>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. [ Silence ] >> Hello everybody, welcome to the Library of Congress. I think we're ready to go. I'm Anne Boni with the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. And one of our major duties is to promote books within libraries and literacy. One way we do that is through our Books and Beyond series and that's what we're doing today. Paul, Paul, Paul. [Laughs] [Inaudible Remark] Okay, Paul is here to speak. Another way we do this is, is through the National Book Festival. We plan to have over a hundred authors here again this year. They will be here on September 22nd and 23rd on the National Ball. And later this month, we are, hopefully, releasing a list of authors confirm to date. This program is being filmed for later broadcast on the library website and the Center for the Book website. So, if you ask a question during the Q&A, you may be on the film. The Humanities and Social Science Division is cosponsoring the event with us. Darren Jones is here to introduce the author. Darren is a reference librarian in the division where he serves as the recommending officer in sports and education. He is one of several librarians who provide expert reference assistant in the main reading room. Darren has worked at the Library of Congress since 1990. I've got a few years on him. He lives in the District of Columbia with his wife Levaun [phonetic] and his son Derrick. Let's welcome Darren Jones. [ Applause ] >> Good afternoon everybody. As Anne said, I'm Darren Jones. I guess you were looking for Dave Kelly who's been the sports [inaudible] here for 40 years. Well, I'm the new Dave Kelly [laughter]. Paul Dickson was born in Yonkers, New York and graduated from Wesleyan University in 1961. He was honored by his alma mater as distinguished alumni in 1996. After graduation, he served in the US Navy and later worked as a reporter from McGraw-Hill Publications. Since 1968, Paul has been a full-time freelance writer, contributing articles to various magazines and newspapers, including Smithsonian, Esquire, The Nation, Town & Country, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. He has written numerous books on a wide range of subjects. Paul is the author of more than 55 nonfiction books and hundreds of magazine articles. Although he was written on a variety of subjects from ice cream to kite flying, to electronic warfare, he now concentrates writing about American language, baseball, and 20th century history. In addition to his new book, Bill Veeck: Baseball's Greatest Maverick which will he will discuss today, Paul has written the baseball books, The Unwritten Rules of Baseball, The Hidden Language of Baseball, How Signs and Sign Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime, The Joy of Keeping Score-- [ Pause ] Baseball's Greatest Quotations, Baseball: the President's Game, and the Dickson Baseball Dictionary which is now in its third edition. The original Dickson Baseball Dictionary was awarded the 1989 Macmillan-SABR Award for Baseball Research. Paul is the former president and founding member of Washington Independent Writers and a member of the National Press Club. He is a consulting editor for Dover Publications Incorporated and a contributing editor at Washingtonian Magazine. Paul lived in Garrett Park, Maryland with his wife Nancy who works with him as his first line editor and financial manager. Many of you know Paul as a frequent Library of Congress researcher. Many of us have-- you know him as an interesting guy. [Laughter] Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you today the interesting guy, Mr. Paul Dickson. [ Applause ] >> Thanks Anne, thanks Darren. Try to be as interesting as I can. I'm really happy to be here because I got-- talk about the Library for a second then we'll talk about the Bill Veeck. At age 68, I decided that I was going to teach myself how to write a biography and it sort of like-- I mean, not be modest about it, but it sort of like deciding at 68 you want to build a house or something and it's a totally different skill, you know. And I-- you know, and one of the first things that occurred to me was that if you took ten Pullet Surprise winning biographers and ask them to do-- all do Ben Franklin or all do Babe Ruth or all do, you know, anybody, that you would come up with ten different Ben Franklins and ten different Baby Ruths because you know they are all going to look for primary sources and they're all going to try to find as much fresh material as they can even though that these things have been worked over many times. You're always looking for that new material. And I-- so I-- I basically have to teach myself how to do this and also I was a little bit afraid of it because, you know, you can do-- you can do a big thesis-based history book. You could say that the approximate cause of the Peloponnesian Wars was a lack of cellophane and somebody will actually take you seriously, you know, because the theses are now high. You can do almost anything you want. But when you're doing a biography, it's sort of like holding a bird in your hand. If you do it wrong, you crush the bird and you have other obligations 'cause you're really