Veeck As In Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck

1

A Can of Beer, a Slice of Cake—and Thou, Eddie Gaedel

In 1951, in a moment of madness, I became owner and operator of a collection of old rags and tags known to baseball historians as the St. Louis Browns.

The Browns, according to reputable anthropologists, rank in the annals of baseball a step or two ahead of Cro-Magnon man. One thing should be made clear. A typical Brownie was more than four feet tall. Except, of course, for Eddie Gaedel, who was 3′7″ and weighed 65 lbs. Eddie gave the Browns their only distinction. He was, by golly, the best darn midget who ever played big-league ball. He was also the only one.

Eddie came to us in a moment of desperation. Not his desperation, ours. After a month or so in St. Louis, we were looking around desperately for a way to draw a few people into the ball park, it being perfectly clear by that time that the ball club wasn’t going to do it unaided. The best bet seemed to be to call upon the resources of our radio sponsors, Falstaff Brewery. For although Falstaff only broadcast our games locally, they had distributors and dealers all over the state.

It happened that 1951 was the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American League, an event the league was exploiting with its usual burst of inspiration by sewing special emblems on the uniforms of all the players. It seemed to me that a birthday party was clearly called for. It seemed to me, further, that if I could throw a party to celebrate the birthdays of both the American League and Falstaff Brewery, the sponsors would be getting a nice little tie-in and we would have their distributors and dealers hustling tickets for us all over the state. Nobody at Falstaff’s seemed to know exactly when their birthday was, but that was no great problem. If we couldn’t prove it fell on the day we chose, neither could anyone prove that it didn’t. The day we chose was a Sunday doubleheader against the last-place Detroit Tigers, a struggle which did not threaten to set the pulses of the city beating madly.

Rudie Schaffer, the Browns’ business manager, and I met with the Falstaff people—Mr. Griesedieck Sr., the head of the company, Bud and Joe Griesedieck and their various department heads—to romance our project. In addition to the regular party, the acts and so on, I told Bud, I’ll do something for you that I have never done before. Something so original and spectacular that it will get you national publicity.

Naturally, they pressed me for details. Naturally, I had to tell them that much as I hated to hold out on them, my idea was so explosive I could not afford to take the slightest chance of a leak.

The Falstaff people, romantics all, went for it. They were so anxious to find out what I was going to do that they could hardly bear to wait out the two weeks. I was rather anxious to find out what I was going to do, too. The real reason I had not been willing to let them in on my top-secret plan was that I didn’t have any plan.

What can I do, I asked myself, that is so spectacular that no one will be able to say he had seen it before? The answer was perfectly obvious. I would send a midget up to bat.

Actually, the idea of using a midget had been kicking around in my head all my life. I have frequently been accused of stealing the idea from a James Thurber short story, You Could Look It Up. Sheer libel. I didn’t steal the idea from Thurber, I stole it from John J. McGraw.

McGraw had been a great friend of my father’s in the days when McGraw was managing the New York Giants and my daddy was president of the Chicago Cubs. Once or twice every season he would come to the house, and one of my greatest thrills would be to sit quietly at the table after dinner and listen to them tell their lies. McGraw had a little hunchback he kept around the club as a sort of good-luck charm. His name, if I remember, was Eddie Morrow. Morrow wasn’t a midget, you understand, he was a sort of gnome. By the time McGraw got to the stub of his last cigar, he would always swear to my father that one day before he retired he was going to send his gnome up to bat.

All kids are tickled by the incongruous. The picture of McGraw’s gnome coming to bat had made such a vivid impression on me that it was there, ready for the plucking, when I needed it.

I put in a call to Marty Caine, the booking agent from whom I had hired all my acts when I was operating in Cleveland, and asked him to find me a midget who was somewhat athletic and game for anything. And Marty, I said, I want this to be a secret.

I never told Marty what I wanted him for. Only five other people knew. Mary Frances, my wife; Rudie Schaffer; Bob Fishel, our publicity man; Bill Durney, our traveling secretary; and, of course, Zack Taylor, our manager.

Marty Caine found Eddie Gaedel in Chicago and sent him down to be looked over. He was a nice little guy, in his mid-twenties. Like all midgets, he had sad little eyes, and like all midgets, he had a squeaky little voice that sounded as if it were on the wrong speed of a record player.

