A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred

by Will, George

  Bill Veeck’s winding baseball trail took him back to where he began. He died in 1986. He was cremated, and his ashes are in Oak Woods Cemetery, fifteen miles from Wrigley Field. He is spending eternity in interesting company. Also buried there, in addition to Chicago gangsters Big Jim Colosimo and Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, are Jesse Owens, the hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

  In 1919, two years after the Russian Revolution announced the agenda of abolishing private property, William Wrigley bought a fifty-eight-thousand-acre island. Santa Catalina, the “isle with the smile,” is about twenty miles off California’s Orange County. The Cubs conducted spring training on the island from 1921 until shifting to Mesa, Arizona, in 1951. That, however, is not why Santa Catalina deserves an important paragraph in American history. Here is why:

  Ronald Wilson Reagan of Dixon, Illinois, graduated from Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, in 1932, the trough of the Depression. The unemployment rate was 26 percent when he hitchhiked home to Dixon, where he applied for a $12.50-a-week job managing the sporting goods section of a store Montgomery Ward was opening there. The job went to one of his high school classmates, which was a fortunate failure for Reagan, who set out in his family’s car to seek employment as a radio announcer. After a brief and rocky stint with WOC in Davenport, Iowa, where he was miscast as a disc jockey, he was offered a chance to broadcast the Drake Relays, one of the nation’s premier track meets, for station WHO in Des Moines. The station liked what it heard and made Reagan a sportscaster; his tasks included re-creating Cubs games as details trickled in over a telegraph wire. In 1937, Reagan persuaded the station to finance his drive to southern California to report about the Cubs’ spring training on Santa Catalina Island. He had dinner in Los Angeles with a former WHO colleague, who put him in touch with an agent, who placed the famous call to a casting director at Warner Bros.: “I have another Robert Taylor sitting in my office.”

  Dapper Dutch: Santa Catalina Island, here I come. (photo credit 1.11)

  The unimpressed director supposedly replied that God made only one Robert Taylor. Nevertheless, Reagan got his foot in Hollywood’s door. When he was still twenty-eight years away from winning the presidency, he starred in the 1952 movie The Winning Team, playing a former Cubs pitcher with a presidential name: Grover Cleveland Alexander, who, like Reagan, was the son of an alcoholic. Alexander suffered from alcoholism and epilepsy, a bad combination, but not bad enough to prevent him from winning 373 games—128 of them for the Cubs—and becoming, in 1938, a member of the third class elected to the Hall of Fame.

  A right-hander on the Wrigley Field mound. (photo credit 1.12)

  In his 1990 memoir, An American Life, Reagan wrote, “At twenty-two I’d achieved my dream: I was a sports announcer. If I had stopped there, I believe I would have been happy the rest of my life.” His talent for happiness is apparent in the this page photo of him on Wrigley Field’s pitcher’s mound.

  The Midwest has supplied the two longest-serving commissioners of baseball: the first and the ninth, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Allan H. “Bud” Selig. Between them, they governed the sport, through 2013, for forty-six years—Landis for twenty-four and Selig for twenty-two—and they did so from the Midwest.

  Landis grew up in Logansport, Indiana, and earned his law degree from what is now Northwestern University Law School. When he was commissioner, the door of his Michigan Avenue office, which was about a mile south of the Wrigley Building, had a sign of majestic terseness: “Baseball.” With his chiseled features; unsmiling, mail-slot mouth; and shock of white hair, Landis looked like a pewter statue of the virtue Rectitude. The fact that he governed like Lenin—more decisively than justly—mattered less than his visage. After baseball’s trauma of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, the baseball owners hired Landis to look stern, which he often did from the front row of the box seats at Wrigley Field, not far from where Al Capone occasionally sat.

