Bill Veeck (18 page)

“The guy says, ‘Come on and play some rummy. I'll deal.'

“I look over and he's got two hooks for arms. He starts shuffling and dealing with those hooks across the glass-top table. I remember I started to laugh, because we were in such awful shape. But that's the last time I felt sorry for myself. It was a good lesson.”
⁵⁴

Veeck continued to conduct baseball business from his hospital bed. Among his initiatives was setting up a system of farm clubs for the Brewers. Walter “Dutch” Ruether, who had pitched for the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series against the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, resigned from his scouting job with the Cubs and signed on with the Brewers as Veeck's prime talent scout. In 1943, while employed by the Cubs, Ruether had quietly advised Veeck to buy pitcher Julio Acosta from the Piedmont League. “I'd rather work for a Veeck team than for any other big-league club,” Ruether claimed. “Bill's a big leaguer in every respect and a better baseball man than a lot of fellas in the majors.”
⁵⁵

On July 10, 1945, Veeck was examined by a three-man Medical Survey Board, which recommended that he be given an honorable medical discharge after nineteen and a half months of service. He was still having trouble walking and was deemed unable to perform his military duties; the report noted that he was required to walk very little in civilian life. The discharge report, which Veeck was advised of but was not shown, appears to contain a significant discrepancy. Veeck claimed a shell casing from a .55 mm howitzer had caused his injury, but the board officially determined that his ankle collapse had not occurred in the line of duty but had existed prior to his enlistment and then been aggravated by military service. The report ignored the point that Veeck was now suffering from a war-related bone infection, which
threatened both his legs.
^at
The open wound over the ankle had almost certainly led to osteomyelitis with complications from the tropical lesions Veeck called jungle fungus.
⁵⁶
Veeck later told a friend that a shell casing from a howitzer had caused the wound, complicating the previous Kenyon injury.
⁵⁷

Veeck was released from Corona on August 15, 1945, and formally discharged from the Marines on arrival at his West Bend, Wisconsin, home, which took place on the nineteenth. The following night the Brewers held an official welcome-home celebration for Veeck between games of a doubleheader. As the climax to the ceremonies, Bill was treated to a Veeckian surprise: a crate full of pigeons, pigs, and chickens, which were turned loose at home plate. The resulting scramble to recover the livestock was led by manager Nick Cullop, who personally tackled two of the pigs.
⁵⁸

The mostly bedridden Veeck had worked with Ruether on the West Coast to create a team that Cullop could win with, and he did. On September 9, Milwaukee beat St. Paul 5–1 in a game at Borchert Field, thereby capturing its third American Association pennant in a row. Though they again lost in the playoffs, Veeck had succeeded to a degree nobody but he—and, perhaps, Charlie Grimm—ever could have imagined.
⁵⁹

While Veeck had been in Corona, a rumor had circulated in late April 1945 that he was putting together a syndicate to buy the Chicago White Sox—further evidence of his involvement in the game while hospitalized. When the rumor appeared in Arch Ward's column in the
Chicago Tribune
, it was denied by Grace Comiskey, president of the team. Reports of dissension within the Comiskey family gave legs to the rumor, which also planted the idea that Veeck was now in the market for a major-league team.
¹

At the 1945 World Series in early October, Veeck told Dan Daniel of the
New York Telegram
that he was ready with a flattering offer for the White Sox, but “she [Grace Comiskey] won't sell.” Veeck was also rumored to be in line to replace Harry Grabiner, who had retired, as general manager of the White Sox. Veeck later admitted that he had been offered an important job in the major leagues but had turned it down.
²

On October 25, as a fresh rumor about Veeck buying the White Sox was beginning to circulate, Branch Rickey matter-of-factly announced that he had signed Jack Roosevelt Robinson, an African American, to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers' Class AA International League team in Montreal. Robinson, who had played for the Kansas City Monarchs, was a former Army lieutenant and UCLA football star. Rickey judged him an “outstanding prospect” and expected him to reach the majors after a period of “orientation.”
³

