Bill Veeck Read Online Free Page B

which the incident was reported and never challenged. For instance, he was a participant in a conference on sports and government at the Brookings Institution in 1971, at which time Gerald W. Scully of Southern Illinois University—later of Southern Methodist University—in a scholarly paper on race discussed the 1942 attempt to purchase the Phillies. The story was repeated and accepted as true. Attorney Phil Hochberg, who attended the conference and who had lunch with Veeck that day, attested to the fact that the participants did not dispute the matter.
    7. The authors of the SABR piece made no attempt to contact Bill Veeck’s family. Mary Frances Veeck said that it was common knowledge in the family. Bill’s sister, Peg, got a call from him when he returned to Chicago from Philadelphia, during which the matter was spelled out in some detail. As Mary Frances Veeck expressed it, “Margaret Ann Veeck Krehbiel would never have agreed to saying that it had not happened if it had not. She would never forget how excited she was when he called. We talked about it all the time.” Mary Frances also pointed out that the reason that Veeck’s name does not appear on Landis’s schedule for the day is because Veeck had easy and open access to the commissioner’s office. Also, an article in which she discussed the issue was cited by the SABR authors but dismissed in a footnote because her source was “Sportshirt Bill.” Bill’s son Mike has expressed himself many times on the SABR allegations. “Baseball researchers are constantly screaming that there is no paper trail to prove this,” he said to a reporter from the
Baltimore Sun.
“But I never knew my old man to deal in falsehoods. That wasn’t his style.” 19
    8. Many people who conducted extensive interviews with Veeck attest to the story’s veracity. Joseph Thomas Moore, who interviewed Veeck at some length for his biography of Larry Doby, had read the SABR article and said that there is no doubt in his mind thatwhat Veeck said about the proposed deal actually happened. “Personally, I have in fact no doubt that this actually happened. When I talked with Veeck I had no sense that he was making this up.” Stephen Banker, a journalist, conducted a series of interviews, including one with Veeck, for his 1979 audio compilation
Black Diamonds.
Banker was firm in his belief that Veeck had been truthful in the very detailed account of the attempt in the interview. The last time Banker and I discussed it was at a lunch in late 2009, a few months before his death. Banker was a man who suffered neither fools nor liars, and his status as a journalist was unassailable—a point made at the time of his death in a public eulogy written for the
Atlantic
by his friend James Fallows. 20
    9. Those involved in Veeck’s account either confirmed (Saperstein) or never denied (Frick) their role in the story, and both were alive when
Veeck—as in Wreck
was published (Saperstein died in 1966, Frick in 1978).
    10. The event has always been looked at in isolation, neglecting the general push to put a black team on the field, which had first been proposed to Veeck’s father. It is exactly the kind of impetuous move that characterized Veeck’s entire life. “For Veeck, it would have been a typical move—rushed, radical, and revolutionary,” wrote Jonathan Eig in his book
Opening Day
(2007). “Turning to Negro leaguers to restock the Phillies seemed like just the sort of thing he would do, although no one has ever been able to confirm that version of events.” 21
    Since the SABR article appeared, it has taken on an even deeper dimension as part of the grand story of the racial integration of baseball. It has been converted into the what-if premise of several novels, including Peter Schilling Jr.’s masterly 2008 work
The End of Baseball
, in which Veeck obtains the Phillies and staffs them with