I remembered that Veeck had orchestrated a publicity stunt in 1951. His team, the St. Louis Browns, had a player go up to bat who had the narrowest strike zone imaginable. The man was Eddie Gaedel. He was a midget. And that was his only appearance ever in a ball game.
Then I recalled a riotous evening in 1979 when Veeck’s team, the Chicago White Sox, held a Disco Demolition Night. Things escalated into chaos. Dickson bristled a bit at my recollections, but those are the events that most people probably remember. This book gives readers a deeper and more nuanced impression of this extraordinary man.
Veeck had baseball in his bones. His father was an executive with the Chicago Cubs. Young Veeck soon determined that a good way to entice fans to come out to ball games was to offer plenty of entertainment. This notion inspired a wealth of promotional ideas. Dickson takes us through that astonishing baseball career, season by season.
Over the course of time he changed the way the game was being presented. He devised special promotions to attract women to the games. One of the first things he did was to provide clean and well-lit restrooms. Some of his ideas were hilarious. At one game he gave “1,000 pickles to one fan, 1,000 bottles of beer to another and 1,000 cans of chow mein noodles to still another. Veeck then gave a fan 1,000 silver dollars embedded in a large block of ice.”
It was Veeck who planted the ivy that is still one of the most distinctive features at Wrigley Field, the venerable home of the Chicago Cubs. Jackie Robinson became the first black player in the major leagues when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League in 1947. The following year Veeck integrated the American League when he signed Larry Doby to play for the Cleveland Indians.
Under Veeck the Indians won the 1948 World Series. They haven’t won it since. When he owned the Chicago White Sox, Veeck installed an exploding scoreboard at Comiskey Park.
The real strength of this book is in the insights we obtain into Veeck the human being.
He served in World War II and suffered an injury that cost him his leg. Although he was often in great pain, Veeck didn’t complain. He actually installed an ashtray in his wooden leg and delighted fans by sitting up in the bleachers with them, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and depositing the spent butts inside his wooden leg.
Vick Mickunas of Yellow Springs interviews authors every Friday at 1:30 p.m. and on Sundays at 11 a.m. on WYSO-FM (91.3). For more information, go online to www.wyso.org/programs/book-nook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com.
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