Eddie, I said, how would you like to be a big-league ballplayer?

When he first heard what I wanted him to do, he was a little dubious. I had to give him a sales pitch. I said, Eddie, you’ll be the only midget in the history of the game. You’ll be appearing before thousands of people. Your name will go into the record books for all time. You’ll be famous, Eddie, I said. Eddie, I said, you’ll be immortal.

Well, Eddie Gaedel had more than a little ham in him. The more I talked, the braver he became. By the time I was finished, little Eddie was ready to charge through a machine-gun nest to get to the plate.

I asked him how much he knew about baseball. Well, he said, I know you’re supposed to hit the white ball with the bat. And then you run somewhere.

Obviously, he was well schooled in the fundamentals. I’ll show you what I want you to do, I told him.

I picked up a little toy bat and crouched over as far as I could, my front elbow resting on my front knee. The rules of the game say that the strike zone is between the batter’s armpits and the top of his knees when he assumes his natural stance. Since Gaedel would bat only once in his life, whatever stance he took was, by definition, his natural one.

When Eddie went into that crouch, his strike zone was just about visible to the naked eye. I picked up a ruler and measured it for posterity. It was 1-1/2 inches. Marvelous.

Eddie practiced that crouch for awhile, up and down, up and down, while I cheered him on lustily from the sidelines. After a while, he began to test the heft of the bat and glare out toward an imaginary pitcher. He sprang out of his crouch and took an awkward, lunging swing.

No, no, I said. You just stay in that crouch. All you have to do is stand there and take four balls. Then you’ll trot down to first base and we’ll send someone in to run for you.

His face collapsed. You could see his visions of glory leaking out of him. All at once, I remembered that the twist in the James Thurber story was that the midget got ambitious, swung at the 3-0 pitch and got thrown out at first base because it took him an hour and a half to run down the baseline.

Eddie, I said gently, I’m going to be up on the roof with a high-powered rifle watching every move you make. If you so much as look as if you’re going to swing, I’m going to shoot you dead.

Eddie went back to Chicago with instructions to return on Saturday, August 18, the day before the game. In the meantime, there were details to be attended to. First of all, there was the question of a uniform. No problem. Bill DeWitt Jr., the seven-year-old son of our vice-president, had a little Browns’ uniform hanging in the locker room. Rudie stole it and sent it out to get the number 1/8 sewed on the back. Scorecards are traditionally printed up on the morning of the game, so listing him would be no problem at all.

Just for the heck of it, I took out a $1,000,000 insurance policy to protect us in case of sudden death, sudden growth or any other pernicious act of nature. Somehow no opportunity to tell anybody about that policy ever came up, no great loss since the whole thing cost me about a buck and a half.

We were hiring Eddie for one day at $100, the minimum AGVA scale for a midget act. Still, if he was going to play in an official game he had to be signed to a standard player’s contract, with a salary set on an annual basis and a guaranteed 30-day payment upon termination. That was no real problem, either. We computed the salary on the basis of $100 a game and typed in an additional clause in which Eddie agreed to waive the 30-day notice.

I must admit that by the time Eddie came back to St. Louis we were playing the cloak-and-dagger stuff a bit strong. Eddie went directly to a hotel suite we had hired for him about ten blocks from the park. Instead of bringing the contract to his room, Bob Fishel set up a meeting on a street corner a block or two from the hotel. Bob drove up in his old Packard and Eddie slid into the front seat, scribbled his signature on two contracts and jumped back out. One of the contracts was mailed to league headquarters on Saturday night, which meant that it would not be delivered until Monday morning. The other contract was given to Zack Taylor, in case our promising rookie was challenged by the umpires. The morning of the game, I wired headquarters that we were putting player Edward Gaedel on our active list.

On Sunday morning, we smuggled Eddie up to the office for further instruction on the fine art of crouching. That was a little dangerous. I have always taken the doors off my office and encouraged people to walk right in to see me. We posted a lookout and from time to time either Mary Frances or Bob or Rudie would have to hustle Eddie out to the farm-system offices in the back. Always they’d come back with the same story. As soon as Eddie got out of my sight he’d turn tiger and start swinging his little bat. He’s going to foul it up, they all told me. If you saw him back there you’d know he’s going to swing.

