Bill Veeck (43 page)

At the time of Veeck's death, Ed Linn wrote in the
New York Times
that after going over the manuscript for the presumed final time, the pair had had what Linn termed “the only real argument we were ever going to have. That late in the game, Veeck had decided that he had given Rogers Hornsby a worse pummeling than an old guy, long out of baseball, was worth. I accused Bill—if you can believe this—of running scared, and he informed me that it didn't matter what I thought. ‘It's my book, and those two pages are out.'

“He was, of course, right on both counts. In order to explain away my temper tantrum before I left the next day, I said, ‘You have to understand, Bill, that by this time, I think I made you up.'

“ ‘Don't worry about it,' Bill said. ‘You have to understand that by this time, I think I wrote the book.'

“It was the perfect response. From that day on, we understood each other completely. Meaning that when Veeck got blacklisted from baseball for turning out such an honest, hard-hitting book, I could decide whether I wanted to be ashamed of myself.”
²⁷

On June 19, 1962, while Bill was at the Mayo Clinic for a checkup, Mary Frances delivered their third son, Christopher, Veeck's ninth child in all. Veeck returned to Chicago in July 1962 to promote his book and put in an appearance at a White Sox game, where the exploding scoreboard was detonated as the organist, recalling Veeck's father's pen name, played “Bill Bailey Won't You Please Come Home.” Veeck was immediately besieged by reporters, and he told them he was in town to push the book and “shop for a new wooden leg.” Pointing to the leg he'd come with, he said: “This one is being held together by nuts, bolts, and baling wire—like an old Model-T.”
²⁸

Back in Chicago in September for a quick job promoting a music festival, Veeck was accompanied for a day by William Braden of the
Chicago Sun-Times
, who was amazed by his manic ability to talk about anything and everything. “Between bites of a double corned-beef sandwich,” he wrote, “Veeck discusses the nature of disasters, the geometry of baseball, the Milwaukee Braves, democracy,
Treasure Island
, Herman Melville, the development of the Ford Trimotor, friendliness, the sea literature, luck, freewill, telephone numbers, jazz, and Medicare, among other things.”

Melville? he was asked. “Ahab is a great character, but the rest of
Moby-Dick
is not very special,” Veeck replied.

Everywhere Veeck went, people approached him, and he responded with glee and a kind word. While in an elevator on his way to an appointment, a woman craned her neck and addressed Veeck. “Hope you will remember me,” she said. “It was twenty years ago, and—”

“Knox, Indiana,” said Veeck.

The woman beamed.
²⁹

Among the friends and writers visiting him in Maryland were occasional newcomers seeking mentorship. Among these was Pat Williams, then twenty-two, who made the first of many visits to see Veeck in September 1962. Then a minor-league catcher, Williams believed his future lay in the front office of a professional team. Having read
Veeck—as in Wreck
on its publication, he wanted in-person inspiration from its author.

“I approached him on the porch. He shut the book and smiled a broad and unassuming smile.” Williams quickly realized this was how Veeck rested—that he and other visitors were part of Veeck's recovery, as were
“reading with his wooden leg propped next to him, gardening, refinishing early American furniture, raising his six children, along with a dozen dogs, a horse, multiple fish tanks, gerbils, guinea pigs, and an armadillo. He had a guesthouse that held a dozen people, had a beer tap connected to a keg in the wall, had a game room in an adjacent building, and had a massive Seeburg automatic jukebox.”

Veeck immediately befriended Williams, and the two had a number of tutorial sessions as Williams worked his way into front offices in baseball and basketball.
^co
The visits were intense and informative: “Once I came in and Veeck ignored me for a half hour. Didn't say anything to me. Didn't even look up. He was in the dining room, helping one of his daughters fashion a papiermâché re-creation of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders storming San Juan Hill. He was gluing. He was cutting. He was irretrievably lost in the moment. When he was finished, he stood. ‘Pat,' he said, ‘let's talk. I'm ready now.'

