One of the most disappointing moments of his life was the moment when he learned that he was not on President Nixon’s enemies list.
—MARY FRANCES VEECK, quoted in Dickson, Bill Veeck
[Bill Veeck] was proof positive that one man with courage constitutes a majority.
—IRV KUPCINET, Chicago Sun-Times, January 3, 1986
Bill Veeck was a lifelong baseball-team team owner and executive who owned one Minor League (Milwaukee Brewers) and four Major League clubs (Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns and Chicago White Sox, the latter twice). Baseball historians know him best as an iconoclastic, antiestablishment figure, well known for over-the-top promotions of his teams. His lesser known, more lasting achievement was as the individual responsible for beginning integration of the American League, hiring Larry Doby for the Cleveland Indians a scant several weeks after Branch Rickey, president and general manager of the Dodgers, brought Jackie Robinson aboard his Brooklyn-based National League team.
The contrasts between the two men were numerous. Branch Rickey was devout, although many said a goodly portion of Rickey’s piety was hypocrisy. Bill Veeck appeared irreligious, most of his life evincing no religious fervor of any kind. Rickey dressed and acted the businessman, all pressed suits and bow ties, with an office at 215 Montague Street, in downtown Brooklyn. Veeck was an open-neck sports-shirt guy who took his shirt off when he sat in the bleachers with his team’s fans. “I will not sit in a box seat in my home park,” was a lodestar for Veeck.1
Veeck’s offices were makeshift affairs, always at the ballpark. As a point of honor, the first thing Bill Veeck did at each new team (Indians, Browns, and White Sox twice) was to remove the door to his office.2 To players, office personnel, ushers, and concession-stand workers, his introduction was the same, “Call me Bill.”3 While he owned the St. Louis Browns, Veeck, his wife, Mary Frances, and their son lived at Sportsman’s Park, where they had space under the grandstands remodeled into an apartment. He had tried to do the same earlier in Cleveland, when he owned the Cleveland Indians, but zoning laws prevented him.4
In contrast, wherever he went, Branch Rickey had a large estate, although in New York it was the urban equivalent. Rickey sat in boxes along the third base line, hobnobbing with owners and bigwigs, while Veeck sat in the bleachers, shirt off, talking to the fans. Financially, Rickey prospered, becoming a wealthy man. Veeck, on the other hand, stumbled: he had four stints as owner of a Major League team (again, Indians, Browns, and White Sox, twice), but he never amassed the funds to hang on to any of them. He was “the last owner to purchase a Major League Baseball franchise without a personal fortune.”5
Rickey’s greatest innovations in baseball were the creation of the first farm team system, at St. Louis, and beginning the integration of the National League, by signing Jackie Robinson, at Brooklyn. History has been kind to Branch Rickey. By contrast, at most, Bill Veeck is remembered as having had a supporting role in the integration of baseball. National Public Radio Weekend host Scott Simon, who saw Bill Veeck up close in Chicago and whose memory is more vivid, disagrees with the prevailing historical review, writing: “I wanted Bill Veeck to be the Commissioner of Baseball. I wanted Bill Veeck to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. I wanted Bill Veeck to be President of the United States. He deserves to be the subject of a musical comedy . . . [or] the lead in an epic novel instead of a subordinate character in another man’s memoir.”6
Veeck’s innovations were numerous, although at least several would not be considered of the highest order: sending a dwarf (Eddie Pagael) up to bat while at St. Louis, installing the first exploding scoreboard in Chicago’s Comiskey Park (ten mortars, roman candles, flashing strobe lights, Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” belching smoke), or promotions such as nylon stocking and orchid giveaways on Mothers’ Day at Cleveland. Veeck promoted Family Night, Ladies Day, and Salute to Mexico Night. He caused giant showers to be installed in the bleachers, had games with grandstand management by fans, and preceded games with full-blown circuses or cricket games featuring his players. He staged flagpole sitting at the Cleveland ballpark. He raffled off livestock to fans attending games.
