by Will, George
On March 29, 1954, at a spring training meeting with Philip K. Wrigley, Cavarretta annoyed his employer by saying the Cubs could not compete for the pennant, that they were a “second division team.” Cavarretta promptly acquired the distinction of being the first manager ever fired during spring training. He was, of course, right about the team. The Cubs’ 64–90 record—their fourth season with 90 or more losses since 1948—landed them in seventh place.
William Wrigley had died in January 1932 at his winter home in Phoenix, where, with the assistance of a Chicago architect named Frank Lloyd Wright, he had built the Biltmore Hotel. The Cubs fell into the lap of his son, Philip, who in at least one way was like his father. He was a promoter. His product was baseball.
Or maybe not. The product was actually the Wrigley Field experience. His father had loved baseball; Philip never really pretended to. When, in 1934, he became the team’s president, he said, “God knows, I don’t want the job.” By inertia he acquired responsibility for the Cubs, and because of filial piety—he had assured his dying father he would not sell the team—he kept it until his own death, in 1977. Philip’s son would sell the Cubs to the Chicago Tribune in 1981. Carefully parse the words Philip said publicly after his father’s death: “The club and the park stand as memorials to my father. I will never dispose of my holdings in the club as long as the chewing gum business remains profitable enough to retain it.” He did not expect the team itself to be profitable. He seems to have expected it to be a loser financially as well as athletically.
1948: Annus horribilis. Et tu, Norman Rockwell? (photo credit 1.8)
Some people buy major league baseball teams as a ticket to celebrity. Wrigley, a painfully shy man, endured his inheritance. In 1958, Wrigley told Sports Illustrated, “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything I’ve wanted to do or ever will.” So determined was he to fade into the background of life that he tried to avoid being photographed. “My ambition,” he said “is to go live in a cave somewhere with no telephone and roll a big rock over the door.” He was commonly called P.K., which he detested because there was a brand of Wrigley gum called P.K. He insisted, implausibly, that it was named not for him but because a Wrigley gum slogan was “Packed tight, kept right.”
Born on December 5, 1894, he was sent to a tony prep school, Andover. He was, his father hoped and assumed, destined for Yale. Instead, Philip left Andover before graduating and entered the family business, running the Wrigley chewing-gum factory in Australia. An able businessman, he had also inherited his father’s faith in advertising. And he had, as many people successful in business do, inordinate faith in his expertise beyond his core business. His business was chewing gum. Baseball was a hobby. And it was not his favorite hobby, which was tinkering with motors.
Charlie Grimm, who played for the Cubs for twelve seasons and who managed them for P. K. Wrigley four times, said that concerning baseball, Wrigley was “absolutely wrong about everything.” For example, Wrigley’s 1938 brainstorm was to hire a University of Illinois professor to measure the reflexes and physical characteristics of the Cubs’ players, who were not amused. “It was,” Wrigley said, “a coincidence that he was the head of the psychology department.”
Loyalty to a Chicago friend caused Wrigley to resist the newfangled idea of farm teams, where talent could be cultivated. Wrigley’s father was among those who recruited Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to be baseball commissioner, and Landis, said the younger Wrigley, was opposed to farm systems: “Because of our high regard for the Judge, we had no farm system.”
P. K. Wrigley, reluctant owner. (photo credit 1.9)
When World War II military conscription depleted the major league rosters, Wrigley was the prime mover behind the creation of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. This venture inspired the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, in which Tom Hanks famously says something Cub fans dispute: “There’s no crying in baseball.” There is, however, apologizing. An ad Wrigley placed in Chicago newspapers in 1948 read in full:
The Cub management wants you to know we appreciate the wonderful support you are giving the ball club. We want to have a winning team that can be up at the top—the kind you deserve. This year’s rebuilding job has been a flop. But we are not content to just go along with an eye to attendance. We want a winner just as you do and will do everything in our power to get one.
