked at three houses. This was the first one,” Veeck later said, also explaining that he picked the Eastern Shore over returning to the ranch in New Mexico because it was closer to a major city and to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he knew he would return with some regularity.
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Ever impulsive, he bought the house after only one walk-through and without Mary Frances's having seen it—“courageous of me, maybe a little foolhardy.”
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Veeck remained ill during their early days in Easton, and two weeks after arriving he returned to the Mayo Clinic, accompanied by Mary Frances. Hank Greenberg came from Chicago to be with them, because it looked as though Veeck, whose headaches were insistent, would be slated for brain surgery. On August 19, new tests revealed that Veeck did not have a brain tumor, but he was kept at the Mayo Clinic so doctors could determine why he had lost fifty pounds and seemed to tire so quickly. Veeck was still in considerable pain, and when a rumor attributed to a “family friend” circulated that Veeck was about to get back into baseball, Mary Frances was furious: “We'll have enough trouble with him on this rest routine without something like this. Somebody seems to know a lot more about Bill than the doctors, God, and us. This report supposedly came from a friend of the family, but apparently, it's some friend we don't know about.”
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On September 1, a spokesman for the clinic announced that Veeck's illness had been diagnosed: “slight concussions caused by violent coughing spells resulting from excessive smoking.” When Veeck finally checked out of the clinic and arrived back in Maryland, he was still experiencing headaches and weighed a mere 136 pounds.
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The Veecks had had all of their heavy oak furniture and Navajo and Pueblo Indian art trucked in from the New Mexico ranch. A reporter visiting the estate after the Veecks had settled in wrote: “The walls of the house are covered by paintings of Indian scenes, warlike ones dominating. The mantels and shelves are adorned with massive Indian pottery and giant size katchinas, or tribal emblem figures. Those walls which are not occupied by art are lined with tanks of tropical fish.”
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Within weeks of his return from Minnesota, and despite orders to rest, Veeck began supervising the construction of a brick pathway on his Easton
property and the planting of a new field of boxwood trees to augment the existing stands. Veeck called his patch of young boxwoods “the farm club.” Having given away thousands of orchids to female fans, Veeck saw his greenhouse as an opportunity to start raising them. By the end of November 1961, his health gradually improving, he could boast that “two orchids bloomed today in my hothouse.”
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“The place was not in very good shape when the family arrived,” nephew Fred Krehbiel, a frequent visitor, observed. “Over time it was transformed into a showcase. Bill was like a very good English gardener who lined his property with strong lines of boxwood and filled the inside with color.”
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Late that year, during a telephone interview, Veeck's dislike for the Yankees surfaced anew. New York had won the 1961 World Series, and during the season Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle had chased Babe Ruth's single-season home run record, with Maris hitting a record-breaking sixty-first at season's end. Veeck lambasted the Yankees for, in his mind, marginalizing Maris's quest, claiming that the Yankees had actually sided against Maris in an effort to protect Ruth's record, and with it the sacred reputation of Yankee Stadium as the “House That Ruth Built.” Far from capitalizing on what he regarded as a “once-in-a-lifetime event,” he felt the Yankees had encouraged such a negative image of Maris that it brought down attendance at Yankee Stadium in the final days of his drive for the record.

The following May a profile of Veeck in the
Baltimore Sun
detailed how much his life had been transformed. For the first time, his children were the center of his life. Alluding to those from both marriages, Veeck said he had kids ranging from less than a year to twenty-five years. “You select an age, I've got a child.” Pets, too, proliferated. The first thing one encountered when pulling into the circular driveway was a sign that read BEWARE OF PUPPIES. “You saw that,” reporter Myra MacPherson recalled, “and you didn't stop smiling until you were on your way home.”
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With strong encouragement by Mary Frances, Veeck was reunited with the children from his first marriage, William, Peter, and Ellen. “The only recollection I had of him was seeing his leg behind the door,” said Ellen, who had not seen him since the time of his divorce from Eleanor in 1949, when she was five, until she went to Easton to see him at age eighteen.
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Veeck's rituals often amused his children. Greg recalled that every summer his father would take out a can of copper boat paint and paint the wooden leg so that it would match his tan. Veeck would tuck the leg around
the back of his head and spin on one leg to delight his children and their friends.
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Mary Frances was a big proponent of holidays, which Veeck had largely ignored before marrying her. Easter egg hunts became a ritual—Veeck would always hide exactly 144 eggs, twelve dozen. Even Arbor Day was celebrated. And New Year's festivities were treasured. “There would be other New Year's Eve parties in the area,” recalled Lisa, “but it always seemed like everybody from all the other parties ended up at our house.” Bill and Mary Frances developed a tradition they practiced every New Year's Day of forgiving any debts owed to them by others.
