Bill Veeck, the seemingly indestructible maverick baseball owner who entertained the fans and often enraged his fellow moguls, died early Thursday at Illinois Masonic Medical Center. The cause of death was cardiac arrest. Mr. Veeck, who was 71, had entered the hospital early Monday, suffering from emphysema.
A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday at St. Thomas the Apostle Church, 5472 S. Kimbark Ave. Interment will be private.
Mr. Veeck, who saved the White Sox for Chicago, operated three major-league clubs: the Cleveland Indians, the St. Louis Browns and the White Sox twice. He owned the White Sox from 1959-61 and again from 1976-80, buying the team a second time after discovering that the franchise was near bankruptcy and was to be moved to Seattle.
Mr. Veeck, a promotional genius, often was described as the ”Barnum of Baseball.” He fractured many of baseball`s stuffy rules in the belief that the fans came to the ballpark not only to see a game but to be entertained. Among other innovations he introduced were the exploding scoreboard, a now common attraction that he unveiled at Comiskey Park in 1960, and players`
names on the back of their uniforms.
Mr. Veeck`s most memorable stunt occurred in August of 1951, when he was the owner of the financially strapped St. Louis Browns, a perennial dormat.
He signed the late Eddie Gaedel, a 3-foot-7-inch, 65-pound midget, to the standard American League contract and then, after keeping him under cover, sent him in as a pinch batter in the second game of a Sunday double-header.
Wearing uniform No. 7/8, Gaedel popped out of a giant cake commemorating the AL`s 50th birthday and strode to the plate swinging three little bats. As instructed by Mr. Veeck, Gaedel, though tempted to swing away, kept the bat on his shoulder, offering pitcher Bob Cain a two-inch strike zone. Gaedel walked on four pitches.
The next morning, as the nation rocked with laughter, the late Will Harridge, president of the AL, issued an executive order barring Gaedel from baseball, an action that Mr. Veeck insisted was discriminatory against
”little people.”
”I`m puzzled, baffled and grieved by Mr. Harridge`s ruling,” Mr. Veeck wrote later in ”Veeck as in Wreck,” the first of his four books. ”We`re paying a lot of guys good money to get on base, and when they don`t do it, nobody sympathizes with us. But when this little guy goes to the plate and draws a walk on his only time at bat, they call it `conduct detrimental to baseball.` ”
There was also a more serious side to Mr. Veeck. He devoured books with an uncommon hunger, often reading as many as five a week, and was a constant champion of liberal and sometimes unpopular causes.
Although he had a peg leg, he repeatedly refused the use of crutches, even when he participated in the day-long historic civil rights march in Selma, Ala., in March of 1965.
In 1947, when Mr. Veeck was in Cleveland, he signed Larry Doby, the AL`s first black player. He also signed the late Satchel Paige, a legendary black pitcher who played for him in Cleveland and St. Louis.
Mr. Veeck, a 180-pound, 6-footer with brown, curly hair and a corrugated forehead, dressed casually, an indication of his freedom from the corporate world that he usually viewed with disdain. He had little interest in clothes. He wore open-necked white sport shirts that he purchased by the box and, when necessary, a dark blue jacket. He did not own an overcoat. In concession to Chicago`s winters, he wore a Navy pea jacket and a blue seaman`s cap, an ancient mariner home on leave.
He was born in Hinsdale on Feb. 9, 1914, to William Louis and Grace Veeck. At the time of his birth, his father, under the pen name ”Bill Bailey,” was a sportswriter for the Chicago Evening American. When Mr. Veeck was 5, his father became president of the Cubs.
The story has been widely told that the elder Veeck panned the Cub management so vigorously in his column that they hired him to keep him silent. Mr. Veeck insisted this was a myth. ”My daddy (he always referred to his father as `my daddy`) was the fairest and most reasonable man I have ever known. He had a lot of ideas about how the Cubs should be run and he wrote them as constructive criticism.”
After three years at Hinsdale High School, Mr. Veeck went to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. He made the Phillips football team as a blocking back. He also played baseball but not with success. Swimming and tennis–and later horseback riding, when he owned a ranch in Arizona–were his favorite sports. He once advanced to the state final in tennis and swam against Johnny Weissmuller several times in competition.
