Terror in the City of Champions (11 page)

Against the Browns on August 7 at Navin Field, Rowe headed out to the mound in search of his twelfth straight win. He didn’t feel right. His warm-up pitches lacked punch. Harlond Clift, the first batter, drove a ball to the wall for a double. On the second pitch to the second batter, Rowe stumbled off the mound and grabbed his right side. Greenberg, Gehringer, Cochrane, Rogell, and Owen closed in around him, fearing he had reinjured his arm. He was rushed into the clubhouse and onto the massage table of Denny Carroll. As the game continued, coaches Perkins and Baker, scout Wish Egan, and Navin’s nephew Charles, the team secretary, hovered nearby. They watched Carroll in a sleeveless white T-shirt probe the star pitcher’s bare back and arms. If Rowe were seriously hurt, the Tigers might just have witnessed their downfall. A crucial series with the Yankees was a week away.

Within days, recovered from the muscle strain, Rowe resumed his streak against Cleveland. He pitched eleven innings, breaking the 5–5 tie himself with a long sacrifice that brought home Greenberg. The next Tuesday in New York, he threw a four-hit, complete-game victory. The Bronx stadium was packed. Then, on Friday, August 17, nearly 80,000 people jammed into the park again to watch as he held the Yankees to three hits. His complete-game shutout put Detroit five and a half games ahead of New York. “Rowe pitched one of the greatest games I ever saw,” said Cochrane.

Rowe’s incredible run—fourteen straight and counting—overshadowed other fine performances. He wasn’t winning on his own. The team had taken fifteen of its last seventeen games. Rowe was 18–4, but Tommy Bridges was 15–6 and Elden Auker was 10–4, and seven everyday players were hitting above .300, among them a league leader, Charlie Gehringer. (Henry Ford presented him with a V-8 convertible coupe as a thank-you.) But the nation’s attention had turned fully to Schoolboy Rowe. Photographers and reporters hounded him. Here was another story to uplift the masses, whether in the Dust Bowl or the silted cities. Rowe needed to win his next two games to tie the American League record for most consecutive victories.

At Boston’s Fenway Park more than 46,000 people turned out for a Sunday doubleheader, hoping Rowe would pitch. He didn’t. The Tigers won anyway. Afterward Cochrane and the boys boarded three boats and headed toward Graves Light for an overnight fishing trip. They spent their off day, Monday, on Massachusetts Bay to escape fans, journalists, and the building pressure. On Tuesday Rowe pitched another complete game, beating the Red Sox 8–4. It was his fifteenth straight win.

Back to Washington the team went. It was hot. Because the hotel did not have air-conditioned rooms, players were given private rooms. Rowe and Pete Fox had their own rooms on the first and second nights. But after the Tigers lost both of those games, Rowe became suspicious. Perhaps the change in routine had thrown off a winning pattern. He didn’t like what it meant for him and the record. The next night Rowe showed up at Fox’s door and asked if he could stay with him. When he explained why, Fox agreed.

On Saturday Rowe, pitching on a sprained ankle, went for his sixteenth consecutive win. The Tigers looked deflated and Rowe didn’t feel his usual self. They wasted several scoring chances. The streak was in danger of ending. The Tigers were behind 2–1 entering the last inning when Hank Greenberg launched a solo home run to tie the game. Marv Owen and Fox followed with singles, and Rowe got one too, bringing in the winning run. The victory tied the record. With one more win he would break it. The opportunity would come in Philadelphia.

The story of the polite twenty-four-year-old sensation had spread across the nation. Rowe seemed to have come out of nowhere and risen rapidly to proportions matching his size. Here might be the start of a living folk hero, a fresh figure from El Dorado, emerging just as the old glowing light that was Babe Ruth faced the dimming days of his luminous career. They described Rowe as “Frank Merriwell in the flesh,” a bow to the fictional hero of dime novels, comic strips, and radio serials who excelled at all the sports he tried. They floated new nicknames for Schoolboy: “Man Mountain from Arkansas,” “The Pygmy from El Dorado,” etc. The newspaper verse-makers wrote odes to him. One began, “Today they’re pitching Schoolboy Rowe, I shut my eyes and see; immortal stars of long ago, in days that used to be . . .” After reminiscing for many stanzas about dozens of pitchers of yore, like Cy Young and Christy Mathewson, author Harry Bannister concluded, “The vision fades, the past stays dead, the Schoolboy flings one through; I know that in the years ahead, he’ll be immortal, too.”

In Philadelphia chaos engulfed the elegant nineteen-story Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. Reporters, well-wishers, agents from vaudeville, programmers of radio, and purveyors of profit schemes waited in the lobby to speak with Rowe. They phoned his room. They pestered him in the restaurant. They knocked on his door at all hours. They filled his mailbox with pleas and offers. Pete Fox tried to guard his roommate’s time, but Rowe accommodated all news requests, answering the same questions repeatedly in private interviews, telling his life story over and over again. He was, said Cy Peterman of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, “handsome in the athletic way, neither taciturn and inarticulate, like Lefty Grove, nor voluble, like a good many lesser lights in the game . . . what I would call a right agreeable lad.” With good cheer Rowe also obliged the photographers, sunnily executing their goofy requests. One cameraman said he “has practically a fool-proof face.”

The Tigers were in Philadelphia for four days, four nights, and four games. With all the interruptions and commotion, Rowe slept only a few hours most nights. The pressure felt almost unbearable. “He’s becoming nervous,” Fox said. Teammates innocently added to the stress by heaping absurd expectations upon him. Marv Owen looked beyond the American League record toward the major league best. “He will break Rube Marquard’s record of nineteen straight,” he said. “Mark my words.” Pitcher Vic Sorrell guessed: “Rowe probably will not be beaten for the rest of the year.” But it wasn’t just Rowe bearing it. Fox would take ill the next day and miss several games. Cochrane, his catcher and manager, felt it too.

