Bill Veeck (40 page)

The Dodgers, who had had a disastrous first season on the West Coast in 1958, were a surprise team, having survived a thrilling three-team pennant race and a two-game playoff against the Milwaukee Braves. The 1959 Dodgers were seen as underdogs, much as the White Sox were. Led by manager Walter Alston, the team drew more than 2 million fans to Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, validating the optimistic projections Veeck had made in his report that had paved the way for the National League move west.

Game 1 of the World Series was held at Comiskey Park. Veeck brought in crooner Tony Martin to sing the national anthem, sprang for 20,000 red roses for ladies in attendance, and attired the White Sox in actual white stockings for the first time anyone could remember. Veeck also decided not to festoon Comiskey Park with the traditional red, white, and blue World Series bunting, as he wanted the world to have an unadorned view of the well-scrubbed and freshly painted ballpark.
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Paced by a pair of two-run homers and five RBIs by Ted Kluszewski and strong pitching from Early Wynn, Chicago won the opener in a rout, 11–0. The second game was much closer. Chicago jumped on top with two runs in the first, but two home runs by Dodger second baseman Charlie Neal and one by pinch hitter Chuck Essegian bested Bob Shaw, 4–3. The teams moved to Los Angeles for the next three games. Don Drysdale gave the White Sox eleven hits but only one run in a 3–1 Dodger victory, followed by a pulsating game 4 in which Early Wynn was knocked out in a four-run third inning but the White Sox clawed back to tie the game on Sherm Lollar's three-run homer in the seventh; Gil Hodges sealed the 5–4 Dodger win with a homer in the eighth.

Bob Shaw threw a brilliant 1–0 shutout for the White Sox in game 5, before a record World Series crowd of 92,706 in the Coliseum, and Veeck's squad returned home down 3–2. Working on two days of rest, Early Wynn was routed in the fourth inning of the game, and despite Kluszewski's third home run of the Series, the White Sox fell 9–3. The Dodgers were the champions in only their second year in Los Angeles.

The disappointment of losing the Series aside, Veeck's first year of owning the White Sox was an unqualified success. The 1959 club drew 1,423,144 fans to Comiskey Park, double the attendance of 1958. The number of women attending games tripled, to about 420,000. The gross income at the gate alone—excluding the radio-TV rights and concession sales—soared to
$3,587,400. The other great satisfaction afforded Veeck was that Early Wynn won the Cy Young Award—this at a time when one award was given for both leagues.

During the season Veeck had become interested in unlocking the dynamics of the game by testing its conventional wisdom with hard numbers—a precursor to the kind of analysis that later would be embraced by Bill James and the Society for American Baseball Research. “Sent a fellow to the public library in Chicago for the summer to find out about what happened to left-handed hitters against right-handed pitching and vice versa,” Veeck revealed on his syndicated radio show in 1968. “We found that a batter with better than a .300 average lost less than a half a percentage point, [those between] .276 and .300 lost 17 percentage points, [those between] .250 and .275 lost 34 percentage points, and below that, they just collapsed. In other words the good hitters weren't affected.”
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Veeck also pioneered regarding the tax benefits of owning a team. When he bought the White Sox in 1959, he asserted that ballplayers “waste away” over time, and claimed depreciation of their contracts on the club's taxes. The Internal Revenue Service, remarkably, bought it. Since then, owners of pro sports teams have been able to use the so-called roster depreciation allowance to offset profits.

Veeck had become beloved by the South Side fans. Stan Isaacs, then a columnist with
Newsday
in town to cover a Yankees game earlier in the season, recalled an evening during Veeck's first year with the Sox: “When we rode out to the ballpark on the South Side, people recognized him all the way. When we were stopped for a light, people called to him, shouted at him that his Sox would beat the Yankees. He smiled and laughed with them. He was a pied piper of joy,” said Isaacs. “He owned the city.”

