For He's A Jolly Good Fellow

You may not believe this, but there was a time when even I sank so low as to take advantage of poor amiable Horace.

Item: In 1946, when I bought the Cleveland Indians I was determined, for reasons having to do with segregation, to move our spring training camp from Florida to Arizona. I had Tucson set up for myself but, since I also needed another team somewhere on the horizon to play against, I suggested to Jim Gallagher, general manager of the Cubs, that he move the Cubs' training grounds from Catalina Island to Phoenix. Catalina was such a lousy place to train that I was confident Phil Wrigley would just jump at the chance. But, no, Jim said, Wrigley wasn't quite ready to evacuate Catalina yet. Swell.

Gallagher suggested that I try Horace Stoneham, so I did. Was Horace interested? Sure, he was interested.

Together with Roy Drachman, a Tucson realtor, we worked Horace's deal out with the city of Phoenix. When the papers were ready to be signed, Horace flew out from New York. The following day Roy and I drove up from Tucson for the ceremony.

We went up to Horace's suite at the Westward Ho Hotel and were greeted by the sound of his whisky baritone roaring insults into the telephone at the operators. It was morning, but he was already nicely loaded.

At lunch Horace was still throwing those Scotches down, so I had a few cans of beer just to keep him company. The mayor finally arrived with the contract, but Horace—ever mindful of his reputation as the perfect host—insisted that they have a couple of drinks together.

When the contract was finally placed in front of him, Horace put down the glass, picked up the pen and promptly dropped it. I handed it to him and he scribbled something that would pass as his signature.

With the press coming in for the story within the hour, we had a second contract prepared to permit us to fake a picture. Now, Horace has a simply amazing faculty of rallying himself when strangers are around. Once the press was on the scene, his eyes became unglazed, his speech unscrambled. He posed for pictures nicely, and he went off and talked to the writers. If you didn't know Horace, there was no possible way to suspect that he had been stoned 10 minutes before they walked into the room.

Horace and I both had to go back East that night, and we had reservations on the same flight to Chicago. The mayor insisted upon commemorating the occasion by taking us both out to dinner, however, and that was a mistake. When the time came to leave for the airport, Horace was stoned again. We had to pour him into a cab and then support him all the way out to the plane, the mayor on one side and I on the other.

Now, I wasn't too much of a help in that kind of an enterprise, because my bad leg was in a heavy walking cast and I was on crutches. I was staggering under Horace's load, you might say, even more than Horace. All the weight was therefore thrown upon the mayor, a rather short, slight man, which meant that he was staggering at least as badly as either of us. As luck would have it, the terminal was mobbed, and you could just see all those registered voters glaring at us and saying, "Look at those drunks. Disgraceful." All the poor mayor could do was duck his head, pray that his constituents wouldn't recognize him and keep Horace moving toward the plane.