The Original Curse (4 page)

It was still dark. Lucky Charley cinched the buttons of his waistcoat. He smoothed the bottom of the waistcoat with both hands, dropped his watch into his pocket, squeezing the fob into the opposite pocket. He slid into his overcoat, pressed his derby over his forehead, and grabbed his kit and bag. He took a deep breath and looked in the mirror. Natty, he thought, smiling. They’d called him a natty dresser as far back as his days at King’s diner down in the Loop, where he was a $10-a-week waiter hustling eggs and doughnuts and mugs of Postum to the midnight crowds, mostly newsmen. But that was 20 years ago. Gray hairs had presented themselves in the interim. Charley patted his waistcoat again. Still thin. Now he was one of the best-known businessmen in the city, owner of a chain of lunchrooms, a movie theater, a billiard parlor. Lucky Charley was a millionaire, president of the Chicago Cubs.

Millionaire? Charley knew better. He was no millionaire, but the papers liked to speculate that he was, and he’d done little to discourage them. He hadn’t really been a waiter at King’s either—more like a night manager—but Charley had spent enough time around Chicago’s newsmen to know that what they wanted was a good and splashy story, details be damned. So he’d let them believe he was a waiter-turned-millionaire.

Charley knew how to work newsmen, and he was planning to do it again this week. When he got to New York, he was going to give Chicago a story, a big story. A Cubs story. He’d give them the greatest pitcher and catcher in baseball today. Perhaps, too, the greatest young hitter. Yes, there was a corker of a story in New York.

Charley stopped in to kiss his daughter, Dorothy, on the forehead before he left. He did not kiss his wife, Bessie. He took the elevator to the lobby of the Edgewater,
¹
and when he got there he gave a wink and a thank-you to the deskmen who had, with alacrity, brought him the telegram hurrying him to New York today, Sunday, rather than tomorrow.
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The boys gave Charley goofy smiles. Charley loved playing the part of baseball magnate. The lobby boys did not care a whit when the well-to-do lumberyard owners and doctors and auto parts suppliers who lived here at the Edgewater Beach Hotel received messages. But when Charley got a telegram, it was different. The boys fought to deliver it, because they just knew it had something to do with the North Side ball club, and each wanted some part, however small, in putting over the Cubs’ latest transaction. They looked at Charley with admiration. Charley liked being admired.

This morning the telegram told him there was a change of schedule and he should get to New York early for the league meetings. Charley stepped out of the lobby, into a blast of morning cold, to the waiting car. As he slid into the backseat, Charley looked up at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, with its stucco facade and red terra-cotta roof. It looked ridiculous, a luxury resort plucked off the Riviera and placed on Sheridan Road, along the icy shore of Lake Michigan. But the Edgewater’s mere existence, let alone the fact that he lived there, helped to assure Charley that he was as lucky as everyone thought him. These days he needed that assurance.

Coincidences always seemed to fall in Charley’s favor. For example, back in 1914, John T. Connery’s syndicate had attempted to buy the Cubs from Charles Taft for $750,000, promising another $500,000 to upgrade the Cubs’ West Side park. Taft turned down Connery. Charley wanted the Cubs too, but he couldn’t afford them. Instead he bought into the Chicago Whales of the upstart Federal League, which was challenging the dominance of the American and National leagues. By 1915 the Federal League had failed but had done enough financial damage to the other leagues that Taft now wanted out. As part of baseball’s peace deal with the Feds, Charley was allowed to put together a group to buy the Cubs.
For $500,000
. And Charley, naturally, moved the team to the Whales’ new park at Addison and Sheffield.
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Connery, having missed out on his chance at the Cubs, tried his hand at the hotel game instead. He built the Edgewater. How about that? Charley wound up with the Cubs for one-third less than what Connery offered, and Connery wound up building Charley a place to live.

Charley Weeghman, ever the sharp dresser, broke into Chicago’s baseball scene as owner of the Federal League’s Whales in 1914. (N
ATIONAL
B
ASEBALL
H
ALL OF
F
AME
L
IBRARY
, C
OOPERSTOWN
, N.Y.)

See? Lucky him.

But lately Charley’s reservoir of luck had been draining, thanks to the damned war in Europe. It was difficult enough to watch America mobilize against Germany, his parents’ birthplace (the family name was actually Veichman but had been Americanized after the family settled in Richmond, Indiana).
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For Charley, though, the war was primarily a financial matter. Food rationing had sapped his quick-serve restaurants, which had once seen lines snake around corners in the downtown Loop district. Charley was Chicago’s Lunchroom King, and, at its peak his flagship spot at Madison just west of Dearborn served 5,000 customers daily.
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With the war on, though, the government was conserving resources, and Herbert Hoover (head of the Food Administration) was single-handedly crushing the restaurant business. Hoover pushed the population to cut out certain food groups on certain days—wheatless Mondays and Wednesdays, meatless Tuesdays, porkless Thursdays and Saturdays. Flour was in short supply. Sugar and milk too. Hoover tried to get Americans to eat fish, which was fine in the East but no easy chore in the Midwest, especially for a hurry-up lunchroom like the Weeghman chain. Chicagoans were not eaters of fish, and most fish caught in Illinois rivers was sent to New York. Hoover also asked consumers to cut back on grains, making the bread for sandwiches—that staple of the lunchroom—harder to come by. In September 1917, to conserve the supply of grains, whiskey production was banned, which did not affect Charley’s restaurants but surely affected his ability to cope with his losses. (Beer production, too, would be banned later—the path to prohibition in America was rooted as much in patriotism as in morality.)