Veeck also addressed the issue of neighborhood safety head-on. Before he took over the Sox, the area surrounding Comiskey Park was considered dangerous, especially after games. Veeck installed lights around the park to brighten up the streets, but he pointed out that the danger was overblown. “Take a look at the police blotter and see what the crime is,” he told Isaacs. “I did and saw that almost all of it was people who had thrown beer on the field or been argumentative with each other. No knife fights, robberies, or worse, as was the scuttlebutt.”
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His penchant for charitable causes and kindnesses to those he knew were on full display. John Kuenster, staff writer and columnist with the
Chicago Daily News
, often accompanied Veeck to speaking engagements. “One time,”

he recalled, “we drove to Highland Park, a suburb north of Chicago, to talk about baseball to a group of kids. It was late by the time we finished, and as we headed back south to his apartment in Hyde Park, he said, ‘Let's stop at the ballpark.'

“I said, ‘What for, Bill? It's past midnight.'

“‘That's all right,' he responded. ‘It won't take long. I just want to pick something up.'

“We pulled alongside Comiskey Park on 35th Street, parked the car, and after being let in by a security guard, we climbed the stairs to the kitchen of the Bards Room. Veeck walked over to the refrigerators and extracted six raw steaks, each almost the size of a catcher's mitt. He said, ‘You've got a big family, take three of these.'

“We then went back to my car, and as we pulled away from the curb, Veeck hungrily began devouring one of the raw steaks. He finished most of it, which rather astonished me.”
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At the end of the year Veeck announced that the red-brick exterior of Comiskey Park would be painted white for the 1960 season and that a picnic area under the left-field stands would be erected for pre-game festivities. It would become a sort of “Veeckskeller” for fans.
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Then Veeck headed to the Winter Meetings in Florida, from which he returned in, as his friend Wendell Smith put it in the
Courier
, “a fluffy cloud of joy” because he had acquired Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso from the Cleveland Indians. Veeck brushed aside the notion that the thirty-seven-year-old Cuban was too old: “They don't ask a fellow how old he is before he hits a home run.”
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That winter, John Callahan recalled, Veeck “signed on to a once-a-week baseball show for WBBM radio, where I was employed as a young writer/reporter. Every time Bill Veeck walked into the WBBM newsroom he carried a book with him. One week it might be a historical treatise, another week a book of essays, the next week the latest serious examination of current affairs.” Callahan went on, “Veeck was a warm and gregarious man, but imposing in his own way. I felt shy around him. But one day I asked him about what he was reading and from that moment on we forged a relationship based on a mutual love of books.”
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Also over the winter, inspired by Mary Frances, who attended many of the White Sox home games, Veeck built a room she could use to entertain players' wives and other women. The White Sox and most other ball clubs had club rooms for the team officials and the press, in which women were not welcome. The Bards Room at Comiskey Park was, for all intents and purposes, an all-male retreat. Mary Frances wanted a new room, and she and Bill decided to hold a naming contest in the room on Valentine's Day. Carol Scott, who worked on a local magazine, was invited by William Barry Furlong of the
Chicago Sun-Times
to attend to the event as a guest.

Scott was recovering from minor surgery at the time: “I had a tiny bump beside my nose removed that week by a Michigan Avenue plastic surgeon and had three stitches and a small Band-Aid covering the spot,” but she felt well enough to take the Elevated to Comiskey Park, where Veeck met her at the door.

“He escorted me to a large comfortably furnished room where already many people were drinking, talking, and laughing. I recognized his special guest, Ted Williams, but the rest (executives of the club) were new to me. But I was most impressed by Mary Frances Veeck. She lit up the room and made everyone feel welcome. She had a great laugh. She was tall, had shoulder-length dark hair, and was wearing a navy blue coat dress with a wide skirt, also pearl earrings, blue pumps, and short white gloves.

“The party extended, dinner was served (pheasant under glass, would you believe), and lots of champagne. It was announced that the reason for the party was to kick off the use of the room and to give it a name…. Ballots were distributed for the contest. I had recently read about choosing inductees for the Hall of Fame, and it struck me that this contest was set up the same way—Hall of Fame, hmmm, and it hit me: Hall of Femme.