Don’t worry, I’d tell them, worrying furiously. I’ve got the situation well in hand.

Don’t worry. . . . Just as I was leaving the office to circulate among the customers as they arrived at the park, Eddie asked me, Bill . . . ? How tall was Wee Willie Keeler?

Oh, boy. . . .

Eddie, I said, I’ve got your life insured for a million dollars. I’ve got a gun stashed up on the roof. But don’t you let any of that bother you. You just crouch over like you’ve been doing and take four pitches, huh?

As I was going out the door, I turned back one final time. Wee Willie Keeler, I told him, was six-feet-five.

Falstaff came through nobly. We had a paid attendance of better than 18,000, the biggest crowd to see the Browns at home in four years. Since our customers were also our guests for the Falstaff Birthday Party, we presented everybody with a can of beer, a slice of birthday cake and a box of ice cream as they entered the park. I also gave out one of Falstaff’s own promotional gimmicks, salt-and-pepper shakers in the shape of a Falstaff bottle. The tie-in there was that we were giving the fans midget beer bottles as souvenirs of the day, a subtlety which managed to elude everybody completely.

The most surprising thing to me, as I moved through the crowd during the first game, was that nobody seemed to have paid the slightest attention to the rather unique scorecard listing:

1/8 Gaedel

Harry Mitauer of the Globe-Democrat did ask Bob Fishel about it up in the press box, but Roberto was able to shunt the question aside. (The next day, we had a hundred or so requests from collectors, so I suppose there are quite a few of the Gaedel scorecards still in existence around the country.)

Every baseball crowd, like every theatre audience, has its own distinctive attitude and atmosphere. You can usually tell as they are coming into the park whether it is going to be a happy, responsive crowd or a dead and sullen one. With the Birthday Party and the gifts and the busfuls of people from the outlying towns, the crowd arrived in a gay and festive mood. Not even the loss of the first game could dampen their spirit.

We went all out in our between-games Birthday Celebration. We had a parade of old-fashioned cars circling the field. We had two men and two women, dressed in Gay Ninety costumes, pedaling around the park on a bicycle-built-for-four. Troubadours roamed through the stands to entertain the customers. Our own band, featuring Satchel Paige on the drums, performed at home plate. Satch, who is good enough to be a professional, stopped the show cold.

In our own version of a 3-ring circus, we had something going on at every base—a hand-balancing act at first base, a trampoline act on second and a team of jugglers at third. Max Patkin, our rubber-boned clown, pulled a woman out of the grandstand and did a wild jitterbug dance with her on the pitcher’s mound.

Eddie Gaedel had remained up in the office during the game, under the care of big Bill Durney. Between games, Durney was to bring him down under the stands, in full uniform, and put him into a huge 7-foot birthday cake we had stashed away under the ramp. There was a hollowed-out section in the middle of the cake, complete with a board slab for Eddie to sit on. For we had a walk-on role written in for Eddie during the celebration; we were really getting our $100 worth out of him. As a matter of fact, the cake cost us a darn sight more than Eddie did.

As I hustled down the ramp, I could hear the crowd roaring at Patkin. Eddie could hear it too. And apparently the tremendous roar, magnified underground, frightened him. Gee, I could hear him saying, I don’t feel so good. And then, after a second or two, I don’t think I’m going to do it.

Now, Bill Durney is 6′4″ and in those days he weighed 250 lbs. Listen, Eddie, he said. There are eighteen thousand people in this park and there’s one I know I can lick. You. Dead or alive, you’re going in there.

I arrived on the scene just as Bill was lifting him up to stuff him inside. Eddie was holding his bat in one hand and, at that stage of the proceedings, he was wearing little slippers turned up at the end like elf’s shoes. Well, it is difficult enough, I suppose, for anybody to look calm and confident while he is being hung out like laundry. Nor do I imagine that anybody has ever managed to look like a raging tiger in elf’s shoes. Taking all that into consideration, you could still see that Eddie was scared. He wanted out. Bill, he said piteously, as he dangled there, these shoes hurt my feet. I don’t think I’ll be able to go on.

We weren’t about to let him duck out this late in the game. Durney dropped him in the cake, sat him down and covered the top over with tissue paper.