Not exactly. Winning was not central to P.K.’s business plan, which he explained this way: “Our idea in advertising the game, and the fun, and the healthfulness of it, the sunshine and the relaxation, is to get the public to see ballgames, win or lose.” Although in 1941 he was prepared to sacrifice some sunshine for artificial light, the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted him to donate to the war effort the steel he had purchased for Wrigley Field lights. And then after the war, he seemed to revert to his 1935 belief that night baseball was “just a passing fad.”
Jim Brosnan, a pitcher who wrote two books about his major league experiences, The Long Season and Pennant Race, spent four seasons with the Cubs in the mid-1950s. He said of Wrigley, “His slogan was ‘Come Out and Have a Picnic’—and the other teams usually did.” But Wrigley gave his full attention to cosmetic details. He told Sports Illustrated, “I’ve always preferred CHICAGO rather than CHICAGO CUBS on the uniform. CUBS ends up on the stomach, and that emphasizes it. Just CHICAGO across the chest makes them look huskier.” You can’t make such stuff up. Or this: He believed “we’re in show business” and thought fans were being deprived of excitement because Cubs first and third basemen did not field grounders hit in foul territory. After he complained to his manager, the first and third basemen began exerting themselves to make stops that were as strenuous as they were pointless.
Dennis Eckersley is in the Hall of Fame, and his bronze plaque depicts him wearing an Oakland A’s hat. What sort of people traded him from the Cubs to Oakland in 1987? One of the members of the Cubs’ senior leadership at that time was Salty Saltwell, who P. K. Wrigley, in one of his last acts as team owner, made general manager in 1976. A year earlier, Saltwell had been in charge of Wrigley Field concessions. Buying hot dogs, selling players—what’s the difference?
In 1958, Wrigley explained why he was prepared to sacrifice the family name:
The idea is to get out in the open air, have a picnic. We mention that the things people like to do, to enjoy, are all in the ballpark. We stress the green vines on the wall. We stopped calling it Wrigley Field. Instead we call it Cubs Park. You see, people want to go to a park. We are aiming at people not interested in baseball. These are fans we want to get. Dyed-in-the-wool fans want us to tell about batting averages. Why should we tell the dyed-in-the-wool fans? They know where everything is, what’s going on.
There you have it. Much of the Cubs’ history is explained by the celebration of Wrigley Field—or, if you prefer, Cubs Park—as a haven for “people not interested in baseball.”
A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
—FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
It is not a good sign for fans when their team’s venue is better known for the attractiveness of its flora than for the excellence of the athletes who have played there. Which brings us to the subject of Wrigley Field’s ivy.
Its origin story is told by Bill Veeck Jr. with characteristic verve, and perhaps equally characteristic license, in his autobiography Veeck as in Wreck, one of the indispensable books for any baseball fan’s library. In 1917, when Wrigley Field and Bill were both three years old, his father, William Veeck Sr., became president of the Chicago Cubs. He had written several articles for the Chicago American in a literary genre that has, by now, a long tradition—the What Is Wrong with the Cubs? school of analysis. Veeck Sr. had explained, frequently and perhaps a bit obnoxiously, what he would do were he running the franchise. The team’s owner, William Wrigley, said, in effect: Well, then, smarty-pants, come aboard and do it.
The ivy arrives in September 1937. (photo c
redit 1.10)
Which Veeck did for sixteen years, during which, his son was to write, the Cubs won their first pennant in twenty-one years. (Bill Jr. was mistaken: The Cubs won in 1929, just eleven years after their previous pennant.) Bill Jr. also wrote that under his father the Cubs became the first major league team to draw a million fans in a season. He was wrong again. In 1927, the Cubs became the first National League team to draw more than a million, but the Yankees had done that in 1920, with 1,289,422. The Cubs’ 1927 attendance of 1,159,168 was, however, the record for a Chicago team until the Cubs drew 1,485,166 two years later. The Cubs held the Chicago record until 1960, when the White Sox drew 1,644,460 under the ownership of … Bill Veeck Jr.
But we are getting ahead of the story.
