Bill Veeck (45 page)

In early 1967, Veeck's health hit a bump, and he was uncharacteristically out of the news, spending much of his time in Easton. At this time, months after his old friend Abe Saperstein had died in the spring of 1966, Saperstein's daughter Eloise asked him to take over management of the Harlem Globetrotters, but the call came at one of those not uncommon moments when Veeck felt too sick to tackle a new responsibility. “It would have been like a hand in glove—can you imagine Bill Veeck running the Globetrotters?” Eloise said many years after the fact.
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A great admirer of Martin Luther King Jr., Veeck was able to march in the slain civil rights leader's funeral procession in Atlanta in April 1968. Photos of the event in
Ebony
suggest that Veeck, Sammy Davis Jr., and Stokely Carmichael were the only tieless men in the procession.
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In the wake of the assassination came the riots. Opening day in Washington saw District of Columbia Stadium used as a bivouac for the National Guard, including Pfc. Eddie Brinkman, the Senators shortstop, who was photographed in his National Guard uniform standing outside the stadium. But neither these urban disturbances nor the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that summer deterred Veeck from taking a third swing at getting the Washington Senators. Owner James Johnston was ill and Veeck knew the team would soon come on the market; he had a standing offer in place to buy the club. If he was successful, he wanted to employ former Yankees star catcher Elston Howard, who had retired after the 1968 season, as his manager. Howard would then become the first black manager in the game.

“We were in St. Louis for the World Series when Elston got a phone call from Veeck, who at the time was trying to buy the Washington Senators,” Howard's wife, Arlene, recalled. “We agreed to have breakfast at the Jefferson Hotel. I came along and heard the whole thing…. As we talked over breakfast, I couldn't believe my ears. Veeck wanted Elston to manage his baseball team. When he asked Elston if he would like to try managing, Elston laughed and said, ‘Would I like to finish this breakfast and go on breathing?' Elston was so excited. He and Veeck shook hands and agreed that Elston would be his manager starting in 1969. The only catch was that Elston would have to wait until the deal went down before he could tell anyone.”
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Johnston died in October and the team was now officially for sale. Veeck and his old partner from Cleveland, Nate Dolin, offered $6 million, which they could have increased to $6.5 million. Bob Short, an entrepreneur who had earlier owned the Minneapolis Lakers in basketball and moved them to Los Angeles, seemed to come out of nowhere with an offer of $9 million, which was matched by Veeck's old partner Bob Hope, but was then topped by Short.

“Of course,” Arlene Howard lamented after Veeck's bid failed, “Elston never got to manage the Senators, or any other major-league team.” Short promptly hired Ted Williams as his manager.
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If Veeck had failed to help Howard, the same could not be said of Satchel Paige. Frazier Robinson, who had caught for Paige and played with many other legendary Negro leaguers, noted in his autobiography: “I remember when Satchel wasn't eligible for his pension. He didn't have enough time in the majors so in 1968 Bill Veeck convinced Billy Bartholomay, the owner of the Braves, to hire Satchel on as a coach and keep him until he was eligible for his pension.” When the story of Paige's hiring by Atlanta was announced, a common headline was “Baseball Displays a Heart.”
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A month after Paige was hired by Atlanta, guaranteeing his $250-a-month pension, and after Veeck had met with the Howards, Dave Condon noted in his column that it had been ten years since Veeck had taken over the White Sox. In Easton, restless and looking for a source of income and an outlet for his energies now that he was out of the running for the Senators, Veeck said he was eager to have a “piece of the real action.”
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Two weeks later, rumors were rampant that Veeck was about to get that action. “Look for Bill Veeck, the onetime Chicago White Sox boss, to emerge from his Easton, Md., country home to announce a new venture far removed from Chicago and the baseball that he loves so much,” wrote Robert Wiedrich in the
Chicago Tribune
. “It will be an East Coast–based venture, but still in the area of sports.”
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At age fifty-four, Veeck turned to another sport: horse racing. On November 20, 1968, he became president and chief operating officer of Suffolk Downs, a racetrack in East Boston, Massachusetts, a stone's throw from Logan Airport.