Veeck’s marketing ploys ranged from the high-minded and noble (“give a pint of blood to aid the War Effort”) to the riotous, nearly catastrophic (Disco Demolition Night at Chicago, with LPs flying through the air, almost decapitating players and fans, nearly as deadly as Odd Job’s hat). He initiated many of the giveaways so common at ballparks today: comic books, baseball bats, decals, and batting helmets. He raffled off old cars and farm animals (a donkey once). Numbered among his door prizes were livestock, ten thousand cupcakes, and one thousand cans of beer. He promoted clear sight lines for fans in the grandstands, created by using dwarves as vendors because they would not block fans’ views as taller vendors did at other ballparks.7
Veeck was the P. T. Barnum of baseball, a one-of-a-kind iconoclast, a gadfly, “the Baron of Ballyhoo,” a fresh breeze, and a man who changed Major League Baseball for all time, despite the undying enmity and fierce opposition of owners of the other fifteen Major League teams. Look magazine dubbed him “baseball’s number 1 screwball”; fellow owners denominated him “a shameless exhibitionist.”8 Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, openly called Veeck “a disgrace to baseball.”9
Huey Long, the populist governor of Louisiana, promised voters “a Ford Model T in every garage and a chicken in every pot.” Bill Veeck’s mantra was “Every day Mardi Gras and every fan a king.”10 At Cleveland, and before that in Milwaukee and later at St. Louis and in Chicago, Veeck followed through, implementing that mantra every step of the way. In the process he offended all the other team owners, who professed to believe that Veeck’s promotions were an affront to the dignity of baseball.
In the game of baseball itself, Veeck introduced the designated hitter concept, the interleague play idea, the playoff system, free agency, and the need for league expansion.11 His fellow owners liked Veeck’s baseball innovations possibly even less than his promotional activities. Signing Larry Doby, thus beginning the integration of the American League, was an action of the highest order, a courageous and noble effort by Veeck, just as significant as Rickey’s signing of Robinson to a Major League contract. In fact, the NAACP and other groups dubbed Bill Veeck “the Abe Lincoln of Baseball.”12
Unlike Rickey, though, Veeck is best known for his unconventional and innovative marketing and management methods, not so much for baseball improvements or for what probably was his most significant achievement in baseball, scouting and signing the first African American baseball player in the American League.
Cardinals, Dodgers, and Pirates called their team president “Mr. Rickey.” Indians, Browns, and White Sox players called their president, also owner, “Bill.” Veeck was a casual presence, seemingly always around the ballpark. He was taller than average, his head topped with kinky reddish blond hair (which close friends sometimes compared to a Brillo pad) that Veeck always kept short. His build was robust as well, despite his having had a leg amputated in 1946. Not only did Veeck shuffle papers in the front office, plan promotions, and trade players; he would also pick up a brush to paint a fence or help out in an overloaded concession stand.
Veeck had volunteered and served in the Marine Corps in World War II. He was never in heavy combat, though, as most Marines were; instead he injured a leg while working on Bougainville in the Pacific theater. The leg became infected, Veeck neglected it, and after two years in and out of military hospitals, Veeck consented to amputation of the leg. Loss of the leg never seemed to have made him feel sorry for himself or slowed him down in any way. On the contrary, Veeck joked about it and had an ashtray carved into his wooden prosthesis. He would amaze visitors by rolling up his pants leg and dumping ashes from his cigarette (practically everyone smoked in those days) into the carved-out ashtray.
What made Veeck approachable to players, his casual appearance and impish demeanor, contributed to the other team owners’ dislike for him. He had somewhat the look of a rascal about him. A smile was always on his face and a twinkle in his eyes. He never wore a necktie. He was unconventional, one of a kind perhaps—not the typical pinstripe wearing, self-important businessman-owner with expensive tie and ostentatious pocket square.
Surprisingly, though, the men who played for Veeck, and later wrote or commented on it, have little to say about him, either praiseworthy or critical, with the exception of Larry Doby. Doby considered Veeck a second father, saying so often. In later years several times Doby and his wife, Helyn, vacationed with their family of five children at Veeck’s farm, Peach Blossom Creek, on the Maryland eastern shore.13 Veeck and Doby had a handshake trust in each other about everything, baseball included.
One player comment did concern the juxtaposition of Veeck’s showmanship and circus-master image with his role as a pioneer in the integration of professional sports. In advance of the other players, Lou Boudreau, player-manager in 1946–50 and the Indians’ Hall of Fame shortstop, received word that a black player would be joining the team. Boudreau recalled:
We were in Chicago. . . . I had been unaware that Veeck had been considering a black player. My first reaction was skepticism. Knowing Bill as I did, and knowing his penchant for promotion, I immediately wondered if signing a black player was another publicity stunt, another way to sell tickets. . . .
