Bill Veeck (41 page)

Veeck got an immediate call from an official of the emerging American Football League (AFL) who had seen a newspaper photo of the Kluszewski jersey and wanted Veeck's blessing to make player nameplates an AFL rule, believing they and other innovations such as the two-point conversion would give the nascent league an edge over the National Football League, especially as it tailored itself to television.
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Veeck was toying with the notion of attracting an AFL team of his own to play at Comiskey Park and said the idea was fine with him.

In addition to adding Miñoso, Veeck had addressed the White Sox' glaring need for power by trading with the Senators for slugging first baseman Roy Sievers and trading young Johnny Callison to the Phillies for first baseman Gene Freese. And in a poignant move, with the prodding of Al Lopez,
he acquired lefty Herb Score from Cleveland, giving him another chance after his terrible injury—he had been hit in the eye with a line drive early in 1957, almost losing his right eye, and had struggled to regain the brilliance he had displayed in 1956.

On June 25, 1960, his leg having deteriorated further, Veeck was back in the hospital for another amputation, his seventh, and his twelfth major hospitalization. This time his right leg was amputated to a point three inches above the knee, causing him to need to relearn using an artificial leg. Though he tossed this off as “vexing,” he was in considerable pain.
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On August 6 Veeck held a midseason party for reporters and their wives. Bob Addie of the
Washington Post
noted that “a woman came to the table with her husband and Veeck gallantly rose to his foot.” The right leg of Veeck's blue pants was neatly creased, folded in half above the knee, and pinned to the waist. Addie said that Veeck looked gaunt from his recent ordeal but that his energy and indefatigable curiosity “brooked no time for minor tragedies.” He was back on the job attending to the Chicago White Sox franchise, which Addie said “could well become the richest in baseball.”
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However strong Veeck's own spirit was, and despite their improved power, the White Sox in 1960 lacked the spark that had propelled them the year before. On August 10, they lost a game at home to the Yankees, 6–0, putting the team two and a half games out of first place. That same day, a threatening letter addressed to Veeck arrived at the ballpark. Printed crudely in block letters, it read:

FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR BALL PARK ONE WEEK FROM TODAY I WANT YOU SEND ME $10,000 … IF YOU THINK THIS IS A JOKE AND IF YOU DON'T DO LIKE I COMMAND YOU TO DO WE THE UNTOUCHABLES WILL BLOW THAT PARK AND SCOREBOARD UP IF YOU GO TO THE POLICE OR HER. WE WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU BOTH IN THE MEANTIME BE GETTING MONEY TOGETHER—NO BILLS JUST CHANGE … YOU WILL BE NOTIFIED IN A FEW DAYS WERE TO LEAVE THE MONEY OUT. PLEASE DON'T THINK YOU CAN CATCH US. REALLY IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. WE KNOW YOU'RE EVER MOVE AND EVEN HAVE A FEW OF US ON YOUR PAY ROLL.

The note went on to say that the explosion would take place during a game, and it demanded that Veeck put a personal ad in the
Chicago Tribune
saying “Poor people will do as you ask. Bill V.” if he was willing to go along with the extortion.

Veeck took the matter to the Chicago office of the FBI, which tried to lift fingerprints off the letter and compared it to other ransom notes. He put the ad in the paper saying he was willing to go along, but heard nothing more, and the FBI closed the case in September.
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As the season ended, Veeck admitted that he had hoped for more. In August he had predicted the White Sox would win the pennant by five games, but a late-season surge never materialized and the Yankees ended on a fifteen-game winning streak, eight games ahead of the Orioles and ten ahead of the 87–67 White Sox.
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The acquisition of Miñoso somewhat offset the disappointment of a third-place finish: he slugged 20 homers, drove in 105 runs, hit .311, appeared in the All-Star Game, was awarded a Gold Glove, and ranked fourth in the MVP voting. Herb Score (5–10) was not able to reach his old form and the team had fared poorly on the road.

