Terror in the City of Champions (9 page)

The Tigers’ victories cheered Mickey Cochrane, but not for long. He was bracing for a critical fifteen-game road trip to Boston, New York, Washington, and Philadelphia. “If we finish our present swing through the east with an average of .500 or better, we will be in an excellent spot for the dash down the stretch,” he said. “Just give us an even break or better now and the boys will find us very, very tough when we get back on our own lot.”

Cochrane settled on a lineup in early June. He deviated occasionally, but most often he batted Fox first, placed himself second, and followed with Goslin, Gehringer, Rogell, Greenberg, Walker, Owen, and the pitcher. After games at Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium, the Tigers were on target to meet Cochrane’s goal of breaking even on the road trip. Detroit arrived in Washington on June 19, the day before they were to face the defending American League champions. Goose Goslin offered a bold prediction. He said Detroit would take four of five games at Griffith Stadium. Goslin had played with the Senators last year and despised some of them. The Tigers were able to pry him away because of his clashes with manager Joe Cronin.

Leading the league and being a major leaguer carried responsibilities, Cochrane believed. One of them was to represent your club in a dignified fashion. The Tigers stayed at the elegant Wardman Park Hotel, not far from the National Zoo. One morning, Cochrane headed into the fancy main dining room for breakfast. He was astounded to discover four of his young players wearing unclean club sweaters. He expected them in sports coats. “This sort of stuff belongs in a Class B league,” he told them at a team meeting that afternoon. “From now on act like champions off the ball field as well as on, and pay a little attention to your appearance. Make people respect you outside the ball park as well as inside the park. Don’t ever forget that you are the top team in the American League and act like it.”

The Tigers played like a first-place team. They proved Goslin correct and took four of the five Washington games. Goslin contributed by scoring eight runs and knocking in six. It was onto Philadelphia next, where Detroit took two out of three—and would probably have taken another had Connie Mack not canceled the fourth game. He called it for wet conditions, but seeing as it had not rained, the more likely reason was dismal ticket sales. Mack figured he’d be better off hosting a doubleheader later.

The road trip was a flag-waving success. Hank Greenberg stood out, driving in twenty-four runs in fifteen games. Gehringer scored twenty-one times. Goslin got twenty-five hits. And Gee Walker, the high-spirited buck who tested Cochrane’s patience, launched a 400-foot home run, chased down a long fly with a remarkable over-the-shoulder catch, and raised his average twenty points. The trip filled Walker with confidence. A bit too much.

The Tigers headed into St. Louis, home of the lowly Browns, with a half-game lead over New York. The next week would be telling. The Tigers would be playing three doubleheaders in five days. Two would be back-to-back—in different cities. The schedule promised to be exhausting, but Cochrane hoped to put distance between his team and the Yankees. In the eighth inning on June 30, with the game tied 3–3, the Tigers saw a chance to pull ahead. Greenberg singled and Gee Walker advanced him to second while beating out a grounder. Detroit had two runners on base with Marv Owen batting. Then the trouble began. Walker got daring and stepped too far off first base, prompting catcher Rollie Hemsley to rifle the ball to first baseman Jack Burns. They had Walker trapped, so Greenberg headed toward third to take the pressure off Walker. Greenberg got caught in the rundown and the speedier Walker advanced to second. Moments later, Browns pitcher Jack Knott wheeled around and picked Walker off second base. Two sloppy base-running errors cost the team its best shot. The Tigers lost 4–3 in ten innings. New York regained first.

Walker’s carelessness flabbergasted reporters. One called him “the chief squanderer” and singed him for “his characteristic crack-pottery” and for acting as foolishly “brave as the boy on the burning deck.” Another criticized him as “dizzy.”

Cochrane was livid. After the game he raged in the dugout. He carried his anger into the clubhouse and then sequestered himself in his hotel room that evening, not leaving until lunch the next day. He had worked so hard to tame Walker in spring training. And now this? Twice in one inning? Of a tied game? With first place on the line? Cochrane suspended Walker and ordered him out of uniform. Walker watched the next day’s doubleheader from the stands in street clothes. Afterward, on Cochrane’s command, he boarded a train back to Detroit as the team headed to Cleveland.