doing-- working with a real person who has a real family and a real, you know, widow who is still alive and a bunch of kids that are still alive, and grandchildren and great grandchildren. And so-- but you also don't want to make it into a honorific to this person. You want to it as strictly as a good biography as you can. So that's where the library comes in. And, oh, the Library, there's a lot-- there's tons and tons and tons and tons of secondary source material on a guy like Bill Veeck. And when I approached him, I knew I was going to-- I ended up filling six bankers boxes with clippings and, you know, all the stuff that everybody else in the universe has access to. But the Library had the stuff that really made it a tremendous difference in the book. And if you look at the book, the-- not the cover but many of the pictures in the book, the back cover, there's a front-- there's a first-- the picture of Veeck facing you. These all came from the Library of Congress. They all came from the Look Magazine Collection. These are all-- these were all photographs that were originally contact sheets. And there was a-- one of the photographers really fall in love with Veeck, had done five sessions with Veeck. So I had about 6-700 context to deal with Veeck. Again, the majority of the photographs in the book are from that collection. The cover photo is also a Look photo but some of the early Look stuff ended at Cooperstown. So, again, it's real the same collection. And in doing that, I was able to see a whole lot of stuff that I hadn't seen before 'cause I'm-- you know, day after day, going to through context with a magnifying glass, you sort of see-- you actually see him-- sometimes in those days, they would shoot-- you know, there's 36 triacs [assumed spelling] photos inside a room and you'd see it has relationship with Hank Greenberg. You'd see his relationship with Larry Doby. It was almost like you were watching a slow motion film. So that was one thing. But the real big thing was finding in the recorded division, recorded sound, it was in the catalog but I didn't really see that at first, you were sort of going through the catalog. All of a sudden, it says 320 five-minute broadcast of Bill Veeck in [inaudible] for Armed Forces Radio. So I go-- you know, I-- these are-- they have so many coal paper [phonetic] [inaudible] they queue them up on a machine and I go into this recording booth and I put the earphones on and I listen to-- for day and half, I listen to him talk. And I was-- I have to-- I couldn't-- I was taking notes from them. And so, I had to backup and I was, "Let's do them again, let's do them again." And when I came out of that day and half of listening to this guy, I knew how he talked. I knew if a quote that he made was bog-- I just-- 'cause it was all extemporaneous. So I'd heard his voice. The family doesn't know this exists. Nobody knows this exist-- I mean, the Library does 'cause they'd put in the catalog. But the fact is in terms of primary source material, and it was also just loading his speech patterns, the man could not say woman, he say the female of the species. He could not say [laughter]-- and he was sort of a Victorian way of speaking. He would not say that somebody was in an apt infield or you could say-- or an outfield, he could not say that. He would say he was "No gazelle of the greensward," you know? [Laughter] And he couldn't call anybody-- he had to call everybody by their first name. And he would say these outrageous things, outrageous things on this radio show and I'm getting fresh quotes. And the kudegra was-- again, this is second. But Veeck had gone a very extraordinary motion. In 1942, he tried to buy the Philidelphia Phillies and convert them into an all black team that would then Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige on down the line, this guy-- there's 42, the war is on but this-- the African-American guys were all older and therefore deferred from the draft or excused to at that point of the war. And he knew he could just map up the leagues with them. But he is prevented from doing this. By the powers to be, they're just not ready to have an all-black team go out there and beat everything else up on the field. So-- but in recent years, some scholars claimed that this was all false based on-- they couldn't find any evidence that was true and they, literally, in a scholarly article, called them a liar, et cetera, et cetera. And so, I was fascinated because I started listening to a lot of oral history, some here, but the most-- other library collections had a lot of oral history. And I listened to it tell the story again and again and the name the trainee was on when he tried to do this. But I realized that these guys were-- they have come up with a thesis. They believe that Veeck was a liar. Therefore, they're going to prove he is a liar. But therefore, they looked at all of the places. There was no information. The Library provided me with stuff, pieces of information. A little pamphlet that was produced in Chicago on race and sports that it would never-- it's not in Google. It's not-- it hasn't been digitized. It's not on Wikipedia. It's not on any digital source. But I found it