Bill Veeck (57 page)

“You ought a buy the club back,” a fan yelled to Veeck.

“I've got enough troubles of my own,” he shot back.

It was Veeck's last excursion to a ballpark.
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A few days later, the Veecks enrolled in a program that would instruct them on how to teach reading to people who could not read. Neither Bill nor Mary Frances could imagine the poverty of a life led without the ability to read.

One final windmill at which Veeck chose to tilt appeared in October 1985: the way players had behaved during and after two cocaine trials conducted in Pittsburgh earlier that fall. They were part of a prosecution against a dealer who had allegedly supplied cocaine to major-league ballplayers. All the players who testified were granted immunity in return for their testimony.

Veeck's diatribe, which appeared in
The Sporting News
, began with a description of the star prosecution witnesses: “They strolled into the courtroom in $500 three-piece suits, $150 custom-made shirts, $200 shoes by Gucci, and a quarter's worth of character.” Veeck drilled into them for naming teammates past and present, other ballplayers, and individuals outside the game who had bought cocaine, in order to keep their immunity. Seven well-paid major leaguers had worked in concert to nail a small-time drug dealer named Curtis Strong.

“It's customary to grant immunity to small fry when fishing for sharks. But something smells a mite fishy when the sharks get the immunity,” Veeck railed. “There are those who contend that only Curtis Strong was on trial in Pittsburgh, that the spectacle of ballplayers admitting incompetency because of addiction somehow had nothing to do with the game, but with the fans, the owners or the press. There are also those who believe the Easter Bunny lays eggs.”

Veeck insisted that ballplayers had come to believe they were a breed apart and no longer subject to the rules the rest of society lived by. Veeck had also been stunned by the matter-of-factness of the confessions. Tim Raines of the Montreal Expos, for example, testified that he routinely stashed a gram of cocaine in the back pocket of his uniform pants during games. Raines, who at the time of the hearing was a four-time National League stolen base
champion, testified that he always slid into bases headfirst to ensure that the glass vial wouldn't break. Veeck, who had long sided with problem players and their infirmities, demanded that Commissioner Peter Ueberroth punish the “rat-fink” players immediately and dramatically.
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During the Hot Stove season, Veeck hosted and addressed the fifth annual John Fischetti Scholarship Dinner, sponsored by Chicago's Columbia College. His booming voice had been softened to a monotone, but his message was no less sharp. Alluding to Pete Rose's recent September 1985 feat of breaking Ty Cobb's all-time hits record with his 4,192nd hit, Veeck hit his stride when he said of the baseball season just ended: “This should have been the year of the Rose, but instead, it turned out to be the year of the rat fink, as seven wealthy athletes, with seven grants of immunity, banded together to get one poor, fat, black bookie 12 years in the pokey.” Then he was off on a grab bag of topics, including college football recruiting violations, cigarette manufacturers, and George Steinbrenner. It would be his last public appearance.
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Despite his protestation the previous summer, Veeck still dreamed of owning one last team. Just before Christmas, he called Art Modell, then owner of the National Football League's Cleveland Browns, to say that he wanted to get back into baseball, and he asked what his chances were of buying the Cleveland Indians.
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Veeck entered Illinois Masonic Hospital on Monday, December 30, complaining of shortness of breath. Hank Greenberg called Veeck at the hospital later in the day and Veeck told him, “You know, I think I can get the Cleveland club.”

“You're crazy,” was Greenberg's response. “Why don't you go someplace where you have a chance to make some money? Why don't you go into the stock market, or some other business. With your talents you can make a lot of money at anything.”

“Wouldn't it be great, Hank, to get the old gang together again?”

“You still want to sell peanuts at the ballpark, don't you?”