Up on the roof behind home plate we had a special box with a connecting bar and restaurant for the care and feeding of visiting dignitaries. By the time I got up there to join Bud Griesedieck and the rest of the Falstaff executive force, the cake had already been rolled out onto the infield grass. Along with the cake came Sir John Falstaff or, at any rate, a hefty actor dressed in Elizabethan clothes. There was a touch to warm the cockles and hops of the Falstaff crowd.

Watch this, I chuckled.

Our announcer, Bernie Ebert, boomed: Ladies and gentlemen, as a special birthday present to manager Zack Taylor, the management is presenting him with a brand-new Brownie.

Sir John tapped the cake with his gleaming cutlass and, right on cue, out through the paper popped Eddie Gaedel.

There was a smattering of applause from the stands and a light ripple of laughter.

In the Falstaff box, there was nothing but stunned silence.

Holy smokes, Bud said, this is what your big thing is? A little midget jumps out of a cake and he’s wearing a baseball uniform and he’s a bat boy or something?

Don’t you understand? I said. He’s a real live Brownie.

You put funny shoes on a midget and he’s a real live Brownie and that’s going to get us national coverage?

Karl Vollmer, their advertising manager, was plainly disgusted. Aw, this is lousy, Bill, he said. Even the cake gimmick, you’ve used that before in Milwaukee and Cleveland. You haven’t given us anything new at all.

I begged them not to be too unhappy. Maybe it isn’t the best gag in the world, I said, but the rest of the show was good and everybody seems happy. It will be all right.

They were determined to be unhappy, though. The gloom in that box was so thick that our Falstaff could have come up and carved it into loaves with his cutlass. (That didn’t seem like a very good idea at the moment, however, because Vollmer looked as if he was just about ready to grab the cutlass and cut my throat.) This is the explosive thing you couldn’t tell us about, Vollmer muttered. A midget jumps out of a cake and, what do you know, he’s a real live Brownie.

I did my best to look ashamed of myself.

In the second game, we started Frank Saucier in place of our regular center fielder, Jim Delsing. This is the only part of the gag I’ve ever felt bad about. Saucier was a great kid whom I had personally talked back into the game when I bought the Browns. Everything went wrong for Frank, and all he has to show for his great promise is that he was the only guy a midget ever batted for.

For as we came up for our half of the first inning, Eddie Gaedel emerged from the dugout waving three little bats. For the Browns, said Bernie Ebert over the loudspeaker system, number one-eighth, Eddie Gaedel, batting for Saucier.

Suddenly, the whole park came alive. Suddenly, my honored guests sat upright in their seats. Suddenly, the sun was shining. Eddie Hurley, the umpire behind the plate, took one look at Gaedel and started toward our bench. Hey, he shouted out to Taylor, what’s going on here?

Zack came out with a sheaf of papers. He showed Hurley Gaedel’s contract. He showed him the telegram to headquarters, duly promulgated with a time stamp. He even showed him a copy of our active list to prove that we did have room to add another player.

Hurley returned to home plate, shooed away the photographers who had rushed out to take Eddie’s picture and motioned the midget into the batter’s box. The place went wild. Bobby Cain, the Detroit pitcher, and Bob Swift, their catcher, had been standing by peacefully for about 15 minutes, thinking unsolemn thoughts about that jerk Veeck and his gags. I will never forget the look of utter disbelief that came over Cain’s face as he finally realized that this was for real.

Bob Swift rose to the occasion like a real trouper. If I had set out to use the opposing catcher to help build up the tension, I could not have improved one whit upon his performance. Bob, bless his heart, did just what I was hoping he would do. He went out to the mound to discuss the intricacies of pitching to a midget with Cain. And when he came back, he did something I had never even dreamed of. To complete the sheer incongruity of the scene—and make the newspaper pictures of the event more memorable—he got down on both knees to offer his pitcher a target.

By now, the whole park was rocking, and nowhere were there seven more delirious people than my guests in the rooftop box. Veeck the jerk had become Willie the wizard. The only unhappy person in that box was me, good old Willie the wizard. Gaedel, little ham that he was, had not gone into the crouch I had spent so many hours teaching him. He was standing straight up, his little bat held high, his feet spraddled wide in a fair approximation of Joe DiMaggio’s classic style. While the Falstaff people were whacking me on the back and letting their joy flow unrestrained, I was thinking: I should have brought that gun up here. I’ll kill him if he swings. I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him.

