Bill Veeck (5 page)

Scott Jones lived on the same street in Hinsdale and quickly discovered that Bill was “very smart” and “absolutely afraid of nothing.” Almost nine decades later, Jones clearly remembered an incident that typified Bill's fear
lessness. The two third-graders were walking home from school when Bill spotted three older boys across the street and started insulting them, making fun of their names and nicknames.

“I was horrified,” Jones recalled. “We ran for our lives for four or five blocks and into my house and slammed the door. My mother was coming down the stairs just then, and when we told her we had been chased by bullies, she figured out what was going on and made us go outside with her. She lined up the three older boys and said we had to face the biggest one—for the two of us to stand up against him and fight. It was over in seconds. Bill went for his legs and tackled him and I hit him high and sat on him.”

Veeck would also torment his friends. One Halloween, he painted the curb and much of the road in front of Jones's house bright red, hoping Jones would be blamed, which he was.
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In school, Veeck was, in Jones's words, “the devil incarnate.” In stark contrast, Bill was also an avid reader. The elder Veeck read to his son and daughter every night he was home, and young Bill acquired an early and intense love of books. “At 8, Veeck was reading three books a week, a rate that he doubled as an adult. He had finished the entire Tom Swift series before I even knew it existed,” recalled Jones.
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At Christmas, his father gave him complete sets of authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Alexandre Dumas. By fifteen, he had read most of the books then considered to be classics. “My father had only a third grade education,” Bill later observed. “But he was so well read and he wanted me to be that way too.”
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The perks that accrued to the son of a top baseball executive were shared with Bill's pals. These included season passes to Cubs Park for all football and basketball letter winners at Hinsdale High. Scott Jones recalled: “One of my greatest thrills as a boy was being invited by Mr. Veeck to join him and son Bill at the team's offices in the Wrigley Building, then driving in his big open Packard with the manager of the team, Bill Killefer, to the ballpark for lunch with some of the players.
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And finally we'd watch the game from the president's box with Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the distinguished commissioner of baseball. I was on Cloud 9 for a year.”
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Bill idolized the players on his father's team, but none more than Lewis Robert “Hack” Wilson, a stumpy, rectangular man with tiny feet (he wore a 5½ shoe), a barrel chest, and an eighteen-inch neck who joined the Cubs in 1926, when Bill was twelve. In batting practice, he would pick up a handful of dirt and wipe the sides of his pants and the sleeves of his jersey. “By the time the game started,” Veeck later wrote, “Hack would always look as if he had just delivered a ton of coal.” Wilson also had a big drinking problem. Veeck would tell of Wilson being sobered up in the clubhouse before a game by being doused in a tub of ice water. Despite his addiction, Wilson's batting exploits were legendary, and he led the Cubs back to prominence and the 1929 pennant.
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His daily exposure to baseball had an inevitable effect. “By the time I was 12,” Veeck remembered, “I decided that I was going to own a baseball team. Oh, I had other plans, too, that I figured could be sandwiched in because for me each day seemed to have at least 30 hours. But my life was going to be centered on baseball. It was inevitable.”
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After grammar school, Veeck was sent away to Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite private schoool in Andover, Massachusetts. But he became so homesick that he returned home after only a semester.