“All I wanted to do is to get that fellow out of my sight in a hurry,” Cochrane fumed. “I’m through with that fellow. I’ve done everything I could to help him. Everybody has tried to help him. And then he goes and kicks away a ball game through reckless, stupid blundering. It would not be fair to the other players to keep a fellow of Walker’s type around.”

Cochrane wanted to send him to the minor leagues as punishment, but Browns manager Rogers Hornsby said he would claim Walker, which forced the Tigers to either give up on him entirely or take him back. They didn’t decide instantly. Walker’s wife, with their small sons, picked him up at the train station. He was in a somber mood. He headed home, changed into a dress shirt, and went quickly to the ballpark to meet with Frank Navin, where he apologized profusely and promised to be more cautious if given another chance. The decision would be Cochrane’s, and he wouldn’t make it until he came back to town, Navin said. Walker headed down to the field and worked out “like a freshman footballer anxious to get in shape for the opening of the season,” wrote Tod Rockwell of the
Free Press
.

The Tigers returned home for a July 4 doubleheader. Thirty-eight thousand fans packed into and onto Navin Field. Among them, with a fedora tilted over his left eye, was Gee Walker, whose request to suit up had been rejected by Cochrane. “I guess I had it coming,” Walker said. In the outfield a mass of fans stood in front of the fences and sometimes made way for the fielders when balls were hit in their direction. Police on horseback patrolled the grounds, pushing back the men in their straw hats and the children in their shorts as they encroached on the territory. Navin Field had not seen such a crowd in half a decade. It had been a long time since the Tigers found themselves in the heart of a pennant race. A mania was beginning to percolate throughout the city.

After the Independence Day doubleheader—one win, one loss—Cochrane brought the team together for a private clubhouse meeting. He put the decision in the players’ hands: Give Gee Walker another chance or cut him loose? By secret ballot they voted him back onto the team. Walker was made to apologize to his teammates, serve out a ten-day suspension, and pay a twenty-dollar fine. The experience deflated him. He was, one witness said, “thoroughly chastened,” the “saddest man” in the dugout, and “fighting off a severe case of the blues.”

The next day, an off day, saw Cochrane, Walker, and the rest of the team at the horse races at the Michigan State Fair Grounds.

Perhaps Dayton Dean was there. He lived just blocks away.

The Little Stone Chapel

Heinrich Pickert took over as Detroit police commissioner in April. A well-known character in city circles, he had served as commander of the Michigan National Guard, heading up parades on horseback in full regalia. When the cornerstone was laid for the Masonic Temple and President Warren Harding came to town, Col. Pickert, as he liked to be called, played a central role in organizing the stunning procession. He had also been the city’s chief customs collector, appointed by President Hoover.

Born poor to German immigrants and raised in the Irish district of Corktown near the Tigers ballpark, Pickert provided reporters with good copy. He had color. He believed in astrology. He collected Oriental rugs. (“No one can tell what patience and what industry, what joy and sorrow, has gone into an old Oriental.”) He had been awarded a Purple Heart in the Great War.

Col. Pickert had definite ideas about how his police officers should act. His first order as commissioner was to forbid officers from chewing gum. “Gum and police work don’t go together,” he said. “Imagine how a police officer looks walking down the street and in public places with his jaws working like a cow munching a cud.” Col. Pickert didn’t care much for tobacco chewing either, but he allowed it in moderation. He insisted on a more militaristic feel for his police force. He liked to be saluted fully, not halfheartedly, and the sight of officers with their feet on furniture or windowsills, or with their chairs tilted against walls, could set off a tirade. He called for clean white shirts to be worn without suspenders (unless covered by a coat). He also preferred that officers not have facial hair. His own face, clean-shaven, was topped by light-colored hair, cut starkly and parted crisply over his left eye.

Beyond his quirks and personality, Col. Pickert instituted a hard line against protesters, radicals, and labor organizers. Claims of police brutality rose under his administration, and the Special Investigations Division evolved into a Red Squad. He did not hide his feelings on these matters. Col. Pickert and his wife, Julie, spoke freely about their beliefs. They had met in their forties through patriotic organizations. Both were active in the American Legion. At the downtown Women’s City Club, to which Julie belonged, Col. Pickert boasted that the police department kept lists of radicals and watched their activities “all the time.” He accused Detroit public school educators of “teaching, living, talking, and breathing” communism. “The appalling thing is that the people in whom we put so much faith are forgetting their Americanism and teaching this rotten doctrine,” he said. “If we allow these instructors to remain in our schools, pretty soon we will be on the downgrade.” He worried about unions and labor troubles. “I wish we could have a showdown soon,” he said.