Fortunately, Cain started out by really trying to pitch to him. The first two deliveries came whizzing past Eddie’s head before he had time to swing. By the third pitch, Cain was laughing so hard that he could barely throw. Ball three and ball four came floating up about three feet over Eddie’s head.

Eddie trotted down to first base to the happy tune of snapping cameras. He waited for the runner, one foot holding to the bag like a pro, and he patted Delsing on the butt in good professional exhortation before he surrendered the base. He shook hands with our first-base coach and he waved to the cheering throng.

The St. Louis dugout was behind third base, which meant that Eddie had to cut completely across the infield. If it had been difficult to get him into the cake earlier, I was worried for awhile that I would have to send Bill Durney out there again to carry him off the field. Eddie, after all, was a performer. In his small, unspectacular way he was a part of show business. He had dreamed all his life of his moment in the spotlight and now that it had come to him, he was not about to bow his head and leave quietly. He crossed that field one step at a time, stopping in between to wave his hat or bow from the waist or just to raise an acknowledging hand to the plaudits of the crowd. When he disappeared, at last, into the dugout he was the happiest little man you have ever seen.

If the thing had been done right, Delsing, running for Gaedel, would have scored and we would have won the game, 1–0. I was willing to settle for less than that. I was willing to win by one run, regardless of the final score, as long as that one run represented Eddie Gaedel. As it was, there being a limit to the amount of help you can expect from either the St. Louis Browns or fortune, Delsing got as far as third base with only one out and was then left stranded. We lost the game, 6–2.

Nothing remained but to wait for the expected blasts from league headquarters and, more particularly, from the deacons of the press, those old-timers who look upon baseball not as a game or a business but as a solemn ritual, almost a holy calling.

The press, for the most part, took the sane attitude that Gaedel had provided a bright moment in what could easily have been a deadly dull doubleheader between a 7th and an 8th place ball club. Vincent X. Flaherty of Los Angeles pretty much summed up the general reaction when he wrote, I do not advocate baseball burlesque. Such practices do not redound to the better interests of the game—but I claim it was the funniest thing that has happened to baseball in years.

It’s fine to be appreciated for a day; I recommend it highly for the soul. It’s better for the box office, though, to be attacked for a full week. I was counting on the deacons to turn Gaedel into a full week’s story by attacking me for spitting in their Cathedral. They didn’t let me down, although I did feel the words cheap and tawdry and travesty and mockery were badly overworked. The spirit was willing, but I’m afraid the rhetoric was weak.

Dan Daniel, a well-known high priest from New York, wondered what Ban Johnson and John J. McGraw are saying about it up there in Baseball’s Valhalla, a good example of Dan’s lean and graceful style. Non-baseball fans should understand that baseball men do not go to heaven or hell when they die; they go to Valhalla where they sit around a hot stove and talk over the good old days with Odin, Thor and the rest of that crowd. (I am assuming that the baseball people haven’t driven the old Norse gods out to the suburbs. You know what guys like Johnson and McGraw do to real-estate values.)

To Joe Williams, Daniel’s colleague on the New York World-Telegram, I was that fellow Veeck out in St. Louis.

It didn’t matter that this made a mockery of the sport or that it exploited a freak of biology in a shameful, disgraceful way, Williams wrote. . . . What he calls showmanship can more often be accurately identified as vulgarity.

I have never objected to being called vulgar. The word, as I never tire of pointing out to my tireless critics, comes from the Latin vulgaris, which means—students?—the common people. (If you don’t believe it, Joe, you could look it up.) I am so darn vulgar that I will probably never get into Valhalla, which is a shame because I would love to be able to let McGraw know how he helped that little boy who used to listen to him, enraptured, over the dinner table. From what I can remember of McGraw, he would roar with delight.

