Bill Veeck (74 page)

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An Associated Press report ten days after the Hornsby firing said that Landis was about to open an investigation into the allegation that several Cubs players had joined Hornsby in his racetrack betting (
New York Times
, August 12, 1932).

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Attendance was 10,132,262 in 1930, dropping to 8,467,107 in 1931 and 6,974,566 in 1932. The next year, 1933, the numbers hit rock bottom at 6,089,031, the worst since the war-shortened season of 1918, when only 3,080,126 went through the turnstiles.

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The Pythians disbanded after their leader, Octavius Catto, a baseball and cricket player, was murdered in 1871.

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In 1916 Walter McCredie, manager of Portland in the Pacific Coast League, signed Lang Akena, a player of Chinese-Hawaiian origin, who was quickly released because of “strenuous objections from prospective team mates.”
Chicago Defender
, January 16, 1916.

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As the Depression wore on, two of her sisters got into financial trouble and asked for her help. She agreed under the proviso that they write each month asking for the money and acknowledging their indebtedness to her late husband, the man who had outraged her family with his lack of education and poor professional prospects.

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David Spenard, Saperstein's nephew, said that he always understood that the first time the team appeared in Harlem was in 1968.

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Dorr had lived with his family in a bungalow built beneath the left-field grandstand—a unique and whimsical idea that had come to William Wrigley in 1923. According to the Cubs' director of event operations and security, who was interviewed for this book by Brad Beechen, the new groundskeeper's apartment was located in a separate building across Waveland Avenue, which is used now for storage and for staff training sessions.

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They also later added some Baltic ivy, with shiny, leathery leaves that stay green all winter, and Virginia creeper, whose five-leaflet clusters turn reddish brown in the fall. “There are two stories as to the inspiration of the ivy-covered walls,” according to Cubs historian Bill Hartig. One is that Bill Veeck was impressed with the ivy-covered walls of Bush Stadium, a minor-league park, in Indianapolis. Another had the White Sox' ivy-covered outfield walls in their spring-training venue in Pasadena as the inspiration. Today's ivy is a Boston ivy–bittersweet blend but still contains elements of the original Veeck-Dorr plantings.

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Powell was actually not a police officer but simply a resident of Dayton who claimed to be one. Ironically, Powell died in a police station in 1948—while he was being questioned for passing bad checks, he shot himself to death. Westbook Pegler drifted further and further to the right until eventually he was banned from writing for the magazine of the John Birch Society because his views became too extreme.

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The American Association was the highest level in the minors at the time, so it was the equivalent of the modern AAA, which began in 1946.

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Grimm was replaced as first base coach by Dizzy Dean a few days later.

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This was a later development, as photographs taken at the time of his marriage to Eleanor show him with a tie.

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He was known far and wide as the man who on Yom Kippur in 1934 went to the synagogue rather than the stadium. The Tigers lost that day, but the team beat the Yankees for the pennant.

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Almost seventy years after this event, American League umpire Jim Evans was asked about Veeck, and his terse answer was, “He didn't think much of umpires.”

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Bush remained active in baseball until 1972, when he died at age eighty-four. He was still working as a scout for the Chicago White Sox.

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In another report of the incident, he slapped the bottle thrower and ended the game in a seat on the roof of the stadium. This version was secondhand, while the Levy version was presented as an eyewitness account.

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He was sold to the Cubs at the end of the season and began his major-league career in 1943.

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Sunday, December 12, 1920, when George Halas's Decatur Staleys (before being renamed the Chicago Bears), champions of the West, played the Akron Steel, the champions of the East, for the championship, Akron was led by their star halfback, Fritz Pollard, the first African American to play in a professional sporting event at Cubs Park. The match-up, billed as “The Game to Decide the Pro Football Championship of the World,” was played before 12,000 fans and ended in a scoreless tie. Afterward, George Halas proposed a replay—promising a crowd of at least 15,000 at Cubs Park—but Akron manager Frank Nied declined. Notably, according to Cubs and Wrigley Field historian Al Hartig, Halas “borrowed” Paddy Driscoll from the Chicago Cardinals for the game. A week earlier, Driscoll had played for the Cardinals against the Staleys.