in-- I did not found it, it was there for me to find. It was in the catalog. But I got it here. I mean, physically brought it down and I actually took notes. And for an analog person in a digital age, it was phenomenal because this was one of the key pieces of evidence and it would not have been available to me and probably as close as I could get to the-- my version of the smoking gun which is that he really did try to do this and it really was true and there are a lot of other reasons why I came to this conclusion and I was open-minded about it. But, again, the value of the library, and I sound like I'm doing an infomercial for the Library of Congress, but the value the library for this kind of stuff-- and I think the other thing I got to say is at the top of all this is there are so many people to thank in here. Tom Mann, [inaudible], I mean, up and down the line, but I-- but that really helped me with the people in current periodicals, Gary I see you back there, the periodical reading room. But it was-- so the other thing was I dedicated the book to Nancy, my wife, and I also dedicate it to Dave Kelly for decades of service to writers because they can always find stuff and they've loved the subject, love the stuff, love-- you know, was always looking for something for me that wasn't in the normal-- in a sort of ritual of what a researcher does. And to this day-- and Darren now wears this cap. But to this day, if I look in a news sports biography or a book about sports and Dave Kelly is not in there to thank you, I figure the guy wasn't working as hard as he could because you got to [inaudible]. Bill Veeck-- the reason I pick Bill Veeck was Bill Veeck was a transformational character in the history of baseball and also in the history the country. He was a man who was born into a wealthy family. His father was president of the Chicago Clubs. His father was a brilliant writer who may have been on to the fact and there's some significant evidence that he was on to the fact that the 1918 World Series was fixed. That was between the Cubs and the Red Sox. And at some point, he was made president of the Cubs when the Wrigley's took over and I posit in the book. And I think I pretty much show that the reason that he was given this job, he's a newspaper guy, all of a sudden, he's running a Major League ball club. And the reason they brought him aboard was because he could clean up baseball. Baseball was corrupt. The 1919 World Series was fixed. In 1920, when he takes over the Cubs, he finds gamblers actually trying to fix games. He's getting tips from other gamblers that another gambler is try to fix the game. He's getting calls from gamblers saying someone's already got their pictures-- your picture has been compromised, et cetera, et cetera. Veeck at 1920 calls for a grand jury investigation of the particular incident. All of a sudden, the grand jury now is going into the 1919 World Series which is the huge-- they call them the Black Sox that was the-- this was the great scar on baseball's history because there was corruption. So he-- so Veeck comes in to this son of this guy who also, very early on, decided that women had to be part of the marketing and part of the group of baseball. He introduces Ladies Days. He has huge promotions for women and he has-- then of course, he knows they're going to start bringing the kids with them and then the family is going to come and [inaudible]-- those old pictures of baseball where you see nothing but guys out there in the white shirts and the fedoras or whatever they were, straw hats. He changed that. And he also is the first guy to promote a woman to an executive front office position at baseball. So he was very close to doing all this stuff. And early on, he also had some discussions with-- or there was some discussions made with the idea that you put a black team in the National League and a black team in the American League, and all a sudden, the attendance skyrockets. And in my research, I actually found that there were people like Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson who are very much in favor of putting these black teams in each league 'cause they felt that they were always being compared to these other players but they could never play with them-- against them. So Walter Johnson, is he the greatest right handed pitcher in the world or isn't he? Is Babe Ruth really the greatest slugger or isn't he? And so these guys, the white guys, they want to do this with the sole except-- with the major exception of Tycott [phonetic] who was bona fide [inaudible] in the world races. So-- but Veeck Sr. dies in 1933. He dies of leukemia in his later days. He is so popular in Chicago. The older Veeck that the word goes out on the street, prohibitions and full force and word goes out in the street that he loves French champagne, he would love to have French champagne to sit by as he passes his final days on this earth. And a creative champagne arrives at the front door one day with compliments about Al Capone. [Laughter] So I think my own-- mine's the only baseball book has in the index, Martin Luther King Jr., Al Capone, Salvador Dali, and Howard Hughes. [Laughter] That's how I got Capone to-- it