Bill Veeck (7 page)

Gould's story appeared in every major city. The reaction to what the
Chicago Daily News
called a “radical prescription” was immediate. Cleveland Indians president Alva Bradley and Brooklyn Dodgers president Stephen W. McKeever had declared themselves definitely in favor of the idea, and the Cardinals' Sam Breadon and the Pirates' William Benswanger felt it was worth considering.
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Soon, though, the “Veeck Plan,” as it was known, was attracting serious American League opposition. Opined Clark Griffith, the gray-haired president of the Washington Senators, “Nobody thinks of that sort of stuff unless he's deaf, dumb, and blind.” Col. Jacob Ruppert, the owner of the Yankees, dismissed the notion, saying he had not given it “a single thought.”
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The American League believed itself the superior circuit and did not want to share the box office draw of Ruth, Gehrig, and others.

The day after Veeck's interview with Alan Gould was published, a letter dated August 23, 1933, was sent to Veeck's office from Syd Pollock, owner of the Cuban Stars, a semipro team playing in the Negro leagues. Addressing Veeck's statement that only one major-league club was profitable, Pollock urged that the ban on Negro teams be lifted, which would boost gate revenue throughout baseball. He proposed “placing an entire Colored club to represent a city like Cincinnati in the National League and Boston in the American League. “My solution is simple,” he wrote, “yet would meet with plenty of opposition from league moguls, but only because of social pride.
Social pride and prejudice must be overlooked where business enterprise is at stake, and no one can dispute Major League ball is a business.”

Pollock based his argument on having sent his Cuban Stars to play in thirty-two states during the previous season, in the process beating every white minor-league team they faced. He wrote about one of his stars, Tetelo Vargas, who he predicted would steal more bases during the season than any two current major-league players combined. Vargas had also hit seven consecutive home runs in two days against top semipro competition in 1931, but this feat was entirely ignored by the white press. “With a colored club in either or both circuits, these feats, common among colored ballplayers, would not go unnoticed and bring greater interest in baseball, with the necessary publicity to go with it.”

To bolster his argument, Pollock quoted Babe Ruth's comment that “the colorfulness of Negroes in baseball and their sparkling brilliancy on the field would have a tendency to increase attendance at games,” Pirates coach Honus Wagner's assertion that “the good colored clubs played just as good as seen anywhere,” and the opinion of former major league catcher and then Yankee coach Cy Perkins, who had played exhibition ball against the Homestead Grays and said that Vic Harris and Oscar Charleston of the Grays would “grace the roster of any big league club.” Perkins also thought that Johnny Beckwith, a 230-pound right-handed slugger who hit some of the longest and most memorable home runs in Negro league baseball during the 1920s and early 1930s, could hit a baseball harder than any man he had ever seen.

