Bill Veeck Read Online Free Page A

on him as Cubs president. For the SABR researchers, who were so dependent on the written record to make their point, to miss a prominent item in
Baseball Digest
suggests a lack of thoroughness. 13
    4. One of the major points made by the three researchers was that the story had not appeared in print before Veeck’s autobiography. Besides the 1948
Baseball Digest
piece, a search of newspaper databases revealed the following evidence to the contrary:
    â€¢ The first time the story appeared in print was on July 25, 1947, in the
St. Petersburg Times
in a column by Vernon Gibson, the paper’s regular sports columnist: “Bill Veeck, Cleveland Indians owner now in the Cleveland Clinic for another operation … revealed recently that he tried to buy the Philadelphia Phillies during the war with an eye to making them an all-Negro club … turned down flat.”
    â€¢ In February 1949, at the thirty-third annual meeting of the Urban League of Chicago, Veeck made a startling revelation when he pointed to Young and said that “the gentleman, now sitting atmy right out there, and I talked for several hours about integrating Negroes in major league baseball. At that time I was planning to buy the Philadelphia Nationals”—Nationals being the old-school way that Veeck referred to the Phillies. 14
    â€¢ Shirley Povich discussed the plan in detail in the
Washington Post
on May 10, 1953, quoting Veeck: “‘landis stopped me, I think. It was after Gerry Nugent had tossed in the towel with the Philadelphia Phillies and the franchise was back in the lap of the league. Abe Saperstein, an owner in the Negro National League, and I had plans. I don’t blame the other club owners. ‘We’d have walked away with the pennant.’” The article was part of a ground-breaking thirteen-part series on integration called “No More Shutouts.” This article appeared while Ford Frick was baseball commissioner, and again, there was no apparent challenge from Frick or any of the other living individuals mentioned in the context of the article, including Saperstein. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by the
Post
, the Povich series was widely read and discussed. 15
    â€¢ In August 1954, Abe Saperstein gave an interview to the Associated Negro Press that ran in the Chicago
Defender
and other African American newspapers that discussed the plan in some detail. “I don’t think there was a team in the league back in 1943 that could have stopped the team he was going to assemble.” 16
    â€¢ In April 1956, Jack Mabley of the
Chicago Daily News
published a small paperback as part of a series on economic and social issues from the Public Affairs Committee of New York City. Entitled
Who’s on First?
, it was a discussion of baseball and minorities, with an introduction by Lou Boudreau, who was at the time the manager of the Kansas City Athletics. The Philadelphia story was reported in book form six years before
Veeck—as in Wreck
. 17
    5. From 1961 through Veeck’s death in 1986 and up to the time of the SABR article, dozens of articles were written that mentioned the attempt to purchase the Phillies, including those by David Israel, David Kindred, Red Smith, Jim Murray, Tracy Ringolsby, and another by Shirley Povich. (Povich again wrote of the incident in 1962 with new details that still depicted Commissioner Landis in an unflattering light.) All these writers knew Veeck—some, like RedSmith, had known him for decades—and none ever had reason to doubt or question him on this matter. In July 1974, Red Smith ran a column in the
New York Times,
which had large syndication to newspapers around the country, in which Veeck talked about his two greatest regrets—that he did not get to purchase the Phillies in late 1942 and that he was unable to bring Elston Howard aboard as his manager for the Washington Senators. 18
    6. Veeck appeared in public on various occasions during