What that fellow Williams in New York didn’t seem to realize—or did he?—was that it was he who was gratuitously and publicly calling Eddie Gaedel a freak. Eddie was a professional midget. He made his living by displaying himself, the only way we permit a midget to earn a living in our enlightened society. In more barbaric times, they were able to achieve a certain stature as court jesters. My use of him—vulgaris that I am—was the biggest thing that ever happened to him. In the week that followed, I got him bookings that earned him something between $5,000 and $10,000. I kept getting him bookings here and there for the rest of his life. Eddie hungered for another chance at the spotlight. Whenever he came to a town where I was operating he would phone and say, OK, Boss, I’m ready.

I did use him for a couple of my gags. One of the last times was at Comiskey Park in Chicago, about a year before his death. Eddie and three other midgets, all dressed in regimental Martian clothing (gold helmets and shoes, coveralls, oxygen tanks), somehow dropped out of the heavens in a helicopter and landed directly behind second base. Quickly capturing our tiny second-base combination, Nellie Fox and Luis Aparicio, they made them honorary Martians and informed them—over the remarkably handy public-address system—that they had come down to aid them in their battle against the giant earthlings.

It was during this historic meeting that Eddie Gaedel uttered those immortal words, I don’t want to be taken to your leader. I’ve already met him.

The battle with league headquarters had begun before Eddie stepped into the batter’s box. Will Harridge, the league president—for reasons best known to himself—had gone to his office that Sunday and had seen the report come over the Western Union teletype that I was trying to send a midget up to bat. While Hurley was still looking over the papers, our switchboard operator, Ada Ireland, sent word to me that Harridge was on the phone threatening to blow a fuse unless someone in authority came out to talk to him. I sent back word that we had all disappeared from the face of the earth.

A few minutes later, I was told that Will was trying to get me on the office teletype, which is in direct communication with headquarters. I told them to turn off the machine.

The next day, Harridge issued an executive order barring Gaedel from baseball. A new rule was promptly passed making it mandatory that all player contracts be filed with and approved by the president.

Naturally, I was bewildered and alarmed and shocked. I was a few other things too: I’m puzzled, baffled and grieved by Mr. Harridge’s ruling, I announced. Why, we’re paying a lot of guys on the Browns’ roster good money to get on base and even though they don’t do it, nobody sympathizes with us. But when this little guy goes up to the plate and draws a walk on his only time at bat, they call it ‘conduct detrimental to baseball.’

If baseball wanted to discriminate against the little people, I said, why didn’t we have the courage to be honest about it, write a minimum height into the rules and submit ourselves to the terrible wrath of all right-thinking Americans. I think, I said, that further clarification is called for. Should the height of a player be 3 feet 6 inches, 4 feet 6 inches, 6 feet 6 inches, or 9 feet 6 inches? Now that midgets had been so arbitrarily barred, I asked, were we to assume that giants were also barred? I made dark references to the stature of Phil Rizzuto, who is not much over five feet tall, and I implied very strongly that I was going to demand an official ruling on whether he was a short ballplayer or a tall midget.

I hammered away at the phrase little people, which had a solid political currency in those days. I had given Eddie Gaedel a speech on that theme too. Everybody talks about protecting the little man these days, he was supposed to say, and now that someone has finally taken a direct step to help the plight of the little man in baseball, Harridge has stepped in and ruined my career.

Political connotations, unfortunately, were lost on Eddie. When the time came for him to deliver his statement, he blew it. Now that someone has finally taken a direct step to help us short guys, he said, Harridge is ruining my baseball career. Ah well, you can’t win them all.

In the end I had to agree, reluctantly, to bow to superior authority. As much as it grieves me, I said, I will have to go along with this odd ruling. I thought that was rather big of me, especially since I had only hired Gaedel for one day.

Something else happened, though, that I was not disposed to be so amiable about. The good deacons of the press had been wailing that unless Harridge acted immediately, the name of Eddie Gaedel would desecrate the record books for all time. Harridge dutifully decreed that Gaedel’s appearance be stricken from all official records. This I wouldn’t stand for. I had promised Eddie that he would live forever in the record books, which are cast in bronze, carved in marble and encased in cement. Immortality I had promised him, and immortality he would have. I reminded Harridge that Gaedel had a legal contract and had been permitted to bat in an official game presided over by the league’s own umpires. If Gaedel hadn’t batted, I pointed out, it would also mean that Bobby Cain hadn’t thrown the pitches and that Swift hadn’t caught them. It would mean that Delsing had come in to run for no one, and that Saucier had been deprived of a time at bat. It would mean, in short, that the continuity of baseball was no longer intact, and the integrity of its records had been compromised. If Desecration was the game they wanted to play, then I held a pretty strong hand myself.