“Yeah,” said Veeck, “I do.”
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Bob Fishel, now the executive vice president of the American League, talked to him on New Year's Day, and it seemed like he was getting better. Fishel planned to see him the next day.
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However, early the next morning, at 2:55 a.m. Central Standard Time,
Bill Veeck died of cardiac arrest.
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“Despite all the time he spent in hospitals,” his daughter Lisa recalled, “we were devastated. He was larger than life and none of us ever expected him to die.”
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Lisa later had the task of delivering her father's wooden legs to the group that fit his protheses. “I had three legs to deliver, but I couldn't bear to give them all up, so I kept one of them in the trunk of my Mustang. It made a lot of noise back there, and I was eventually stopped by a policeman who asked me to open the trunk.” She had to explain why she had Bill Veeck's leg in her trunk.
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Within hours, the tributes began rolling in. One of the first telegrams to arrive was addressed to Mary Frances from Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity, a civil rights group), which was signed by Rev. Willie T. Barrow, national executive director, and Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, founding president. It began: “Mr. Veeck dared to have imagination and he embodied much of what Dr. King described in his dream. He believed this nation could be truly one nation. He rejected every element of bigotry that kept it a patchwork of ethnic rivalries and a hostile camp.” Telegrams and letters followed from such notables as the archbishop of Chicago, Senator Paul Simon, and President Ronald Reagan, who wrote a personal note to Mary Frances saying that Bill had brought “joy to the game of baseball and the game of life.” As per his final instructions, his remaining organs were harvested and his remains cremated.

Veeck's column appeared one last time in the January 1986 issue of
North Shore
magazine. It contained a ten-stanza Veeck original whose first and last stanzas were:

Where did it go? I looked away
And suddenly it seemed
There wasn't any time at all
To do the things I'd dreamed.

…
So now I sit and ponder long
Who, when and where I'll be.
But when it all is said and done
I'd rather just be me.
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Close to a thousand people packed into St. Thomas the Apostle for Veeck's funeral, while thousands more stood in the streets as Veeck's funeral procession came and went. Many of those on the streets told reporters they had known Veeck—most from talking to him and thus befriending him in the bleachers at Comiskey Park, Wrigley Field, or both. Others said they had marched with him in antiwar protests during the Vietnam War or knew him from his days in the gun-control and civil rights movements.

Peter Bavasi, then president of the Cleveland Indians, recalled that the single most important tribute to Veeck occurred as the mourners took their seats. It was “the lone figure of Minnie Miñoso, making his way slowly and a bit haltingly down the aisle to a seat in a pew filled with Bill's former players and other friends. Minnie, in a special tribute to Bill, wore a vintage White Sox uniform, the one with the floppy collar. They say it was Bill's favorite design.” Worn by Miñoso when he was reactivated five years earlier by Veeck so that he could say he'd played in four decades, the uniform, with the number 9 on the back, “pierced a sea of mink and camel's hair like Bill Veeck's smile.”
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The service began with Aaron Copland's
Fanfare for the Common Man
and moved through a series of hymns and readings to Father Thomas J. Fitzgerald's homily, which opened with the words “Bill is loving all of this. Of course, it is worship and prayer. But we're trying to do it with
class
.”

He then talked of a man who prayed. “I know some will say, ‘Yeah, in the late innings when the score was tied.' But I am referring to something bigger and broader than that. Prayer is not just multiplying words—it is really a state of mind, an acceptance of our littleness before the Lord and our need for His help. I think that Bill had that fundamental posture.” He described him as a man totally devoid of pretense, someone who moved as easily in the bleachers as he did in the Pump Room. “He laughed at himself as easily as he laughed at the world around him.”