“Don't misunderstand me though,” he told the Associated Press. “I still think baseball is the greatest game there is. It has to be because of all that we've done to it.” He insisted that he was totally committed to his new position, vowing to build a home on the track grounds. “I don't believe in absentee ownership. I'm going to stay with it. I figured this is the last go-around for me. They're going to cart me out of here.”
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The collapse of the Washington Senators deal had left him feeling at loose ends, and he and his old partner Nate Dolin had been looking at this deal for more than a year. He was to be paid a salary of $50,000 a year plus an unlimited expense account from Realty Equity Corp., the conglomerate that held the track as part of its portfolio of real estate holdings. The media described Veeck as a part owner in the track. Actually, he and Dolin would get 10 percent of the profits over $1 million and were given a five-year option to buy 15 percent of the operation. Veeck and Dolin reasoned that they could use the 10 percent override to purchase the options.

At the time Veeck took over, the track hosted both thoroughbred and harness races. It was an ill-kept 200-acre property commonly known as “Sucker Downs” or “Suffering Downs.” Red Smith said it had “the stately charm of an abandoned noodle factory,” while Larry Merchant called it “an
outdoor roulette wheel with all the warmth of an Alaskan oil field, all barbed wire and pay toilets.”
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Before the first season, Veeck told Red Smith that he intended to learn the business from “the hooves up” and intended to improve the physical plant and hike the stakes in order to bring in the better stables and attract young people. “Unlike most people who buy into baseball, I'm not going to become a 20-minute expert. There could be several things I don't know about racing, but if people go to the track to have fun, there's something I do understand.”
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During the winter of 1968–69, as Veeck prepared for a new kind of Opening Day, a search was in progress to replace baseball commissioner William Eckert, who had been let go in December, three years before his contract was up. Eckert lacked experience, charisma, public image, and personality, all of which added up to an inability to use showmanship to sell the game—the very thing that, as many writers were quick to point out, Veeck had been preaching for years.

Once more Veeck plumped hard for the appointment of Hank Greenberg, whom he called “the most qualified man in the country.” However, Greenberg took himself out of the running, insisting that the only thing that would get him back into baseball would be another co-ownership with Veeck. With tongue firmly in cheek, Veeck brought up the possibility of himself being made commissioner but then ruled it out, noting that his confirmation vote would be the first time both leagues were unanimous on anything: 24–0 against him.
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On February 4, 1969, Bowie Kuhn, an attorney for the law firm that represented the National League, was named commissioner. His strongest credential was that he had won a 1966 antitrust court battle clearing the way for the Braves' move from Milwaukee to Atlanta. Veeck was quick to toss a grenade in Kuhn's direction two weeks into the new season, charging baseball with having juiced up the ball to manufacture home runs. “Since wild William knows a great deal more about baseball than he does about horse racing,” wrote Arthur Daley in the
New York Times
, “he can command fancier headlines by jabbing his mischievous needle into the diamond sport than he can for a not-so-learned opinion on the turf.” Kuhn was charged with proving Veeck wrong, a difficult task since two spring training games had, in fact, been played that year using a livelier ball. The experiment went no further, but it had put the term “rabbit ball” back in the news.
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In April 1969, on the eve of his first sixty-day series of race meetings,
Veeck brought his old friend and business partner Rudie Schaffer aboard to bolster his new track operation. Two hours before the April 19 opening, Veeck noticed 150 horseplayers waiting in the rain outside the locked front gate, waiting to get in.

“What's the trouble?” he asked.

“The armored car with the change hasn't arrived,” said an attendant.

“Let 'em in anyway,” Veeck roared so that all could hear.

The doors swung open, and 150 fans saved themselves the new bargain admission of $1.50 that Veeck had initiated.

A cry went up: “Thank you, Mr. Veeck.”