Eddie crept back into the record books and remains there today. When he died, he got a front-page obituary in The New York Times, a recognition normally accorded only to statesmen, generals and Nobel Prize winners.

I did not recognize at the time that Gaedel’s moment was my moment too. I knew it was a good gag. I knew it would delight the fans and outrage the stuffed shirts. I knew, in other words, that it would be a lot of fun. It never entered my mind, however, that it would be the single act with which I would become permanently identified. Even today, I cannot talk to anybody from St. Louis without being told that they were there the day the midget came to bat. If everybody was there who says he was there, we would have had a tidy gathering of 280,000.

I have done a few other things in baseball, you know. I’ve won pennants and finished dead last; I’ve set attendance records and been close to bankruptcy. At the age of fifteen, I was taking care of Ladies’ Day passes at Wrigley Field. I owned my first ball club when I was twenty-eight. I have operated five clubs—three in the major leagues and two in the minors—and in three of the towns I won pennants and broke attendance records. Two of the three teams to beat the Yankees since I came to the American League in 1946 were my teams, the 1948 Cleveland Indians and the 1959 Chicago White Sox. The only other team, the 1954 Indians, was made up for the most part of my old players.

But no one has to tell me that if I returned to baseball tomorrow, won ten straight pennants and left all the old attendance records moldering in the dust, I would still be remembered, in the end, as the man who sent a midget up to bat. It is not the identification I would have chosen for myself when I came into baseball. My ambitions were grander than that. And yet I cannot deny that it is an accurate one. I have always found humor in the incongruous, I have always tried to entertain. And I have always found a stuffed-shirt the most irresistible of all targets.

I’m Bill Veeck, the guy who sent a midget up to bat?

Fair enough.

2

A Man of Dignity

My daddy, William Veeck Sr., became president of the Chicago Cubs in 1917 when I was three years old. There is a story that he was hired by William Wrigley after he had written a series of articles in the Chicago American blasting the way the Cubs were being run. The story is not really inaccurate, it is simply overstated. He did not blast the Cubs, he wrote a sane and thoughtful series telling, in a sane and thoughtful way, what changes he would make if he were running the club. I can remember seeing that series a long time ago, and it was what you so often hear about and so seldom see: constructive criticism without any attempt to be either colorful or clever. My father was not one of the great sportswriters of his time, he had little facility with words. But he was a good, solid reporter.

If you asked anybody who knew my daddy to describe him in a word, that word would undoubtedly be dignified. And then they would be constrained to add, dignified without being stuffy. He had a good sense of humor and he was always scrupulously fair. I can say, without any fear that I might be a little prejudiced, that he was the most popular fellow in baseball.

I can remember one time—I was no more than eleven—when he took me to the ball park with him. The ticket sellers had just brought the day’s receipts in to the club secretary, Margaret Donahue, and her desk was covered with money. You know, Bill, he said, it’s a very interesting thing. You look at that money and it all looks exactly the same, doesn’t it? You can’t tell who put it into your box office. It’s all exactly the same color, the same size and the same shape. You remember that.

Although it was years before I came to understand his point, I’ve always remembered it.

One of the great differences between my father and me is that he was always Mr. Veeck to everyone who knew him and I am always Bill. Not even the members of the Cubs’ operating staff, all of whom remained with him throughout his entire 16-year tenure, would have dreamed of calling him by his first name.

For my part, I have wandered around a bit in baseball. Wherever I land, I make it clear to the girls at the switchboard and the guys who run the elevators that I am Bill. I believe very strongly that we are all working together for the best interests of the ball club. I cannot see why the fact that I own some stock and they don’t should have any bearing on our personal relationship. I do not have my father’s inborn sense of dignity, and false dignity annoys me.