  Selig, a native of Milwaukee, has been the un-Landis. He is never autocratic, and he has a genius for the politics of a small group—the thirty owners. No one really knows how Selig has made many of his decisions or how he has produced support for them among those thirty fractious constituents. Like Dwight Eisenhower, Selig practices hidden-hand leadership. What is not hidden is its effectiveness. It has transformed Major League Baseball from a $1.2 billion business in 1992, when he became acting commissioner, to what probably will be a $8 billion business in Wrigley Field’s one hundredth year. Selig has a posh corner office in Major League Baseball’s headquarters on Park Avenue in Manhattan, but he rarely uses it. He prefers his office on the thirtieth floor of a Milwaukee bank building overlooking Lake Michigan, less than ninety miles from Wrigley Field, where in 1944 he saw his first major league game. He was a Cub fan until the Braves arrived in Milwaukee from Boston in 1953, when he began rooting for the home team. A good choice, that. The Braves won the World Series in 1957. Cub fans are still waiting.

  Scott Joplin, an African American, was born soon after the end of the Civil War, in Texarkana, Arkansas, on the border with Texas. He became a traveling musician proficient in the rising style called ragtime and played with a band at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. In 1907, when the Cubs ruled the roost in baseball, Scott Joplin lived in Chicago, where piano players in bars and bordellos probably played his 1899 composition “The Ragtime Dance”:

  I attended a ball last Thursday night,

  Given by the dark town swells.

  Every coon came out in full dress alright,

  And the girls were society belles.

  The hall was illuminated by electric lights,

  It certainly was a sight to see;

  So many colored folks there without a razor fight.

  ’Twas a great surprise to me.

  It is stunning to become acquainted, more than a century later, with such evidence of how thoroughly American culture was permeated with an unself-conscious crudeness about race, on both sides of the racial divide. Of all the serrated edges Chicago had at the turn of the last century, none was more jagged than relations between blacks and whites.

  Chicago’s first resident was probably Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who in 1779 built a trading post at the mouth of what is now known as the Chicago River. Du Sable means “black,” and the trader was black. But 140 years later, the ugliest episode in Chicago’s history occurred when a black teenager crossed a line that was difficult to see because it was drawn on water.

  On July 27, 1919, Eugene Williams was swimming in Lake Michigan off the 25th Street beach, which was north of the 29th Street beach. By an unwritten social consensus, the former was for African Americans, the latter for whites. When Williams swam, probably inadvertently, south of the understood line, some whites began throwing rocks at him. It is unknown whether he drowned because a rock knocked him unconscious or because he was afraid to come ashore in white territory and was too tired to swim back to black territory.

  Chicago was dry tinder that summer. Since July 1917, at least twenty-six black homes in previously all-white neighborhoods had been bombed. In the summer of 1919, a new African American newspaper, the Whip, had just been born, proclaiming this message:

  The Whip informs you, the whites, that the compromising, peace-at-any-price Negro is rapidly passing into the scrap heap of yesterday and being replaced by a fearless, intelligent Negro who recognizes no compromise but who demands absolute justice and fair play.… WE ARE NOT PACIFISTS, THEREFORE WE BELIEVE IN WAR, BUT ONLY WHEN ALL ORDERLY CIVIL PROCEDURE HAS BEEN EXHAUSTED AND THE POINTS IN QUESTION ARE JUSTIFIABLE.… THE BOMBERS WILL BE BOMBED.

  The rioting that ensued after Eugene Williams drowned lasted for seven days and required the intervention of the state militia—because the city police force was too weak and too sympathetic to the rioting whites. By the end of the violence, arson, shootings, and beatings, almost all on the South Side, had resulted in 38 dead (15 whites and 23 blacks) and 537 injured (195 whites, 342
blacks).

  A long fuse had burned before this explosion. For hundreds of thousands of rural blacks in the South, the Illinois Central had been the steel highway to the promised land, a.k.a. Chicago. They boarded trains at small depots in Mississippi and elsewhere and stepped off in the city’s cavernous Twelfth Street station. Then they turned south, where trouble awaited them.

  The First World War had accelerated the Great Migration of people escaping from American apartheid and reaching for employment in northern industries. The war had also virtually halted housing construction. And neighborhoods of unmeltable ethnics were not welcoming. The seventeen-year-old Richard J. Daley, who would grow up to be mayor of Chicago for twenty-one years (1955–1976), lived in the South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport. There he belonged to a neighborhood club called the Hamburgs, many of whose members participated in the rioting. Did Daley join in? He was frequently asked this question but never answered it.