The letter ended with an assurance that Pollock was in a position to assemble such a team or teams for the 1934 season. Within a week, Margaret Donahue acknowledged receipt of the letter, writing Pollock that the elder Veeck was on the road with the team and said it would be given to him for his personal attention when he returned.
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A resident of North Tarrytown, New York, Pollock sent a copy of the letter to the local
North Tarrytown Daily News
, which published it the day after it was mailed to Veeck. In due course, it was picked up by the
Chicago Defender
,
Pittsburgh Courier, Amsterdam News
, and other Negro newspapers.
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Whether Veeck had any thoughts of acting on the idea of a black team or teams in the majors is unknown. No surviving record exsists of a response by Veeck to Pollock, which is most likely explained by the fact that Veeck was suffering the early stages of the illness that would take his life.
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Bill junior may well have seen the letter or heard about it from Margaret
Donahue, as the two were close, and it is hard to imagine that the idea was not at least discussed casually with him. The extroverted Pollock and the outgoing Veeck almost certainly crossed paths. As Pollock's son Alan pointed out in his biography of his father, the idea of a black team in the majors was not dropped after the letter was sent: “Dad worked verbally thereafter through all his major league contacts, trying to secure integration of baseball through an all-black team, and, while he hoped his club would break the racial barrier … he would have been delighted at any team selected so long as the racial barrier crumbled.”
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On September 16, the
Defender
published a column by Al Munro complaining that too little had been made of the fact that 20,000 had paid to see a Negro All-Star game played at Comiskey Park the previous Sunday while fewer than 12,000 people showed up to watch the Cubs at Wrigley Field for a doubleheader. Munro jabbed at Veeck senior on the matter of race, though his claim appeared without any supporting evidence: “'Twas Veeck, you know, who laughed loudly when asked about the chances of race players performing in the National League.” Munro was also frustrated with Veeck on another count because of Veeck's habit of changing the numbers on players' uniforms to thwart newspapers, such as the
Defender
, from publishing scorecards that were given away gratis with the paper.
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Less than a week after the
Defender
article, Veeck came down with what appeared to be influenza, originally believed to have been caused by watching the Cubs play the Giants in Chicago on September 14, a cold, drizzly afternoon. On September 26, he announced from his sickbed in Hinsdale that Charlie Grimm would be retained as Cubs manager for the 1934 season, and Grimm spent a short time with him discussing changes for the 1934 team.
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As the elder Veeck's condition worsened, he asked for high-quality champagne—then illegal under Prohibition—to mitigate his suffering. The next day, two cases of the finest French champagne arrived at the house with a note: “Compliments of Al Capone.” After almost two weeks in bed, his conditioned worsened to the point that his doctor had him admitted to St. Luke's Hospital on the thirtieth for observation. There his illness was finally diagnosed as leukemia, and he soon drifted into a coma and died in his sleep on October 5, 1933.
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Testimonials and telegrams came from everywhere and everyone. Babe Ruth told the
Chicago American
: “If Bill Veeck would have been in the Cub lineup in 1932, I don't think we'd have won in four straight games. He was
a fighter and a great guy.” Judge Landis, reached at his hotel in Washington, where he was attending the World Series, read through part of a prepared statement, and after calling Veeck one of the fairest men the game had ever known, he broke down in tears.
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As per Veeck's final wishes, the funeral was to be at home on the corner lot at 640 South Park Avenue in Hinsdale. Gracie Veeck had declared that the funeral would be simple and asked that members of the Cubs not wear mourning bands at the postseason exhibition game between the Cubs and White Sox on the eve of the funeral. The family received more than 500 telegrams of condolence at the house and 400 floral pieces.
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All but a handful of Cubs and White Sox players, as well as a galaxy of baseball executives, were among the hundreds of mourners at the funeral. The house filled quickly, and many people were forced to pay their respects while standing outside on the lawn.
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Charlie Grimm and many of his players found it difficult to suppress their tears for a man some of them regarded as a father figure rather than an employer. Pallbearers, all neighbors, carried his coffin through the streets to the nearby cemetery, passing through two columns of Cubs ushers standing at attention in their neat blue uniforms. Immediately following the casket was the Veeck family and Margaret Donahue, who at least one sports editor had already suggested might be an appropriate replacement for Veeck given her remarkable knowledge of the game.
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Within two weeks of Veeck's death, an informal poll of owners by the Associated Press made it clear that the idea of interleague play was not going to be seriously considered, opposed as it was by the majority of American League owners, who felt not only that it would compromise the pennant race but also that it was merely an expedient measure that would be unnecessary when fans started coming back to the ballparks. Their National League counterparts argued for it on economic grounds, but the issue was dead.
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When National League officials met on December 13 in Chicago, league president John Heydler presented a resolution honoring Veeck for his fourteen years of service to the game, during which he had proved himself to be “a man of powerful intellect, of fine qualities of leadership, clear judgment, and keen logic” and “a forcible advocate of fair play, impressive in speech and convincing in argument. Always sincere and candid in his business relations and honorable in his every act, he was likewise a lovable associate and trustworthy adviser and friend.”
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Gracie Veeck, then in her fifties, was left with two teenagers in what was emerging as the worst year of the Depression thus far. Many of the family assets had been wiped out in the crash, but her husband had left two life insurance policies, which would pay her an annuity. Several weeks after the funeral Phil Wrigley asked her if she wanted to sell her interest in the Cubs. She agreed, and the team and her lawyer worked out an equitable offer. When the settlement arrived, it was three times the agreed-upon amount, guaranteeing her a secure future.
^u

