Bill Veeck (19 page)

Veeck initially approached attorneys for John Sherwin, the Indians largest stockholder, but not club president Alva Bradley, and his interest was kept secret. Veeck registered in Cleveland hotels under an assumed name. On Sunday, May 28, the Associated Press reported that Veeck was negotiating for the team, and Bradley responded that the Indians were not for sale and that he did not even know Bill Veeck. Bradley opposed the sale, believing the team should be owned locally, but Sherwin had moved too far along and Bradley's opposition was voiced too late. To seal the deal and address the issue of local ownership, Veeck offered to hold $200,000 of stock for the present owners—but none took him up on the offer.
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The week before he actually took ownership of the Indians, Veeck roamed around Cleveland in taxicabs and on streetcars, stopping at bars, restaurants, and social clubs such as the VFW and the Knights of Columbus to ask people what they thought of their team. He discovered that they loved the Indians but disliked the syndicate that had owned the team since 1928, as its members seemed aloof and penurious. The promotion-loving Veeck was, for example, shocked to learn that a ball hit into the stands was deemed team property and had to be returned to an usher. He tried to call the ballpark to see if he could reserve a block of seats for an upcoming game and found that to be impossible. He also learned that Indians games were not on the radio and most cab drivers and bartenders were not aware of when the team was in town. To Veeck, this was an opportunity tailor-made for his promotional abilities.

As the sale was moving ahead, Veeck accused the existing group of being more interested in profits than a pennant. The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
conducted a poll that showed that 60 percent of local fans favored a change of ownership.
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On June 22, 1946, Veeck bought the Cleveland Indians from Bradley's group for $1,539,000, with a group of partners that included Phil Clarke and Lester Armour (now respectively president and vice president of the City National Bank of Chicago), investment bankers Arthur Allyn and Newton Frye, attorney Sydney K. Schiff, Harry Grabiner, and comedian Bob Hope, who had been born in Britain but raised in Cleveland from infancy. Hope was known in Cleveland sports circles; he had had a brief career as an amateur boxer, fighting under the name Packy East, and would later quip that the locals renamed him Rembrandt because he spent so much time on the canvas. Hope was clearly impressed with Veeck, in whom he had “a world of faith.” He was an avid fan of the Indians and now owned about a sixth of the franchise, ensuring the Indians additional national publicity, which pleased Veeck to no end.
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Veeck used the moment to make a point: “Nobody in baseball is more aware of the fact that a ball club must sell baseball and win games. There is no substitute for that. But you don't sell your baseball without dressing it up in bright colored paper and red ribbons.”
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Later that day, during the first game played under the new ownership, Veeck took a count of the customers, and the point was made: only 8,526 came to see the Indians beat the league-leading Red Sox.
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Veeck's new front office was led by vice president Harry Grabiner. Rudie Schaffer had been summoned from Milwaukee to take over as general manager. Marsh Samuel, Veeck's old schoolmate from Hinsdale, was hired away from the White Sox as his public relations man.

From the outset, rumors indicated that Veeck was not happy with Lou Boudreau as his player-manager and that he planned to replace him as manager with Jimmy Dykes, then managing the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League, or Charlie Grimm. In June, when Dykes came to Cleveland, it was assumed that he was in town to talk about the job. On June 23, Veeck gave one of many lukewarm endorsements of Boudreau when asked if he would keep him on for the rest of the season: “You can't say just point blank that Boudreau will be the manager for the rest of the year. Something may happen to make a change in managers desirable. But no change is contemplated at present.”
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Rumors followed about Grimm leaving the Cubs to join Veeck in Cleveland. Phil Wrigley denied them.
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But, as Veeck revealed later, he really had his eye on Casey Stengel, now cooling his heels in the Pacific Coast League in his new position with the Oakland Oaks. In time, Veeck
realized he could not afford to lose Boudreau as his shortstop, which might well have happened if he had been sacked as manager.
^au

His strategy with the public in Cleveland mirrored his approach in Milwaukee: create a good team and make sure the fans left the ballpark happy. After a quick tour of the restrooms, Veeck immediately ordered several dozen mirrors. “Whoever heard of a ladies' room,” he asked, “without looking glasses the gals can primp in front of?” Now a ball hit into the stands could be kept, and after most home games, Veeck stationed himself outside one of the gates, where he personally thanked the fans for attending.