^ai
In “Paving the Way,”
Basketball Digest
, February 2001, Douglas Stark wrote, “The reason you may not know about the NBL's pioneering efforts is because integration in the NBL and professional basketball as a whole came with much less fanfare and fewer problems than it did in other sports. Unlike baseball, hockey, and football, basketball was largely an urban game played by a diverse population on every level but the pros.” Its integration “came four years before Kenny Washington played football for the NFL's Los Angeles Rams, five years before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier, and 16 years before Willie O'Ree skated for the Boston Bruins of the NHL.”

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Some have claimed that the story about Veeck attempting to buy the Philadelphia Phillies is untrue. I believe it to be true based on my own research. A discussion of the matter and a refutation of the charge appears in the Appendix titled
Did Bill Veeck Lie About His Plan to Purchase the '43 Phillies?

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According to Grimm's autobiography, on
page 154
: “That bound was deducted from my next paycheck!”

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Ultimately, President Truman named Sengstacke to the commission he formed to racially integrate the U.S. Armed Forces.

^am
Landis used “haymow” several times in the discussion as a synonym for a secret or covert decision. The haymow is the portion of a barn in which hay is stored.

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Meanwhile, the Phillies were next taken over by Bob Carpenter, whose hostility to blacks would extend up through the moment in 1947 when he told Branch Rickey to bench Jackie Robinson on his first visit to Philadelphia in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform. Bruce Kuklick,
To Every Thing a Season
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 146.

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Veeck had traded Arnold Moser for Epps in July 1941.

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Shoup would go on to receive the Medal of Honor for his service in the war. He was later appointed commandant of the Marine Corps and after retirement became a severe and highly visible critic of the Vietnam War.

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Torrance tried to get the message to Veeck that he had gotten him the transfer but could not find him. Torchy's position was that not getting Veeck transferred could have saved his life, given the large number who died or were wounded in the invasion of Guam and the subsequent invasion of Iwo Jima.

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Speculation over the injury was widespread. “No one was ever sure whether Bill got hit by a shell fragment, a sniper's bullet, or one from a Zero's machine gun,” Fordham said in an interview at the time of Veeck's death.

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Cullop's nickname was inspired from what
The Sporting News
called his “catsup complexion.”

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Reviewing Veeck's medical records, released to the author by the National Archives in June 2010, one is struck by the official assertion that a ten-year-old injury was the cause of a major physical collapse during a military operation. His ankle certainly had been previously compromised, but something else was needed to cause traumatic injury. Veeck had undergone a rigorous induction physical, survived intense basic training, and for months had been handling large munitions as part of a heavy artillery unit. Veeck led an intensely physical life after the 1933 fall and the subsequent football injury. Photos of him prior to his enlistment show him in various situations with all his weight on his right foot. The assertion that Veeck “did not walk much” as a civilian is belied on numerous occasions, including accounts of him walking many miles from his mountain home in Wisconsin in the snow to the train to take him to Milwaukee.

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The closest Veeck could get to Stengel was William Stengel, fifty-six, a down-and-outer who claimed to be Casey's cousin and who asked if he could move into the tent in center field that housed the Tribe's fifteen-piece band during games. Veeck found the whole thing deeply amusing and agreed, saying he would charge him no rent (
Montreal Gazette
, July 31, 1946).

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The hot dogs had to be fresh and locally produced, and mustard was all-important. “Every year Veeck and Max would review the mustard to make sure it was just right—a little on the dark side with a touch of horseradish,” said Chris Axelrod, who also added that Connie Mack became such a fan of the ballpark franks in Cleveland that he ordered ten pounds of them to take home with him after each visit.

