Terror in the City of Champions (6 page)

In Lincoln Park, a suburb south of Detroit populated by workers from the massive, 70,000-employee Ford Rouge complex, White became a familiar presence, hobbling about on his shoeless stump, which was concealed beneath the baggy bell of a long left trouser leg. Councilman George Shanley reported that White threatened his life after Shanley asked for a police investigation into the mob beating of two leftist men who had sought to use a school auditorium for a political meeting. Not long after, someone shot at Shanley as he walked along Fort Street. Shanley complained to Lincoln Park police chief Charles Barker who, it turned out, belonged to a group that fronted for the legion.

Several times White had threatened George Marchuk, an officer of Local Seven of the communist-led Auto Workers’ Union in Lincoln Park. Married and the father of a six-year-old daughter, Marchuk had been arrested over the years as an agitator. He had participated prominently in the Ford Hunger March. On a Friday morning three days before Christmas 1933—a week after the Tigers had hired Mickey Cochrane—two boys going to school discovered his body in a field beside a road. Marchuk had been shot once in the head. He had been on his way to a union meeting. Neither the police nor the dailies showed much interest in the crime. A small story played on the inside pages. R
ED’S
S
LAYING
S
TILL
M
YSTERY
, said one headline. Police focused their minimal investigation on Marchuk’s peers in the union and publicly blamed the killing on leftists. It was practically the same as closing the case.

During the time of the Ford Hunger March and in the years after, White worked for the Citizens Committee, a business-sponsored agency that supplied rosters of suspected radicals to auto-plant officials, who used the lists to fight the organizing of unions. White delivered lists to numerous factories, including Ford and Budd Wheel—“in fact,” he said, “to all the plants that had strikes or threats of strikes.” With two other Black Legion members, White carried one of those lists to the personnel department of Hudson Motor Company. It included the names of five men he identified as communists and saboteurs. One of them was John Bielak.

By the time of the Oxford muster, White’s star was dimming in the eyes of Effinger. A few jobs hadn’t gone smoothly and White may have been drawing too much attention to himself and jeopardizing the legion’s stealthy nature. White moved his young wife and son hours from Detroit to Lyons, a little farming town northwest of Lansing, an area with an active Black Legion element. In 1931 Earl Little, father of the future Malcolm X, had bled to death on the streetcar tracks of Lansing. His wife, Louise, thought the Black Legion was responsible.

Peg-Leg White and family lived in a small frame house on a three-acre plot. He did odd jobs for neighbors, all while keeping his one foot in the legion. White’s diminished role coincided with Arthur Lupp’s soaring stature. Lupp took on more responsibilities and Effinger came up from Ohio regularly to confer with him, one time bringing a suitcase containing several grenades, which he flashed to legionnaires. Lupp was beginning to explore how he might use his job as milk inspector to further the legion’s mission.

Among the thousands attending the Oxford muster was Dayton Dean. He loved the camaraderie and being in the center of the action. It was his sort of thing.

A Future Together

John “Jack” Bielak drove a sporty black Ford coupe with red racing stripes and red wire wheels. Gregarious and likeable, he had come to Detroit from Toledo in the late 1920s, quickly meeting and marrying Wanda Wadelik. Soon after they had a daughter, Dolores. Wanda adored Jack, but he had trouble holding a job and too freely gambled away their money. She found that she couldn’t live with him, so they separated but remained friendly. She still cared for him. So did her parents, who liked that he was Polish, a fact he disguised at the Hudson plant, where they knew him as Bailey.

By March 1934 Bielak, twenty-seven, had matured, and he and Wanda, a waitress, had reconciled. She appreciated that he had kept his job at the Gratiot factory, risen to be head of the metal finishers, successfully pushed for a wage increase for his department, and gotten his younger brother Joe a job there too. All of these signs pointed to a brighter future. Bielak acted almost giddy about his success in persuading co-workers to join the union local. One week he gathered ninety membership applications. Just recently, the men at the plant had stood with him, threatening to walk off the job when higher-ups tried to fire him for his union activities.

