Bill Veeck (8 page)

Veeck also dealt with a number of small-volume suppliers, including an ardent Cubs fan named Ray Kroc, who sold paper cups and was always putting pressure on Veeck to lay in a larger supply than Veeck needed. Like others he met during this period, Kroc would remain a lifelong friend, and he would go on to build a lone McDonald's hamburger restaurant into the most successful fast-food operation in history and become owner of the San Diego Padres in 1974.
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Besides his duties with the Cubs, Veeck worked part time from 1934 to 1941 as a receptionist in the offices of the Chicago Bears, where he came to know, work with, and respect his father's friend George Halas. Veeck represented the Cubs' interest in handling Bears' tickets, checking ticket sellers, and being responsible for ballpark operations.
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At the same time as he embarked on his career with the Cubs, Bill's personal life hit the headlines. One of his Hinsdale school classmates had been Eleanor Raymond. When Bill went west to the Ranch School, she had gone east to St. Mary's on the Hudson, a finishing school in Peekskill, New York. The two had kept in touch and reunited in Hinsdale, and they became informally engaged in December 1934. Both Bill and his sister, Peg, who had married less than a year after Bill senior's passing, were, her son Fred Krehbiel recalled later, eager to get out from under a grieving mother with whom neither child had ever been close. Grace Veeck “disapproved of much of what Bill did and the two fought over many things and would for the rest of their lives. Bill and his mother actually looked alike and were similar in that both of them were feisty.”
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Eleanor's father was a friend of circus man John Ringling North, and she took a position as an equestrienne and elephant trainer for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. She made her circus debut at Chicago's Soldier Field on August 4, 1935. At the beginning of the nine-day circus run, Veeck sat in the box seats watching her every move. According to a breathless report on page two of the next morning's
Chicago Tribune
, “at the end of the show he gave her a square-cut diamond.” The
Tribune
account
included a picture of the two arm in arm, slugged “Big Top Romance.” When Bill's mother was asked why Eleanor had joined the circus, she presciently replied, “Because she can't stay away from horses.”
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Mary Margaret McBride, the syndicated and popular women's page editor, featured Eleanor in an article about well-educated girls who went on to do the unexpected. Eleanor went on tour with the circus, and when it came to Newark, New Jersey, in the fall of 1935, Veeck's childhood friend Scott Jones, by then a student at Princeton, made the trek to watch her perform. He visited with Eleanor before the show, watching the matinee in the wings while sitting with the clowns, then saw the evening show as a paying customer in the audience. “She was a real star, a real headliner,” Jones recalled years later, noting that she first soloed as a horseback rider and then led a separate act with the elephants.
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She stayed with the circus through its sweep into Texas, returning to Chicago to marry Bill on December 18, 1935. The wedding announcement in the papers noted that Eleanor had concluded her contract with the circus before the marriage. The wedding was a private affair performed by a local Episcopal minister. Stories in the papers announced that the couple were taking a honeymoon at an undisclosed location and that they would move into an apartment in Hinsdale, which was actually a room over the Veeck family garage where the servants' quarters had been.
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As if he really needed it, Veeck now had a textbook example of how to put himself in the news. Another man might have courted a high-profile socialite who was working in the circus, but only Bill would have the aplomb to show up at ringside with a big diamond and a reporter from the
Trib
in tow. Eleanor was a willing participant. Scott Jones recalled that the two were very much alike in their love of the limelight—“maybe too much alike.” On December 14, 1936, almost a year to the day after their marriage, their first child was born, a boy named William L. Veeck III.
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Veeck had been a fan of the Negro leagues from his early teens and through his days with the Cubs, and he once recalled that in 1926 and 1927 he “watched all the good Negro league clubs come into Chicago and play the Chicago American Giants.” He added, “I, of course, later saw—worked, as a matter of fact—most of their East-West All-Star games.” The Negro East-West game was a major event on the Chicago calendar, drawing large numbers of black and white fans alike.
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In early 1934, in California for spring training, Veeck saw Satchel Paige and Dizzy Dean trade scoreless innings in Hollywood in an exhibition game that lasted thirteen innings, with Satchel's Negro league squad eking out a 1–0 win. “The greatest pitchers' battle I have ever seen,” Veeck recalled in his autobiography. “Even in those early days, Satch had all kinds of different deliveries. He'd hesitate before he'd throw. He'd wiggle the fingers of his glove. He'd wind up three times. He'd get the hitters overanxious, then he'd get them mad, and by the time the ball was there at the plate to be swung at, he'd have them way off balance.”
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The Dean-Paige exhibitions were popular around the country, with a postseason Midwest tour in October 1935, including games in Kansas City and St. Joseph, Missouri, gaining a great deal of media attention. References were continually made to Paige's big-league qualifications. “If Paige were white,” Ray Doan, manager of the Dean All-Stars, told the
St. Joseph Gazette
, “he would be worth $200,000.”
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Besides the Negro leagues and their star attraction, Veeck became increasingly interested in an all-black basketball team, the Harlem Globe Trotters, and their owner, Abraham Michael Saperstein. In background and physical presence, Saperstein was Veeck's opposite. The London-born Saperstein was five feet tall, Jewish, and roly-poly enough that he was sometimes described as resembling a baseball. But the two thought alike to the point that in later years they would be constantly compared.
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The team was Chicago-based, but Saperstein chose “Harlem” to indicate that the players were African American, even though they were actually from Chicago. The “Globe Trotters” moniker made it seem as though the team had traveled all around the world, even though in the early years they seldom traveled beyond Illinois and Wisconsin. Veeck admired Saperstein's promotional skills; his freewheeling team attracted large, racially mixed crowds in small venues all through the Midwest—150,000 paying customers, for example, in 1934.
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Through the 1930s, they played straight basketball and gradually developed into a superior team. But almost from their inception, the Globe Trotters were performing showy extras, such as a ball-handling circle that was part of their pre-game warm-up—an exhibition of fancy behind-the-back and between-the-legs passes and of bouncing the balls off knees, elbows,
and heads, to the fans' delight. Their ability to have fun while competing appealed greatly to Veeck.