At age ten, Bill, who attended school with the sons of Ring Lardner, a star sportswriter for the Chicago American, began accompanying his father to the ballpark. By the time he was fifteen, his duties included mailing out tickets for Ladies’ Day games, and P.K. hired him as an office boy, paying him eighteen dollars a week. The younger Wrigley was not a great builder of Cub teams, but as Veeck says, “He made the park itself his best promotion.” In doing so, “he taught me perhaps the greatest single lesson of running a ball club.” This lesson, which might be one reason why the Cubs have been so badly run, was explained by Veeck this way:
Wrigley compared the Cubs’ won-and-lost records with corresponding daily-attendance charts and showed me that the two followed a practically identical pattern. His conclusion was inescapable. A team that isn’t winning a pennant has to sell something in addition to its won-lost record to fill in those low points on the attendance chart. His solution was to sell “Beautiful Wrigley Field”; that is, to make the park itself so great an attraction that it would be thought of as a place to take the whole family for a delightful day.
This became the Cubs’ conscious business model: If the team is bad, strive mightily to improve … the ballpark. In that spirit, Veeck got Wrigley’s permission to install atop the flagpole on the center-field scoreboard a crossbar with a green light on one side and a red light on the other, visible to passengers heading home on the elevated trains in the late afternoon. The green light announced a victory, the red a defeat. But neither victory nor defeat mattered as much as the venue for both.
Pursuant to Wrigley’s plan to have a beautiful setting for ugly baseball, Veeck suggested that they borrow an idea from Perry Stadium, in Indianapolis, where ivy adorned the outfield walls. Wrigley responded enthusiastically, “And we can put trees or something in the back.” Except he did not want the trees outside the park; he wanted them in the bleachers. And although Wrigley seems to have had too much patience when trying, sort of, to grow a good team, he did not want to wait for saplings to grow big enough to shade the steps leading up to the scoreboard. So tree boxes large enough for full-grown trees were built on each step. These required concrete footings, which, in turn, required new steel supports for the bleachers, to withstand the weight. The trees were planted and, Veeck recalled, “a week after we were finished the bleachers looked like the Russian steppes during a hard, cold winter. Nothing but cement and bark.” The wind off Lake Michigan had stripped the leaves from the trees. So new trees were planted. And the wind again denuded them. The forestation of the Wrigley Field bleachers was eventually abandoned. The footings for the trees had cost $200,000. That year, 1937, the Cubs’ team payroll was about $250,000.
Veeck had planned to plant the ivy after the season. However, the day before the team returned from a long road trip to end the season with a short home stand, Wrigley told Veeck he had invited some friends to the next day’s game to see the ivy. But Veeck had not yet bought it. A specialist at a nursery was consulted. He said ivy could not be deployed in one night. Veeck asked what could be. The specialist answered with one word: “Bittersweet.” He was not a philosophic merchant commenting on the human condition; neither was he summing up the experience of being a Cub fan. Rather, he was recommending a plant with that name. So that night Veeck and Wrigley Field’s groundskeeper strung light bulbs along the outfield wall to illuminate their work, and by morning the wall was entirely covered with bittersweet. In its midst they planted ivy, which eventually took over the wall.
Veeck was also involved in installing something that today is still very much what it was then: the green hand-operated scoreboard. The designer of this had a dreadful idea. Veeck wrote, “Instead of having lights switching on and off, like all other scoreboards, his model featured brightly painted eyelids which were pulled up and down magnetically.” Cub fans, who have been spared so few embarrassments, were spared this one.
Veeck went on to own the St. Louis Browns, from 1951 through 1953. That team frequently played in front of such small crowds that Veeck used to joke that when a fan called to ask what time that day’s game would start, he would answer, “What time can you get here?” The ivy he planted probably drew more fans to Wrigley Field than his Browns team drew to Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis.
On September 17, 1937, the Chicago Tribune carried a story with this headline: “New Wrigley Field Blooms in Scenic Beauty—and Scoffers Rush to Apologize.” One of the scoffers was the author of the story, Edward Burns, who had written a series of grumpy reports about changes under way at the field, including enlargement of the bleachers. Now, however, he was prepared to “emboss an apologetic scroll to P. K. Wrigley, owner of the most artistic ballpark in the majors.” Burns estimated that the park was valued at $3 million.
