Personally, Casey wasn’t quite down. Coinciding with this professional setback, some wonderful news emerged for Casey and Edna, almost immediately after the firing.
As Casey remembered it, he was at a dinner at Joe’s Restaurant, under the Brooklyn Bridge, when his former player Randy Moore told him, “My father-in-law has some oil wells back home in Naples, Texas. I might get involved with that.”
Casey said: “I might be interested in investing in that if you have room.” Moore agreed to speak to his father-in-law and Casey added, “Let’s put the Mexican in it too,” meaning Al Lopez.*1
Edna tells the story in her memoir:
One day, during pre-game practice, Moore mentioned to Casey that his father-in-law, a banker in a small Texas town, had discovered oil on a peach grove. He was going to run a wildcat well, and was Casey interested in going into the venture with him?
Casey sure was, but it took more spare dough than he had at the time. He wrote me saying he wanted to go in on the deal. My family, who knew Casey was a good bet and shrewd as they came, backed him.
“How much does he need?” was all my father asked.
Father entered whole-heartedly into the gamble. So did a few of the more venturesome players—Johnny Cooney, who was with Casey much of his baseball life, Al Lopez, later Cleveland manager, Watty Clark, a pitcher, Freddie Frankhouse, Bill McKechnie, the Braves manager, and John [Bob] Quinn.
The well was located on a farm near Mt. Pleasant, Texas and was called the “All-Star.” It was a lucky star for us, and the turning point in Casey’s life.
When the season ended—and it really ended for Casey, because he had been fired—we started a leisurely drive back across the country with my niece, Margaret Hunter. We were there on a Sunday in October 1936 [just days after his firing], when that first well came in. We stood so close that the beautiful, black blood splattered all over my white blouse and Casey’s clean shirt, and we didn’t even notice. We couldn’t take our eyes off that oil well.
It was a strange sensation to stand there, with your feet firmly planted on solid earth, and realize that one minute you were poor the next instant, you are rich. Or at least, Casey and the boys were. This was one venture in which I had no part.
The oil strike made history; it was the first group of ball players who ever cashed in on a big strike, and it set most of them up for life. They were touched with luck: there wasn’t a dry well in the entire Talco Oil Field! This, combined with his shrewd manipulations in stocks, started Casey on his way to being a wealthy man.
Attention had been drawn to East Texas since the discovery of oil in the East Texas Field in 1930, the biggest oil discovery in the world up to that point. And even though the “Casey find” wasn’t part of that, it was a sensation unto itself. The oil field, crescent-shaped and covering about thirty-five miles along U.S. Highway 271 in Northeast Texas, eventually had over seven hundred drilling operations going. Talco became an oil boomtown. The grade of oil was not suitable for petroleum production, it was perfect for asphalt, and Talco came to be called the “Asphalt Capital of the World.”
There was a certain irony in this. Casey’s father’s street-watering truck had gone out of business when the streets of Kansas City began to be paved. Now Casey was becoming a rich man on the material used for just such paving.
Al Lopez went in for about one-tenth of what Casey did (though he added more later), and said that even twenty years later it was producing seven hundred dollars a month. The investment did not make Casey a millionaire, but it gave him financial credibility with Edna’s family, and provided a fine income for the Stengels for the rest of their lives. His 1938 tax return showed he had received $16,740 from the wells that year (about $285,000 in today’s money), and that might have been the peak. He was not making “millions,” as baseball people whispered, but he was making more from the wells than he was from baseball.
Casey told it this way in his autobiography: “I took the $15,000 the club had to pay me for not managing in 1937 and used it to go in the oil business in Texas with Randy Moore, who had played ball for me in Brooklyn. I’d go into separate wells and take a small fraction of them. It turned out to be a profitable business for twenty years or more, in fact, some of the wells are still going. Randy Moore has been very successful down there and he’s been a wonderful friend to me and some of his other baseball pals he brought into the oil business….”
On December 2, 1936, the Associated Press reported, “Casey Stengel is doing all right in Texas Oil.” That would be putting it mildly. Word was out.
For the rest of his life, Casey accumulated wealth off that investment. Most people who knew him—sportswriters, players, club officials—knew that he was well off, but tended to attribute it to Lawson family money, particularly the banking business in Glendale. Not true.