  When Chicago was incorporated, under Illinois law, in 1837, it had approximately 3,000 residents. Thirty-four years later, at the time of the great fire of 1871, the city’s population had burgeoned to 300,000 and the place was combustible in several senses. Its buildings were made of wood cut from timber harvested from the forests of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan and floated to Chicago. It was also a simmering stew of mutually suspicious ethnic communities. If the city was to become a true community, it needed some shared allegiances that would transcend ethnicity and, especially, race. Baseball could help. It finally did, but not until twenty-eight years after Eugene Williams drowned.

  On Monday, May 19, 1947, the eight-column headline across the front page of the Chicago Tribune’s sports section proclaimed:

  RECORD 46,572

  SEE DODGERS BEAT CUBS, 4–2

  Why had so many people flocked to Wrigley Field to see the Cubs lose their fifth in a row? The story’s first two paragraphs explained this in a notably understated way:

  The largest National League crowd that ever paid to see a game in Wrigley Field—46,572 cash guests—yesterday jammed all available spaces to see Jackie Robinson, his fellow Dodgers and the Cubs. Those who were rooting to the Dodgers as a team got the greatest satisfaction for the Dodgers won, 4–2, with little help from Robinson and much help from the Cubs.

  The crowd, by the way, was the second-largest in the history of Wrigley Field for a league game, being topped only by the gathering of 51,556 in 1930, under the old bleacher setup, when overflow field crowds were tolerated. That crowd, however, included 30,476 ladies day crasherettes.

  It is difficult to decipher what the writer might have had in mind with that last word, but the 46,572 paying customers on May 18, 1947, were luckier than the 20,000 or so fans who milled around outside Wrigley Field, unable to get in. Estimates at the time were that about half of those who were drawn to Wrigley Field by Robinson’s magnetism were African Americans. If so, it was probably the largest concentration of African Americans in the history of the North Side up to that point. No unpleasant incidents were reported.

  The headline in the Chicago Defender, the paper published by and for African Americans, was:

  The unruly. (photo credit 1.13)

  ROBINSON MAKES CHICAGO DEBUT; FANS ARE ORDERLY.

  A Cub official told the paper that this was “the most orderly large crowd in the history of Wrigley Field. We … were pleased to note that the Negro fans behaved better than our average Sunday fans, for which we thank the Defender for its part in this.” As happened in all the cities the Dodgers visited in 1947, Chicago’s African American leaders urged members of their community to dress and behave impeccably when going out with the crowd to see Robinson.

  On October 24, 1972, twenty-five years after his major league debut, Jackie Robinson died. That day, Mike Royko, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Chicago columnist, wrote about Robinson’s first game at Wrigley Field. Royko said he was there, and he recalled that in 1947 “few blacks were seen in the Loop, much less up on the white North Side at a Cub game.” On the day of Robinson’s first visit to Wrigley Field, Royko remembered seeing something that was, indeed, common when the Dodgers visited a city that year: African American fans came to the game dressed as though for church: “white shirts, ties, gleaming shoes, and straw hats.” Royko, who was then fourteen, could not get a seat but found a place to stand behind the last row of grandstand seats. He remembered that when Robinson, who was batting second, approached the plate in the first inning, there was “long, rolling applause” but that when he stepped into the batter’s box, “it was as if someone had flicked a switch. The place went silent.”

  Late in the game, Royko said, something miraculous happened. Robinson hit a foul ball that “came into the stands low and fast, in our direction. Somebody in the seats grabbed for it, but it caromed off his hands and kept coming.” Through the forest of fans’ hands “the ball kept bouncing” and—you guessed it—came to rest in Royko’s little hands. Royko said he sold it for ten dollars to an African American man standing next to him.

  Well. Stand in Wrigley Field anywhere “behind the last row of grandstand seats” and estimate how likely it was that a foul ball got there, bouncing through the hands of some of the 46,572 other spectators there that day and finally coming into the possession, briefly and conveniently, of a future columnist. For Robinson’s foul ball to have had that trajectory, the laws of physics would have to have been suspended.

