Bill Veeck (56 page)

Veeck thought of himself as just another bleacher bum, and he extolled the virtues of the cheap seats: “An afternoon in the bleachers is the greatest buy in the country. Drinking a few beers and telling a few lies, you can't beat the entertainment.” Veeck himself was very much part of the entertainment; among other things, he made a ritual of rubbing suntan lotion on fans' backs.
¹⁸

A year later, Veeck covered the 1983 American League Championship Series (ALCS) playoffs between the White Sox and the Orioles as an analyst for the
Chicago Tribune
. It was a best-of-five affair, and the morning after the second game two in Baltimore, the writers were heading for Chicago, where the series, tied at 1–1, would resume that evening, Friday, October 7. Just prior to the plane's early-morning departure from Baltimore, Veeck was rolled into the plane in a wheelchair.

“Writers knew something was amiss, because Veeck never used his infirmity to gain an advantage,” observed Red Foley. “It seems that while walking down the long corridor toward the plane, Veeck's artificial limb became undone. He sprawled on the floor, and though [he was] unhurt, airline personnel loaded him into the wheelchair. As he entered the plane, Veeck was holding the faulty limb on his lap. ‘Do you need a doctor?' inquired one of the solicitous airline people. ‘No, right now all I need is a carpenter,' Veeck replied, flashing his famous smile.”
¹⁹

Upon arrival in Chicago, Veeck had the necessary repairs made, and he was on hand for the third and fourth games, won by the Orioles to capture the American League pennant. The White Sox owners had offered Veeck the opportunity to throw out the opening pitch in Chicago, but he graciously declined, suggesting Roland Hemond as a more appropriate choice.
²⁰
He had reason to be proud of and identify with the 1983 Sox, which still bore his stamp. Hemond had proven to be a skillful team builder, Tony La Russa a first-class manager. The players he had signed were team leaders, including Ron Kittle, who in his first full year clubbed 35 home runs and drove in 100 runs, and Harold Baines, who was fast maturing into one of baseball's best hitters and whom Veeck termed the White Sox' and the American League's most valuable player. “But [Baines] will probably not get the nod,” Veeck wrote at the end of September.
^dh
“He doesn't pop off. He's too quiet, too dignified, too efficient. He just gets the job done a little better than anyone else.”
²¹

Veeck also covered the 1983 World Series for the
Tribune
, traveling with the press corps between Philadelphia and Baltimore. “I remember him in the outdoor press box in Philadelphia,” wrote Ira Berkow later. “I noticed him at game's end set up his turquoise portable typewriter and begin to hit the keys. He had been forced for financial reasons to sell the White Sox three years before, but his heart was still in the game—it always would be—and now he would write about it. On deadline. He was no phony. This former big-league baseball owner wrote his own stuff. I remember reading one of his pieces afterward and enjoying it very much. He knew the game, had original insights and stuck the adverbs and adjectives in all the right places.”
²²

The autumn 1983 deaths of George Halas, then eighty-eight, and Charlie Grimm, eighty-five, underscored his own mortality. Veeck's public eulogy of Halas, whom he had worked for as a young man, captured Halas's enormous impact: “There are very few people who invent a game and see it become national in scope. I don't think there is much more of a tribute to him than every Sunday when 60 million people or so sit down and watch what he achieved.” Grimm had been a good friend and mentor for decades,
and by special dispensation his ashes were spread over Wrigley Field.
^di
No doubt that pleased Veeck.
²³

The year ended on two happier notes. On December 6 Veeck celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition, which, in character, he declared a more important holiday than Arbor Day. The next day a show of his mobiles opened in a Chicago gallery. Veeck had been making the intricately balanced sculptures since 1962, when he began constructing them out of pieces of driftwood he found on the banks of Peachblossom Creek in Maryland. He had expanded his craft since then, and his recent work was more colorful and Veeckian. “This one here is my commentary on humankind,” he remarked at the opening, pointing to a dozen toy monkeys outfitted with musical instruments suspended at the end of varying lengths of fishing line. “See, they're tooting their own horns and banging their own drums.” Dan Brogan of the
Tribune
watched Veeck unpack and hang these mobiles and concluded they were deceptively complex contraptions, dancing precipitously from a series of wooden dowels, sturdy wire, or monofilament line. “Balance is the key,” Veeck said. “One thing gets out of whack and the whole thing goes klunk.” Greg Veeck observed that very few of his father's mobiles could not be made to work; one such was made of small pots of cacti, which, problematically, had to be watered on occasion.
²⁴