And so Casey and Edna were out of baseball in 1937. This would be the only summer of Casey’s adult life between 1910 and 1960 when he would have such “idle” time. Though he got some managing and coaching inquiries, he was content to learn the oil business and otherwise stay home.
To be sure, Casey absolutely missed the game. He had no other hobbies: not golf, not card playing, not reading, not swimming, not tennis. But he couldn’t be certain of a return to baseball; it might actually be over. So he made numerous trips to the oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma that he had invested in, while Edna sharpened her skills as a businesswoman.
The general manager Bob Quinn, who had gone from Brooklyn to Boston, needed a manager for 1938. Bill McKechnie, one of Casey’s oil partners, had been named Manager of the Year by The Sporting News in 1937 for merely bringing the Braves in fifth. He took his award and accepted an offer to manage Cincinnati.
Quinn called Casey in Omaha, Texas, and offered him the Boston job on October 25, 1937.
Casey had been in touch with George Weiss about possibly taking a job at the Yankee farm clubs of Kansas City or Newark. He had also spoken to Bill Terry about a job in the Giants organization. But he leaped at Quinn’s offer. They didn’t even discuss salary.
Casey wasn’t Quinn’s first choice. That was Donie Bush, who was happy in Minneapolis and turned him down. (Bush had won the 1927 pennant with Pittsburgh.) Other names considered were Rabbit Maranville, Roger Peckinpaugh, and yes, Babe Ruth. But Casey had a reputation for attracting fans, and the Bees (they had dropped “Braves” after 1935), were the second team in town, after the Red Sox. It had been twenty-three years since they had won a pennant. The Bees in fact had drawn only 385,339 in 1937, a little over five thousand a game.
On November 22, at the Copley Plaza Hotel, Casey was introduced to the Boston baseball writers at a luncheon. Seventy-five journalists turned out—it seemed like most of New England. The reaction was, well, mixed. “Called a ‘crackpot’ and a ‘screwball’ by thousands of fans, Charles Dillon ‘Casey’ Stengel, the newly-appointed manager of the Boston Bees, has earned the respect of those who make baseball their livelihood because of his shrewdness,” wrote Hy Hurwitz in the Globe.
Casey went to the Baseball Writers’ Dinner in Boston in January 1938 and was, predictably, a hit, with his stories, pantomime, and predictions. The writers were happy to have him: good copy was sure to follow.
The team’s second-class citizenship would be evident in the difference between Braves Field and Fenway Park, but it was also immediately apparent to Casey in spring training. Quinn himself called the clubhouse at Waterfront Park in Bradenton, Florida, a “kennel.” Both the stands and the field were run-down. The hotel was a loser.
Stengel brought in two unrelated coaches named Kelly: George (“High Pockets”) Kelly, who had been Casey’s teammate with the Giants, and the less famous Mike Kelly. He had two pitchers who would stand out: Jim Turner and Lou Fette. Turner had won twenty games as a thirty-three-year-old rookie the year before. Not only would Casey quickly see Turner’s wisdom as a pitcher; he would make Turner his pitching coach when he later went to the Yankees.
There were some familiar faces on the club, to be sure. Al Lopez, Joe Stripp, Bobby Reis, Tony Cuccinello, and Johnny Cooney were all players he had managed in Brooklyn. A sophomore in the outfield was Vince DiMaggio, older brother of Joe, who had led the league in strikeouts in ’37 with 111 and would do it again in ’38 with 134—extraordinary numbers for the times.
Vince would be sent down to Kansas City in February 1939, as Casey admitted his own failure to curb the strikeouts and suggested someone else might do better. (The someone else turned out to be Casey when he had Vince again, with the minor-league Oakland Oaks in 1947.)
Lopez, catching, took a foul ball off his thumb one day; he knew it was bad, but decided to soldier on. Lopez described what happened next:
Casey rushed out to look at it, but I said, “No, it’ll be all right.” He demanded to see it.
“You really want to see it, Casey?” I asked.
He said, “Certainly.”
I stuck the thumb right in front of his face. He took one look, turned green and then passed out.
Lopez was out from May 24 to July 26. Injuries took a huge toll on the team. There were days when Casey had as few as sixteen able-bodied men to work with.