He assured me it wasn’t, “Larry Doby will be a great player, you’ll see,” Veeck told me and anyone else who expressed doubts about his motives. Still, I had to wonder.14
Veeck moved quickly both to assuage doubts or fears on the Indians’ part and also to head off any possible insurrection. He met with the Indians players, several of whom were southerners. “His words were forceful. ‘I understand that some of you said if a “n—r” joins the club, you’re leaving. Well, you can leave now because this guy is going to be a bigger star than any guy in this room.’”15
Doby reported to the big league club two days later, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, for a game against the Chicago White Sox. He pinch hit in his first big league game, striking out. Other Indians players of that era, or at least those who penned memoirs (Early Wynn, Al Rosen, manager Al Lopez), have little to say about Bill Veeck, other than to recount and some implicitly to praise Veeck for signing Doby.
More expansive was strikeout king Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller. In one of his two biographies, Feller notes that Veeck “read three and four books a week, on every subject under the sun and had a sense of history. He knew that signing Doby was significant.” Veeck, though, was a businessman: “He had a sense of purpose, too. He also knew that signing Doby would put people in the ballpark and, most important, he knew that Doby had star potential, enough that he could make [the Indians] a pennant winner for the first time in 28 years.”16
Feller gives insight into Veeck’s management style. “Veeck took the doors off his office because he said that his door was always open to anyone, anyhow, so why have one?”17 Veeck’s home telephone always remained listed in the directory. After games he stood outside stadium gates, much like a pastor on the church’s steps, trading notes with and thanking fans.18 According to Feller, Veeck also “wasn’t afraid to do good old-fashioned wheeling and dealing to get good players” for the team.19
In the other Feller biography, author John Sickels’s paraphrase of Feller’s comments echoes the comment that Lou Boudreau had made ten or so years earlier. “[Bill Veeck] had been interested in signing black players before” signing Doby in 1947. “[But Veeck] waited until [Jackie] Robinson was established . . . before making a move. [Veeck] was already a maverick: those who supported integration feared that if Veeck were the first owner to bring in a black ballplayer, that the whole issue would be tarred as a publicity stunt, especially if the player failed.” Instead, “with Robinson successful and the bookish Branch Rickey having cleared the way, Veeck was free to move.”20
Just how much success Robinson had had by then, late summer 1947, paving the way for Veeck’s initiatives and a softer landing for Doby, might be questioned. Doby entered Major League Baseball a mere eleven weeks after Robinson and had been discovered by Veeck and his scouts a few weeks earlier than that. Veeck and Doby then integrated a different league, several of the teams in different cities, against different baseball clubs.
Undoubtedly, there were Indians, Browns, and White Sox players who would have preferred a more sedate, traditional baseball man as owner and front-office executive rather than Bill Veeck, baseball’s P. T. Barnum. Those players, if there were any, seemed to have remained quiet about their preference in owners and executives, for none of their adverse commentary, if any existed, seems to have survived.
Rickey and Veeck knew and respected each other. They met at baseball meetings and conducted trade discussions and negotiations together. One anecdote is that Veeck learned never to deal face-to-face with Branch Rickey. Veeck said that he remained in his hotel room, using a bellboy to shuttle back and forth with notes, suggestions, offers, and counteroffers. To the bellhop, “Tell him [Rickey] that I’m scared of him because I know if I go up there I’ll end up buying two catchers I don’t need for twice as much money as I’ve got to spend. . . . I’m scared of him. This is one of the world’s great con artists.”21
Much like the opposing attorney who first identifies himself as “just a country lawyer” and then skins his opponent alive, in person Rickey would convey to the opposing side that he was a religious man and altogether virtuous. Beginning with a long-winded recitation of moral precepts and maxims, he would end by getting the other side to agree to what he had had no intention of doing, or finish an oration during the course of which the opponent had no idea to what he had agreed. “Rickey was the only man who could simply outtalk you, outgeneral you and out maneuver you, who could, in short, traumatize and transfix you through the sheer force of language and personality.”22
Bill Veeck wrote three books. One is about managing the Suffolk Downs racetrack (horse racing), a task he undertook late in life.23 Two others are autobiographies about his life in baseball, as owner-operator of four Major League and two Minor League professional baseball clubs. The better of those two, Veeck as in Wreck, “became an instant best seller in 1962, loved by fans but hated by owners for its belligerence toward them.”24 Sports columnist Red Smith wrote that Veeck’s book “was better described as 380 pages of aggravated assault.”25
But Red Smith must have gotten his Veeck books confused. Veeck as in Wreck is a compilation of good baseball and Bill Veeck stories, only a pinch acerbic here and there, a book well worth reading. By contrast, the Veeck book written three years later, The Hustler’s Handbook, is sarcastic, irreverent, flippant, bitter at times, and difficult to read all the way through. The Hustler’s Handbook, not Veeck as in Wreck, is the aggravated assault. “I have occasionally disagreed with baseball operators—publicly, privately, and semi-privately, in print and out, in summer and in winter, in sickness and in health. I have called them backward, unimaginative, and feckless. I have been known to assail a few of the more worthy as greedy and rapacious. So how come they don’t like me?” Veeck asks.26 That quotation summarizes and seemingly states the single-minded objective of The Hustler’s Handbook.