He entered Hinsdale High, where he played football on the lightweight team, being well under the 135-pound limit. Scott Jones recalled that Veeck chose to play football without a helmet, a practice that was frowned upon but allowed if a player was adamant about it. “Veeck was the only one to do so. With a carrottop mat of kinky curly hair (one of his nicknames was Steel Wool), he could easily be spotted at the bottom of every pile. He loved football.” In baseball, he was an excellent sandlot player, but there was no official team in high school.
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After two years of public high school, Veeck was sent to the Ranch School in New Mexico, which emphasized rigorous outdoor living and a classical education. It was also very expensive—$5,000 a year—and catered to the sons of the nation's corporate elite. Veeck was a square peg in a round hole: “I was known as ‘that public school rowdy,' a description that put me just one rung above the loinclothed savage. I got into a lot of fights. Someone would make a wisecrack and I'd pop him.”
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Veeck grew dramatically during this period, adding eight inches and fifty pounds. He stayed at the Ranch school until Easter of his senior year, as Scott Jones recalled, “with the understanding that he would not return—a genteel way, he later described it, of being kicked out.”
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Veeck, who never graduated from high school, was nonetheless admitted in the fall of 1932 to Kenyon College in Ohio after passing the era's standardized College Board examinations, including one in history, which he had never taken in school.
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This he accomplished by virtually memorizing the textbook.
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In January 1932, William Wrigley died in his sleep of a heart attack. He had acquired the club fourteen years earlier with the dream of a World Championship and little concern about profitability. Veeck had brought him profits, a pennant in 1929, and a solid fan base—but no championship. At the time of Wrigley's death, Veeck prophetically told his old boss, Ed Smith: “Just a couple more years and I'll let go. We've got to win the big series you know.”
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Wrigley, a strong advocate of advertising and promotion, had been the perfect owner for the elder Veeck to work with, and Bill junior could not have failed to learn from them. One of the combined legacies of the two men was the radio coverage of Cubs games that Veeck had arranged, believing that the broadcasts would educate new fans. Late in the 1923 season, Judith Waller, managing director of Chicago's WMAQ, had asked Wrigley and Veeck for a thirty-day trial to air the Cubs games live. At the end of the trial, listeners were asked to write in to give their opinion. Letters came in bundles from all over the Midwest. A Wisconsin dentist wrote: “I have had no trouble with my patients since I installed the radio for the Cubs games. They sit and listen and let me work.” An Indiana farmer wrote that he had a radio rigged in his field and caught the score as he finished each turn of the plow.

The experimenting continued, and on June 1, 1925, WMAQ became the first station in the United States to broadcast a tream's every home game. Surprisingly, the deal with WMAQ was not exclusive, and through the late 1920s as many as five radio stations carried the games live. But the key was WMAQ, a 50,000-watt clear-channel station that could be heard over much of the Midwest. “The middle as well as the country at large was becoming Cub-conscious,” newsman John Carmichael later wrote of the WMAQ deal. “The team was on its way to fame and fortune.”
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The statistics bore out Veeck's belief in what radio could do for the team. For the seven-year period from 1918 to 1924, the Cubs averaged fourth place
in the National League standings and drew 3,585,439 patrons. From 1925 to 1931, with a club that also averaged fourth place, 7,845,700 fans watched a Cubs game, a gain of 119 percent in a time when the other seven National League clubs increased home attendance by only 27 percent.
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But the majority of other teams were increasingly fearful that radio would cut down on ticket sales by allowing the lukewarm fan to stay home and get a word picture of the game for nothing. In December 1931, eleven of sixteen major league teams came to the Winter Meetings in Chicago planning to establish a ban on all radio coverage, but the measure had to be tabled—the night before the ban was to be discussed, Veeck had signed a new radio contract for the 1932 season, infuriating those who were against the broadcasts. President William Harridge of the American League intimated that if radio became an issue of competition with newspapers, he would recommend that broadcasts be eliminated. “Newspaper publicity made baseball,” said Harridge.
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He had the support of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, which had expressed the belief that radio was cutting into the sale of “extra” editions of their newspapers.
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If Veeck was an owner's ideal executive, he was also a player's dream come true. Jim Gallagher, a sportswriter who became the Chicago Cubs' general manager in 1941, wrote of Veeck at the time of his death that his greatest accomplishment was creating the “one happy family” spirit so noticeable on the Cubs and so lacking elsewhere. Each winter, Veeck made trips to sign each of his players in person. He paid what was believed to be the highest salaries in the major leagues, and even in 1929 and 1932, when the Cubs won the pennant, he never had a holdout. “In the spring when awestruck, frightened rookies reported to the Cubs' training camp, it was Bill Veeck who looked them up, introduced himself and endeavored to make them feel at home.”
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Veeck senior's confidence in matters of promotion was matched by his on-field instincts. When he hired Joe McCarthy to manage the Cubs for the 1926 season, he ignored the credo that former major-league players made the best managers. McCarthy had been, at best, a so-so minor leaguer. Chicago had gone through three managers in 1925 and finished in last place.
Veeck needed someone dynamic, and his former Louisville contacts vouched for McCarthy, who was successfully managing the minor-league Colonels, leading the team to American Association pennants in 1921 and 1925. With the Cubs, McCarthy immediately asserted himself by running a tightly disciplined spring training camp, and then urged Veeck to acquire Hack Wilson from the Giants and trade Grover Cleveland Alexander, an aging alcoholic, to the Cardinals. By 1929 Veeck and McCarthy had turned the Cubs into a powerhouse that finished well ahead of the rest of the National League and played before 1,485,000 home customers, setting a new major-league attendance record. Though it lost the World Series 4–1 to Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, interest in the team was at an all-time high.