By 1984, Veeck's infirmities had taken a firmer grip on him, and he spent fewer days in the Wrigley bleachers. Gravity became his enemy: he was falling more, and the fear of it held him back. On July 2, while grocery shopping, he slipped and fell on the contents of a jar that had fallen from a shelf and broken. “I was sitting in my office when Bill called,” said Dr. Sid Shafer. “He said, ‘I'm on Roosevelt Road, in a grocery store. I either broke or dislocated my hip. If you're going to be in your office, I'll come right in.' He took a cab, came up to my office. We're on the 17th floor of the Pittsfield Building.
He had fractured his hip, on the same side as the amputation.” He was hospitalized, and two days later, a hospital spokesman described Veeck as “fine,” adding, “He's talking on the phone, and he has visitors.”
²⁵
Veeck was soon seen prowling the corridors of Illinois Masonic Hospital with a walker, bemoaning the fact that he would have to miss the All-Star Game in San Francisco, where he had planned to link up with his pal Henry Greenberg.

Recalling that day and others like it, Shafer reiterated an oft-stated observation: “Bill Veeck had more physical courage than anyone I've known. And I never heard him complain. Not once.”
²⁶

Veeck came back to Wrigley Field as soon as his good leg could carry him, full of his usual irreverence. “Would you like a lamb chop?” he asked William Nack, who was sitting with him in the bleachers reporting on the Cubs for
Sports Illustrated.
Veeck had brought a large container filled with spiced Greek-style lamb chops to the game, and a friend had a bag of sliced tomatoes. Veeck was holding a beer. “Why are you out here instead of the grandstand?” a spectator yelled from below. “Here the beer is colder, the fans much smarter, and you can see better,” he bellowed back. “This is for the people who come to enjoy, to relax!”
²⁷

When a late-summer rain delay caused him to leave hastily, Veeck told his fellow fans, “There's only two things I live in mortal fear of: rain and termites,” the former because it made the walkways slippery. That year Veeck had begun writing a column he titled “Cleanup Man” for a slick magazine called
North Shore.
The themes varied—the Olympics, television and sports, the plight of the left-handed. On several occasions the column was devoted to Veeck's poetry, including one column composed of nine poems all based on Robert Louis Stevenson's
A Child's Garden of Verses
, one of which delightfully emphasized another reason he disliked wet conditions.

“RAIN”

The rain is raining all around,

It falls on mound and plate.

It rains upon the outfield grass

And louses up the gate.
²⁸

By the fall of 1984, Veeck had yet another physical challenge to overcome. In October, a spot was detected on his lung that had not been there—or, at least, had not been seen—during his July hospitalization. He was scheduled for immediate surgery to have the lung removed.
²⁹
But because
he was having trouble breathing, he was put into the intensive care unit instead. By October 11 his condition had improved, and he was scheduled for surgery on the seventeenth, complaining that he felt like “one of the inmates in the monkey house. They keep the monkeys on a short leash, and that's where they've got me. So, I can't have a beer.”
³⁰

Old baseball friend Bing Devine visited Veeck on the thirteenth. “When I got to his room, he was asleep with a bright light on. I walked around his room and noticed on every piece of furniture there were stacks of books … must have been 50 of them. The amazing thing was, they all had bookmarks in them. Bill told me later that's how he read. He read six to twelve pages in one book and then moved on to another one. Eventually he'd get through all of them that way.”
³¹