Veeck does not spare Branch Rickey, whom he derisively refers to as “Papa Branch,” from criticism.27 Presaging his discussion of Rickey and his constant sale of players, Veeck advances the hypothesis that “baseball, like loan sharking, is a humanitarian sport.”28 Citing examples of Rickey’s sales of Eddie Stanky for $100,000 and Sam Jethroe for $105,000, Veeck stands back from the individual transactions and detects a pattern: Rickey “always had that bushy-tailed crop of good young players down on the farm and he’d let them develop until, as he liked to say in his paternal humane way, they ‘turned into money.’ The reserve strength on the farm allowed him to sell his name players [Dizzy Dean, Paul Dean, Johnny Mize, Rip Collins, Ducky Medwick, Eddie Stanky, Ralph Kiner, Dolph Camilli, to name but a few] while their market value was still at its peak.”29 Rickey, Veeck also notes, “was always a seller.”30 He even asks, “Why?” and answers his own question, at least in part: Rickey “got a percentage on all player sales while in Brooklyn.”31 Veeck, though, never goes further to note that Rickey sold players for cash, lots of it, throughout a forty-plus-years career and that Rickey’s contracts, at St. Louis, at Brooklyn, and at Pittsburgh, always gave him a generous cut of the cash proceeds received in return for players.
The last step, of course, would be to note how ironic it was that the man, Branch Rickey, given credit for integrating Major League Baseball was also far and away the greatest salesman of baseball flesh in the history of the game. Veeck did not make that leap. Maybe, though, Veeck was sniffing around it when he titled his Branch Rickey chapter “Snake Oil for Sale” and summed up Rickey as “a man who has spent his life leading sacrificial lambs to the slaughter.”32
Veeck’s other autobiography, Veeck as in Wreck, is unstinting in its praise for Rickey: “I think Branch Rickey is a remarkable man. He does things; he has ideas; he shakes the game up.”33
Bill Veeck was, as they say, “born to the purple,” in Chicago in 1914. To the north of the city were (and are) some of the city’s wealthiest suburbs—Kenilworth, Winnetka, and Wilmette. But there were (and still are) ritzy suburbs to the west as well—Oak Park, River Forest, Glen Ellyn, or Wheaton. Veeck and his family lived in the ritziest of the ritzy of the western suburbs, Hinsdale.
Veeck attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, often rated as the top prep school in the United States, uttered in the same breath with Deerfield Academy, Phillips Andover, Groton, Choate, St. Paul’s, and other eastern elites. Next, Veeck attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, named after it principal sponsor, Lord Kenyon of Great Britain, who to this day still attends Kenyon graduations. Kenyon is the college that produced President Rutherford B. Hayes, poet Robert Lowell, actor Paul Newman, Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme, and, perhaps most brilliantly, comedian Jonathan Winters, to name a few. Veeck never graduated from Kenyon, and Exeter before that, but, then again, he did not need to.