Yet when the Cubs fell back to second place in 1930, Veeck unceremoniously fired McCarthy with four days left in the season. Infielder Rogers Hornsby was made player-manager with the expectation he would be a stronger leader than McCarthy. Less than two years later, in the middle of a pennant race the Cubs would ultimately win, Veeck fired Hornsby on August 2, 1932. “I removed him because I came to the conclusion that the only trouble with the Cubs in 1932 was the atmosphere of the club,” Veeck declared. He felt the team had peaked in midseason and was falling back, and that Hornsby was overmanaging, holding “too-tight on the reins.”
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Given his position on gambling, Veeck was no doubt also displeased by Hornsby's horsetrack betting losses and his propensity to borrow from his own players, who we were almost universal in their dislike of the man.
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“Rogers Hornsby was all business,” Billy Herman, the stellar second baseman, later revealed. “You couldn't smoke or even drink a soda in the clubhouse or read a paper or anything like that. Sort of an odd guy, too. If you were a rookie, he wouldn't talk to you. Never say hello. You might get a grunt out of him, but that was about all. The only time you'd hear his voice with your name in it was when you did something wrong, and then you heard it loud and clear. If he ignored you, then you knew you were doing all right.”
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Veeck replaced Hornsby with Charlie Grimm, the Cubs first baseman, who was as popular with the players as Hornsby had been unpopular. Grimm led the club to its second pennant in Veeck's tenure and a World Series showdown with the Yankees, who since 1931 had been managed by McCarthy.
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The Cubs lost four straight games to the Yankees, unable to withstand the onslaught of hits by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and others. But the Series was most notable for a gesture allegedly made by Ruth in Wrigley Field on October 1, 1932, in the fifth inning of the third game, before hitting a long home run off Charlie Root to break a 4–4 tie. Participants in the game gave varying accounts of whether Ruth had called his shot by pointing at pitcher Root, at the Cubs dugout (which had been riding him mercilessly), or toward center field. Ruth himself gave conflicting accounts, thereby fueling the legend as it grew over the years.
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That fall bill Veeck Jr. began his sophomore year at Kenyon College and pledged Beta Theta Pi fraternity, undergoing the hazing that accompanied initiation. His college friend Howard Preston recalled the night: “The final part was a joy ride—for the brothers, not for the fellow being initiated. The boys would remove everything from the guy's pockets, leaving him just his shoes and socks and pants and shirt. Then they'd drive him twenty or twenty-five miles out in the country and dump him out in the dark of night. He had to be back at the house by eight o'clock in the morning, or else. The Betas did that with Bill. They took his wallet, keys, papers, and drove him out in the country. They took him so far out—he was a pretty hot-shot kid—that they got lost themselves a couple of times going and coming. They pushed him out of the car on a dark, lonely country road and left him. Then they went home, losing their way a few times in the backwoods and stopping for a snack at a roadhouse. When they got home, what do you think they found? Veeck had beaten them back.”