Bill Veeck (58 page)

The 1986 season opener at Comiskey Park featured a tribute to Veeck, which included a three-minute video played on the mammoth scoreboard. The last frame in the presentation focused on a huge banner hanging in
Comiskey. It featured two Chicago giants—on one side was a picture of the Sears Tower, and on the other was a picture of Bill Veeck.
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Illinois declared Opening Day Bill Veeck Day, which set off a new wave of editorials demanding his posthumous election to the Hall of Fame. “I will continue to mourn his loss, and I will campaign at every opportunity for his induction into the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown,” wrote Rick Talley in
Vineline: The Official Newspaper of the Chicago Cubs
, “Baseball owes him.”
⁵⁹

“Somehow,” wrote William Brashler in
Chicago Magazine
as baseball started up anew, “we will have to muddle through Opening Day without him. And we will have to adjust to a few sad facts: the gross national consumption of beer has diminished, some say measurably. Every day now, one good book goes unread. And marches against handguns and for peace and civil rights have one fewer peg-leg pounding the pavement…. But the arc lights must still be turned on, boys. Let us wander over to the ballpark, lift a sign heavenward, and laugh some more.”
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Bill Veeck had one of the most absorbing and
valuable American lives of the century.

—SCOTT SIMON

Bill Veeck died while Bowie Kuhn was writing his autobiography, and the former commissioner toyed with the notion of leaving Veeck out of his book entirely—as had Ford Frick in his 1972 memoir,
Games, Asterisks and People: Memoirs of a Lucky Fan.
But Kuhn decided differently: “Wherever the shade of William Veeck resides, and I have several clear theories as to where that may be, the last thing it would want said of Bill is nothing.”

After saying that he could not imagine any two people more unalike than himself and Veeck, he typified Veeck as “equal parts charlatan and rebel,” someone who in an earlier age would have been the Music Man, shamelessly “selling elixirs to the unwary.” He was “ill at ease with every commissioner he ever knew” and viewed them as an abomination. “I never knew a self-respecting commissioner who failed to return the compliment.”
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Surely Ford Frick would have agreed with Kuhn's interpretation. Perhaps William Eckert, who Veeck called the “unknown soldier,” would have as well, as a result of the constant badgering and baiting he had felt from Veeck during his short time in office. But Happy Chandler disagreed. Two years after Kuhn's book was published, Chandler's autobiography referred to Veeck as “a stand-up fellow,” in contrast to many of the other owners he typified as “crybabies.” He applauded Veeck's circus razzle-dazzle and praised the fun and excitement he put into the game. “Bill Veeck sometimes broke a rule. I caught him. ‘Bill, belly up,' I said. Veeck didn't whimper. He just accepted his punishment. I like that kind of a fella.” Chandler concluded that Veeck actually would have made a good baseball commissioner.
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Such was the spread of opinion Bill Veeck left in his wake, and such was the polarity on his election to National Baseball Hall of Fame.
³
Although immediately after his death he lacked the votes to get into the Hall of Fame, others saw him in line for other, even higher honors. In June 1988, a newsletter entitled
Initiatives
, published by the National Center for the Laity, contained an article about hidden saints that prompted readers to submit their own nominations for sainthood among those “living saintly lives within ordinary circumstances.” The list included Senator Robert Kennedy, Dorothy Day (co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement), and Bill Veeck—which, as the newsletter put it, was not bad for a man who described himself as “a very casual Catholic.”
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Also while he was in the waiting room for the Hall of Fame, Veeck's name was increasingly invoked by those who appreciated baseball's idiosyncratic past. Chicago architect Philip Bess wrote an article entitled “Bill Veeck Park: A Modest Proposal,” in which he designed a traditional 40,000-seat urban ballpark set on a single block, reinforcing the traditional urban pattern of streets and squares. It grew out of the author's disdain for twenty-five years of gargantuan multipurpose stadiums, which he deemed bad for both the sports that use them and the cities that build them. The site for this proposed project was a parcel of land on the South Side of Chicago, which at the time was designated by the city for a multiuse stadium. Next to the south end of the park, Bess wanted to create a public square, complete with a statue of Veeck. While the park was never built, the idea was a perfect honor for the man who had ripped out the artificial turf from Comiskey Park and prized Wrigley Field and Fenway Park above all others.
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By 1990, the inability to gather the votes needed to elect Veeck to the Hall of Fame was becoming a larger issue in the media. Unlike players, who were elected by the sportswriters, executives and umpires were elected by the Veterans Committee, composed of former players and a few writers, a group that Ray Sons of the
Chicago Sun-Times
termed an “establishment committee”
representing the mind-set of those whom Veeck used to delight in irritating. Sons noted that Veeck would have been voted in immediately had it been the writers voting, but that was not the case, and an “outrageous injustice persists. His matchless contributions to fun and fairness cry for recognition.”
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There was another problem in that the rules allowed the committee to take only two ballots. Given the minimum number of votes needed for election, with only two rounds the votes might still be split too broadly to elect anyone, which was the case in 1990.