Charley’s restaurants were his income. Truthfully, he was a financial lightweight in baseball. He valued his position and his stock holdings in the team, but the Cubs’ real clout was in the investors he had assembled when he bought the club. These were Chicago’s wealthiest businessmen, like meatpacker J. Ogden Armour, Sears-Roebuck head Julius Rosenwald, and chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. The group was so flush with cash that, when the sale was first announced, one newspaper giddily estimated that the Cubs were a “$100,000,000 ball club.”
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That was a stretch. Either way, Charley’s bank account was not nearly on a par with those of the Cubs’ other owners. He was much better at being around wealthy men than being a wealthy man himself.

He also wasn’t very good, it seemed, at assembling baseball teams. In two years at the helm, success on the field was elusive for Charley, and 1917 had been a particular nightmare. The United States officially entered the war in April, and baseball attendance plummeted. Chicago was still baseball crazy, but for the second year in a row the Cubs struggled to a fifth-place finish with a young, no-name roster. Meanwhile, on the South Side, the White Sox rolled to the AL pennant and led the league in attendance by a wide margin—684,521 fans, well ahead of the Cubs’ 360,218. This greatly displeased the Cubs’ backers. At least they could afford the financial hit. Charley couldn’t. With his restaurants strangled by rationing, if he wasn’t making money on his Cubs holdings, he wasn’t making money. To stay afloat financially, Charley took the painful step of selling shares of Cubs stock to his friend Wrigley. Publicly he was still the face of the Cubs, but privately he was ceding more and more power to Wrigley.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. When he had gained control of the team, Charley spent lavishly to publicize and aggrandize the Cubs. He employed endless parades and brass bands and dancing girls (there were always dancing girls at Weeghman events, which might help explain his impending divorce). On the spring training trip of ’16, Charley chartered a special Cubs train to camp in Tampa, outfitted with electric pianos, record players, canaries, fine foods, and a singing group called the Florida Troubadors. There was even a billiard table.
Baseball Magazine
reported, “These gorgeous accommodations were really for ballplayers and not for millionaires.”
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The pool table on the train, it turns out, was a good metaphor for Charley’s finances—impressive looking from the outside but not reflecting the reality inside. The pool table was a beauty, a Brunswick, and as the train stopped along the way to Florida in March 1916, those who saw folks calmly shooting pool most likely whistled in amazement at the decadence. That’s because it was easy to play pool on a train when the train was stopped. For most of the trip, the train was speeding and bumping along. As
Tribune
writer James Crusinberry noted: “Playing billiards [on a moving train] was like trying to spear goldfish with a table fork. A few of the downstate boys were fooled, however, because whenever the train stopped someone grabbed a cue and started playing, while the fellows outside gazed in wonder.”
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From the outside, folks gazed in wonder at Lucky Charley Weeghman, the $10-a-week-waiter-turned-millionaire-magnate. From the inside, it was a different story.

In the winter before the 1918 season, Charley still had hope. He just needed a quick end to the war, and some felt that could happen by the spring. It wasn’t hard to project how things would go from there: mass celebration at home, the end of rationing, lines of diners back at his restaurants, Americans flocking to their favorite diversions. Like baseball. Charley’s task this winter was to land top players for the Cubs so that when fans came back they’d come to the North Side. Cubs owners, tired of losing while the White Sox were winning, had authorized Weeghman to spend $250,000 to acquire players. It was an absurd amount. The biggest purchase price one team had given another for a player to that point was $55,000, paid by Cleveland to the Red Sox for Tris Speaker in 1916. Theoretically, $250,000 would buy four Speakers, and there weren’t four for sale. But Charley made a splash with fans and press wags by very publicly announcing his bankroll.
The Sporting News
labeled him “The Mad Spendthrift.”
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Few shared Charley’s optimism. Overall, baseball’s 1917 attendance was 1,283,525, a staggering 19.7 percent drop from the ’16 season. That, in a way, made that winter the perfect time for player shopping. Some of the game’s magnates, concerned about the war and facing continued attendance problems, were eager to cut salaries by selling players, hoping to make up for the previous year’s losses and gird the bottom line for the coming season.

It was this business—plucking players and building a sure pennant winner at the National League meetings—that called Charley to New York a day early on that frigid day in December. It was only four degrees outside, and Charley’s early-morning hurrying was probably unnecessary. His train left at noon. At the LaSalle Street station, Charley met Walter Craighead, the Cubs’ 31-year-old business manager. Craighead and Weeghman boarded the 20th Century Limited, a businessman’s special that could zip to New York in less than 18 hours, and Charley had no worries about keeping himself natty over the trip. The 20th Century had a tailor, a manicurist, saltwater baths, and a barber to ensure that businessmen aboard would not arrive in the East a stubbled mess.

Craighead was Charley’s brother-in-law, married to his younger sister, Myral. Charley had been criticized that winter for dumping well-respected team secretary Charley Williams, who had been in Chicago baseball for 33 years, longer than Craighead had been alive. But, for Weeghman, family trumped all. His clan was from conservative German stock and did not necessarily approve of his showmanship and man-about-town bearing, but that did not seem to affect the family bond. He had given his two younger brothers jobs running his restaurants. He had moved his parents to Chicago from Indiana and taught his father baseball. Craighead had no real experience in business or baseball, but Charley still pushed out Williams for his brother-in-law.

In New York, Craighead and Charley were to meet Cubs manager Fred Mitchell, who would be coming down from his farm in Massachusetts, to settle on a strategy for adding players. Already the Cubs had one big deal all but complete. Back in November, Weeghman had agreed to a blockbuster deal with Phillies owner William F. Baker. The Cubs would send two low-level players and a large sum of money to Philadelphia for ace Grover Cleveland Alexander and catcher Bill Killefer. Baker had sworn Charley to secrecy. He wanted to wait before announcing the deal, because he knew the trade would not play well with fans or the press.