Paul Dickson is the author of a 2012 biography of Veeck that contains some fascinating details about Veeck’s job supervising Wrigley Field’s concessions. Veeck hired vendors to sell programs, peanuts, and other ballpark staples, and one of his hires was known as a “duker,” meaning a sort of hustler. This young fellow, named Jacob Leon Rubenstein, had been born in 1911 and had developed some disagreeable tricks of the vendor’s trade, such as bumping into a startled fan, placing the program in his hand, and then demanding a quarter in payment. Rubenstein also hawked paper birds tied to wooden sticks. The birds chirped when the sticks were twirled, and he would foist them on children in the hope that they would pressure their parents into purchasing the birds. Veeck said the Cubs assigned someone with binoculars to monitor this vendor “to make sure they were getting their share of his nefarious sales.”
This vendor did not linger in Chicago. Rubenstein went west, changing his name to Jack Ruby. In 1947, he settled in Dallas, where he opened several seedy nightclubs. On November 22, 1963, distraught about the assassination of President John Kennedy, the former vendor put his snub-nosed Colt Cobra .38-caliber revolver in his jacket pocket and headed to the Dallas police headquarters, where Oswald was being held; there, he passed himself off as a newspaper reporter to attend a press conference about the assassination. Two days later, he returned to that building and fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruby was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to death. His conviction was overturned, and he succumbed to lung cancer while awaiting a new trial. He died at Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy had been declared dead, and where Oswald had died from Ruby’s gunshot. Ruby is buried in Westlawn Cemetery in Norridge, Illinois, nine miles from Wrigley Field.
Veeck’s supervision of Wrigley Field’s concessions also brought him into contact with a short, stocky go-getter salesman of paper cups and Multimixer milk-shake machines. The salesman was an ardent Cub fan. He was also a pest, constantly badgering Veeck to stock up on more cups. Born in 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, Ray Kroc was a cheerful Willy Loman. The son of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, he was as unpretentious as a hamburger, as salty as a French fry, and as American as frozen apple pie. In 1945, after sixteen years of the Depression and war, Americans were eager to get into their cars and hit the road, which is what Kroc did to hawk his cups and machines. In 1954, when he got an astonishing order for eight milk-shake machines from a restaurant in San Bernardino, California, owned by two brothers, he went there to take a lo
ok. One look was all he needed.
The Second World War had accustomed many millions of American palates to the standardized fare of C-rations and factory canteens. Standardization was what the San Bernardino brothers offered. Kroc convinced Richard and Maurice McDonald to accept a small percentage of his gross revenues, if there were to be any, in exchange for his use of their name and business model, which involved selling only hamburgers (fifteen cents), fries (ten cents), and milk shakes (twenty cents). He opened his first restaurant in Des Plaines, a Chicago suburb fifteen miles from Wrigley Field. By the time he died, in 1984, he had satisfied his baseball yearnings by buying the San Diego Padres. As Wrigley Field turns one hundred, there are more than thirty-four thousand McDonald’s restaurants worldwide.
Paul Sullivan, who has been covering baseball for the Chicago Tribune since 1989 and has been working for the paper since 1981, remembers that “in the early 1980s, Veeck used to hang out at Wrigley Field.” When Veeck sold the White Sox, in 1981, he thought the new owners disparaged his years on the South Side, so he returned to Wrigley Field to slake his undiminished thirst for baseball. And for beer. “He could drink like a fish,” Sullivan recalls, “but never had to go to the bathroom.” It was, Sullivan says, as though Veeck’s wooden leg—a war wound, then thirty-six surgeries, cost him a leg—were hollow. It wasn’t, but it did have a slide-out ashtray, which was cheeky for a man with cancer. But, then, insouciance was the essence of Veeck, the baseball lifer who one night in 1937 gave Wrigley Field the look that to this day defines it. Late in his life he used to sit high above the ivy he had planted, in the upper part of the center-field bleachers. These years were, Sullivan says with a tone of some regret, “the last gasp of the old Wrigley Field.” He means that those were the last days before the fans, their appetite for success whetted by the 1984 season, began to become impatient for wins. Before that, says Sullivan, “The team was bad and the fans weren’t that bothered by it.”