19th Hole: The Readers Take Over

HAPPY? (CONT.)
Sirs:
I was surprised that you would print the one-sided views of A. B. (Happy) Chandler (How I Jumped from Clean Politics into Dirty Baseball, April 26 and May 3). Four years ago Mr. Chandler ran in the Kentucky gubernatorial Democratic primary. After being defeated soundly, Sore Loser Chandler supported the Republican candidate in the final election. This is only one example of his character and of his "clean politics."

If you had checked Mr. Chandler's baseball record, you would not wonder why nearly half of the owners were fed up after only one term of his commissionership. I hope the owners who opposed Mr. Chandler will reply. I think you should show both sides of the coin.
LARRY HARDWICK
Louisa, Ky.

Sirs:
Just read the articles by the Bluegrass Jackass. In the words of the immortal General George Patton, — —!
FRED SAIGH
St. Louis

Sirs:
My first inclination is to leave Unhappy Chandler and his bad memory to the oblivion he has earned. But the reference to the gamblers at the exhibition game in Havana, which is left hanging in the article, rather like a dangling participle, needs a little laundering.

The bookies were in the box seats, all right. Who put them there? At the prodding of MacPhail, Charlie McCarthy Chandler staged a mock trial in Florida to investigate Durocher, Rickey, the gamblers and the stealing of Charley Dressen, the Dodger coach, by the Yankees. All strictly Gilbert and Sullivan stuff. More ludicrous yet, when weeks later Chandler huffed and puffed and brought forth his mousy proclamation banning Durocher, the man most angered was MacPhail, who had ordered the whole farce! Right there the machinery for Chandler's firing was set in motion.

Consider the joke decision baseball and the public were asked to swallow by this flag-waving politician: Durocher was paid a salary of $50,000 to take the summer off; the Yankees and the Dodgers were flea-bitten with $2,000 fines. I was the only one really hurt—$500 out of a small salary—so I went right to Versailles, Ky. after Chandler. I proved to him that the Yankees, not I, had given the bad, bad bookies their tickets. Chandler gulped and coughed up the $500. "I'll give you your money back," said the fearless commissioner, "and it will come to you in an unmarked envelope by a check from somebody you don't know. And if you ever tell anybody, I'll fine you $5,000 instead of $500!" Real gutsy.

As soon as the check cleared I went to good friend Max Kase, sports editor of the New York Journal-American, who turned this comic caper into an eight-column headline. Kase made the point that if Parrott was innocent, so indeed must Durocher be without sin. But Leo didn't care; he was cashing his checks for not managing the Dodgers and installing a sprinking system at Laraine's California mansion.

Having put together a few of these "as told to" pieces in my day, God help me, may I say that never have I encountered one where so many dead men and anonymous characters were quoted? Unhappy sprays baseball in general and some good men in particular with his Kentucky-distilled type of sour-grapes venom and doesn't seem to know, even now, who really fired him! As long as Unhappy was going in for posthumous quotes, he could have at least included the funnies of the late Dan Parker who, along with the late sports cartoonist, Fred Weatherly, had a columning picnic with this "Ah loves baseball" man and his embarrassing Kentucky swimming pool. Those were the days!
HAROLD PARROTT
La Jolla, Calif.

Sirs:
Four stars plus to you for publishing the interesting story by Happy Chandler who tells it like it was. Although the big-town sportswriters tried to make him out to be a comic, his influence on big-league baseball was emphatically all for the good.
J. W. BENJAMIN
Lewisburg, W. Va.

DOWNHILL?
Sirs:
My, were you easy on Squaw Valley (For Sale: One Hunk of American History, May 3). I wish that your pictures and words could have conveyed the disappointment that I felt on my first visit there last month. If there ever was any genteel charm about the place, it has long since been buried under peeled paint, broken glass and threadbare furnishings. It was a shock to find such a tawdry collection of antiquated, ill-maintained facilities. The chair lifts groaned from seeming disrepair. The one bright spot in the area—the new $3 million tramway—wasn't running.