One of Casey’s few players who could rightly be called a star was the outfielder Max West, who broke in in 1938, and started the 1940 All-Star Game, hitting a three-run home run off Red Ruffing in the contest, which the National League won 4–0. (McKechnie, the National League manager, named Casey as one of his coaches.)
Casey also had a left-handed hitter named Debs Garms, who had batted .259 in 1937. Garms would remember:
The following spring, Stengel came to the club. I remember we were training at Bradenton, Florida, and Casey said to me: “They tell me there’s a man on that infield you like pretty well.” I knew he meant the second baseman. I must have hit 150 or 200 balls down that way the previous year.
Then Case said, “Young man, if you’re ever going to make a living up here in the big leagues, you’ve got to learn to bunt and hit the ball by the third baseman.”
By the time Casey had started working on me, I realized that it was up to me to do something or lose my job. A .259 average wasn’t good enough. He told me to make the third baseman my target, and hope that I missed him. If I aimed at him, enough balls would go to either side and be safe. I owe Casey a great deal for the way he likes to sit around and talk baseball.
In 1940, Garms led the National League with a .355 average. Unfortunately, by then he was playing for Pittsburgh.
On June 11 in Cincinnati, the Bees were no-hit by Johnny Vander Meer, which might not have been as historic had he not no-hit Brooklyn his next time out (in the first night game at Ebbets Field), the only pitcher in history to throw consecutive no-hitters.
Casey was far more accustomed to losing than to winning by now, and his six years in Boston would not change that pattern. His fifth place finish in 1938 was his high-water mark with the team. Alas, attendance fell to 341,149 in 1938, even though the Bees finished only twelve games out of first. After that, he was seventh four years in a row, and then sixth. He never tasted the first division.
“People often ask me if this affected his personality—did he snap at the dog, glower at the toaster, snarl at his wife?” wrote Edna. “No, never. Casey would start talking baseball the minute we left Braves Field, and he’d gab, non-stop, until we reached our hotel. He might be temporarily upset about losing a tough one, but his tremendous love of baseball and people always brought him back to even keel. He thinks always of tomorrow’s chance, not yesterday’s loss.”
Casey’s mother, Jennie Stengel, suffered a heart attack and died at seventy-nine years of age in Kansas City on December 5, 1938. Casey barely missed a flight from Dallas (the Winter Meetings) that would have gotten him home in time to say goodbye.
Louis Stengel died sixteen months later, on April 7, 1940, also at seventy-nine. After Casey got the phone call from his brother, Grant, the Bees’ traveling secretary, Duffy Lewis, arranged for Casey to get from spring training in Augusta, Georgia, to Atlanta, from which he could travel by train for the funeral. The report was that Louis had suffered “a shock,” which probably meant a heart attack, or perhaps a stroke.
Although his parents would have been proud and happy to see Casey become a dentist, they had rejoiced in his celebrity in baseball, and often went to Chicago, or even to New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, or Brooklyn, to see him play. They were baseball fans, and though they didn’t get to see Casey’s finest hours as a manager, they did get to delight in his major-league status and celebrity.
“Bucketfoot” Al Simmons, who had had a great career in the American League, joined “the Swarm” (the newspapers’ sometime name for the Bees) in 1939. And then there was Paul “Big Poison” Waner, who was on the Bees in 1941 and 1942, collecting 168 hits in those two years, including the one that made him the seventh member of the 3,000-Hit Club.
His three thousandth hit came on June 19, 1942, in Braves Field, off Rip Sewell of Pittsburgh (Waner’s longtime team), and would probably have been viewed as a bigger moment if anyone had realized that he would be the only player in thirty-three years—between Eddie Collins in 1925 and Stan Musial in 1958—to accomplish the feat.
The game was halted so that Waner could retrieve the milestone baseball, and the Pirates came on the field to join the Bees and congratulate him. Casey, coaching third, was among the first in a Boston uniform to get to him and slap him on the back.
It was fairly well celebrated by 1942 standards, even before fans and writers really bore down on baseball statistics.
Because Casey’s Boston seasons produced few positive highlights, some games remained etched in fans’ minds. The Bees, for instance, played a twenty-three-inning game on June 28, 1939, the third longest in history to that point, which ended in a 2–2 tie five hours after it began. It needn’t have gone that far, but a Bees pinch runner named Otto Huber fell down trying to score the winning run in the thirteenth. To Casey’s total dismay, it turned out that Huber lost his footing because his spikes were worn down to nubs. There was no record of how many of the 2,457 fans in attendance that day stayed to the finish.