For Veeck was born to the purple in a second sense as well, into the world of professional baseball. Veeck’s father, William Veeck Senior, was president of the Chicago Cubs from 1917 to 1933. Owner William Wrigley plucked Veeck Senior from the ranks of journalists who covered the Cubs and their management or, rather, mismanagement. So young Veeck “was raised with the Chicago Cubs.” As early as age ten, he accompanied his father to Cubs spring training, out west and to California, at faraway Catalina Island, most of which Wrigley owned. From 1933 on Veeck became the right-hand man (lower level) of Cubs owner Phillip K. Wrigley, who in 1933 had succeeded his father both as owner of the Cubs and as the crown prince, nay, king, of chewing gum. In his eight years there, Veeck did a bit of everything at the Cubs: remodel concessions, count and sell tickets, plant ivy along the Wrigley Field outfield wall, and paint bleacher seats.
His appetite thus whetted, in 1941 Veeck bought the Milwaukee Brewers farm team, then in last place in the American Association. In June 1946, with the help of his backers—meatpacking heirs Lester Amour and Phil Swift, Chicago investment banker Art Allyn, and comedian Bob Hope, originally from Cleveland, and other investors—Bill Veeck bought the Cleveland Indians for $1.539 million.
In 1947 Veeck signed Larry Doby to a Major League contract, thus launching integration of the American League. He did so at some personal cost: “When I signed Doby . . . we received 20,000 letters, most of them in violent and obscene protest.”34 That rough treatment did not change Veeck’s views of Doby. In the snidest book of all snide books, The Hustler’s Handbook, though, Veeck pens only one positive accolade; it is about Doby, whom he describes as “my dear friend Larry Doby.”35
By mid-1949, under Veeck, Indians teams had fourteen African American ballplayers, including Doby, under contract.36 Only two other of the sixteen Major League teams, the Dodgers and the Giants, had any black players at all. The best either one of those racial “pioneers” had was three.
The question that arises, or the paradox that now should be apparent, is how could one from such a privileged and elite background become the person who more than anyone else, including Branch Rickey, was the leader in bringing integration to Major League Baseball?
Reflecting back on his own animus, Veeck muses: “I have always had a strong feeling for minority groups. . . . Thinking about it, it seems to me that all my life I have been fighting the status quo, against the tyranny of the fossilized majority. I suppose that whatever impels me to battle the old fossils [other Major League team owners] also drives me to the side of the underdog.”37 Veeck’s attitudes trace themselves to times long before he became a baseball team owner. As an adolescent he “used to see the Homestead Grays and Kansas City Monarchs in the old [Chicago] American Giants’ park [Hollywood Park] right across the street from Comiskey Park.”38 He attended Negro League All-Star games that at that time were generally held in Chicago.39 At that point in his life, he did those things not so much as a racial activist or pioneer but as a kid who seemed color-blind and who was intent on seeing some good baseball (for which the Negro Leagues were famous) played.
Later in life Bill Veeck joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In Cleveland Veeck appeared in advertisements for the NAACP. He did posters with Larry Doby and with Satchel Paige: “The NAACP gets the ball to you.” As mentioned earlier, still later, and more seriously, the NAACP and other groups named Veeck, not Branch Rickey, “the Abe Lincoln of baseball.”40 In his autobiography Veeck waxes philosophical once again: “What offends me about prejudice . . . is that it assumes an unwarranted superiority. For as long as I can remember, I have felt vaguely uneasy when anybody tells an anti-Negro joke, an anti-Semitic or anti-Catholic joke.”41 “It only takes one leg [remember Veeck was an amputee], you know, to walk away.”42
We either don’t know or there are a myriad reasons why someone rises above and achieves far beyond where the biases and prejudices of their background might have led them. From a backward setting in rural Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson rose not only to be president of the United States but also to shepherd through Congress the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, landmark pieces of legislation that profoundly changed the United States for all time and righted wrongs of a past century. So, too, from a privileged and lily-white background in Hinsdale, Illinois, Bill Veeck emerged to lead Major League Baseball into the twentieth century and to right wrongs that had persisted for sixty or more years.
It is to that subject that we now turn.
“Doby was as close to me as any player I have ever known. . . . I am extremely fond of Larry and his wife, Helyn, and their children,” Veeck wrote in his autobiography.43 In 1947 Veeck brought Doby aboard as the first black player in the American League. Although it took a while, once he got his feet on the ground as an Indian, Doby often would drop into Veeck’s office to visit and chat. In Doby’s last years as a player, Veeck, then the owner of the White Sox, traded for Doby, although in 1957 field manager and Doby nemesis Al Lopez and assistant general manager Hank Greenberg soon conspired to do Doby in, sending him to the minor leagues (San Diego Padres, then in the Pacific Coast League) as a penalty for having slumped after a stellar 1956 season (from 24 home runs and 102 RBIs in 1956 to 14 home runs and 79 RBIs in 1957) (see chapter 12).