was a game I was playing. You get all these people to-- so Veeck takes over. He gets-- the Wrigleys, he quits college, walks out of college. He got to start making a living. He gets a jobs with the Cubs. The first job that they gave him-- Wrigley gives him-- what was the Cub [inaudible] go around the stadium and find out what the fans really want, how to make them happy. In the mean time, he comes up with this interesting characters that becomes his friends. One's a ballpark hustler sells score cards name Jack Ruby. The other is a pet guy who sells paper cups to him as he's running some of the concessions named Ray Kroc who the later starts McDonalds. He's-- and there are all these other characters like Abe Saperstein who owns the [inaudible] there, hanging around with him. He's getting to know George Halas. He's working for George Halas on the side. And Veeck is now immersed in this-- sort of this culture of promotion and new ideas. Then Wrigley says on '37, "All right, the ballpark's have mess. The Wrigley Field is just a mess. Come on in, fix the place." So he said, "Get contractors, bring in-- and here's your budget," [inaudible] does it. He totally reconfigures Wrigley. They ripped out the [inaudible] outfield walls. They widen the seats. They build in concessions stands. They plant a bunch of ivy. They created an iconic look. And they created a little signal if you're on the elevated-- and the Cubs have won, there's one signal, one light. If they've lost that-- there's another signal. And so, people going home on the elevator would know who won the game that day. And this is all Veeck's doing. I mean if you walk into Wrigley today and you, you know, you come through those portals, I'm going to be there tonight. [Laughter] You walk through those portals and you see that thing open up to you, that's all his doing. And he's just a kid. He's just out of-- you know, he's-- in the mean time, he wants to run a ball club. And then at 41, he-- we're going to come to the point in a minute where I said the rest is history. But he takes over the-- he takes over the Milwaukee Brewers which is this down and out, terrible, miserable, no attendance ballpark in Milwaukee, where I'm going to be in Thursday, [laughter] and he basic-- with no money, and he creates this unbelievable attraction. First, he does this-- every ballpark he takes over, he-- first thing that he does is he rips out the ladies rooms, the powder rooms, whatever you call them. Takes out the fluorescent lighting which he-- as he says-- he said, "I know this is a stereotypical behavior, but ladies don't like fluorescent lights when they're out in company," and he rips out the fluorescent lights, put in soft lighting, makes them much bigger, they don't have to wait outside, and he starts promoting the ballpark to women. Every place he goes, that's the first thing he does. And but he gets to Milwaukee and he starts this bizarre promotions. He is giving away live pigs, breasts of chickens, kegs full of nails. [Inaudible] to see one said it was-- it's one thing to give 10,000 fans a can of beer but if you give one fan 10,000 cans of beer, it's funny. [Laughter] I mean, he would do things like he'd say, the lucky fan tonight will get a hundred silver dollars and then some kid would get this thing a hundred silver dollars, nineteen, you know, 1941, and he gets a hundred silver dollars and a wheelbarrow comes out with this mammoth block of ice. And the kid has got to wait all night for the ice to melt so that he can get it. So, and then he does something extraordinary. He-- the war is really going on in earnest now and Milwaukee is a three shift city. There's huge industrial production going on for the war ammunitions, et cetera in Milwaukee, and Veeck decides to have a game, stage games for the third shift which means 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock in the morning games, third shift coming off work at that time and of course, everybody in baseball is just torn inside out. You can't do that. It's against tradition. You can't start a game at 8 o'clock in the morning. Well, he does it in such a way he's got Charlie Grimm, his manager in a bed and they wake him up and get back to the door handing out Wheaties with strawberries and of course everybody, they end up-- the league is just furious. They say you can't do this. This is a horrible thing. But Connie Mack that time was the sort of the grand old man of baseball who was the-- who ran the Philadelphia Athletics at that time. He actually came out and said, "You know, Veeck is beautiful. This is a great idea, great idea. He's going to change this game. He's going to do a lot of promotion." And Veeck was then all of a sudden, you know, those of you who were old enough to remember how important the magazines were. And within a couple months of that, it's the Saturday Evening Post but Look, the cover, picture on the cover of the book is from that. That's right after that incident. He Saturday Evening Post, Look, Esquire and Colliers. So in 44, he decides out of the blue, this is all going well. He's to strife-- 42, he tries to buy the Phillies which again was restored. And he wanted to produce an all black team. He'd been