“Otto got us into the Little Red Book of Baseball,” said Casey, referring to the game’s record book.
A year later, the Bees lost to the Dodgers a twenty-inning game that lasted five hours and nineteen minutes; Brooklyn ended it by scoring four in the twentieth inning.
In September 1939, Casey was in Chicago to play the Cubs when he agreed to manage the Bees again in 1940. He wired Bob Quinn: “Am more than pleased to accept the management again and want you to know that I never have entered into a conversation or looked elsewhere for a position because the treatment and cooperation I have received from you has been more than any place I ever held a position and only hope my plans for a young ball club for the Boston public will be realized in 1940.”
At the end of the season, Mike Kelly went to coach Pittsburgh, and the ever-present Cooney replaced him as a player-coach. (A fictional “Cooney,” it might be noted, “died at first” in line three of “Casey at the Bat,” which people still associated with Stengel.)
Casey tried something different in February 1940, when he opened an early-spring training camp in Bradenton. It was an experiment he would come to repeat during his glory years with the Yankees. He would instruct and observe the youngest of the organization’s prospects, which at that time included twenty-three “Baby Bees,” including Sibby Sisti and Phil Masi, who had just come up the previous summer. Both would enjoy long stays with Boston.
He, with Fred Haney of the St. Louis Browns, became the first two managers to take their teams to Mexico during spring training. They played two weekend games in Monterrey, but few fans turned out on Sunday, which was bullfight day in Mexico. (Haney later managed Milwaukee against Casey in the 1957 and 1958 World Series.)
Early in the 1940 season, Casey sent a handwritten letter back to his sister, Louise, in Kansas City, on hotel letterhead from Cincinnati:
Dear Louise. I have been very slow to answer your letters’ reason is that Edna + I have been so busy and she returned home today by way of Chicago + then on the Union Pacific so won’t stop at K.C. She had a nice trip but did not see us win many games. Every club is after my [“pitchers” written with a line through it] players for a trade but will not give any good players in return and our club needs the money badly + expect the owners to make a deal by June 15th. My pitchers are terrible but my young men in the field have been doing well. I am mailing you 100.00 for your account at the bank and will positively send you another hundred at the first of July. Hope all are well and doing O.K. With love to all your loving brother C.D. Stengel.
Money would always be an issue with the Bees, even more so than in Brooklyn. They drew fewer than four thousand fans a game during Casey’s time there, and never had enough to contend seriously. Casey’s effort was recognized by the respected H. G. Salsinger of The Detroit News, who wrote: “Stengel has one of the least desirable jobs in baseball. The Boston club controls so little money that it cannot even afford to pay the waiver price and they say that only Bob Quinn’s personal popularity has kept the sheriff from taking over. Unable to buy players, Stengel has been limited to such material as he could get for nothing, and when you think how thoroughly the minor leagues and sandlots are scouted today for material, you can realize what a limited field was left for Stengel to choose from.”
There was one Boston owner, Charles Adams, who had lots of money to invest. He also owned the Suffolk Downs racetrack and the Boston Bruins hockey team. But because Commissioner Landis wanted no intermingling of racetrack money and baseball teams, Adams was unable to help out.
In April 1941, Adams sold his share to about a dozen investors, including Lou and Joe Perini, Joe Maney, Guido Rugo, golf star Francis Ouimet, Casey’s friend Max Meyer (a Brooklyn jeweler, who tried several times to buy the Dodgers—with Casey as part of the investment team), Bob Quinn and his son John, and Casey, who put in twenty-five thousand dollars and became a team owner. Johnny Cooney wanted in, but was rejected because he was an active player. Bing Crosby wanted in, but was rejected for his racetrack connections.*2
The annual results were disappointing, and attendance was horrid. But Casey loved Boston, loved walking down Commonwealth Avenue to the ballpark and talking baseball with the fans. Braves Field (fans still called it that, even though the team was now the Bees) was about a mile and a half from Casey’s hotel. The breeze from the Charles River played a role in his games, but also provided a nice summer climate. (The field still stands, as well as the right-field bleachers, as Nickerson Field, on the campus of Boston University.)