Veeck went through a divorce in 1949–50. He was forced to sell the Indians to raise cash with which to fund the divorce settlement and to establish trust funds for the three children from his first marriage. Then, too, quick to forget Cleveland’s 1948 World Championship, in 1949 the Cleveland fans and the Cleveland press had also turned on Veeck and the Indians, who finished third that year despite having one of the strongest teams in baseball.
“What’s Happening in Cleveland?” headlined an article written by Wendell Smith in the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading African American newspaper of its day. Smith, a figure greatly respected in the world of baseball, then and now, called Veeck “one of the shrewdest and most capable men in all of baseball.” He did not mince his words: “The people of Cleveland should hang their heads in shame. [Cleveland] has turned out to be a city of spineless people.”44
Veeck sold the Indians to Elis Ryan, an insurance executive. Veeck and Doby were parted. In November 1976, in Veeck’s reincarnation as owner of the Chicago White Sox, Veeck hired former Cleveland pitcher Bob Lemon as manager and brought in Larry Doby, Lemon’s former teammate and friend, as hitting coach.45 Doby had been serving as hitting coach of the Montreal Expos. Thus Doby and Veeck were reunited, as they had been twice before.
In June 1978 Veeck replaced Lemon, who went on to several World Series victories as manager of the Yankees, with Larry Doby, making Doby not only the second black player but also the second black manager of a Major League team (Frank Robinson was the first). Later that year, in October, Veeck replaced Doby with former Chicago Cubs shortstop Don Kissinger, who was immensely popular in Chicago. Veeck was running out of money and in failing health. He felt he had to do something drastic to increase the gate and the cash flow, although Doby had managed the White Sox to over .500. He adopted something of a whack-a-mole approach and replaced Doby with Don Kissinger. Doby realized and accepted that Veeck had to make a change.46
Still later Doby and his family would spend several days each year visiting Veeck’s Maryland farm. Larry Doby Jr. remembered those visits fondly as an annual family expedition.
In his autobiography Veeck provides background on the beginning of his relationship with Doby: “When I first came to Cleveland, I was almost sure I was going to sign a negro player.”47 The player’s name that kept floating to the surface was Larry Doby, infielder for the Newark Eagles in the Negro League. Veeck sent out his chief scout, Bill Killifer, and then himself went to see Doby play and to investigate Doby’s background. In June 1947 Veeck paid Effa Manley, who co-owned Newark with her husband, Abe, $10,000 for Doby’s contract with an additional payment of $5,000 if Doby made the Major League club.48
Manley was overjoyed, in part because Branch Rickey, who did not regard player contracts with Negro League teams as real contracts, just smashed and grabbed, oblivious to any piece of paper the player had signed. Rickey never paid the Kansas City Monarchs a single cent when he signed Jackie Robinson for Montreal. He never paid Manley when he signed future Hall of Fame pitcher Don Newcombe from the Newark Eagles. Manley was so impressed with Veeck’s forthright dealing “that she told [him he] could have the contract of her shortstop, who she though was just as good, for $1,000.” The Indians scouting reports on the shortstop were just as good as those on Doby, but the Cleveland brain trust had thought the Newark shortstop to be “too old.” Veeck wryly commented, “To show how smart I am, the shortstop was Monte Irvin.”49 Irvin, of course, went on to star for the New York Giants, hitting .293 lifetime, although he did not break into the majors until age thirty, in 1948, and played only eight years—seven with the Giants and a tail year (1956) with the Cubs. Nonetheless, Irvin is today enshrined in the Hall of Fame, elected by the Negro League Committee in 1973.
