Bill Veeck (15 page)

On August 2, 1943, Veeck was able to score a publicity coup as well as a historic first when the Brewers played an exhibition game against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. It was the first appearance ever of a minor-league team at a major-league ballpark. Veeck had challenged the Cubs in spring training, claiming he could beat the Cubs any day of the week. Cubs officials took him up on the challenge, and Veeck immediately called on Cubs fans to root for the Brewers.

The game, which the
Milwaukee Sentinel
called “a tribute to Veeck,” was a chance for Chicago to honor the two men that Wrigley had allowed to get away—Veeck and the ever popular Charlie Grimm, who was making his first appearance on the Cubs' field since he left the ballpark in 1938. Before the game Veeck and Grimm performed in their seven-piece pipe band. The Cubs won 7–6 in the tenth inning on Eddie Stanky's third hit of the day, a long drive down the right-field line, which scored Lennie Merullo from second, but Veeck was the ultimate winner.
⁸

Before the end of the season, one more stunt garnered still more national publicity. August 28 was Charlie Grimm's forty-fifth birthday, and Veeck engineered a special celebration with various gifts including a $1,000 war bond.
^ak
The culmination was the presentation of a twelve-foot-wide birthday cake, out of which came a half dozen dancing girls escorting a newly acquired and somewhat embarrassed pitcher—Julio Acosta, a Cuban hurler with a 17–6 record for Richmond in the Piedmont League. After commenting that he was “floor-strucken,” Grimm named Acosta his starting pitcher. Veeck had paid cash for Acosta to preserve the surprise.
⁹

On top of all this publicity, the Brewers finished 90–61 during the regular season and set a new attendance record of 332,597. The team lost in the playoffs but did have its first pennant since 1936. In two years the Brewers had gone from last to first, a remarkable feat at any level in baseball.

In the fall of 1943, Veeck became a genuine American celebrity when three of the country's top magazines—
Look
,
The Saturday Evening Post
, and
Esquire
—all published features on him. The
Look
story was illustrated by a pictorial spread on “Baseball's Number 1 Screwball: Bill Veeck of Milwaukee,” which included an image of a trim, muscular Veeck stripped to his undershorts to practice fly-casting at the ballpark. It also contained a rare family photo of Bill, Eleanor, and their children, now three in number following the birth of Ellen, and a rare quote from Eleanor: “When I got married, I thought I was all through with circuses. Apparently, I was wrong.”
¹⁰

The season over, Veeck tried to accommodate his restlessness with a new career as a boxing promoter. He lined up a partner with boxing experience, and the two went to see the World Series in New York with the collateral mission of making some boxing connections. Veeck had known Barney Ross—a Chicagoan who was the first fighter to hold both the lightweight and welterweight titles simultaneously—for some time, and their dinner at Toots Shor's restaurant was to affect Veeck in a wholly unexpected way. Ross had retired from the ring in 1938 and joined the Marines. As a corporal, he became a hero in the battle for Guadalcanal, protecting wounded fellow Marines over a long, bloody night. He returned to the States suffering from malaria and shock and was awarded the Silver Star for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in
action.” He also received the Distinguished Service Cross and the Presidential Unit Citation from President Roosevelt.

When Veeck's plans as a boxing promoter fell through—he and his partner were unable to secure an arena with an exclusive right to stage their matches—he made the stunning announcement that he wanted to become a private in the United States Marine Corps. Ross, he said, was the inspiration for his enlistment and, like Ross, he would demand to go into combat.
¹¹
Until the fall of 1943, Veeck could not have joined the military because of the size of his family and his age, but as the need for manpower increased, the services began to accept fathers and older men.

The officer in charge of his local recruiting office, Capt. Robert Rankin, remembered Veeck's arrival: “My first sergeant came in and told me that Veeck wanted to see me. Many such callers want to become officers. Veeck was different. He told me he did not want a commission, but that he wanted to join as a private and would be very happy to be sent into battle within six weeks.” The salary he listed on his application was $150 a week.
¹²

The application was approved, on Saturday, November 27, 1943. At the age of twenty-nine, Veeck was sworn in by Capt. Rankin in a public ceremony while Grimm, Schaffer, and others looked on. This was also the first day of the U.S. assault on the Japanese-held island of Tarawa in the South Pacific, during which 1,677 Marines and Navy personnel were killed. Explaining his decision to R. G. Lynch of the
Milwaukee Journal
, who was following Veeck's unexpected enlistment, Veeck reinforced his commitment: “I have to live with myself not only now but after the war is won, and I felt I was in a better position to go than many other fathers who have been drafted. I am satisfied that I have done the right thing by my country, my family, and myself. I am going into the Marine Corps just like any other buck private, and I hope, in time, to earn a promotion from the ranks. Service overseas will be uppermost in my mind.”
¹³

Whether or not Eleanor approved of this decision—or even knew about it in advance—is a matter for speculation, but Veeck himself believed that his family would not suffer: “Sure, I've got three children, but I can go and know Ellen and the kids will be all right. I mean I'm in a better position to go than a lot of other men who have kids. I couldn't sit back and let the draft get those fellows first, so I volunteered. It's the only way I could feel right about it.”
¹⁴
The enlistment came as a shock to all but a few of his closest friends; others saw the Marines as an opportunity for Veeck to get a strong dose of discipline. Lynch, both a fan and a critic of Veeck's since they first
met in June 1941, hoped the man he called a “grade A screwball” would return a better person. “He is a little too high pressure now for most people he deals with. He does just about as he damn pleases, in public and in private, and the devil take anybody that doesn't like it. The Marines will give him a chance to blow off some of that extra steam.”
¹⁵

Because of his celebrity status and his choice of the Marine Corps, later reports suggested that the Marines had planned to use Veeck for his publicity value as a recruiter, giving him a stateside position running recreational programs and appearing in newsreel shots. Perhaps a commission would also have been awarded. But Veeck refused.
¹⁶
While some big leaguers—Joe DiMaggio, Pee Wee Reese, and Johnny Mize among them—spent their military time playing baseball, Veeck joined a cadre of others, including Warren Spahn, Yogi Berra, and Ted Williams, who would be put in harm's way.

