Searching For Bill Veeck

This last week we finally got to hear those magical words that assured us spring is on its way:  “Pitchers and catchers report to spring training.” Those words always bring a smile to my face and memories of one of my boyhood heroes, Baseball Hall of Famer Bill Veeck. 

Veeck was the first of the great sports promoters. He famously tweaked the baseball establishment for much of the 20^th century while owning the major league St. Louis Browns, Cleveland Indians, my Chicago White Sox twice, and very successfully throughout the war years, the minor league Milwaukee Brewers. His Brewers won three straight American Association pennants in his five years of ownership and set attendance records while entertaining fans with offbeat promotions.

Veeck’s roots in baseball went back to the 1920s. While working for his father, Chicago Cubs President Bill Veeck, Sr., young Bill planted the original ivy at the base of Wrigley Field’s outfield wall. Among other notable promotions, gimmicks and innovations, Veeck created Ladies Days, exploding scoreboards, names on the back of jerseys and in 1951, he famously sent 3’7″ tall Eddie Gaedel into a major league game as a pinch hitter. He also signed Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League, created grandstand manager day, popularized giveaways and created financing structures that revolutionized sports team ownership. But more than being a promotional genius, Veeck was a common man with uncommon generosity and love of life.

He was my vocational inspiration and a person whose values and actions I’ve always admired and tried to emulate. His autobiography Veeck As In Wreck, is one of the all-time great inside looks at baseball. Pat Williams’ amazing book about Veeck, Marketing Your Dreams:  Business and Life Lessons from Bill Veeck, Baseball’s Promotional Genius tells story after story that serve as guidelines to life that are meaningful for all and absolute mandatory education for those in sports promotion.

Any transparency, accessibility and interaction with soccer fans I’ve provided over the last 25 years is directly attributable to the correspondence Veeck and I had in the 1970s when he owned the White Sox.

The letters we exchanged began when I was angered by his trade for former Chicago Cubs shortstop Don Kessinger. Veeck’s response using Cubs legend Phil Cavaretta finishing his career with two seasons on the south side after 20 on the north did nothing to sooth my distress of the trade, but it did make an impression on me I’ve never forgotten. I wrote back to him to tell him that I still didn’t agree and I threw in a trivia question I had just learned: “Q. Who is the only center fielder to ever catch a foul ball in the major leagues?”  I printed the answer upside down on the bottom of my letter: “A. Johnny Mize."  I was delighted to get a response a week later from Veeck only to read that he knew the answer – and mine was wrong.  The correct answer, he pointed out, was Johnny Mostil. I had simply made a mental mistake interchanging the two old time players both named “Johnny M.”, but I was too embarrassed to respond.

I only met Veeck once.  In the late 1970s, we shared a rickety elevator. It was in rickety old Comiskey Park with Veeck, who by then, with one wooden leg, was becoming a bit rickety himself. My worship of him has led to a quest to get closer to him by seeking out various Veeck shrines in and around Chicago.  Over the years I tracked down and took pictures of his old home in suburban Hinsdale, the sign at Hinsdale’s Veeck Park, the plaque outside US Cellular Field’s Bill Veeck Press Box and the Bill Veeck Drive street sign outside US Cellular Field.  

I occasionally belly up to the bars at Veeck’s Corner in Miller’s Pub and the Billy Goat Tavern, one of his favorite watering holes.  I have also had the pleasure to meet and chat with my hero’s son Mike (who is a baseball legend in his own right), and have also become friends with his grandson Night Train, who now works in the family business for the White Sox. A memorable outing to a Sox game a couple years ago with Night Train and my friend John Daley led me to write an article about their grandfathers and their impact on Chicago. I may be wrong, but I’d like to think my interest in Veeck is more about respect and admiration than an unhealthy obsession.

Until recently, however, I had never attempted to pursue Veeck’s significant connection to Milwaukee - the city I’ve called home for the last 33 years. I never thought there could still be any physical reminders of his time in Milwaukee.

Last week I was told of a historical marker in Milwaukee that commemorates Borchert Field and pays homage to Veeck and his minor league Brewers. I knew the Borchert Field site was on Milwaukee’s north side along the I-43 corridor and I received a tip that the plaque was at Rose Park east of the old Borchert location. 