“It's Bill,” he bellowed back, announcing his return to the game—albeit a new one.
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For this Opening Day, the fans were treated to $1 million in track improvements that had been engineered with dispatch when Veeck took over. The barbed-wire fence that encircled the track was gone. “Was it supposed to keep people in or out?” Veeck asked. With malice aforethought, Veeck himself yanked artificial plastic flowers from their beds, to be replaced with the real thing. The class distinction between clubhouse and grandstand seating was erased with a flat admission to all parts of the track. The restrooms sparkled, and fresh red and gold paint was everywhere.

“I remember when I went to Suffolk Downs that I think the most important improvement made was that we knocked all the locks off the pay toilets. It seemed somehow indecent to charge people to get in, to charge them to eat and drink, and then to charge them again,” Veeck later told a Senate hearing on stadiums, echoing his history in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Chicago. “We spent $300,000 or $400,000 in toilet improvements. Ladies' rooms specifically.”
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The opener began with two special races—the Paul Revere for three-year-olds, and the Lady Godiva, a $10,000 race featuring eight fillies ridden by eight female jockeys brought in from as far away as Gulfstream Park in Florida and Santa Anita in California. Veeckian touches abounded. Pink sinks and white curtains were installed in the female jockeys' dressing room. Reasoning that the male jocks had a pool table in theirs, he jokingly put an old-fashioned spinning wheel in the distaff dressing area. The Godiva trophy was presented by Annie Guay, ninety-one, a racetrack regular.

At the end of the second race came the “Veeck Special,” celebrated as workmen ran into the infield to plant two dozen crabapple trees in holes that had already been dug. It was Veeck's way of saying that even more improvements
were forthcoming. The motto on pasteboard signs around the park read: THINGS ARE LOOKING UP AT SUFFOLK DOWNS.
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On Joe Fan Day, he gave away a three-year-old filly named Buck's Delight to a South Boston water department worker named Bob Morgan. The horse would run four times at Suffolk Downs before the season was over, finishing second on her final run of the meeting. On Flag Day, June 14, 3,600 American flags were given out, and anyone named John, Alden, or Priscilla (for Pilgrim John Alden and his wife, the former Priscilla Mullins) got free admission to see that day's John Alden Handicap.

On the day of the Beef Stake Handicap, he entertained 2,500 “beefs” from the track's long-suffering fans. John Savage won first prize, a steer and a calf, for his winning “beef,” which was that he wanted to know why the horses could not be saddled up in full view of the fans. Henceforth, the saddling ritual would be a public one. Unable to get the livestock home on the subway, he sold the steer and calf back to Veeck for $100. Later, Veeck answered all the complaints, personally enclosing a coupon with each entitling the recipient to a free McDonald's hamburger.

On June 28, 1969, Veeck posted a purse of $254,750 for the Yankee Gold Cup, the most ever for a race run on a grass track in America. The two-mile race was flawed by too many horses, fifteen, on too narrow a track, but Veeck had made his mark on the big time and endeared himself to the local fans when he refused to move the time of the race to a later hour to accommodate ABC television. Veeck had promised his fans they would get home earlier, and he wanted to keep the promise.
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As his 1969 spring meeting drew to a close, Veeck had met with limited success but was making more money at the turnstiles even with a lower admission, having revoked the free passes that had traditionally gone to almost every politician in the Commonwealth. Much to the delight of his fan base, the politicians howled. “For a while, 90 per cent of our mail and phone calls were complaints about the end of free passes,” Veeck told Pete Axthelm of
Newsweek.
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Revoking the free passes was Veeck's first salvo in taking on the Bay State political establishment. He went to Superior Court and got a judge to overturn a Massachusetts ban on minors at the track. Veeck's claim was that he wanted to start them off young. One of his early promotions following the decision was to give away 2,000 coloring books. But when Veeck applied to add twenty-four racing dates to his calendar, he was turned down;
he immediately sued the state attorney general, which he would do on several more occasions while running the track.