The surgery was again postponed, and visitors were banned in order to get Veeck ready. His lung was finally removed on October 26. Two weeks later, one Chicago gossip column reported that a rich dessert called a Floating Island had been delivered to him on a silver platter by his favorite chef, Lucien Verge of L'Escargot. Mary Frances reported that it was enough to get Bill out of intensive care.
³²

Veeck called Mike Lupica of the
Daily News
to tell him that his cancerous lung had been removed and that he was now getting better. He told Lupica that he was planning a trip to Miller's Pub at Adams and Wabash to celebrate being “whole” again. He added, “Now you must understand, something whole for me is a little different than whole for everybody else. I now have a lung and an eighth, a leg and a quarter, 40 percent of my hearing, and one legal eye. I figure I've given the rest of the world as much of an edge as I'm going to give.” Lupica dedicated his Thanksgiving column to the man who had been blowing “a cool breeze” across baseball for the past half century.
³³

His first major public appearance after he was released from the hospital was in mid-January 1985, at Lino's Restaurant, where a select group of Chicago VIPs was gathering to honor Ed DeBartolo Sr., whose son's San Francisco 49ers were about to play in Super Bowl XIX. DeBartolo had come to Chicago with a batch of Super Bowl tickets for his friends, especially those who had supported his bid for the White Sox years earlier.

Veeck arrived late, hobbled into the room, and moved slowly to the seat that had been held for him at the head of the table. He looked around and said, “Holy smoke, every hustler, con man, and swindler within fifty miles of Chicago is here. The citizenry is safe for twenty-four hours.”

“And from there on,” said friend and former White Sox board member Nick Kladis, “he completely dominated the proceedings for two straight hours.”

On opening day 1985, Bill and Mary Frances sat in the bleachers at Wrigley Field surrounded by 200 or so doctors, nurses, and orderlies from Illinois Masonic Hospital. Veeck reasoned that the seats were the best payback he could think of for keeping him alive during lung surgery. During the seventh-inning stretch, Veeck stood on his one leg and sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
³⁴

Further honors awaited him. On May 8 Veeck was inducted into the Chicagoland Sports Hall of Fame; as Steve Daley of the
Chicago Tribune
put it, “Any hall of fame that carves out a space for Bill Veeck is longer on good sense than the one in Cooperstown, N.Y.” At a luncheon announcing his election in mid-April, Veeck was in fine form, mocking the trappings of modern baseball. On Opening Day he had been astonished to see that the time and temperature information posted on the Wrigley Field scoreboard was sponsored. “I've met all sorts of people who wouldn't give me the time of day,” he said, laughing. “I never met anybody who wanted to sell it to me.”
³⁵

That September, the local PBS station aired a half-hour documentary entitled
Veeck: Man for Any Season.
The show was the brainchild of producer Jamie Ceaser, who had first met Veeck when she worked on the PBS sports talk show
Time Out
, on which Veeck was a regular guest. Ceaser would occasionally pick Veeck up at his apartment, and during these drives Ceaser listened to the articulate and approachable celebrity. “He was a delicious storyteller,” Ceaser later recalled. The more Veeck talked, the more Ceaser wanted to learn. So during her summer vacation—after the
Time Out
show was canceled and before it won an Emmy—Ceaser read
Veeck—as in Wreck
. Out of the reading came the idea for a documentary on Veeck, which he and Mary Frances agreed to.

“We followed Bill around town for the next four or five months, hanging out with him in all his favorite haunts,” wrote Ceaser.
³⁶
The show was narrated by Mary Frances, who helped present her husband at his best. At one key moment, he ruminates about old age and the relationship of money to happiness. “How much money can you pay a tulip to bloom?” he asks. The show ends with Veeck in the Wrigley Field bleachers, hoisting a beer and singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” “This,” he says, “is the epitome of pleasure.”

Veeck returned to Comiskey Park that summer as the lesser of two evils, since he had started boycotting the Cubs—Wrigley Field was now selling bleacher tickets in advance, a move he believed had turned his beloved cheap seats into a commodity to be sold by scalpers. He sat with Mary Frances and Otto Denning, who had played for him many years earlier in Milwaukee.