My father was a completely self-educated man. He was born in Boonville, Indiana, in 1877, the son of a wagon builder, and he went to work himself after only four years of schooling. My mother, Grace DeForest, was his childhood sweetheart. He first became a working newspaperman with the Louisville Courier-Journal. At the age of twenty-five, he came to Chicago to work for the Chicago Inter Ocean, a newspaper that folded a year later. With its collapse, he moved to Hearst’s Chicago American as a reporter and rewrite man. Eventually, an opening developed on the sports desk and my father, a good baseball man and a close friend of the paper’s great sportswriter, Ring Lardner, took over the newspaper’s stock sports byline, Bill Bailey.

I went to school with the Lardner boys. In Chicago, our families lived in the same apartment house, and when we moved to Hinsdale, a suburb, the Lardners moved to nearby Western Springs.

It was as Bill Bailey that my daddy wrote the series that brought him to the attention of William Wrigley, who had only recently bought control of the club. Mr. Wrigley invited him to his home for dinner and in the course of the subsequent discussion and dissection, told him, All right, if you’re so smart why don’t you come and do it? And so he did.

Mr. Wrigley contented himself with being a fan and left the running of the club entirely to his new president. The only argument they ever had arose over the hiring of Rogers Hornsby as manager. Wrigley had become so convinced that Hornsby was the answer to all the Cubs’ problems that he bought him from Boston, over my father’s head, for $120,000 and five players, a fantastic outlay in those days. My father immediately resigned. Mr. Wrigley got him to return only on the promise that he would never interfere again.

Unlike me, my father was far too dignified a man to pull any promotional stunts. He was a man of imagination, though, and easily the greatest innovator of his time. It was my father who first brought Ladies’ Day to the big leagues. He was also the first to broadcast his ball games, and he did it in the face of furious protests from every other team in the league. In 1922, he formally proposed a round robin of inter-league games at the halfway point of the season, an idea so progressive that when I next suggested it, in 1949, it was still considered visionary by the forward-looking fossils who run the game.

In an era when managers came exclusively from the ranks of the great players, he hired a minor-league manager who had never played a game in the majors in his life, Joe McCarthy. With McCarthy, the Cubs won their first pennant in 21 years.

And, finally, it was William Veeck who fought the attempts to retain the weak three-man governing Commission, after the Black Sox scandal of 1919, and not only insisted upon a single Commissioner with absolute powers but nominated Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a close personal friend, as the logical choice.

His system certainly worked for him, with or without promotion. His Cubs were the first team to ever draw more than a million people during a season, and he set a Chicago attendance record that lasted until we broke it with the White Sox in 1960.

From the time I was ten, my daddy began to take me to the park with him. When I was fifteen, I was put to work mailing out Ladies’ Day tickets. Ladies’ Day, which was held every Friday, had become such a smashing success that it had become impossible to handle all the ticket seekers at the park. The women would write in—there being only a ten-cent tax in those happy days—and I would stuff the envelopes and mail them out.

It doesn’t really seem fair, then, that it was a Ladies’ Day crowd that gave my father his darkest hour. As somebody or other has said, the revolution always eats its own children.

My daddy’s own little Black Friday came with McGraw’s Giants in town. The Cubs were challenging the Giants for the first time within my memory, and the women—with and without tickets—descended upon the park en masse.

The men descended, too, money in hand, but, out of the native shrewdness of our sex, they knew better than to mix with the babes who crushed, like bargain-crazed Christmas shoppers, around every turnstile and ticket window. When the box office is under that kind of a blockade a call goes out to the head man.

Down came the Veecks, father and son. My daddy, like all men of good will, had a childish faith in the powers of pure reason. They were, he told the ladies, more than welcome to come into the park as the guests of the club. He was, he said, heartened by the interest they were displaying in the fortunes of the Chicago Cubs and it was his fervent hope that the team would never let them down. At the same time, he went on—getting to the heart of the matter—he was sure they realized that, under the regrettable conditions that obtained, the paying customers had to be given priority.

In front of the mob was a huge blockbuster of a woman named Emmie. Later, I got to know Emmie very well. She was the wife of a milkman and a fan, I would say—if I had any guts—of the first water. Emmie was a regular. Her emotional tie to the Cubs was more than partisan, it was maternal. If we’d had a good day, she would stand at the bottom of the clubhouse stairs and pat the players on the head as they passed. If they had behaved badly out there on the field, she would stand there anyway and pat them on the head to show them that, for all their sins, she loved them