“And then it was about me.”
³⁰

The trips to Chicago had convinced his doctors to give Veeck a green light to go back to working full-time. He started talking about his “next team,” admitting what others had surmised—that Easton was a perfect perch from which he could attempt to gain control of either of the two ball clubs he most wanted, the Washington Senators or the Baltimore Orioles. He regarded Washington as a great untapped baseball market ready to be developed, and saw Baltimore as the team that was rightfully his.
³¹

In October 1962, Veeck made an attempt to buy the expansion Washington Senators as the leader of a group that also included Hank Greenberg, Rudie Schaffer, and Nate Dolin, who had been an associate in his days with the Indians. When baseball expanded at the end of the 1960 season, Minneapolis–St. Paul was granted a franchise. Calvin Griffith, who had inherited the Washington Senators from his uncle Clark, had persuaded his fellow owners to let him move his troubled club there, thereby granting Washington the expansion instead. The new Senators were owned at the time by a group headed by Elwood “Pete” Quesada, but the team had lost money in its first two seasons, coming in last both times. Veeck and a group had tried to acquire the club when it was first created in 1960. Now Quesada quickly denied that the team was for sale, but Veeck had clearly identified himself as a potential buyer.
³²

Three months later, in late January 1963, Veeck was again reported to be headed back into baseball in partnership with Nate Dolin, who confirmed that he had placed a deposit of $500,000 for the Washington Senators, hoping to buy them for $5 million. But almost as soon as their intentions were made known, the club was snapped up by investment broker James Johnston and his partner James H. Lemon, who quickly acquired 80 percent of the stock.

If baseball was shutting Veeck out, there seemed to be no limit to what Veeck was willing to involve himself with during his early years on the Eastern Shore. In 1963, Maryland's governor, J. Millard Tawes, was ready to veto the state's costly plan for a pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. The pavilion was to feature an elegant restaurant. The head of the fair committee, a friend of Veeck's, called Veeck for help.

“He was in Annapolis and I told him to drive right over,” Veeck recalled. “When he arrived, I drew a picture of the wharf—that was to be the exhibit. They could sell Maryland seafood and beer. The former cost had been something like $1.2 million. I told him this would cost exactly $856,421.19.

“My friend asked how I knew what the cost would be.

“I told him: ‘Never mind that, just talk to Tawes.'

“So later if the cost turned out to be $1.6 million, what could Tawes do once he had put up $856,421.19.”
³³

Veeck then presented the proposal to a meeting of the Maryland World's Fair Commission, embellishing the idea that the wharf would be over water, allowing for real fishing and crabbing. A board member suggested that perhaps a waterman carving duck decoys or a fisherman mending nets could be featured.

“Exactly,” Veeck replied, “there must be action.”
³⁴

Veeck's vision prevailed, and the pavilion was a success.

Veeck was also active in the burgeoning civil rights movement. When he discovered that Negroes were allowed only in the balcony of the local Easton movie house, he initially sat in the balcony with them.
³⁵
He then decided to set up his own impromptu movie theater. Contacting Harold “Spud” Goldstein and other friends in Hollywood, he arranged to have films flown in that would be shown in his guesthouse for all the kids in the area.
³⁶
The movies became a prime attraction for the children who accompanied their parents to the estate. Larry Doby Jr. recalls annual summer visits with his family, cherished memories of his childhood and of the friendship he, like his father, developed with Veeck.
³⁷

Nearby Cambridge, Maryland, was a hotbed of the civil rights struggle, and during their time in Easton, the Veecks hosted movement leaders at their home. Veeck also offered his estate as a place where both sides in the struggle could come together to talk—and often argue. At a May 1964 dinner, black and white factions shared the table. “Bill had decided he might as well clear up their misunderstandings,” journalist Morris Siegel reported. “When I left, a police chief and several others were hollering real loud, and Bill was playing it cool.”
³⁸
Whether the local commander of the Maryland National Guard, Jesse Jackson, or Dick Gregory, visitors found the house a place of compromise and conciliation.
³⁹
Indeed, many of those who visited Veeck in Easton found that he was most interested in talking about human rights, athletes in revolt, or the plight of the left-handed individual, such as himself, in a right-handed world.