The scoreboard, too, was a great satisfaction: Veeck claimed it drew an extra 5,000 fans to Comiskey Park for each game, helping him beat the 1959 attendance record by attracting 1.6 million fans. “The Monster,” as it was known, was way ahead of its time. Veeck termed it “a prefabricated fresh-air theater, built for rainy-day entertainment. All you have to do is set up a closed-circuit television screen and you can entertain your fans with anything from a follow-the-bouncing-baseball community sing to the pictures of last year's World Series. You can even run interviews from the dressing room or press box. You are bound by nothing except taste and imagination.”
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Veeck also perfected the idea of corporate sponsorships for his giveaways. He stockpiled plastic rain capes, emblazoned with the Pepsi-Cola logo, to pass out to White Sox customers when it rained, while the bats given away on Bat Day had the Coca-Cola logo on them.
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Veeck remained closely involved with the Chicago community and with bigger social issues in the off-season. On January 18, 1961, nine Chicago firemen were killed in what became infamously known as the Hubbard Street fire—the largest loss of firefighters in modern Chicago history. No
sooner had the news reached the public than Veeck was on the phone to
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist Irv Kupcinet to say that something had to be done for the dead men's families. The phone call started a chain reaction, and a fund and committee were established by the two men. Contributions totaled $90,000, and it was decided that the money would be used solely for the education of the firemen's children.
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During the last week of March 1961, as the White Sox were completing spring training, Veeck met in Chicago with Robert Paul, an official with the U.S. Department of the Interior, to discuss the refusal of Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall to racially integrate his National Foootball League (NFL) team. Such public bigotry in the nation's capital had forced the hand of Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, whose department ran the stadium in which the Redskins played. Veeck felt the only way to force Marshall to sign Negro players was for the other NFL owners to exert pressure on him, and that to secure this commitment from Commissioner Pete Rozelle, the threat of an American Football League team coming to Washington was needed. Veeck confirmed that he was working toward this end with a group in Washington headed by attorney Edward Bennett Williams, and suggested that Paul share this information with Rozelle in order to force Marshall to change his policy.
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Closer to home, Veeck's insistence had compelled Andy Frain, head of the nationwide ushering service—the same group that years earlier provided an honor guard at William Veeck Sr.'s funeral—to racially integrate his ushering operation, starting with Comiskey Park, where fourteen black ushers would serve patrons beginning with the 1961 season.
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As the 1961 season approached, however, Veeck's health failed him because of his war injuries and his habit of smoking four to five packs of cigarettes a day. On Opening Day, as he put it, he “just ran out of gas.” Though Veeck's health had begun to decline sharply during his tenure as owner of the White Sox, his concern for his own well-being seemed nonexistent, and he reveled in shocking others with his own excesses. “One morning I was working in Bill's office when he and Dizzy Trout came in after being out all night,” recalled Dick Hackett. “Bill took off his trademark open collar short sleeve white shirt and threw it in the waste basket. He then opened a file cabinet drawer where he kept clean shirts. He took one out and put it on
and said to Dizzy, ‘OK, let's open the board room for breakfast,' pulling out a beer and a cigarette for each of them.
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In addition to the trauma of his leg, severe coughing fits had started to plague him, as did frequent headaches. He would at times suddenly lose control of the right side of his body, and occasionally he would black out. His weight was also dropping at an alarming rate. He stopped driving, afraid he would be a menace on the road, and Trout became his driver beginning in late 1960.

On April 21, 1961, Veeck entered the Mayo Clinic to undergo what was announced as a “routine checkup” but which extended into a stay of more than two weeks. Veeck would later admit: “When I walked into the clinic, I literally did not expect to walk out again.” Veeck's doctors suspected he had lung cancer that had spread to his brain—a diagnosis that Veeck also believed. Tests, however, ruled out cancer, and Veeck prevailed on his doctors to be allowed to return to Chicago, under strict orders to avoid anything that might precipitate new attacks. He could not leave the apartment, and he cut down to one pack of cigarettes a day.

In the course of a few months he had become what he had always hated, an absentee owner, and this precipitated the drastic decision to sell his interest in the White Sox to Arthur Allyn Jr., the son of his old benefactor and friend and the brother of John Allyn, who would also be in the ownership group. On June 10, 1961, United Press International reported that Veeck would get $1.1 million and Hank Greenberg, who had more stock than Veeck, would receive $1.4 million. Greenberg would continue to run the club as he had been doing since Opening Day. The sale went through on the thirteenth, two days before Veeck was scheduled to go back to the Mayo Clinic.