When his father died in 1933, Mr. Veeck was attending Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and decided it was time for him to go to work. He took a job with the Cubs, for $15 a week, as an office boy but did not discontinue his formal education. Although he often expressed polite contempt for higher learning, he attended Northwestern`s night school for five years, taking courses in accounting and business law. Legal matters provided an endless fascination for him. He also attended Lewis Institute, now Illinois Institute of Technology.
Mr. Veeck had a common touch remarkable in a man who grew up in an atmosphere of comparative affluence. He always insisted, proudly, that the ballpark and Cub players–night prowlers such as Hack Wilson, Pat Malone and Charley Root–were the principal sources of his education.
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During his high school and college years, when he was home on summer vacation, Mr. Veeck worked at Wrigley Field as a peanut vendor, rising at 5 a.m. It was a regimen he continued for the rest of his life. ”I learned you can get along with four hours` sleep,” he often said.
In 1941, Mr. Veeck purchased his first baseball team, the Milwaukee Brewers, then a minor-league club in the American Association. His managers included the Charlie Grimm and Casey Stengel, both adept at comedy. In an effort to hype the gate, Mr. Veeck pioneered many promotions, most of which have since been copied but at the time irritated the baseball establishment.
On hot summer days, he awarded 25-pound cakes of ice. He gave away homing pigeons, eels and sway-backed horses. He had a night for Joe Doe, the Average Fan, and he introduced ”dawn” baseball for night-shift workers, who were served free breakfasts by ushers attired in nightshirts.
In December, 1943, after the Brewers had clinched the championship, Mr. Veeck enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. He spent nine months as a private in the Pacific and was wounded in the right leg, which he had once broken playing football. He served for two years and was given an honorable discharge after his injury. When in 1946 his foot had to be amputated, he summoned friends, hired a band and danced until morning on his new wooden leg. (Three operations later, all of the leg below the knee had been amputated.)
Five years to the day after he bought the Brewers, Mr. Veeck, supported by a 10-man group, announced his purchase of the Cleveland Indians. The 1948 Indians not only won the pennant, the first for Cleveland since 1920, but were the first club with a home attendance in excess of two million. He sold the team to Cleveland interests in November, 1949.
Mr. Veeck`s next stop was St. Louis. With essentially the same investment group, he took over the operation of the dismal Browns in the summer of 1951. Unable to compete against the crosstown Cardinals, Mr. Veeck asked for permission to move the Browns to Baltimore for the 1953 season. Three of the then seven other AL owners, who had been hostile toward Mr. Veeck, as he was toward them, blocked the move. Approval was granted only after Mr. Veeck and his partners had agreed to sell.
Mr. Veeck, who often said his dream was to own the Cubs, returned to Chicago in the spring of 1959, accompanied by Hall of Fame slugger Hank Greenberg, a Cleveland associate who was to become one of his closest friends. But instead of buying the Cubs, who were not for sale, they purchased majority control of the White Sox. The Sox responded by winning the AL pennant. No Chicago team has won a pennant since.
Suffering from a variety of ailments, Mr. Veeck sold his holdings in the summer of 1961 and moved with his family to Easton, Md. There, he lived the life of a country squire in a converted farmhouse on Tranquility Lane–with a brief time out to purchase and run Suffolk Downs racetrack near Boston from 1969 to 1971. Mr. Veeck remained in Easton until 1975, when Andrew McKenna, a longtime friend, called and told him to hurry home because the AL owners were planning to transfer the White Sox franchise to Seattle.
Mr. Veeck answered the call. Hastily and with the assistance of McKenna, the late John Allyn, who then owned the club, and Mayor Richard J. Daley, Mr. Veeck, in approximately 10 days, raised the $8 million necessary for the purchase. He sold his holdings five years later to a group headed by current owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn.
Mr. Veeck was married twice. His first wife, the former Eleanore Raymond, was an elephant trainer for Ringling Bros. Circus, which Mr. Veeck once tried to buy. He married again, in 1950, to the former Mary Frances Ackerman, whom he met when she was handling publicity for an ice show.