When he took over, the team had no radio broadcasts, no Ladies' Day, no posting of National League scores, and no telephone service for fans wishing to reserve tickets. All these things were changed in a matter of weeks. To make it easy to order tickets over the phone, he installed a switchboard with ten lines and hired people to answer them. “If a fan doesn't like his ticket,” Veeck told his new employees, “exchange them without any back talk. This is a business in which you must try to please the public. The customer may not always be right, but he thinks he is. We have something to sell, naturally go along with him. I didn't invent this idea, but it works for other businesses, and I don't see why it won't work for us.”
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The most visible change that Veeck made was with the ushers, whom he dressed in blue coats and trousers with gold stripes, white shirts, and blue neckties. They were to be clean-shaven, with their shoes were brilliantly polished; they were taught courteousness and how to be firm but not tough.
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As he had done in Chicago and Milwaukee, Veeck paid personal attention to his stadium's food. Max Axelrod was the concessionaire who worked with Veeck to develop just the right tastes and smells for the ballpark. To Veeck the two most important elements of this mix were the freshly roasted peanuts and the hot dogs. “Veeck took hot dogs very seriously,” said Chris Axelrod, Max's grandson.
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He added that for Veeck the hot dogs had to be
just the right flavor and texture to appeal to Cleveland's ethnically diverse audience.
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Continuing the policy he had established in Milwaukee, Veeck made himself available to any group that needed a luncheon or after-dinner speaker. He saw his market as regional rather than local and quickly moved outside Cleveland: “He would go to Buffalo, New York, because we drew quite a bit from Buffalo, which is two hundred miles from Cleveland,” recalled catcher Jim Hegan, “and Erie, Pennsylvania, another hundred miles. But he would make all those towns, and just promote the Indians and I think he was very much responsible for our attendance shifts.”
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On a less formal basis, he worked the nightclubs and bars into the early-morning hours after dinner with local reporters. “In 1946 when Bill first got to Cleveland, I was thirty years old and wanted to get to know him better,” Hal Lebovitz of the
Cleveland News
remembered at age eighty-one. “He was always out making speeches, so I offered to drive him so we could talk. I picked him up about 3 p.m., and he fell asleep in the car. He made the speech, and the crowd loved him. On the drive back, he fell asleep again. We got to Cleveland, and I dropped him off at his favorite nightspot, where he was well rested to begin his night rounds.”
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During one early game, Veeck sat in the bleachers for five innings and discovered that nobody could understand what was being said on the public address system. He quickly installed a new sound system. The fact that an owner would sit in the bleachers hobnobbing with folks in the cheap seats, asking them how to improve their experience, was a startling, radical move that would become one of his trademarks.
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Two weeks after taking over, Veeck arrived in Boston to attend his first American League owners meeting and to attend the thirteenth All-Star
Game on July 9 1946. This came after a one-day visit with his family in Arizona, which, according to Arch Ward, was his first time home since he'd left in April, intending to be away for only a few weeks. Veeck's unexpected arrival in the American League caught baseball writers by surprise, but as ever, they wrote about him. Ed Rumill of the
Christian Science Monitor
devoted his entire column of July 11 to Veeck. Known for his access at baseball's highest level, Rumill reported that Veeck, having moved his act from Milwaukee to Cleveland, would quickly be reminded that a reasonable amount of dignity was expected in the major leagues. Veeck, however, had already begun his frontal attack on baseball's dignity. The day before, Arch Ward had reported in his column in the
Chicago Tribune
that Veeck had apologized for
not
insulting any of his fellow owners at his first American League meeting. “I've got to get warmed up,” he explained.
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If Veeck was about to begin tossing barbs at baseball's executives, he also began throwing bouquets to the working-class folks he needed to fill his ballpark. As a first step, he hired Max Patkin as a coach. Patkin was a thin, tall man with a rubber face and a large nose. A below-average pitcher on the Indians Wilkes-Barre farm club, he had been released earlier in 1946 because of a sore arm. But he was a born clown with an ability to contort his body in the most extraordinary manner. He had picked up his clown reputation during the war when, pitching for the Navy against the Seventh Air Force team in Honolulu, Joe DiMaggio nailed him for a home run. Something got into Patkin, who caught up with DiMaggio at first base and followed him around the bases stride for stride. “I weighed 150 pounds, looked like a nose on a lollipop stick,” he later told Red Smith of the
New York Times
. “When we got to the plate, the whole team was out there shaking my hand.” Smith described him as looking “like a noodle Mrs. Ronzoni left in the box too long.”
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Just after Veeck bought the club, the Indians were scheduled to play an exhibition game against Wilkes-Barre, and Patkin was brought back to entertain the crowd, which he did as first-base coach. He would pretend to faint over a close or disputed call, falling over backward while remaining as straight as a tree. Boudreau thought Patkin's act was hilarious and reported this to Veeck, who gave Patkin a legitimate coach's contract for $1, but also signed him to a performance agreement for $650 a month. “I want you to work the crowd and then perform for two innings a game in the first base coaching box,” he instructed Patkin.
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Veeck also knew an oddball shortstop named Charlie Price, who played
for the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. Price had a broad collection of tricks that he performed either before games or between the games of a doubleheader. These included being able to hit a ball while suspended upside-down from a rack erected over the plate and to catch and throw while standing on his head. He also had a fascination with snakes, which he collected and occasionally brought to the ballpark as part of his pre-game act. During one pre-game sideshow in Oakland in July, he reached for a ball, which somehow ended up inside his shirt, and when he went to retrieve it, he instead pulled out a six-foot-long black snake. Price and his reptile then proceeded to put on a two-creature show in the infield, with Price more than once tossing the snake out at second as it slithered down the base path.
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Price was purchased by the Indians on August 2 for the remainder of the 1946 season. The plan was to use him as a pinch hitter, but Veeck added, “He won't hit much, but is the greatest baseball entertainer in the country.”