Bill Bramham, president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, the minor leagues' governing body, agreed to treat the Robinson contract like any other, but he was clearly unhappy about it. He lashed
out at Rickey, branding him the “carpetbagger stripe of the white race” who “under the guise of helping was, in truth, using the Negro for their own selfish interest, who retard the race.” He accused Rickey of seeing himself as baseball's Moses, commenting sarcastically: “Father Divine will have to look to his laurels, for we can expect a Rickey temple to be in the course of construction in Harlem soon.”
⁴

The Sporting News
sniffed, “Jackie Robinson at 26 is reported to possess baseball abilities which, if he were white, would make him eligible for a trial with, let us say, the Brooklyn Dodgers Class B farm at Newport News.”
⁵

A week after the Robinson signing, on November 1, Albert Chandler resigned his seat in the U.S. Senate to officially become commissioner of baseball. The former Democratic governor of Kentucky, Chandler had been elected the previous April after Landis's death in November 1944, but had to finish up his commitments in the Senate. That he was of a different caste and cut than Landis was clear from his oft-used nickname, “Happy.”

Anticipating his foray into the major leagues, Veeck decided that his first order of business was to sell the Brewers and realize his profits. His marriage also needed fixing after so much time away, and he was ready to move his base of operations. Having accomplished all his goals in Milwaukee, he knew a good sale of that club would prove that he could make a profit for his investors.

On October 27, 1945, Veeck sold his interest in the club to Chicago attorney Oscar Salenger for an undisclosed sum. The new owner, who had been a batboy for the White Sox in 1923, was admittedly “crazy about baseball.” According to his wife, her Russian-born husband was known as “the Encyclopedia of Baseball.” Salenger immediately announced that he would keep all of Veeck's staff, including manager Nick Cullop, and that Veeck would remain an honorary vice president of the club.
⁶

Later that week in Chicago, in an interview, Veeck acknowledged that he now had the money and backing to go after either the White Sox or the Cubs, and had only been delayed by his own health problems and his wife's “illness.” The illness was never specified but was, in effect, a marriage in trouble. Eleanor had visited Bill in the hospital, but his constant absence had alienated her, and she had become increasingly disdainful of his absorption in baseball and all that represented. “She was an animal person, not a people person,” remembered Bill's nephew Fred Krehbiel, who knew her when he was a child. “She disliked baseball and baseball people.”
⁷

Eleanor moved to Arizona alone while Veeck was still hospitalized in
California, leaving their two sons with Bill's mother in Illinois and their daughter, Ellen, in West Bend in the care of a farm woman. The home in West Bend was put on the market and, using some of the money from the sale of the Brewers in a clear attempt to save his marriage, Bill, with the help of Park Parker, former western manager of the National Broadcasting Company and the executor of Bill's father's estate, impulsively purchased the Bar AA ranch, twenty miles southeast of Tucson—a spread with the capacity to comfortably entertain twenty-six guests.

Just before Thanksgiving Veeck reported that his wife was doing well in Arizona and getting better. “Gained five pounds since she went to Arizona,” he said, adding, “She weighs 96 pounds now.” He also acknowledged that his ankle was acting up inside the cast on his leg and that he was scheduled for more penicillin treatment in Tucson. Veeck spent Thanksgiving in Hinsdale with his mother and two sons, gathered his daughter, and headed for Arizona at the end of the month on a chartered aircraft that landed in an open field near the ranch.
⁸

He and Eleanor planned to turn the place into a dude ranch they would call the Double V. Bill wryly said that he was going to Arizona to watch the cacti grow. Interviewed by the
Milwaukee Journal
in December, he sounded wistfully upbeat. “It looks like Ol' Will is about to embark on a new career. I won't say that it replaces the old one, but at least it has kept me busy, and that is something.” The ranch was ready for business, and the Veecks expected their first paying guests on January 10, 1946.
⁹