Casey traded Al Lopez, again, this time to the Pirates, during the 1940 season. “Sailor Bill” Posedel tied for the team pitching lead, with a dozen victories (he would later be pitching coach for the great Oakland A’s teams of the early 1970s).
The ’41 team included Babe Dahlgren, the first baseman who replaced Lou Gehrig on the Yankees, only to be “banished” by Joe McCarthy, who described him as having “short arms.” As eventually came to light, McCarthy never forgave Babe for an error in September 1940 that led to a loss that knocked the Yankees out of first. Offhandedly (and strangely), he suggested to a small gathering of writers, “If Dahlgren doesn’t smoke marijuana, he catches that ball.” (None printed it.) So this first baseman on the ’39 Yankees—one of the great teams in baseball history—found himself on the Braves, where he hit .235, and was essentially blackballed out of the game. Yes, being on the Braves was like being out of the game.
The Braves (their name had been changed back by now) trained in San Antonio in 1941, removed from most other teams. (At one exhibition in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Casey was presented with an active beehive, containing, it was said, 1,296 living bees). The Braves picked up the great American Leaguer Earl Averill that spring, but the short experiment was yet another failure, and after eight games, he was released.
Cooney, meanwhile, hit .318 in 1940 as a player/coach, and .319 in 1941—at age forty. The Boston baseball writers gave him their player-of-the-year honors (the Walter Barnes Memorial Award) in the former year, over Ted Williams’ .344 season for the Red Sox.
In 1941, of course, the Braves were more of an afterthought than usual; across town, Williams was hitting .406.
The “off-season” of 1941–42 was anything but quiet. The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7 put the United States at war. Until Franklin Roosevelt gave baseball the green light to keep going, largely to provide factory workers with a form of recreation, there was uncertainty over whether the national pastime would be put “on hold.”
“Maybe I’ll go back in the Navy and paint ships,” Casey told Edna, recalling his World War I service.
Given the relative speed with which World War I ended for the United States—which was actively engaged for only nineteen months—most did not anticipate that this new war would last nearly four more years. The depletion of baseball’s rosters was mighty, but for the Boston Braves it was hardly noticeable. The replacement players, mostly classified 4-F, were nearly as bad as the ones who went to serve.
In 1942, the Braves trained in Sanford, Florida. One afternoon, the team had an exhibition game in Sebring, against the Yankees’ powerful farm club, the Newark Bears. Casey did not suit up that day. He left his number-31 uniform back in Sanford and let his coaches manage. He decided to sit in the stands with his old friend from the Eastern League days, George Weiss. Weiss, director of the Yankees farm system, was there to watch his Newark players in action. The Bears were probably a better club than Casey’s major-league team—an observation that must have been shared by Casey and Weiss as the afternoon unfolded.
Ernie Lombardi came in to do the catching in 1942 and hit .330 despite being woefully slow afoot. A pitcher named Tom Earley was suspended by Stengel for “indifferent pitching.” Meanwhile, the Boston press showed signs of turning on Casey, getting tired of the team’s annual plunge to the lower recesses of the league standings. Only a more awful club in Philadelphia kept the Braves from last place in these seasons.
In 1942, a couple of pitchers, Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain, made their debuts; they would lead the franchise to a pennant six years later. Sain, who later pitched for Casey at the Yankees, in his forty appearances as a rookie, made a nice impression before going off for three years in the service. Spahn, who would also pitch for Casey but with the Mets, was only twenty-one in 1942, and made less of an impression. He, too, went off for three years of military service.
On April 20, in a game at Ebbets Field, Casey ordered Spahn, pitching in relief, to fire a brushback pitch at the Dodgers’ Pee Wee Reese. Three times Spahn threw inside—but not enough to satisfy Casey’s definition of a brushback.
“Young man, you’ve got no guts,” Stengel told him when he reached the dugout. “Go pick up your railroad ticket to Hartford.”
And Spahn was gone, though he would return for two games in September before heading off for his three years of combat service. Eventually, Spahn became the winningest left-handed pitcher in baseball history.
“Yes,” Casey later reflected. “I said ‘no guts’ to a kid who wound up being a war hero and one of the best pitchers anybody ever saw. You can’t say I don’t miss ’em when I miss ’em.”
Spahn would later tell people, “I’m the only guy to play for Casey Stengel before and after he was a genius.”