Between the time of the enlistment ceremony and his reporting for basic training in San Diego, Veeck attended the winter baseball meetings in New York City, where they were held for the first time in twenty-four years. The meetings led off with the business of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues—otherwise known as the minors. Veeck was warmly received by his fellow minor-league owners, who wished him good luck in the service even though he was at loggerheads with many of them. Almost immediately, Veeck's manufactured flap with the city of St. Paul was revisited, and a rule was enacted to require all teams in the American Association to stay in a hotel in the city where they were playing. Veeck was the lone dissenter, and he fussed and fumed for the cameras and reporters.
¹⁷

The major-league presidents then met behind closed doors. For the second time, an appeal had been made by a group of black publishers and editors to address the winter joint meeting and advocate for the entry of blacks into baseball. This time the request had been granted, and on December 3, 1943, the journalists presented their case for racial integration to Commissioner Landis and the forty-four assembled owners and officials, including Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Veeck was not privy to the meeting, but what transpired behind closed doors would influence what Rickey and he would later accomplish.

The African American delegation was led by John Herman Henry Sengstacke, publisher of the
Chicago Defender
and president of the Negro Publishers Association, and included the presidents and editors of black newspapers in New York, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Detroit. In addition, top officials of the Urban League and the black clergy were present. Sengstacke
was an ardent desegregationist working to integrate all elements of American life, including the Post Office and the Armed Forces.
^al

The star witness was African American actor and former All-American football player Paul Robeson, then drawing raves on Broadway for his portrayal of Othello. Robeson had, in fact, been invited by Landis, who opened the meeting by clearing the room of all reporters and sportswriters save for those in the Negro press. It was to be a closed meeting, and the full transcript was protected as a confidential document for more than sixty years.
¹⁸

Landis introduced Robeson and declared that he had not been taken in by “the propaganda that there is an agreement in this crowd of men to bar negroes from Baseball.”
¹⁹
Robeson noted that not many years earlier a Negro actor appearing in a white cast would have been considered unthinkable and that he had been told after he had starred in
Othello
in London a few years earlier that he would never be able to take it to Broadway. He considered his role as the Moorish king the outstanding success of his career.
²⁰

Although known for his activism, Robeson spoke in terms the executives could appreciate. “I played against Frankie Frisch when he was at Fordham and I was a catcher at Rutgers. I was just telling the Judge that…. I was a catcher who wound up pretty slowly, and, by the time I drew back, Frisch was practically around second…. I later coached at Columbia, when [Lou] Gehrig was playing. I, as you know, was an All-American football player, and played pro football.”
²¹

The plea Robeson made was a simple one: allow Negroes to enter organized baseball immediately. “I never presumed there was any agreement among you gentlemen to bar Negro ballplayers,” Robeson declared, “but merely that you hate to initiate a policy that has not been initiated before. We live in times when the world is changing very fast and when you might be able to make a great contribution to not only the advance of our own country, but the whole world, because a thing like this—Negro ballplayers becoming a part of the great national pastime of America—could make a great difference in what peoples all over the world would feel toward us as a country in a time when we need their help.”
²²

Robeson finished and thanked Landis for having invited him.
²³
He was followed by Sengstacke and the other editors and publishers, who emphasized that other sports such as track, football, and basketball had integrated,
that the present world heavyweight boxing champion was Joe Louis, and that baseball was long overdue. When it was suggested that an unwritten rule preventing integration was in effect, Landis interrupted: “I say there is no written rule: never has been. There is no verbal rule: never has been. There is no haymow rule or subterranean rule or understanding, express or implied, between leagues or between any two clubs of any league.”
^am

Ira Lewis, publisher of the
Pittsburgh Courier
, came back at Landis: “But we believe, however that there is a tacit understanding—that there is a gentlemen's agreement—that no Negro players be hired … This has become a tradition. Few managers and few owners care to break this precedent. But, gentlemen, precedents are worse than bad laws: Bad laws may be repealed, but precedents, with all their innuendos and implications in a case like this, can be so unfair and so very un-American.”

The publishers submitted a four-point resolution, which they asked the joint meeting to approve: (1) that immediate steps be taken to accept qualified Negroes in the framework of organized baseball; (2) that the process by which players were graduated from Classes C, B, A, and AA teams to the majors be applied without prejudice or discrimination; (3) that the same system by which players were selected from school, sandlot, semipro, and other clubs be used in selecting black players; and (4) that a statement be issued by the joint meeting declaring that Negroes were eligible for trials and permanent places on the teams.

There being no questions, Landis ended the session with the Negro press. The delegation left, and without missing a beat, Landis turned immediately to the fact that Ed Barrow, president and general manager of the New York Yankees, was not in attendance. No mention was made of any of the four points, including the last, which the publishers felt would be the easiest for the white owners to agree to. In sum, the delegation was handled with courtesy, but their proposal was dismissed without a moment of reflection.

Branch Rickey, ill at ease with the fact that no position on the proposals had been taken by the owners, broke into a discussion of player contracts a few minutes after the delegation departed. Addressing Landis, he said, “Mr. Commissioner, are we to understand that the report from this meeting, in response to the delegation that came here today, is to be simply that the matter was not considered?”