“Sometime later the winner was announced: Hall of Femme—me. I started laughing and whoosh, the stitches split and blood was running down my chin. I raced to the bathroom, Mary Frances behind me. She put ice on the spot and the blood stopped. She also put on a large Band-Aid and we chatted and became acquainted.

“An hour or so later after more champagne the wound started bleeding again and I took up residence in the bathroom with both Veecks. Bill Veeck was smoking and I was surprised to see him pull up a pants leg and pull out an ash tray from his cork leg and tamp out the cigarette. He had fallen or bumped into something and his nose was bleeding also. This time they could not stop my bleeding and hauled me off to the nearest hospital. A
bunch of the guests accompanied us. You can imagine my mortification. The original surgeon was called, I was restitched, and a huge bandage covering most of my head was applied. A bevy of cabs headed north took me home. I was pretty much out of it by then and it was at least 2 a.m. All the ladies at the party had been given a heart-shaped box of chocolates and I left mine where my roommates could see it with a note not to worry about me and not to wake me up.

“I missed work the next day but on Tuesday I was in my office with just a tiny bandage. Midmorning a messenger arrived and presented me with a mammoth twenty-pound box of chocolates—the prize for naming the Hall of Femme.

“Sometime that week there was a short piece in the sports section of the
Sun-Times
about the new room, me the winner, and, jokingly, that Furlong had punched Veeck in the nose.”
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Legendary public relations man Aaron Cushman, who was a co-owner and publicity director of the White Sox, recalled the night Veeck dreamed up what became his legendary exploding scoreboard: “Over a steak dinner and a few beers, he told me he was watching a 1939 play by William Saroyan,
The Time of Your Life
, in which a pinball machine played a key role. An actor in the production had been playing the machine through most of the play, and, just before the final curtain, the guy hit the jackpot and the machine exploded with all types of visual effects and loud music. It hit Bill right then, and he transposed the idea to the scoreboard and wrapped it around home runs.”
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What became a signature device for Veeck, his exploding scoreboard, debuted in April 1960, featuring a dazzling array of flashing strobe lights, fireworks, and explosions after every White Sox home run. Loaded with ten mortars that fired Roman candles, it was a theatrical set piece lasting thirty-two seconds with sounds galore—foghorns, fire engine sirens, a cavalry-charge bugle, crashing trains, a steam calliope, the
William Tell
overture, and a woman screaming, “Fireman, save my child.” The board promised an element of surprise, as the tape controlling all the sights and sounds was designed never to repeat itself.

The scoreboard was Veeck's brainchild, but he was aided and abetted by Abe Saperstein, who shared Veeck's unwavering love of fireworks. “They would talk about it on the phone and laugh until tears came to their eyes. They were like two little boys,” recalled Abe's daughter Eloise.
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Built by
Charlie Gibbs of Spencer Advertising at a cost of $350,000, it actually paid for itself through the advertising space Spencer built into it.

The fans and the press loved the scoreboard. The reaction from other teams varied. The first time the New York Yankees faced the White Sox, Bob Fishel smuggled sparklers into the Yankee dugout. These were lit every time a Yankee hit a home run and a small celebratory parade led by Casey Stengel was held in front of the Yankee dugout. Watching from the press box, Veeck chortled and deemed it “brilliant satire.”
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Another Veeck innovation, for which fans have been grateful ever since, was the labeling of players' uniforms. As the season got under way, White Sox players' last names were sewn onto the backs of their jerseys in sizable black letters—a radical departure from tradition that had been sparked by nothing more than Veeck's noting that the increasing numbers of women coming to the ballpark wanted to know who the players were. Veeck had gotten the idea at a basketball game in Minneapolis, where he noticed that players had their names emblazoned on their warm-up jackets. When the newly labeled Sox played the Yankees in New York in early May, the spectators seemed amused that Ted Kluszewski's name appeared with the letter
Z
sewed on backward.
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Overall the fans were quite taken with Veeck's novel idea.
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