Master Of The Joyful Illusion

In September 1933 the elder Veeck became ill with leukemia and on October 5 he died. Bill dropped out of Kenyon College and went to work as an office boy for the Cubs at $17 a week. Eight years later, still in his 20s, he was treasurer of the Cubs and earning $17,000 a year. He was also a husband and father; in 1935 he had married Eleanor Raymond, a childhood friend from Hinsdale whose horsemanship won her a role as a bareback rider in the Ringling Brothers Circus. "I thought when I married Bill I was leaving the circus," she was quoted as saying some years later. She was wrong. Ideas were burgeoning in Veeck's mind, ideas that won no welcome from the Cubs. "It got," Veeck has said, "so that when Mr. Wrigley saw me coming, he automatically said, 'No.' "

$11 AND A TICKET

In 1939, when he was only 25 years old, Veeck had tried unsuccessfully to buy the White Sox. Two years later, on June 21, 1941, with nothing but $11 and a ticket to Milwaukee in his pocket, Veeck quit the Cubs. In Milwaukee he blew $10 partying with newspapermen to celebrate his liberation and imminent purchase of the Milwaukee Brewers of the American Association. At the time the Brewers were, if possible, in worse financial shape than Veeck. They were close to bankruptcy, the league had taken over the franchise, and the bank was about to foreclose. Veeck hurried to the bank to buy the club and get an extension on the loan. He persuaded the bankers that all he really wanted to borrow was time, and he got it. On the strength of this he talked some more and asked for $50,000. He got that too.

On the night that Veeck took over the Brewers, they drew a total attendance of 22 fans. "They were all people who liked to attend hangings," says Veeck. Within 24 hours he had brought in Charlie Grimm as manager and started building the Legend of Bill Veeck. He shuttled players in and out on almost daily schedules. He cleaned up the ball park. He rocked staid Milwaukee with his zany stunts. He began throwing money around as if he were the last of the great spenders. "Fortunately, in Milwaukee it didn't take an awful lot of money," he says. The ball club remained an indomitable last in 1941, but the next year it shot to within a game of first place. Veeck wiped out all but $17 of the club's $135,000 debt, then started earning large profits as the Brewers won three straight American Association pennants and began setting minor-league attendance records. In October 1945, after spending 22 months in the Marines ("I was a four-time buck private"), Veeck sold the Brewers at a personal profit of $275,000. With this, he temporarily retired from baseball. He bought a ranch in southern Arizona and moved there with Eleanor and their three children.

While Veeck had been fighting with the Marines on Bougainville during World War II, both his legs were attacked by a jungle rot that threatened to dissolve the bones. In addition, his right leg was injured in the recoil of an antiaircraft gun. Veeck underwent 10 operations, had bone grafts taken for both legs ("I now have very little bone in my right hip"), and suffered as many as 24 penicillin shots a day for five months while lying in traction. Ultimately his left leg was saved but his right leg was amputated about six inches below the knee in November 1946. Since then, Veeck has had seven more operations to pare off more and more of the bone—the last only a week ago. This time the knee itself was sacrificed, and Veeck may virtually have to learn to walk again.

If Arizona partially saved his legs, it could not save his marriage. Eleanor was an intelligent young woman who, as it developed, was considerably more introverted than her husband. "Eleanor just didn't understand Bill's moods," says one of Veeck's close friends. After a period of separation, the couple was divorced in 1949. At about that time Bill met Mary Frances Ackerman, a onetime drama student who was a press agent for the Ice Capades. They dated almost daily for two weeks, then Bill asked her to marry him. The proposal was enormously complicated by the fact that Mary Frances was a Catholic and Bill a divorced man. Ultimately, the Church made a thorough investigation of Veeck's first marriage and found that a civil but not a sacramental union had taken place: neither Bill nor his first wife had been baptized nor had they been married in a church, so he was granted the Pauline Privilege to re-wed. In the meantime, as a test of his faith and his love, Veeck refrained from seeing Mary Frances for six months. They finally were married by Father Halpin in the Cathedral at Albuquerque in the spring of 1950.

THE INDIANS AND THE BROWNS

Long before that he had returned to baseball. In June 1946, less than a year after selling the Brewers, he acquired the Cleveland Indians for $1,750,000. "The team looked hopeless," he says, "so I bought it." Within 2� years the Indians had won their first pennant in 28 years, won the World Series and set an alltime attendance record of 2,620,627. Because of his need for cash, Veeck sold the Indians for $2,2 million in 1949 and then, almost as if he had a drive for self-immolation, bought the cellar-bound St. Louis Browns for $1.5 million in mid-1951. "They were the worst-looking collection of ballplayers I've ever seen," he said. "It hurt to look at them." Very few people did.

By the end of 1952, however, attendance was up 60%, and the Browns were outdrawing the Detroit Tigers, Chicago White Sox and Philadelphia Athletics on the road. Veeck, meanwhile, was learning some harsh facts of economic life. He was, in fact, engaged in a fight for survival. In February 1953, Fred Saigh, who was about to go to prison on an income tax evasion charge, sold his St. Louis Cardinals to the Anheuser-Busch Brewery. That altered the balance of power in St. Louis. Veeck felt he could compete against the limited resources of Saigh, but he knew that he could not compete against the virtually unlimited resources of the brewery. His only alternative was to move the Browns out of town. In March 1953 he asked permission of the American League to move to Baltimore and saw a unanimous agreement turned into a 5-3 vote against him. He traced the switch to the Yankees. "Let's put it nicely," he has said. "They figured they could beat my brains out—and they did."

The technique was simple: by forcing Veeck to remain in St. Louis, where he was now unpopular because of his plans to move, they could force him to near bankruptcy. They were right. Within a few weeks Veeck found he was getting three cancellations for season tickets for every new one he sold. He had to sell some of his players, then he had to sell his ball park to the St. Louis Cardinals for $800,000 and rent it back for $175,000 a year. He sold his stocks and bonds, his ranch in Arizona, his annuities and much of his personal property. Rudie Schaffer, long his closest aide, mortgaged his own home to help meet payrolls. Unable to raise more than 10% of the $30,000 asking price for a likely-looking shortstop in the Negro league, Veeck told the Cubs about Ernie Banks "to keep him out of the American League." By June, attendance had dropped 37%, Veeck had lost $400,000 of his own money in the club and he was being hanged in effigy regularly at the Browns' ball games. "It was the most difficult year of my life," he says.