Greenberg had the opportunity to increase his stock ownership and become a majority owner of the club. “After a lot of thought,” he later recalled, “I finally decided against it. What tipped the scales against buying was the other owners: I recognized then that there was a lot of prejudice against me. I'd have had my life savings tied up in the club, and I realized that if I ever needed any help, I sure wouldn't get it from my fellow owners. It would be closed ranks against me. Strangely enough, that was the first time antiSemitism really affected me adversely in baseball.”
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In a scene worthy of a Frank Capra film, more than a hundred Chicago cabbies lined up in their vehicles in front of the Tribune Tower, where the White Sox sale was being finalized, and flashed their lights in tribute to Veeck as he limped from the building. “It was completely spontaneous,” Mary
Frances Veeck recalled fifty years later, “and a reminder of a simpler and kinder time.”
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White Sox ace Early Wynn, almost at the end of his Hall of Fame career, wrote a public letter to Veeck that appeared in the
Chicago Sun-Times
and summed up the loyalty that legions of players felt: “I've never written a letter like this before, especially to my boss—I've had quite a few of them. Probably the others were a little stiff-necked, but whatever the reason, I know I speak for all of us when I say that you have been a helluva lot more than just the boss. You have been a wonderful friend. All of us will always cherish your Friendship.”

He told Veeck that, like the fans, the players enjoyed the exploding scoreboard. “I suppose it's because it's like having July 4 everyday, but it affects us, too. Even when we're losing 10 to 0 and Lollar, or Smitty or Sievers hits one, the scoreboard blastoff is like starting a new day.” Wynn also praised Veeck for putting players' names on the backs of their jerseys, and for entertaining the players with his stunts and giveaways, and for the way he treated everyone who played for him.
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“We've all had a lot of fun, Bill, and we're hoping that you'll be back with us soon. One other thing, and that is when you come back, if you don't return as a club owner, a lot of us are hoping you might consider being a Player's Representative and represent all of us in both leagues. That's how highly we think of you.”
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In a poignant counterpoint to these encomiums, five days after the White Sox were sold, Eddie Gaedel was mugged and beaten on a Chicago street corner for $11. He somehow made his way home and died in bed three days later of a heart attack caused by the beating. He was thirty-six years old. He and Veeck had remained close—Gaedel had recently and briefly served as an usher in the box seats at Comiskey Park—but Veeck was back in his doctors' care at the Mayo Clinic and unable to attend the funeral. Bob Cain, the Detroit pitcher who had faced Gaedel on that fateful day in 1951, heard about Gaedel's death in the news and “felt obligated to go” to his funeral eventhough
he had never actually been introduced to him.
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No other baseball people attended. “When we got out of the car,” Cain recalled, “Mrs. Gaedel, who was not a midget, ran over and hugged and kissed me. It meant something to her to see us there. I remember how small the coffin was.”
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The day after Gaedel's death, Milton Gross dedicated his
New York Post
column to Veeck. A rumor had cropped up that Veeck had sold the White Sox so he could buy the Washington Senators. “Would that it were true!” wrote Gross. “It is not. Veeck is disposing of everything he owns because he is a very sick man.”

Gross had many other things to say about Veeck, alternately negative and positive, in the column, which at times had the tone of an obituary. He ended with a story he felt was typical of Veeck, one that took place during one of the years he was out of baseball. Veeck had appeared at the Yankees spring training camp in Florida, where he was not particularly welcome. He joined the writers that evening in the press room, where he entertained those who had never before seen him flick his cigarette ashes into a hollowed-out portion of his artificial leg. The next day, he showed up in the press box for an exhibition game. Wanting something to drink but finding nothing available, he went down into the stands and returned followed by a string of soda, hot dog, ice cream, and sandwich vendors. Refreshments for everyone in the press box were on him. The Yankee brass exploded, assuming he had deliberately made them look cheap.