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More than sixty years later, Andy MacPhail, president of baseball operations for the Baltimore Orioles and grandson of Veeck contemporary Larry MacPhail, was asked why the other owners hated Veeck so much. He replied: “For starters, they hated him because he sat in the bleachers. They really hated that. It was a deeply disturbing gesture to these men,” who saw themselves as removed from the people who paid to come to their games.

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Case's son, George W. Case III, addressed himself to the racial significance of the event in a 2011 personal communication: “I've often thought about that. I don't think at the time anyone really mentioned it because it was Jesse Owens, the Olympic champion, and he was not a baseball player. I know that I never heard my dad ever talk about race, although obviously when he played, baseball was all white.”

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Gordon departed New York after precisely 1,000 games and 1,000 hits, holding a deep and abiding contempt for MacPhail and the Yankees front office, not unlike the one Veeck would himself develop. By the time both men had retired, the transaction was regarded as the perfect trade for both teams.

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Dandridge left Mexico in 1949 after the death of his friend and patron Jorge Pasquel, who was killed in an airplane crash, and was signed by the AAA Minneapolis Millers, a farm team of the New York Giants. Despite Dandridge's earning the league's MVP honor in 1950, the parent club deemed him too old to move up. Others insisted it was not that he was “too old” but that there were already “too many”—the Giants had three black players (Monte Irvin, Hank Thompson, and Artie Wilson). Dandridge retired from baseball after the 1955 season. In 1987 he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at the age of seventy-three.

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In talking with interviewer Bill Marshall about Doby's signing years later, she said, “The whole story has been just one of those kind of things where the strong have taken advantage of the weak. And, of course, that's true of life. I learned that all through life.”

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Teammate Frazier Robinson was among those on the Eagles who believed that Irvin would beat Doby to the majors: “I always thought that Monte Irvin would be the first to leave Newark and go to the majors. Monte was just a great ballplayer, but I think the war hurt him. Monte went into the Army at the same time that Larry and I went into the Navy. But Monte came out kind of shook up. They called it combat fatigue, but I've since heard it was some kind of inner ear problem. Whatever it was, he really wasn't himself for a while. So he started back with Newark, and he played there for a while until he got back into the shape he was in before he went in the service. And after that, couldn't nobody get him out. He was such a good hitter. And he played his position well. He was a complete ballplayer.” From Robinson's
Catching Dreams: My Life in the Negro Baseball Leagues
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 127.

^bc
Doby's major-league debut was an event looking for a story, and over time it has spawned several accounts that fall apart under scrutiny. One story circulated for years after Veeck himself repeated the tale on a New York radio station in 1961: “I can remember Doby's first time at bat. He was nervous and hitting against a left-handed pitcher. He swung at three pitches and missed each of them by at least a foot. He walked back to the dugout with his head down. He was so discouraged that he walked right by everyone on the bench and sat in the corner, all alone, with his head in his hands. Joe Gordon was up next and Gordon was having his best year and this particular left-hander was the type that Joe usually murdered. Well, Joe missed each of three pitches by at least two feet and came back to the bench and sat down next to Doby, and put his head in his hands, too. I never asked Gordon then and I wouldn't ask him today if he struck out deliberately. After that, every time that Doby went onto the field he would pick up Gordon's glove and throw it to him. It's as nice a thing as I ever saw or heard of in sports.” The radio recollection was reprinted verbatim in
Sports Illustrated
a few days later and was repeated for decades, even appearing in Doby's obituary in the same magazine in 2007. The story does not jibe with the box score or newspaper accounts of the game. The origin of the story appears to have come from
Washington Post
columnist Shirley Povich in a piece on Doby in July 1949. In this version Gordon patted Doby on the back after striking out and said, “We all do that. Watch me”—implying that Gordon was going to strike out on purpose. In reality, Gordon was on third when Doby came in as a pinch hitter.