Bill Veeck was finally voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991, five years after his death. “It just kind of happened,” said broadcaster Ernie Harwell, one of the eighteen members of the Veterans Committee “We just started talking about Veeck and all of a sudden there was a ground-swell of support for him. I think we were all a little surprised.” Monte Irvin was another member of the committee that selected Veeck and Tony Lazzeri, who played on six championship Yankee teams during the Babe Ruth era, from among thirty nominees who had survived a screening process by the Veterans Committee.
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They were to be inducted with Rod Carew, Ferguson Jenkins, and Gaylord Perry, who were elected by the Baseball Writers' Association of America. Hank Greenberg's earlier exultation was invoked: “Every innovation in baseball except a couple kookie things that Charlie Finley tried—like orange baseballs and silly uniforms—originated with Veeck. Electric scoreboards, giveaways, fan days, concerts, a pinch-hitting midget.”
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At the induction ceremony on July 21, 1991, Mary Frances Veeck spoke on Bill's behalf. “Life was not wasted on Bill Veeck. He was born with a great joy of living, tremendous energy, integrity. He was curious, imaginative, creative, spontaneous, stubborn, intelligent, opinionated, witty. He was
such fun
to be around, a pied piper. He was magic. He was a ‘pro'! All of these qualities made him the baseball man we remember today.”
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Mary Frances then concluded with the set of twelve commandments by which Bill Veeck lived, to which he felt anyone in the business of baseball should adhere:

1. Take your work very seriously. Go for broke and give it your all.

2. Never ever take yourself seriously.

3. Find yourself an alter ego and bond with him for the rest of your professional life.
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4. Surround yourself with similarly dedicated soul mates, free spirits of whom you can ask why and why not. And who can ask the same thing of you.

5. In your hiring, be color-blind, gender-blind, age- and experience-blind. You never work for Bill Veeck. You work with him.

6. If you're a president, owner, or operator, attend every home game, and never leave until the last out.

7. Answer all your mail; you might learn something.

8. Listen and be available to your fans.

9. Enjoy and respect the members of the media, the stimulation and the challenge. The “them against us” mentality should exist only between the two teams on the field.

10. Create an aura in your city. Make people understand that unless they come to the ballpark, they will miss something.

11. If you don't think a promotion is fun, don't do it. Never insult your fans.

12. Don't miss the essence of what is happening at the moment. Let it happen. Cherish the moment and commit it to your memory.

Veeck's Hall of Fame plaque reads:

BILL VEECK
OWNER OF INDIANS, BROWNS AND WHITE SOX.
CREATED HEIGHTENED FAN INTEREST AT EVERY STOP
WITH INGENIOUS PROMOTIONAL SCHEMES, FAN
PARTICIPATION, EXPLODING SCOREBOARD, OUTRAGEOUS
DOOR PRIZES, NAMES ON UNIFORMS. SET M.L.
ATTENDANCE RECORD WITH PENNANT-WINNER AT
CLEVELAND IN 1948; WON AGAIN WITH “GO-GO”
SOX IN 1959. SIGNED A.L.'S FIRST BLACK PLAYER,
LARRY DOBY, IN 1947 AND OLDEST ROOKIE, 42-YEAR-OLD
SATCHEL PAIGE, IN 1948.
A CHAMPION OF THE LITTLE GUY.