Nonetheless, when the Cubs and White Sox came through Tucson on their annual spring training exhibition tour in 1946, Veeck had a joyful reunion with Charlie Grimm. Veeck confided to Grimm that he had discovered cacti didn't grow more than an inch a year, and it was a tedious process sitting there day after day watching them. When the Cubs and White Sox headed back to Chicago, Veeck was not far behind, leaving Arizona in the rearview mirror. As he would later explain, “The Arizona experiment didn't take. Eleanor and I had already grown too far apart. As far as our marriage was concerned the ship had sailed. The fault was mine. It was mine from the beginning.”
¹⁰

In 1946, baseball beckoned people who had survived the Great Depression and sacrificed much during the war. Editorialists saw the upcoming season as something special: a reward for winning the war and proof of America's place in the universe. “America and her gallant allies won the war,” read an editorial in the
Miami News
, “and so we still have baseball.” America was ready to celebrate, and the place to celebrate was the ballpark.
¹¹

On Opening Day, April 15, President Harry Truman threw out the ceremonial ball at sold-out Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. Later that day, Veeck appeared in Milwaukee as Oscar Salenger's guest at an Elks Club baseball dinner, where the speakers included John Bradley of Appleton, one of the five Marines who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima, creating one of the war's most unforgettable images. The next day was Opening Day for the Brewers, and Veeck admitted in an interview at the game that life on a dude ranch was dull, and he hinted that he wanted to get back into baseball.

Perhaps he was also inspired by the exploits of his fellow vets. After three years away from the game serving as a pilot in the Marine Air Corps, Ted Williams had been released on January 12, 1946. On February 26, he hit the first pitch he saw in spring training for a home run. On April 30, Bob Feller, the Cleveland ace just back from active duty in the Navy, threw a no-hitter against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. A week later, Johnny Pesky of the Red Sox, also lately of the Navy, had eleven straight hits over a two-day period, tying Tris Speaker's major-league record.

In Chicago for the Cubs home opener, Veeck met Harry Grabiner, who, like him, had quickly realized the retired life was not appealing. Veeck was on the prowl for investors and partners with whom to realize his dream of owning a major-league team, but he also needed a good front-office man. While Veeck was with the Cubs, he and Grabiner had worked together on exhibition games between the two Chicago teams and had become friends. Veeck's reaction to Grabiner was sheer amazement.

“Part of my job was checking gates and receipts,” Veeck recalled, “and we used to get tangled up with the White Sox in the spring and fall. At Wrigley Field, we had all kinds of adding machines, comptometers, slide rules, and other gadgets to make for the greatest efficiency. We'd make our rounds and get the count started. Grabiner would have a pencil and a piece of paper. I'd have all the modern equipment, and Harry got a kick out of watching me pressing keys and pulling levers. Once in a while, he'd show me the total he had at the bottom of the figures he'd scribbled down on the way around. Darned if he didn't ALWAYS have the correct figure that I'd finally reach by the latest scientific accounting methods.”
¹²

Veeck's quest for a major-league team surfaced in a mid-May report in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, recording that he had visited Forbes Field, the home of the National League Pittsburgh Pirates, and was possibly preparing an offer to buy the team. Soon after, the
Milwaukee Journal
reported that Veeck was considering the Pirates or the Cleveland Indians in the American
League. At one point he came within twenty-four hours of making a deal for the Pirates but was stopped by the $2 million price tag. Gradually the scales tipped toward Cleveland, which had a good location and the proper distribution of industry to ensure success (he worried that Pittsburgh was too dependent on the steel industry). It also had an oversized ballpark begging to be filled.
¹³

The Indians had had a lackluster 1945 season, finishing in fifth place in the American League, eleven games out of first place. But the value of the team had increased in midseason with the return of hurler Bob Feller from the Navy, who got off to a splendid start in 1946. The team had some promising rookies, including third baseman Bob Lemon and catcher Jim Hegan.