Bill Veeck (9 page)

The final phase of the restoration was the construction of a new scoreboard. On September 7, 1937, 150 men under Veeck's supervision began installing it above the new bleachers. The ball-strike-out portion used magnetic principles never before employed, and atop the scoreboard sat a flagpole on the summit of which was a crossbar with a blue light on one side and a white light on the other—blue for a win, white for a loss—to tell elevated-railroad passengers passing by the field on their way home whether the Cubs had won or lost. A colored flag flying from the board during daylight hours also indicated that day's result.
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When the renovated Wrigley Field opened on October 1 for the team's last home series, fans saw a vastly expanded bleachers and the new $100,000 scoreboard. An additional 32 feet at the right-field foul line and the loss of 6 feet on the left had altered the dimensions of the park to those that remain today: 355 feet 7 inches to left, 400 feet to center, and 353 feet to right. Throughout, the stadium seats were widened from 18 inches to 22 inches, and many were turned at a thirty-degree angle to improve viewing. The 1937 restoration left fewer than a dozen aisles of the original ballpark unchanged.

Edward Burns of the
Chicago Tribune
declared the renovated Wrigley Field to be nothing less than “the most artistic ballpark in the majors,” though the
Herald-Examiner
complained that the scoreboard “proved a disappointment, because the score-by-inning figures are too small.” But when the season ended, it could be said that two father-son combinations, the Veecks and the Wrigleys, had given the Cubs the best ballpark in the majors in terms of amenities for fans and ballplayers alike.
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Veeck again tackled the concessions department in 1938. State-of-the art hot dog cookers, popcorn poppers, and peanut warmers were added. In 1939, he replaced the old concession stand opposite the pass gate, replacing it with a new stand with 85 feet of counter space, two and a half times larger than the previous counter, at a cost of $25,000. The front of the stand was done in Formica, and the new fixtures were stainless steel, with fluorescent lighting and Tiffany brick above the back bar. Veeck's work on the stadium had gained him invaluable experience in the art of putting people in the seats and keeping them there.

In the midst of the 1938 season, what became known as the Jake Powell affair inflamed baseball's position on segregation. During a pregame dugout
interview at Comiskey Park on July 29, 1938, WGN radio announcer Bob Elson asked Powell, a Yankees outfielder, what he did during the off-season to keep in shape. Powell replied that he was a policeman in Dayton, Ohio, where he kept in shape “beating up niggers and then throwing them in jail.”

Outraged listeners besieged the station with phone calls. Others called the Chicago office of baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Local residents and community organizations representing the heavily black neighborhoods of the South Side demanded Powell be removed from the game permanently. Landis ultimately suspended Powell for ten games, the first known penalty in the history of American sports for a racially intolerant remark. But Landis then stirred up the situation again by stating that Powell's remark was due more to carelessness than to intent. The Yankees asked for police protection, and rumor had it that Powell—who had been sent to a secret location—would never appear in a Yankee uniform again, presumably because of the proximity of Yankee Stadium to Harlem.
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Baseball's unwritten but rigidly followed policy of Jim Crow was suddenly back in the forefront. Perhaps the most remarkable commentary came from conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler of the Scripps-Howard syndicate, who suggested that Powell might have gotten his cue from the racial attitudes of the very men whose hired disciplinarian had just benched him. Pegler then made a stunning suggestion: “The Yankees or one of the Chicago teams easily could try the experiment of using a star Negro player from one of the semipro clubs. Customers would suffer no shock, and the Southern white boys would find after a few games that it didn't hurt them much at all.”
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Baseball's black eye healed rather too quickly. Powell was soon back in pinstripes, and the Yankees were free to move about the country, but Veeck had witnessed an event that, among many, would lead to the increased testing of the color bar.
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At age twenty-four, Veeck was promoted to assistant secretary of the Cubs, which made him a member of the club's executive staff and entitled
him to go to New York for the National League Winter Meetings in late 1938. There the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants disclosed that they were going to allow sponsors to buy the rights to broadcast their games on the radio during the 1939 season, thereby realizing the elder Veeck's desire to see baseball sold and promoted on the airwaves. At the end of the Winter Meetings, the only radio holdout in either league was the New York Yankees, and they succumbed shortly thereafter.
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As Veeck rose through the ranks and his regard for Boots Weber grew, his feelings for Wrigley diminished. At the heart of his frustration with his boss was the way in which Wrigley dealt with people, including his own players. While Bill's father was running the Cubs, members of the roster were regarded as the most content in baseball, their contracts among the quickest to be signed. Under Veeck senior, married players were encouraged to take their wives with them on the road. He reasoned correctly that the more rambunctious, trouble-prone players would fare better with their wives keeping an eye on them. Phil Wrigley had inexplicably ended the practice with Bill's father's passing.

