Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [73]
As all White Sox fans know, Dorothy had a falling-out with her brother Chuck. The disagreement developed when young Chuck announced that he was ready to take over the presidency of the club, and Dorothy felt that he lacked sufficient experience. Dorothy finally concluded the matter by selling majority control of the team to Bill Veeck and Hank Greenberg in 1959. Then, in late 1961, Chuck himself closed the Comiskey-White Sox saga by selling his minority interest to a syndicate of young Chicago businessmen.
And now Bill Veeck, too, is no longer with the White Sox. As any American League fan in Chicago will testify – and the fans in Cleveland, St. Louis, and other cities where Bill has operated will corroborate it – there isn’t another baseball executive like him in the game today. Certainly his tenure as president was unforgettable.
Before Bill’s arrival here, former General Manager Frank Lane and his “Go-Go Sox” had pulled the club out of a long stretch of the doldrums. But the tempo whipped up by Frantic Frank seemed almost leisurely when compared to the gallop that Veeck sustained throughout his exciting administration.
Bill, the son of former Cubs president Bill Veeck, Sr., had cut his teeth in baseball. Nothing even remotely connected with the game was too trivial for his personal attention – and no tradition was too sacred to escape his shrewd appraisal. The neighborhood around Comiskey Park had grown increasingly shabby over the years, and the ballpark itself was in disrepair. Bill cleaned up the park – even to painting the walls a sparkling white – and launched a campaign to renovate the nearby slums. He modernized box-office policy and revolutionized promotion methods. He and his lovely wife, Mary Frances, appeared frequently on television, and Bill hit the speech-making trail oftener than any other top executive in the game. He even took to sitting in different parts of Comiskey Park’s bleachers and grandstands to get acquainted with the fans. They loved it.
And the daffy stunts!
One afternoon, for example, Veeck decided that the White Sox should observe “Dairy Farm Day.” Before he was finished, the stadium looked more like the ark than a park – with cows, pigs, ducks, geese, and three tiny burros cavorting about the infield, while chickens scattered in all directions with ushers in hot pursuit.
Then there was the time three White Sox players were matched against three members of the Boston Red Sox in a cow-milking contest at home plate. Boston won – the cow being milked by Sox second-baseman Nellie Fox kept kicking over the pail.
Veeck promoted a series of the most improbable giveaways ever perpetrated. One day the prizes were two thousand pizza pies, delivered steaming hot to the fans with the winning numbers. Another time it was free rental of five hundred tuxedos – all for one man. And on still another occasion, the prize was something that no city-dweller should be without – fifty thousand nuts and bolts.
And there is Veeck’s famous “Cape Canaveral Scoreboard.” If you haven’t heard, the scoreboard to all outward appearances looks like a normal one – until a White Sox player hits a home run! And then boom! – the whole South Side of Chicago begins to shake. Rocketing into the air go some fifty dollars’ worth of colored fireworks. Smoke erupts and aerial torpedoes whistle and explode. Colored lights play up and down the edges of the scoreboard, while horns honk, whistles hoot, and sirens scream.