He and Wanda picked out a house along Six Mile Road, a little place with a yard for their four-year-old daughter. They planned to move in together. On the evening of Thursday, March 15, Bielak met her for dinner at her parents’ place in Hamtramck. He discussed their future with her father, who approved of the reunion. That night, all of the Wadeliks thought John Bielak sweet. But he had rushed off early to meet his plant foreman. En route, he stopped to talk with his best friend about a developing strike action at the plant. His bosses knew him to be an organizer. Not long ago one of his friends had gotten a job at the factory, only to be fired the same day he was seen laughing and joking with Bielak.

After Bielak picked up his foreman, the man asked to be dropped off at a political meeting. It was being held less than a half mile from the Jefferson Avenue apartment that Bielak shared with his brother. Both places were close to the union hall. The meeting turned out to be a gathering of the Black Legion.

Later that night, thirty-seven miles south along a rural road in a small town near Monroe, a driver saw two cars stop abruptly. He braked and then heard the repeated pop of a gun and saw the flash of a shot. He grabbed his crankshaft, thinking he might be next. But the two cars fled past, leaving the scene silent, save for the mournful whistle of a train. Bielak’s body—badly beaten and shot through both arms, the chest, and head—was discovered along the road, a union application tucked beneath his bloody head and fifty blank memberships cards stuffed in his pockets. A card for the Wolverine Republican League was also found on him. Bielak’s foreman convinced Detroit Police that the killing had been committed by communists as part of an intra-party squabble.

Mystery solved. Case closed.

The Bee Is Buzzing

Mickey Cochrane’s intensity hung over spring camp in Florida. He demanded his players hustle. When outfielder Frank Doljack moseyed toward first base on an easy out, Cochrane yelled: “We’re running out everything this year. It’s going to be expensive loafing to first.” He wasn’t joking. To reinforce the point, he started the Fine Club and appointed old-timer Fred Marberry as judge. If you didn’t hustle, you’d pay ten bucks. That was the lighthearted punishment. In actuality if you didn’t hustle, you might lose your job.

Cochrane wasn’t above his own rules. In a spring game against Cleveland, with Charlie Gehringer on first, Cochrane lined to the shortstop. It was an easy catch, but the fielder trapped the ball, allowing him to double up Cochrane, who had stopped running. Gee Walker charged out of the dugout. “That’ll just about cost you ten dollars, Mike,” he said. Walker was beaming. “You would have been safe if you had run out that hit.” Cochrane agreed and paid the money.

The first-year manager tried to inspire his charges with Knute Rockne speeches. “Now fellows, we’re down here to work and get ready for a big season and no monkey business,” he said. “I want every man to bear down and give all he’s got. I want every man to be hustling all the time. I want every man out there on that field giving all to win ball games. . . . You’re a better ball club than you think you are. You belong up there (in the standings) and you’re going to be up there by hustling all the time and bearing down. Now let’s hop to it.”

Cochrane encouraged his players to be cocky and chesty. He favored those with spirit, like rookie Steve Larkin. When Cochrane asked him whether he’d be willing to pitch in relief, Larkin didn’t just say yes. “Willing?” he responded. “Why, I’ll be sitting on that bench every day hoping you will send me into the game.” That’s what Cochrane liked to hear. That’s what he wanted from hard-throwing Schoolboy Rowe, rather than Rowe’s warped notion that he should be experimenting with the whimsical knuckleball, a dalliance that Cochrane quickly crushed.

After games Cochrane held “skull sessions” with his players, talking over opponents’ strengths and weaknesses and looking for ways to improve. He worked on team unity. He wanted his men to socialize together. Many guys played pool across from the hotel and most golfed in the late afternoon, with Cochrane joining them. There were factions of course. The southern boys tended to hang together. Some of the veterans too. Roommates often grew close: Elden Auker and Tommy Bridges, Gehringer and Elon Hogsett, Rowe and Pete Fox, Flea Clifton and Billy Rogell. Everyone had a roommate except Goose Goslin, a fifteen-year veteran who had nine times driven in a hundred or more runs and whom Cochrane had picked up within days of becoming manager. Goslin stayed in a private hotel room, even when the team was at home. Goslin was prickly. (Later in the summer, bothered by pokey service in a dining car, he would hurl a water decanter through a train window.)