The issue smoldered for several years and flared up when Wrigley acquired Dizzy Dean from the Cardinals before 1938 the season. Dean had hurt his arm by altering his delivery after his toe was broken by a line drive in the 1937 All-Star Game, but Wrigley had insisted the Cubs acquire Dean despite his arm injury. A distracted Dean drove everyone crazy with his poor performance and with what Ed Burns of the
Chicago Tribune
euphemistically termed his “bunk,” which had become a “menace to team morale.” He missed trains and team meetings and groused about his low pay, arguing that he could make a lot more barnstorming. Burns noted that in Dean's great years with the Cardinals, his wife had always traveled with him and kept him under control. “Dizzy did nothing but mind his pitching when Mrs. Dean was on hand to quell and direct him.”
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Phil Wrigley projected an image that was not always popular with fans, which he said “mystified him.” In contrast with his father's affection for the sport, he had come into baseball admitting that he didn't care for the game, and he had become a self-described “rabid, superstitious” fan who claimed baseball was the only business he knew in which “an outsider seems to know more about it than the men trying to run it.” He bragged that he had spent two weeks in total isolation before deciding to change managers, and then said that he had fired popular manager
Charlie Grimm because Grimm would relay his ideas to the team by saying “This is Mr. Wrigley's idea, not mine.” He also claimed that Grimm was “too swell a fellow” to run a ballclub and appointed Gabby Hartnett, in his opinion tougher and gruffer, to replace him. Wrigley also admitted that technically he knew practically nothing of baseball.
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Restless and fueled with the same creative spirit and affinity for attracting fans that had characterized his father's career, Bill Veeck wanted a shot at the Cubs presidency; for the moment, however, he would have to settle for less.

Following mediocre seasons in 1939 and 1940, on November 12, 1940, a press conference was called to announce the firing of manager Gabby Hartnett, the resignation of Charles Weber as treasurer, and the appointment of the twenty-six-year-old Veeck to the treasurer's position. Two days later, Wrigley followed his own father's example by hiring a sports reporter as the new head of the team's operations—renaming the position general manager instead of president. Jim Gallagher of the
Herald-American
, like the elder Veeck, had been critical of the team in print—especially the $185,000 signing in 1938 of pitcher Dizzy Dean, whose sore arm had gotten no better. Weber decided to stay on with the team in an advisory position, realizing he could be a help to Gallagher and to his protégé, Veeck.

Wrigley said that Gallagher had been brought in to end “the confusion” in the Cubs front office and “improve the team's relations with the public.”
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Gallagher seemed as surprised by the appointment as the rest of the Chicago press corps and underscored this when he admitted he had not thought much about what he was going to do, including the appointment of a new manager to replace Gabby Hartnett. “First, I've got to cover the Notre Dame–Iowa football game for the
Herald-American
Saturday and wind up my job on the paper. From then on, I'll start learning my job … and help straighten out the confusion of the Cubs.”
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At least one of his fellow writers, Steve Snider of the United Press, recognized Gallagher's shortcomings: “He has neither the color of Brooklyn's Larry MacPhail nor the business experience of Cincinnati's Warren Giles.”
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Indeed, Gallagher was everything that the two Veecks were not, starting with the fact that he was, by his own admission, not an outgoing man and not really interested in promotion or dealing with the public. Unlike Veeck senior, who was at ease with the fraternity of sportswriters when he became
an executive, Gallagher became an easy target for his former fellow scribes, especially after a series of bad decisions and trades, in particular that of Billy Herman.

