Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [74]
All this, of course, happens only when a White Sox player hits a home run. Four-baggers hit by the visiting team are met with crashing silence. When Casey Stengel was still managing the New York Yankees, this “discrimination” slowly got under his skin. Reverting to the zany days when he once tipped his hat and a bird flew out, Stengel plotted his retaliation. Finally, during a night game, Casey struck back. One of the Yankees hit a home run. The scoreboard recorded it silently. Stengel nodded grimly, and the Yankee bench marched into position in front of their dugout. There was another signal from Stengel, and every man pulled out a sparkler, lighted it, and waved it frantically at the stands.
But the loudest fireworks associated with Veeck’s tenure as Sox President weren’t set off at his instigation at all. It occurred on September 22, 1959, the night the White Sox clinched the American League pennant. The game, played in Cleveland, had ended shortly before 10:00 P.M., Chicago time. Suddenly, about 10:30, the eerie whine of air-raid sirens pierced the night air. Every air-raid warning signal in Chicago and in several suburbs sounded for five minutes.
For all that most Chicagoans knew, this was it, the general alert that an air-raid might occur at any time. The Sun-Times’ switchboard, and those of the other papers and the radio stations, were swamped with frantic calls. The police and fire departments were also deluged with inquiries. Panic-stricken apartment-dwellers poured into the streets. A number of home-owners took shelter in their basements. Other Chicagoans took such drastic and dangerous action as leaping into automobiles and heading for the nearest expressway out of town.
It was a frightening moment that could have ended in disaster, had the panic spread further. What had happened, we know now, is that someone had taken too literally a City Council resolution that if the Sox should win the pennant “bells should ring, whistles blow, bands play, and general joy be unconfined.” Insiders say that the person who issued the spurious alert was Mayor Daley himself, a dedicated Sox fan. In any event, Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn, like a good Irishman, publicly took the blame for the incident in a handsome statement of apology. Thousands of Chicagoans learned the hard way the necessity of observing one of the first rules of Civil Defense – when the sirens sound, don’t panic! Tune to the Conelrad radio frequencies for news and instructions!
Bill Veeck’s promotional shenanigans and, to a certain extent, his well-publicized practice of wearing an open-neck sport shirt on all occasions have led some people to draw mistaken conclusions about him. As he has proved time and again, he is not just a boisterous circus-lover who should have won the bid he once made for Ringling Brothers’ Barnum & Bailey. He’s a first-class businessman, extremely articulate and well informed, who could have succeeded in almost any field. He regularly reads three or four good books a week, plows through stacks of daily newspapers, and pursues outside interests ranging from architecture to law.
Arthur C. Allyn, Jr., Veeck’s successor, is almost his complete opposite in everything except business acumen. He is relatively quiet and conservative. He knew very little about baseball until he became one of Veeck’s financial backers. “Years ago, when I had a box seat for a World Series game,” says Allyn, “confidentially, I was bored stiff.” But that happened back in 1929, and the game was the grim pitchers’ duel in which the Phillies’ Howard Ehmke struck out thirteen men to humble the Cubs’ Charley Root, and in which neither team scored until the seventh inning – one of the great afternoons in baseball, but understandably bewildering to a non-fan who had come looking for excitement. Allyn is a baseball fan now, all right, and a smart front-office man with many intelligent decisions already behind him – including the selection of veteran Sox publicist Ed Short as General