Immediately following his father's funeral, young Bill returned to Gambier to finish out the Kenyon football season. The team had lost its first four games by a combined 84–0 score, suggesting a singular level of commitment by Veeck to a lost cause. On October 28, Veeck started at right halfback in the team's only victory of the season—20–6 over the University of Rochester—which was significant enough to be reported by the Associated Press and the
New York Times
. It would be the first and last time that Veeck's name appeared in the national press as a football player. After the season, Veeck headed home to move back in with his mother and sister and go work for the Cubs, who hired him as an office boy and jack-of-all-trades.
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In the wake of Veeck's death, Phil Wrigley assumed the role of president and brought in Charles “Boots” Weber from the West Coast as his new treasurer. Weber had served the Pacific Coast League's Los Angeles Angels in several capacities since 1906. The younger Veeck and Weber arrived within days of each other and formed an immediate friendship. Weber would become young Bill's mentor in the years to come, assigning him more responsibility and serving as his ally in dealing with Phil Wrigley.

Bill's relationship with his boss was strained and, from his standpoint, ever frustrating. He saw Wrigley as a shy man who felt more comfortable with the taciturn gum company men he brought in rather than with the outspoken and gregarious baseball people always promoting the game. “And so while he kept all my father's employees, he also surrounded himself with a kitchen cabinet of gum executives who were always undercutting
Boots and me,” he recalled later. “The one point on which we clashed, perennially, was promotion. I wanted it. He didn't. He was the boss. He won every argument.”
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Another ongoing argument, which began almost as soon as Veeck arrived, revolved around his desire to add lights to Wrigley Field. Veeck began plumping for them in early 1934, a year before Larry MacPhail installed the first lights in the major leagues, in Cincinnati. MacPhail had proven in the minors that night baseball could radically improve attendance. In 1930, MacPhail became president of the Columbus, Ohio, franchise in the minorleague American Association and introduced night baseball. The following year Columbus outdrew its parent St. Louis Cardinals by 30,000 fans for the season, largely due to night games.
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Veeck would periodically bring the issue of lights to Wrigley's attention as a means of increasing attendance, but Wrigley always rejected the idea, on aesthetic grounds and out of respect for the sanctity of baseball before dusk. Decades after the fact, Veeck recalled: “Old men, playing dominoes across the hearth, like to say that Phil Wrigley is the last of the true baseball men because he is the only owner who still holds, in the simple faith of his ancestors, that baseball was meant to be played under God's own sunlight. I know better. Having blown the chance to be first with lights, Mr. Wrigley just wasn't going to do it at all.”
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Although he often expressed polite contempt for the trappings of higher education, and he was ever impatient to take on more responsibility, Veeck nonetheless attended night school at Northwestern University for five years after joining the Cubs, taking courses in accounting and business law. He also attended Lewis Institute—now the Illinois Institute of Technology—where he took night courses in mechanical drawing and other practical skills.

Early in his Cubs tenure, Boots Weber entrusted Bill with Wrigley Field's concessions, and Veeck hired a motley crew of vendors to hawk programs, scorecards, hot dogs, and peanuts. One of the first was a young hustler named Jack Ruby, who would become notorious three decades later for shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruby was known as a great “duker,” a slick scorecard hustler who would bump into a mark, place the program in his hand, and then demand his quarter in payment. Ruby also hustled paper birds tied to a stick (which chirped madly when twirled) outside the park, taking advantage of unsuspecting boys or girls whose parents would have to intervene to avoid paying Ruby. Veeck later admitted the Cubs had to assign someone
with binoculars to monitor Ruby and make sure they were getting their cut of his nefarious sales. Veeck, along with Harry Grabiner of the White Sox, organized a vendors union in Chicago “so the vendors would be guaranteed a living wage and the clubs would be guaranteed a professional working force,” as he put it.
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