The Cubs second baseman, Herman had had a substandard defensive year in 1940, and after getting off to a slow start in the 1941 season, he was traded by the Cubs to Brooklyn for outfielder Charlie Gilbert, infielder Johnny Hudson, and $65,000. On May 7, in his first game as a Dodger, Herman had four hits, and by midseason Larry MacPhail of the Dodgers could brag that without Herman, his club would be as far out of first place as they were in front. Getting rid of Herman was a highly unpopular move with Cubs fans, especially as they watched him help pace the Dodgers to the NL pennant. Gallagher had led off with what would prove the worst trade of his career.
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If Veeck felt slighted or let down by being passed over for the president's job, he did not show it. Warren Brown of the
Chicago Herald-Examiner
wrote in his 1945 history of the Cubs that at the time of Gallagher's appointment, there were many who thought Veeck was the best candidate. Veeck, when asked in a 1947 interview if he had wanted the job, replied, “Let's put it this way, I was ambitious.”
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Perhaps an opinion expressed early in 1941 had hindered his chances. While taking night school law courses at Northwestern University, Veeck had written a letter to Commissioner Landis in which he assailed baseball's reserve clause as both “morally and legally indefensible.” Landis, who had known Bill from the time he was a child, retorted, “Somebody once said a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and your letter proves him to be a wizard”
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On July 12, 1941, Harry Grayson, sports editor of the Newspaper Enterprise Association, reported that Wrigley had become so disgusted with baseball that he was ready to sell the Cubs. Grayson opined that Wrigley had tried to run the team like the chewing gum business and cared nothing about baseball, which he proved by staying away from Wrigley Field for “months at a stretch.”
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But by the time Grayson's nationally syndicated column appeared, Bill Veeck had gotten away from Chicago and Phil Wrigley and his chewing gum executives, leaving it to others to speculate then and for many years what would have happened if he had gotten the job rather than Gallagher. In his history of the Cubs,
Wrigleyville
, Peter Golenbock interviewed Cubs from the first half of the twentieth century and concluded, “Not hiring
Veeck to run the Cubs was the single worst personnel move in the entire history of Phil Wrigley's reign as owner of the team. There were other egregious gaffes, to be sure, but this one had the greatest impact on the future of his team.”
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“The 1941 season was hardly under way when Bill Veeck started talking about taking off,” recalled Charlie Grimm, who had befriended the much younger Veeck. In 1932, after playing first base for the club, Grimm had been hired by Veeck's father to manage the Cubs, which he did until relieved partway through the 1938 season. Veeck was eager to make a name for himself and get out from under Phil Wrigley. “In adjacent Milwaukee, the Brewers were dying,” Grimm recounted years later. “They were last in the American Association. He had been through the mill all these years with the Cubs, he had been inspired by his father's great success with them, and he was anxious to strike out on his own. He sounded me out and I was receptive.”
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The floundering minor-league franchise had been without an actual owner for the first weeks of the 1941 season. On June 16, league president George Trautman took over management of the club with a power of attorney and a mandate to attract new ownership. The fear was that if the weakest-link Brewers failed, the league might somehow follow or at least be diminished in status.
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The banjo-strumming Grimm was a perfect complement to Veeck. Older, wiser, and beloved by many, Grimm could sing and also play the piano, snare drum, harmonica, cello, and xylophone, and he carried a card in the magician's union. And Milwaukee was a perfect city for Veeck in many respects, not least because it was the nation's thirteenth-largest—between San Francisco and Buffalo in population—with a half million potential
fans within the city limits alone. Milwaukee was the largest city in the American Association, with a long baseball history and a tradition of strong fan support, though that enthusiasm had been allowed to dissipate.
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