Addressing Veeck directly, Fitzgerald was elegiac: “The word that comes to me about you is the word
prince.
You are a prince in all the good senses of that word, a prince without pretensions, courageous, a Prince Valiant. I just heard from Scripture that you were tried like gold in the furnace. You attacked life with courage and a stout heart. You have overcome the world; and you deserve the victory where every tear will be wiped away. When I heard that you were dead, I could think only of another text: ‘Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.'”
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The service ended with Handel's “Hallelujah Chorus” from
The Messiah
, which was, as most worshippers at the service knew, a featured element of the exploding scoreboard that boomed every time one of his South Side Hit Men hit one out.
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After the funeral, the media clustered around Miñoso for quotes. Larry Doby, who had sat with Wyonella Smith, Wendell Smith's widow, for the ceremony, attracted no attention. According to Wyonella, none of the reporters paid any attention to Doby as the two passed by the gaggle of reporters surrounding Miñoso. “Larry was delighted. He didn't need the publicity, and neither did Bill. Larry loved Bill, you know”
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The tributes expressed in the days and weeks following his death attest to his legacy. Tom Boswell of the
Washington Post
had in 1980 written an anticipatory line about Veeck's passing that was quoted extensively now that he had actually died: “His cause of death should read: Life.” Boswell's obituary of Veeck in the
Post
was equally memorable: “The tombstone will say Bill Veeck lived 71 years. Don't believe it. The old rapscallion must have rolled the odometer over a couple of times.”
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Columnist and good friend Irv Kupcinet of the
Chicago Sun-Times
wrote that his eulogy should read, “He was proof positive that one man with courage constitutes a majority.”
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“Bill Veeck was just as important to me as Branch Rickey was to Jackie Robinson,” Larry Doby told Bill Littlefield on his National Public Radio show
Only a Game.
“Veeck told me to curb my temper and to turn the other cheek. The guy really motivated me. There were places my wife, my daughter, and I could not go into. Veeck would say, ‘If they can't go in, I won't go in.' Veeck was quite a man, a great man. I think of Veeck as my second father.” Hank Greenberg called him the smartest, most innovative baseball executive of all time. Littlefield ended his on-air obituary this way: “If Bill Veeck was a rebel, his most substantial rebellions were against an establishment that was clannish, racist, and smug. His brightest ideas bettered the game, and he brought a pure joy to his work in baseball that most men and women who own ball clubs today will never know.”
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Stories surfaced at the time of his death that demonstrated the deep regard players and associates had for him. James Loebl, whose friendship with Veeck dated back to 1941 and who was a part owner of the White Sox from 1976 to 1980, revealed for the first time that when Veeck was having financial troubles in St. Louis, Hal Peck, by then a successful automobile dealer, sent Veeck a check for $25,000. It was in repayment for Veeck having given
him several second chances after Peck lost part of his foot, including the big chance that allowed him to become part of the 1948 championship team at Cleveland. “He had that kind of hold over everyone he met.”
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But perhaps the most unexpected was an homage signed by Sig Eisenscher, a self-described Communist activist, in the
People's Daily World
. Eisenscher was not a baseball fan but overtly adored Veeck because of several things that “touched him deeply,” beginning with Veeck's record on race and including the fact that he once gave a fistful of Sox passes to a Soviet delegation so that they could sample baseball Chicago-style.
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A certain amount of myth building ensued. Mary Frances put an end to one instance: The telegram from Operation PUSH had acknowledged his marching with Dr. King on his momentous march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, and Veeck's role in the march was also mentioned posthumously in various newspapers. But it was not true. “I think I would have known if he had left me in Maryland with the children to march from Selma to Montgomery,” said Mary Frances. “Oh! He was there in spirit all right but not in the flesh.”
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On January 10, 1986, one week after the death of her beloved younger brother, while she and her husband were watching the evening news, Peggy Veeck Krehbiel gave a quiet sigh and passed away. She had been suffering from a bad heart for years and had had several complicated and debilitating open-heart procedures.
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Despite his death, Veeck still seemed to be a factor in the conscience of the game—even, perhaps, in baseball's response to the cocaine trials. Veeck's “rat-fink” op-ed in
The Sporting News
had been widely quoted and formed the basis for other opinions. On February 28, 1986, Peter Ueberroth suspended eleven players for involvement with cocaine, with the harshest penalties going to those with a “prolonged pattern of drug use” and of facilitating the distribution of drugs to others in the sport. Ueberroth suspended them all for one year but said he would hold the suspensions in abeyance if the players agreed to donate 10 percent of their 1986 base salaries to a drug treatment facility or program in the city in which they played, perform a minimum of 100 hours of drug-related community service for each of the next two years, and agree to random drug testing for the rest of their playing careers. All the players accepted.
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