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Given his liberal inclinations, some of Veeck's friends were puzzled by his decision to move to a locale known for its deep conservatism. “They lived in the midst of the landed gentry, most of them fiercely opposed to integration,” recalled writer Jerome Holtzman. Not surprisingly, they quickly established their own ground rules. Early on, Veeck and Mary Frances decided to have a dinner party for their neighbors. By coincidence, Minnie Miñoso arrived for a visit. As cocktails were being served, Veeck announced, “An old friend of mind from Chicago will be joining us for dinner.” In walked Miñoso, a coal-black Cuban. “What was really wonderful,” Veeck said later, “was that Orestes had them enthralled. He was the star of the evening.”
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A center for the family was the pool at the Talbot Country Club, less than a mile from the house. When Veeck applied for membership, the two issues that concerned the committee were that he was Jewish, albeit a convert to Catholicism, and that he was too close to African Americans and might propose one as a member. He was, ultimately, admitted, and often came to the pool late in the day to do laps before it closed, taking his prosthesis off and hopping from one end of the pool to the other on one leg.
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“He could swim the length of the pool three times underwater and then pop out and light up a cigarette,” recalled Roger Clark, then a lifeguard at the club.
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Over time, as his health continued to improve, Veeck entertained a steady stream of writers and reporters. “I thought they were all coming down to see him die and everyone wanted to get the last shot in,” recalled his son Mike. “I would judge [the visitors were split] between those who had a great passion for having conversations with him versus those who were coming down to see if he would click out during the interview.”
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Writer Roger Kahn visited him often during his Maryland years. “He and Mary Frances had contributed enthusiastically to the population explosion, and there were always Veeck children about for mine to play with. Plus
swings, Frisbees, a trampoline, and a broad, calm estuary called Peachblossom Creek that was a gentle place until the jellyfish moved in. On arriving at Chateau Veeck, I usually saw something like this: Veeck was sitting on a couch in shorts and a polo shirt, baring what he called his ‘wooden leg.' He was reading a novel, but in case he wanted a change of pace, a biography sat open on the cocktail table. Some sort of talk show barked from the television set. Above that sound, Veeck was explaining to one of the children that certainly, he would drive to the Washington airport to pick up the new pet armadillo, but the animal would not arrive until tomorrow.”
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Then he would acknowledge the Kahn family: “And, oh, yes, hi, to all of us and did I know that if the establishment kept barring him from baseball, he might open a bookshop or run for the Senate or even pass the bar exam and sue them all. He was drinking beer. He was always drinking beer. And smoking mentholated cigarettes. No one ever accused Bill Veeck of running a health club.”
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“I spent an afternoon with him at his home in Maryland,” remembered writer John Holway. “He read a book a day and drank a beer a minute and he could talk on any subject, from Aquinas to Steinbeck.” Writer Stan Issacs believed that “Veeck had a way of turning moderation on its ear, even in others. I spent a night with Bill at his place on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I don't smoke and I usually don't stay up late, but he had me up all night smoking Dutch Schimmelpfennig cigars and talking baseball and life. I loved it.”
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The move to Maryland and finally getting a treatable diagnosis opened a new chapter in Veeck's life: that of a writer and raconteur. Hank Greenberg brought a New York writer whose work he liked, Ed Linn, to Easton for a short lunch. Greenberg wanted Veeck to tell his life story and was convinced that Linn could make it happen.
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Veeck agreed, a contract between them was signed, and Mary Frances suggested the title,
Veeck—as in Wreck.
The two would meet intermittently as Linn commuted from his home in New
York. Linn would prove to be the perfect voice and foil for Veeck. Both men were veterans of World War II, eschewed neckties, and seemed to lack a surrender response. Linn helped Veeck find his voice. “Part of Ed's job was to tone it down to keep Dad out of court,” quipped Greg Veeck, who recalled that the two men and their families became very close friends.
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Veeck, who had started the book with the hope of getting it all on tape before he shuffled off, now held the final product in his hands.
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On the eve of publication, Veeck told a
Washington Post
reporter, “I only hope we sell as many copies as we get libel suits.”

The book became an instant best seller in 1962, loved by fans but hated by the owners for its belligerence toward them. Red Smith said that it purported to be an autobiography but was better described as “380 pages of aggravated assault.”
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Columnist Milt Gross said Veeck “has bared his teeth and is chewing with obvious relish at the baseball hands which slapped him down.” Gross observed that Veeck had dropped the needle and picked up a hatchet to do a job on Ford Frick, depicting him as a man who never used his power to help the game. Gross ended his column on the book with a caveat: “This is a book that should be marked ‘for adults only.' It would be a shame if the kids, who take so much pleasure in what transpires on the field, should learn so early in life what goes on off it.”
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The book closed on what Arthur Daley of the
New York Times
termed “a bright, defiant note” that would be quoted for years to come: “Sometime, somewhere, there will be a club no one really wants. And then Ole Will will come wandering along to laugh some more.
Look for me under the arc-lights, boys. I'll be back.
”
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