As the start of the regular season approached, the Tigers began to jell. Gehringer and Goslin looked ready. Greenberg, though suffering through hitless spells, settled in at first base. Cochrane bounced back from a bout of appendicitis, and Marv Owen won the third base job, his manager predicting that he would be the best in the league. Gee Walker was showing improvement on defense, and Bridges and Auker were impressing on the mound. As for Schoolboy Rowe’s spring training, one day he would have a sore arm—prompting alarmist declarations from columnists: “his fate is in the lap of the gods and no one can tell now just what it will be”—and the next he would be painting the corners of the plate.

Frank Navin, in full suit and hat, turned out to watch the team daily. He ruminated about seasons past, recalling how he learned early not to interfere with his managers. He liked to tell how he had once ordered Hughie Jennings to start a pitcher against Jennings’s judgment. The other team battered the man, costing the Tigers a game. Navin said that he had resisted the temptation to intrude ever since. “This is my thirty-first year in baseball and I’m still what I’ve always been, a grandstand manager,” Navin said. “And there are a few million of us scattered around the country.”

In late March Navin arrived at the ballpark to see the recovering Rowe finally test himself. Schoolboy opened up and gunned several pitches at full speed. “Not so hard—not so hard,” the owner admonished. “Wait until you have had a little more work before you begin to bear down that way.” But Rowe was feeling good. He blazed several more fastballs. “It’s all right, Mr. Navin,” Rowe said. “It feels great. Tonight, Schoolboy Rowe is going to do some serious sleeping. It’s a long time since I’ve been able to do that.”

Rowe frustrated Cochrane. It wasn’t just his sore arm and perceived laziness. Rumors were flying. A club official accused Rowe of violating training rules. The official said that a priest had spotted Rowe drinking and gambling and living a wild nightlife. “The priest” reported that Schoolboy had been ejected from several saloons. Rowe denied it all, saying it was “a pack of lies.” Team officials didn’t believe him. With a friendly disposition and a laid-back nature, Rowe was easily swayed by men and women of questionable character, they felt.

Vexed, Cochrane had earlier turned over Rowe’s day-to-day supervision to his coaches. Cochrane couldn’t deal with him. It felt as if they were riding on different tracks. But finally the manager got behind the plate and caught Rowe for the first time. It was in a scrimmage against Montreal. In six innings Rowe allowed only two balls to leave the infield. Encouraged by the possibilities, Cochrane’s earlier criticism melted like a Charleston chocolate on summer sand. “There isn’t a pitcher in baseball today with a better fastball than Rowe’s . . . it was unhittable,” he said. Teammate Gehringer added, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Owner Frank Navin remained with the Tigers as they headed north, which was unusual. After they swept Cincinnati in several scrimmages, he decided to go to the opening game at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. When was the last time he had been on the road to witness the start of a Tigers season? He couldn’t remember. Usually, he retreated to his own ball field and prepared for the home debut. Perhaps sensing that something special was underway, Navin made an exception. The Tigers rewarded him with a convincing 8–3 victory. He headed back to Detroit as Cochrane’s team finished its road trip. After four games the Tigers were 3–1. The last victory was a ninth-inning win in Cleveland. It raised expectations almost overnight. “The championship bee is buzzing in the ears of Detroit fandom,” noted
Free Press
sports editor M. F. Drukenbrod. The season wasn’t yet a week old.

In his office Navin spoke with uncharacteristic exuberance. He couldn’t say enough about Cochrane. He could hardly believe what he had witnessed in Florida and in the first game in Chicago—how the new manager had fired up the team, got the players thinking differently, envisioning themselves as winners, not as perennial, sure-to-fall-short, not-quite-good-enough entrants in a pointless crusade. And then there was Goose Goslin, the other veteran acquisition, the other proven champion. What an impression he had made on the whole team by insisting, against doctor’s orders, that he be allowed to play in the opener—with a fractured nose and two black eyes. “When the rest of the fellows saw this sort of spirit, they became imbued with it,” Navin said.