So last week I went in search of and found the plaque just beyond the left field fence of a baseball diamond in Rose Park. The plaque mentions the stadium’s location was three blocks west between W. Chambers, W. Burleigh, N. 7^th and N. 8^th Streets.  It tells a narrative of Borchert Field’s 60-plus year history starting as Athletic Park in 1888 until it was demolished in 1953.  Mostly it hosted Milwaukee’s minor league baseball from 1902 through 1952. It hosted the Negro National League Milwaukee Bears for part of the 1923 season and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Milwaukee Chicks in 1944.  Marquette University and the NFL’s Milwaukee Badgers and Green Bay Packers also played football games at Borchert Field.

The plaque mentions Veeck along with other Hall of Famers who called the stadium home: Casey Stengel, Eddie Mathews, Al Simmons and Pete Hill as well as Olympian Jim Thorpe.  “Home runs,” the plaque states, “often landed on the porches across the street from the neighborhood ballpark, especially when Cooperstown legends such as Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson visited.”  Wow….I had to read that sentence twice.  How great is it that these incredible baseball players once smacked home runs onto north side Milwaukee porches.

Then I had to head three blocks west to see the space these legends once roamed. I parked on 7^th Street and walked across the street to the weed-wrapped chain link fence along Interstate 43.  I closed my eyes, imagined Veeck glad-handing fans, Jolly Cholly Grimm yelling at his players and listened to the crack of the bat on the ball a century ago. I felt the edges of my mouth turn upward. My eyes then opened and the park was gone again - replaced by cars and trucks speeding north and south along the concrete roads that long ago replaced the infield dirt.

I returned to my car with a thought. Veeck owned the Brewers for four years. He must have lived in Milwaukee, but where? I had recently been to the Frank P. Zeidler Humanities Room at the Milwaukee Public Library and took note of shelf after shelf of Milwaukee City Directories. I wondered if Veeck’s address in the 1940s would be in one of those books.  Maybe I could find the home he lived in and seek it out. Perhaps he lived in one of those homes across the street from Borchert that once served as targets for Ruth, Mays and Gehrig!

It didn’t take long to find Veeck’s listing - first in the 1942 City Directory, then in 1944.  He was listed along with his first wife, Eleanor, a onetime Ringling Bros, circus equestrienne. They lived in suburban Elm Grove in 1942, but had relocated to West Bend by 1944 when Veeck had joined the US Marine Corps. His wife and three children stayed back in Wisconsin while Veeck served his nation, was injured and ultimately lost a leg. 

Though finding his name in the city directories narrowed my search for his Milwaukee area home, the phone and street numbers were unlisted. It was a long shot, but perhaps, I thought, he would be listed in the telephone directory instead. He was certainly a public figure and would understandably keep his family’s private information unlisted, but then again, he was the most accessible sports personality of his era. And I recalled that one of my other boyhood heroes, Hockey Hall of Fame announcer and Milwaukee philanthropist Lloyd Pettit was listed in the Milwaukee telephone book (1155 W. Dean Road, River Hills, Wisconsin) when I moved to the city in 1978.

Helpful librarians directed me to the periodicals room where the city telephone directories are maintained on microfilm. I checked out half a dozen spools of microfilm covering all the city phone directories from 1941 through 1946.  The first reel revealed Veeck’s phone number in 1942, Greenfield-5359, but only listed his address as “Elm Grove”. I searched the other microfilm spools, but they each skipped from Edmund Veech on N. 50^th St. to Hattie Veeling on E. Mason St. 

Alas, Veeck was not listed. The Champion of the Little Guy himself is now gone. A few years later the Braves moved to Milwaukee and County Stadium. The Brewers moved to Toledo and Borchert Field was demolished. I can’t locate Veeck’s old Milwaukee area residences and people who remember the minor league Brewers are fading along with any Veeck relics in Milwaukee.

But Bill Veeck’s spirit and passion for baseball live on in Milwaukee and in ballparks throughout the country.  That spirit awakens this week in every child and child at heart who hears those magical words:

“Pitchers and catchers report to spring training.”