After a few early fan promotions involving free gifts, Veeck hit on a grand scheme for August 1 that recalled his father's Ladies' Day events: give away nylon stockings to the first 20,000 women to arrive at the ballpark. He was reacting to a nearly insane demand for nylon stockings, which had been introduced by DuPont on the eve of World War II but had been taken off the market for the war years, when nylon was needed for parachutes, tires, and other wartime essentials. Not fully recovered from its wartime conversion, DuPont could not keep up with the immediate postwar demand. Women waiting in line to buy the stockings were sometimes disorderly, and police occasionally had to disperse crowds. When stores sold out of the precious hosiery, fights broke out. In Pittsburgh, the mayor arranged for a stocking sale in response to a petition by 400 women. On the day of the sale, 40,000 people lined up to compete for 13,000 pairs.

On August 1, 21,372 women participated in the giveaway in Cleveland, with many of them getting their prize directly from Veeck or Harry Grabiner. Baseball's traditionalists shuddered and cast aspersions. Bob French, in his
Toledo Blade
column the following morning, talked of “terrifying numbers” of the fair sex swarming the stadium. “There probably was more high-pitched cheering on high fouls than ever before in Cleveland.” “To this day,” Rudie Schaffer recalled five decades later, “I still don't know where he got the nylons.”
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Veeck next conceived a proper event at which to introduce his two entertainers. It had to be a night when a lot of fans would be in the ballpark. One of the most popular people in the Cleveland organization was an exprizefighter and paperboy named Max “Lefty” Weisman, who had been the Indians trainer for twenty-five years. Weisman was known for his constant singing, cornball jokes, and memorable quips. Bob Feller, as a rookie, had complained that his cap was too big. Lefty said, “Make sure it stays that way.” Weisman was devoted to the team, and Veeck wanted to pay tribute to the man who tended the players' aches and pains. He decided to give Weisman his own night at the stadium, an honor usually reserved for stars. It was held on Tuesday night, August 13, and featured Price and Patkin, fireworks and fire trucks, singing by Weisman, and, almost secondarily, a game, leading Veeck to boast: “It was a super-duper evening which Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York might have had difficulty recognizing as a baseball game.” A crowd of 65,765 attended the extravaganza, though on the field the Indians lost the game to the Tigers.