“My father would've loved Cooperstown,” Mike Veeck observed. “He would've loved to set up a table on Main Street, put a case of beer next to a saw horse, and sign autographs for free while the other inductees charge $30 a copy.”
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“Before Bill Veeck, baseball teams simply showed up to play. The decision to come to the ballpark was left up to the fans…. Veeck changed all that—he made everybody want to come to the ballpark,” said Charlie Brotman, longtime sports announcer and public relations agent.
¹¹
Most who knew Bill Veeck acknowledge that he made his sport more popular. “Times have changed since Veeck's time and the game is more sophisticated now, but you can see Veeck's influence all over the game—the interactive attractions at the ballpark, the promotions and even the design of the ballparks The razzmatazz is different today, but it is in the same spirit,” added Stan Kasten, then general manager of the Washington Nationals.
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Perhaps Veeck would have appreciated that spirit. And yet, as Jonathan Yardley observed in the
Washington Post
, “no one else has had his combination of ingenuity, intelligence, humor and deep love of the game, so the promotions that now greet fans—over-amped rock music, Jumbotron scoreboards, wildly overpriced concessions—detract from the game rather than enhance it.”

Veeck loved to share his passion for the game. “My father [Lee] was American League president,” recalled Andy MacPhail. “He loved the late nights with Bill, but he also needed to get some sleep. I was with the Cubs then, and my job was to go with my father and pull him out at a reasonable hour, like one-fifteen or one-thirty in the morning, which of course would upset Veeck, who wondered how I would ever learn anything about baseball if I always had to go home early.”
¹³

Veeck would have enjoyed the irony of the moment during spring training 2008 when the New York Yankees allowed comedian Billy Crystal to bat during an exhibition game. “Somewhere under the celestial lights,” wrote Bill Madden, “the ol' hustler himself, Bill Veeck, is roaring with laughter. Not at the absurdity of 60-year-old Billy Crystal batting leadoff for the Yankees against the Pirates in a spring training game yesterday, but rather at what he would consider the hypocrisy of the lordly Yankees for conceiving such a stunt. After all, who were Veeck's staunchest critics when he held forth as baseball's resident Barnum and establishment-tweaker in four different ownerships stints with the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns and Chicago White Sox from the '40s into the '80s? And who more than the Yankees viewed Veeck, who died in 1986, as a disgrace and embarrassment to baseball for his numerous attendance-boosting gimmicks, most notably sending a 3-foot-7 midget, Eddie Gaedel, to the plate for the Browns against the Detroit Tigers in the second game of an Aug. 19, 1951, doubleheader?”
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There are those who still marginalize Veeck as a stuntsman, still remember him primarily for Eddie Gaedel and Disco Demolition. “If I hear them call him the ‘Barnum of Baseball' one more time, I'll gag—that's the image they want to perpetuate,” said his son Mike. But he was so much more complex, so much more interesting. Passionate about his business, he also took delight in the rhythms of everyday life—running errands, working with his hands, chatting with doormen, reading books, using his leg as a prop to make kids gasp and laugh.
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Greg Veeck captured his father's view of baseball and the world: “It's just a game. Life's hard. Just watch the game.”
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THE VEECKS

Mary Frances Veeck
In March 2011 Mary Frances Veeck (born September 1, 1920) finally left the Hyde Park home that she and Bill had bought in 1975. She moved to an independent-living senior citizens' community. Among her closest friends is Wyonella Smith. Greg Veeck said that, like his father, his mother has always been attentive to waiters, waitresses, parking attendants, and so on: “She'll tell the woman who is checking her out at the grocery store that her hair looks especially lovely today.”
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The Children of Bill Veeck's First Marriage
William Louis Veeck III died on January 30, 1985, at his home in Kauai, Hawaii. He was a teacher and counselor at a community college in Hawaii. He and his wife, Bernice, have two children, Valerie and Raymond. Ellen Veeck Maggs is a retired schoolteacher living in Phoenix; she is very much a part of Bill Veeck's second family, mainly because of Mary Frances, and today she feels lucky to have been his daughter, seeing Bill as a man with a kind heart and a love of people. She finds that she is surprisingly like him as a creative and nonlinear thinker.
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Ellen and her husband, Chuck, have three children, Lisa, Cynthia, and David. Peter Raymond Veeck lives in Texas and is out of touch with his sister and his father's second family. He and his wife, Ramona, have a daughter, Kimberly.