Others of his ideas bordered on the quixotic. Beginning with a new syndicated column in 1963 and going forward at least into 1965, Veeck became a lone advocate for a return to the baseball employed in the dead ball era, when the game was allegedly played with a much less lively baseball.
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Veeck was asking baseball to consciously deaden the baseball to cut down on the number of home runs. “The fans wouldn't mind—they don't like cheap home runs anyhow,” he explained in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington. But even Veeck supporter Jim Murray, a columnist with the
Los Angeles Times
, disagreed with his friend: “To me, if they make the ball dead, the game will soon follow. Lilies will be growing in the infield.”

Veeck persisted, reasoning that the dead ball would make pitchers work faster and throw fewer pitches. He told an audience in Cleveland: “The lively ball forces the pitcher to work on every batter. If he makes one mistake the ball is gone—and often the game as well. I've got it figured out that 40 percent more pitches are made in today's game than the good old days.”
The dead ball campaign went nowhere, though it did underscore Veeck's ongoing ability to get publicity on the thinnest of premises.
⁴⁰

Veeck had traded in his artificial leg and now walked, like Long John Silver, on a peg.
⁴¹
In Cleveland in June 1963 to promote the paperback edition of his book, he read about a young girl going through the trauma he had faced. “Dear Christina,” he wrote to Christina Simco, an eleven-year-old East Cleveland girl recovering from surgery that removed her right leg because of cancer of the hip, “I have been reading about you in the
Plain Dealer
and decided to write because there is such a great similarity between our experiences. You see, I have but one leg, and I had to have mine removed in Cleveland. I didn't want them to remove my leg. I had 10 or 11 operations performed in a vain attempt to keep it. I know exactly the thoughts passing through your mind.” Veeck then advised her that in reality, she could do anything she wanted to do, and do it just about as well. He concluded by telling her not to hesitate to call: “You see, those of us whose feet can only get half as cold have to stick together.”
⁴²

There were constants that Veeck displayed in dealing with the pain and suffering that afflicted him. He not only made light of it (“Suffering is overrated, it doesn't teach you anything” was a line he often used when asked about pain) but also hid it. As best he could, Veeck even shielded his children from his constant ordeal. “I walked in one day and he had this look on his face of extreme pain,” Greg remembered. “I said, ‘Dad?' and he turned around blushing. I was never supposed to see it, but he wore five or six wool stump socks to keep his blisters under control. He had blisters half as large as his butt.” Greg watched as his father's left leg took more and more punishment. “Eventually the good knee was so big that you couldn't look at it,” he said.
⁴³

Veeck had become a source of inspiration for many with disabilities and, save for those times during which he was too ill himself, always had time for others in the same boat. He could also inspire indirectly, as John Herd Thompson, professor of history at Duke University, could attest. “My father, Joe Thompson, was a Canadian World War II amputee—a lieutenant in the Canadian Army who lost his right leg in late September '44. He was active in (and the president of for some years) the Winnipeg branch of the War Amputations of Canada. He and his mates in the War Amps of Canada greatly admired Bill Veeck—they tried to do in Canada what Veeck was doing in the
USA, to help Korean War and civilian amputees deal with the shock of losing a limb and cope with their disabilities. I can't
prove
that Veeck inspired the Canadian War Amps programs for visiting amputees and helping them to adjust, but I'm certain that Veeck was an influence and an inspiration to them. We had a copy of
Veeck—as in Wreck
in our house, and my father (who rarely or never read a book) devoured it.”
⁴⁴

At the end of the 1963 baseball season, a strong and vocal minority, mostly in the press, wanted Veeck back in baseball in some form or another. Most articulate was Jim Murray. If Veeck had been just a gadfly, Murray said, he could have been dismissed, which baseball had tried, but “the compelling national interest of the American League is that it defeats the Yankees once in a while.” Murray pointedly remarked that since 1946, the Yankees had lost only three pennants, and teams created by Bill Veeck had won two of them.