Given the level of competition to be found in the small midwestern towns where they played in the early days, the team won more than 90 percent of the 150 or so games they played each year.
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When the first-ever national professional basketball tournament was held, in 1939 in Chicago, the Globe Trotters placed third, with second place going to the all-white Oshkosh team, which was beaten 34–24 by the New York Renaissance, a black team that, unlike the Chicago-based Trotters, was actually based in Harlem.
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But the Globe Trotters won the tournament in 1940 by beating the Chicago Bruins of the National Basketball League 31–29, and they became the bona fide champions of professional basketball. This was, as Saperstein put it, the apex of the Trotters as a “straight” basketball team.
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As for Saperstein, he had an uncanny ability to attract attention with his relentless promotion: “In four or five years, basketball will be recognized as the national game,” he said in 1935. Saperstein was a promoter of the first order, and Veeck saw much to admire in him.

One of Bill Veeck's early tasks with the Cubs was to roam the stands and talk with fans to determine their wishes, bringing back suggestions that would make a day at the ballpark more enjoyable.
The Sporting News
noted this role in a small feature in early 1935: “Contacting the public is the duty of every official of every club, but Veeck is the first to have such a full-time assignment,” the article observed.
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Using Veeck as a roaming ombudsman fit into Phil Wrigley's plan to merchandise and promote the Cubs year-round to ensure good attendance whether the team was in contention or not. During the winter of 1934–35, advertisements ran in all the Chicago newspapers three times a week exhorting fans to “look ahead to sunshine—recreation—happy hours with the Cubs at Wrigley Field next summer.” “You will note that the theme of the campaign is sunshine, recreation and pleasure,” observed Wrigley to assistant Charles Drake. “Mr. Wrigley is applying merchandising methods to baseball. It is his belief that, in the past, too much stress has been laid upon the team through newspaper publicity and not enough attention given in offering baseball as a great outdoor game, offering many healthful benefits and many hours of pleasure to the fans.”
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Wrigley intended to merchandise the Cubs and the experience of going
to the ballpark as he had merchandised chewing gum. Heavy advertising and attractive packaging were important to his scheme, and the main package was Wrigley Field.

Young Veeck was increasingly involved in the process. By the end of the 1936 season, he had worked his way up to his biggest assignment, one that would have a long-lasting impact on him and on the “friendly confines” where the Cubs played. He was appointed, at age twenty-two, to take charge of a series of major renovations that would create a beautified and expanded Wrigley Field in time for the 1937 World Series, which the Cubs hoped to be part of. Wrigley envisioned a larger, more comfortable bleacher section and new reserved and box seat sections along the left-field line. The new sections would be adorned with foliage and other artistic features.

“Above all,” Veeck said later, “Mr. Wrigley wanted an outdoor, woodsy motif.”
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By comparison with other stadiums, Wrigley Field had always stood out. Charles Weeghman's aim had been to build a park that would outshine any other in the National or American League, to show that he was serious about his team. Thanks to the strict Chicago building code, the ballpark was built to be fireproof, which was no small thing in an era of claptrap wooden ballparks.

Veeck's job was to make this fan-friendly venue even more so. He settled on a design for the new seating from the firm of Holabird & Root, which had already designed Soldier Field and the Chicago Board of Trade building on LaSalle Street.

Work began after the winter thaw and moved quickly, progressing even when games were in progress The new bleachers were to be the best available, with bleacher seating configured like box seats. Offices of glass, brick, and stainless steel were added behind center field. New concession storage was built under the new bleachers, as was storage for the groundskeeping equipment, including head groundskeeper Bobby Dorr's new 30 mph lawn mower.
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The new bleacher seats were made of cypress and elevated twelve feet above the ground, ensuring a much finer view of the playing field. They
were built on a reinforced concrete structure, arranged in a series of curves around the corners and stepped up to provide the best sight lines—yet still allowing fans on the rooftops along Sheffield and Waveland Avenues to be able to watch the games for free as they always had.

The new outfield walls were built with distinctive red brick and had six red gates. Veeck had intended to plant ivy along the walls in the off-season. However, one day in early September, Phil Wrigley told Veeck that he had invited some business associates to see a game the next day and wanted to show off his refreshed and increasingly verdant park. Veeck grabbed Dorr and his assistant and hurriedly decided to plant ivy against the red brick that night. The trio strung five strands of copper wire a foot and a half apart across the 1,003-foot curved wall to support the vines. They planted ivy at the base of the wall and intermixed 350 Japanese bittersweet plants that covered the wall entirely.
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Wrigley, an ardent arborist, had also wanted trees in the ballpark, so on his orders, Veeck had earlier planted eight Chinese elms on the steps leading to the scoreboard. Unfortunately, the trees were not meant for such harsh exposure and their fragile leaves were repeatedly blown off by the gusts coming off Lake Michigan. After five unsuccessful plantings, Veeck convinced Wrigley to give up on the idea.

Wrigley added bleacher ticket booths with glass and concrete cupolas, and Veeck redesigned food concession stands, which stood for close to forty years before they were replaced. Using designs based on ideas he had developed in classes at Lewis Institute, new tile and brick dispensaries were erected, as were storerooms housing the latest in food service equipment. Veeck himself worked the concession stands, which led him to a new understanding of the most efficient use of space: “I found out that when I was able to get from the red hots to the beer and coffee without having to move, I would sell both the red hot and a drink. If I had to take but one step, the beverage sales would begin to drop.”
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