The Black Legion was also ready for such a confrontation. By mid-1934 the legion had expanded in southeast Michigan to four regiments of 1,600 men in Detroit, one regiment in Highland Park, one in the downriver area south of the Ford Rouge plant, two farther south near Monroe, two north of Detroit in Pontiac, one or two in Flint, one in Saginaw, and possibly others. There were regiments in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as well. Not all were at capacity.

Legionnaires congregated in open fields and meeting halls. Smaller groups met in basements and darkened living rooms. Particularly in neighborhoods, frequent swarms of cars could pique curiosity. As the legion grew, the danger of being exposed swelled. With snoops and nosy neighbors a concern, the legion looked for more discreet meeting places. Fraternal halls, already hosting assemblies of men, offered the best camouflage. These ranged from the patriotic to the religious. Oddfellows, Maccabees, Pythians, Forresters, Woodmen, Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Masonic orders—the extensive lists of their meeting times and locations filled special weekly pages in the daily papers.

In the legion’s third regiment, home to Dayton Dean, officers rented a vacant church, the Little Stone Chapel, figuring it would provide privacy. The chapel was situated on the northeast corner of Second and Ledyard. Built in the 1800s, it was a remnant from the days when the neighborhood sparkled as one of the city’s most desirable, host to grand Victorian homes with brick turrets, bay windows, steep gabled roofs, and long porches with iron spindles. Its stone bell tower anchored the corner, adorned with a small sign that stuck from the surface like a starched flag. Two sides of the building featured round rose windows. The pews inside could seat more than five hundred people. But it wasn’t the sanctuary or nave that interested the legionnaires. They liked the intimate meeting rooms that were tucked in the basement and off the main hallways. It was there that they conspired and conjured mystery and extracted promises of devotion.

It also helped that just down the block stood the crowning glory of fraternal life in Detroit, the magnificent, massive, fourteen-story, Indiana-limestone, Gothic-inspired, awe-engendering, accolade-inducing Masonic Temple, the largest Knights’ temple in North America. Constructed in the 1920s, it towered over Cass Park. With more than one million square feet of space, the temple offered a labyrinth of a thousand-plus rooms. The place was so large that a child who wandered in from the street once got lost for nine hours before a passerby heard her frantic cries.

Among the grandest rooms were a 5,000-seat theater, two ballrooms with capacities of 750 and 800, and a cathedral for 1,600. Amenities and flourishes abounded: a hotel, a gymnasium, bowling lanes, billiard tables, a barber shop, and a shoe-shine stand. Lodge rooms were done in Tudor, Egyptian, Corinthian, Byzantine, Greek Doric, Greek Ionic, Italian Renaissance, and Medieval Romanesque. The temple featured marble walls, intricate wood carvings, a terra-cotta fountain, ornamental beams, and brass, bronze, and copper details. All of these added to the ambience, making a spectacular spot for testimonial dinners and a place where the rich, the celebrated, and the powerful—men like Walter O. Briggs, Will Rogers, Thomas Edison, Ty Cobb, and Mickey Cochrane—found comfort and companionship. In the late 1920s, before the market crash, 55,000 men belonged, representing twenty-eight groups. (Cochrane, often assumed by fans and reporters to be a Catholic, was in fact a Protestant and a longtime Shriner.) The temple’s presence on the same block meant Black Legion members needn’t worry about their parked cars drawing attention on the streets around Cass Park. There were always cars.

The Masonic Temple was still gloriously new. But the Little Stone Chapel, like the Victorian homes in the neighborhood, had seen more prosperous days. Parts of the building were in poor shape. Legion members spent Sundays and weeknights improving the facility. Dayton Dean and his lighting department co-worker Harvey Davis were particularly devoted. They wrapped furnace pipes and painted walls with supplies stolen from their employer.