  Baseball is as encrusted with clichés as old ships are with barnacles. One cliché is that baseball is a game of failure. You know: In any given year, the best team will walk off the field beaten about sixty times. Ty Cobb, who had the highest career batting average (.367) in the game’s history, still failed 63 percent of the time. And so on. Wrigley Field has been the scene of some notably peculiar responses to failure. When a team lacks power hitters and timely hitting, when the pitching is spotty and the defense is leaky, what do you do? You do what can be done quickly: You fire the manager. This usually fixes nothing, but it gives the illusion of purposefulness and forward motion.

  In 1960, the Cubs won 60 games and lost 94; this was the seventh time in thirteen seasons they had lost at least 90 games. They finished seventh, ahead of only the 59-and-95 Phillies. Seventeen games into the 1960 season, the Cubs had fired manager Charlie Grimm and replaced him with Lou Boudreau. Although at the time Boudreau was hired he was broadcasting the Cubs’ games over WGN, he had been the shortstop and player-manager of the 1948 Cleveland Indians, who won the World Series. Grimm was sent to the broadcasting booth, where he was dreadful. After the season, P. K. Wrigley, undeterred by the fact that the Cubs had tried six managers in ten seasons, decided to really, seriously change managers. Boudreau went back to broadcasting, and in came the “College of Coaches.”

  Has there ever in the rich history of Major League Baseball been a sillier idea than the one the Cubs adopted in 1961? That season was one of the most luminous in baseball history because of the riveting competition between two Yankees teammates, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, in pursuit of the record Babe Ruth had set thirty-four years earlier, when he hit sixty home runs in a season. It is fortunate for the Cubs that Mantle and Maris distracted attention from Wrigley Field, where the Cubs had implemented Wrigley’s harebrained experiment known as the College of Coaches.

  “Managers,” Wrigley said, “are expendable. I believe there should be relief managers just like relief pitchers.” So, in 1961, the Cubs would not have a manager. Instead, they would have four head coaches, who would rotate through the season. They were Harry Craft, Vedie Himsl, El Tappe, and Lou Klein. Wrigley’s rationale was: “The dictionary tells you a manager is the one who bosses and a coach is the one who works. We want workers.” Of course, no dictionary says any such thing. Inevitably, a joke arose: The Cubs have been playing without players, so now they will try playing without a manager. The nine coaching changes during the season caused so much confusion and uncertainty that Tappe wound up in charge of 96 games, with a 42–54 record
. The other three also had losing records. It follows—arithmetic is funny this way—that the Cubs had a losing record: 64–90. They finished seventh.

  So, in 1962 … they did it again. Craft, no fool he, decamped to Houston to manage the Houston Colt .45s, an expansion team that, notwithstanding the fact that it was assembled from scraps discarded by other teams, finished six games ahead of the Cubs, who finished ninth—the first year that was possible—and lost 103 games. They were spared the ignominy of being the first National League team to finish tenth because the historically awful New York Mets, another freshly minted expansion team, lost 120 games. Seven years later, however, the Mets would have the consolation of winning the World Series.

  It is altogether fitting that on July 20 in 1962, the final year of this nadir of baseball foolishness, the Cubs passed a dismal milestone. Playing the Dodgers in Wrigley Field, they lost 8–2. With that loss, the Cubs’ record since taking up residence in Wrigley Field in 1916—they had defeated the Reds 7–6 in the first game there—fell below .500. It has been there ever since.

  In 1963, the Cubs gave up on Wrigley’s experiment but tried to save face by continuing to call the actual manager, Bob Kennedy, “head coach.” He served two years, then was replaced by head coach Lou Klein.

  The College of Coaches may deserve a portion of the blame for the worst trade in Cubs history. Lou Brock was a struggling twenty-five-year-old outfielder for the Cubs when, on June 15, 1964, they lost patience and sent him to the Cardinals in exchange for a pitcher, twenty-eight-year-old Ernie Broglio. Broglio, whose career would end with the Cubs after the 1966 season, had a 7–19 record with them. The Cardinals won the 1964 World Series with Brock batting .348 in a Cardinal uniform, and they won another with him in 1967. He finished with 3,023 hits and 938 stolen bases (at the time, a major league record). These numbers are on his plaque in Cooperstown. He says he might have found his talent in Wrigley Field if he had received steady attention from coaches who were not distracted by episodic managerial duties.