The return to Philadelphia, where he had spent nine years, saw Cochrane reconnecting with friends. In a private room at a little dance club, with the sound of a piano seeping through the walls, Cochrane shared dinner with coach Perkins, former teammate Bing Miller, and several other men. Jimmy Powers of the
New York Daily News
joined them. With the Tigers five games ahead of New York, the conversation turned to a cataloguing of teams that had blown their pennant chances during the final weeks of a season. Cochrane endured it silently and then left the table abruptly. When he returned, his eyes were wet and red. He swiped at his tears. “The man had been crying,” Powers said. The guy next to Cochrane laid an arm over Cochrane’s shoulders and consoled him. “Aww, you can’t miss, kid. Quit worrying about it.”

The Bellevue-Stratford presented Rowe with his own room the night before the big game. He declined, of course, choosing to stay with Fox, who traveled with a radio and liked to play it loud before bed. The phone interrupted their sleep late into the night until Fox left it off the receiver. The next morning, the streets around Shibe Park throbbed with fans. Connie Mack had not seen such a turnout since the World Series three years earlier. More than 33,000 people packed into the stadium for the midweek doubleheader. Thousands were turned away. Many found spots atop nearby buildings. Others occupied Lehigh, Twentieth, Twenty-First, and Somerset Streets. Unrecognized in the stands in street clothes, Schoolboy Rowe watched his Tigers crush the Athletics 12–7 in the first game before heading into the locker room. He changed for the game and paid homage to his coins and jade elephant. Rowe was haggard. He had lost a few pounds. On the field coach Perkins caught his warm-up sessions.

“How’s he look?” Cochrane asked.

“Pretty awful,” said Perkins. “But what can you do? There’s a crowd here to see him, and, anyway, maybe he will find himself as he goes along.”

Rowe’s arm felt dead. Cochrane realized it as soon as the game began. Rowe had nothing on his fastball.

Back in Detroit, sound trucks stationed in busy sections downtown broadcast play-by-play recreations over loudspeakers. The game account blended with sounds of horns and shifting gears, the usual commotion of a busy city. Crowds ballooned to 4,000 around the Christopher Columbus statue on the grassy median of Washington Boulevard near Grand Circus Park. Lawyers, doctors, office workers, teens, and homeless men listened.

Cochrane visited Rowe at the mound in the fifth inning after Philadelphia went ahead by three.

“You need some help, don’t you?” Cochrane asked.

Rowe admitted as much, but Cochrane left him in.

“This is your ball game today,” he said. “Get to it.”

But he couldn’t. More runs scored and Rowe’s hope of immortality evaporated. There was second-guessing among those listening in Detroit: Cochrane should have let him pitch the first game; he should have held him back until Boston. Midway through the seventh inning, Cochrane finally removed Rowe. Philadelphia fans showed their appreciation to the pitcher with a rousing ovation. The Tigers lost 13–5. The streak had ended.

Cochrane, his teammates, and newspaper observers mostly blamed the defeat on the stress of the spectacle, the swarms of people hounding Rowe, and his lack of sleep. Rowe took the defeat in stride. “I guess it was just not my day,” he said. He also wondered whether a hex had played a part, noting “too many colored people . . . brought various objects into the park . . . to conjure up a jinx.” Black Betsy got painted again with iodine.

William Mollenhauer had a dose of bad luck too. A federal forestry worker (and a former musicians’ union officer), Mollenhauer was outspoken and principled. After offering his Oakland County farm as security in a court case against an auto union striker, he had been warned he would face retaliation. It came on the evening of August 20. While he was in Detroit, the Black Legion sent its arson squad to Mollenhauer’s farm. Neighbors noticed the fire at eleven o’clock that night and rushed to extinguish the flames. They called the police but couldn’t get any lawmen to come to their aid. Armed with shotguns, neighbors guarded Mollenhauer’s property until dawn. When two deputies finally arrived to investigate days later, they treated Mollenhauer as the criminal. One of the deputies was a legion member who would run for county sheriff. The other would eventually become chief of police for General Motors Truck Corporation. Searching Mollenhauer’s home, they smashed furniture and confiscated clothes, legally owned guns, and a keepsake samurai sword. Before an insurance adjuster could get prints from a broken window, the farm was torched again on August 30, the evening after Rowe’s defeat.

Fans mobbed Schoolboy Rowe in a coffee shop at Union Station. The poor man couldn’t go anywhere without attracting a crowd, not even to get a cup of joe and a fry cake. Given his height, he couldn’t hide easily. He almost always stood above the throng, which now included dewy-eyed high school girls smitten by his fame, his sturdy athletic build, and his shiny, slicked-back hair. They came just halfway to his chest and he floated above the sea of them, a steady buoy atop dreamy water. Of course Rowe drew other fans: squawky teenage boys, old women in their Sunday hats, and grizzled baseball veterans. And there were reporters and photographers too. They followed him whenever he left the hotel.

It was eight o’clock on a Thursday morning and Rowe was awaiting the train carrying his beloved, Edna Mary Skinner. They had been sweethearts since eighth grade in El Dorado. In high school, as he tore up the sports leagues, she wore his varsity sweater. They had always been together, and once the Tigers’ season ended, they planned to marry. “I’ve been knowing Edna ever since we were kids,” he said.