Early in July 1947, Doby left his Newark Eagles teammates Monte Irvin, Don Newcombe, and others and took a train to Chicago, where the Indians were playing the White Sox. As instructed, he went straight to the Congress Hotel in downtown Chicago, where Veeck was staying. Doby met Veeck and was then was introduced to the press. Unlike the fourteen-month program through which Rickey put Jackie Robinson, Doby had a baptism by fire. The very next thing, that afternoon, Veeck and Doby took a taxicab to the ballpark for Doby’s first Major League game:
In the taxi . . . I told Larry [Veeck invariably addressed Doby as “Lawrence,” which became a term of affection between the two, but he did not, apparently, at their first meeting] “If you have any troubles, come and talk them over with me. This is not the usual con, I mean this. It will take some time for the other fellows to accept you. You have to accept that. You may have to go it alone for a while. That’s why Lou Jones [an African American public relations representative Veeck had hired to help with the transition] is here.50
From that moment to the moment when Doby hit a “tremendous home run” to win the fourth game of the 1948 World Series, and eighty-one thousand Cleveland fans rose to their feet screaming and cheering, Doby went through a hell on earth. The ordeal was even harder to endure because of his background. Doby had been an all-sports star at Eastside High in Patterson, New Jersey: football running back, All-State in basketball, and a standout baseball player. Patterson, a blue-collar manufacturing center of one hundred thousand or so, was as integrated as any community could be back then and as thoroughly imbued with sports as most such blue-collar towns usually are. Racial prejudice was something Doby knew existed, but he had never come face-to-face with it before the big leagues. “He had not been abused as a human being. . . . He had not had his nose rubbed in it.”51 Moreover, Doby was a quiet, dignified, and sensitive person. Jackie Robinson, who endured many of the same slurs and abuse, had a fiery personality. If Robinson felt slighted, much less abused, he called it out and shouted down those who had attempted to victimize him. He had a disposition that better equipped him for what he faced than did Doby.
And Doby faced it all: hostile teammates; a segregated spring-training hotel in Tucson; segregated hotels in Baltimore, St. Louis, and Washington when on the road; whites-only taxicabs; ushers who would not admit him to ballparks (once when he was in his Cleveland Indians uniform); bottles and rocks thrown at him from the stands; racial epithets shouted by the fans; threatening letters. Through all this Veeck helped Doby as best he could. As Doby later told an interviewer on National Public Radio, “Bill Veeck was just as important to me as Branch Rickey was to Jackie Robinson. Veeck told me to curb my temper and to turn the other cheek. . . . There were places my wife, my daughter and I could not get 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.”52
Doby also helped himself get through it. In 1948, toward the end of spring training, the Indians and the Giants were to play a series of exhibition games in the major cities of Texas: Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and others. The games were all sellouts. But Texas had on the books a statute making criminal any mixed racial participation on a sports field or in a sporting event. With that in mind, the Indians and the Giants had even gone to the extreme of a backup schedule in case Texas authorities tried to block the games. As Veeck later recalled,
Doby was treated very badly in Houston. . . . He couldn’t get a cabdriver to take him to the park. When he came to the plate the first time, he was roundly booed. Larry took one pitch and then he hit what very well might have been the longest ball I have ever seen hit in my life. . . . . Larry hit two home runs, two doubles and a triple that day and made a couple of sensational catches in center field. In every succeeding year, he was greeted in Houston like a favorite son.53
Bill Veeck helped Doby through his trials as best he could, but he could only do so much. Doby himself put too much of the weight of the world on his shoulders. “It was a very real and bitter and gnawing battle for Larry all the way,” Veeck writes in one of his autobiographies. “He was possessed by the idea that he had to fight the battle for integration for his kids, Larry Jr. and Christine, so that they would never have to be bruised as badly as he had been.”54
Theirs, Doby’s and Veeck’s, relationship was one of mutual admiration that lasted both men all their lives. Said Doby of Veeck, “One of the best [and most] down-to-earth human beings I’ve ever met. . . . I lost my father when I was eight years old. Bill Veeck was my father back then. . . . He will never get the accolades he should get.” “He was quite a man, a great man.”55 Scott Simon echoes Doby: “[Veeck] was a compelling and remarkable figure in any field, who stood by his friends, lived by his principles, tried to improve himself, and didn’t scrimp on fun.”56
Writes Veeck of Doby, “It was important to Larry to make this kind of breakthrough [integration] because the problem was always in his mind. . . . With all that, his inner turmoil was such a constant drain on him that he was never able to realize his full potential. Not to my mind, at any rate. If Larry had come up just a little later, when things were just a little better, he might very well have become one of the greatest players of all time.”57