working with integration. When in late 41, Abe Saperstein gives him the franchise for the Harlem Globetrotters in the upper Midwest. At that time, the Harlem Globetrotters was not a stunt team. They were like the Harlem Renaissance which is another team. They were straight up basketball. This clowning and the stunts came later. They were playing in the equivalent of the National Basketball Association, it hadn't become that then but the Detroit Pistons were in there and other teams that came out of the NBA. All of a sudden, the winner of 41, 42, the black team start trading to the white teams. The white started trading the black teams, he's watching integrated basketball. Professional basketball is integrated, 41, 42. Nobody ever hears about this. But it is also, he just sees the gate receipts go through the roof. It's fascinating. You know, he says all of a sudden, "I'm putting on a show. Everyone wants to see this." And so, you know, he can see the value of integration. I mean, from a strictly business standpoint, forgetting all the morality of it. He also saw this-- and Abe Saperstein was also very much in on this. So that's one, he and Saperstein tried to buy the Phillies in '42. And he knows they're not ready for integration but what he was really driving out with the Phillies was sort of racial equality where you could basically put together a whole black team, a whole team in this case in the National League and they could compete as a team. And again, he was thwarted from that. And then after that happened, he again was winning big and Milwaukee made this great team. Out of the blue one night, he decides he's going to join the marines. He says, "I could have been deferred. I'm going to go in anyhow, prevent some younger guy who doesn't have any money, who's got kids, I'll take his place. I'll go in. The marines want to use him as a service show boat. No way will he let them do that. He said, "No, no, I want to go into combat." Demands to go into combat, goes into combat and got in the South Pacific in a combat zone and he is-- I actually found this sergeant who was in charge of him, sergeant who is now in a nursing home in Wisconsin. I found him and he said, he said "I've never seen anyone like Veeck." He said, "He just-- he did go out there" and he'd swirl the Japanese lines of a 350 yards away and he said he have got there and yell insults in the middle of the night at the Japanese attracting fire. And then he said he would. And he said one day, all of a sudden, a plane arrives in this combat zone. And all of a sudden unloads all these bats and balls and gloves. He said, "To this day, nobody knows how he could get all this baseball equipment on a combat zone." And another time apparently, he went out with Pappy, Pappy Boyington, the famous flier flew in and Veeck went out and came back with two bottles of scotch l and two eggs. And the eggs were more valuable than the scotch because they were so rare. But, and again, he gets wounded. There's an accident with a howitzer, a 155 millimeter and anti aircraft gun comes back, hits his foot, his foot is damaged, badly cut here in a horrible zone in terms of disease and viruses and germs and things. He-- it gets infected and he goes through a long process which will last throughout his life, 16 major amputations. Many more minor sort of trimmings. He's-- the amputations affect his ears, affect everything and he's living this whole life with this amazing pain which is one of the reasons he's also such a compelling figure because he uses the pain and its intense. The more I talk to his kids, I realize, everyday he get up and soak the stump of what he had left of a leg. And because of the calluses from the prosthesis were so intense and-- but in the middle of all this, it's a joke. I mean, not a joke, it's a psyche. He builds an ashtray. He gets rid of the stainless steel prosthesis. He can't stand it after all. That's too painful. He has a wooden leg. He looks like a pirate and he has an ashtray built into the wooden leg and he-- in the middle of a negotiation, in those days, you know, people smoke in meetings. He'd pull out his leg and pull out the thing and snap out a cigarette. And his-- one of his kids told me. One point he was living on the eastern shore later in his life, and he had all this deck paint in the house. So as the summer progressed, he would paint the wooden leg so it looked like his tan was getting more intense [laughter]. But I mean his greatest line is he's running to the Baltimore Airport. Later in his life, he's covering the World Series. This is after his own four, kind of four major league franchises. He brought back by USA Today to cover the World Series and he's running through the Baltimore airport and he falls and he sprawled on the car then a woman from the airline comes running and says, "Mr. Veeck, Mr. Veeck, can we get you a doctor?" He said, "No, no, it's my wooden leg. Get me a carpenter [laughter]. So this is the kind of guy he-- the other-- one other-- well, he goes on to own the Cleveland Indians. After he comes out of the war, he is going through a lot of-- he spent many months in the VA hospital. After the war, he comes buys the Cleveland Indians for 1.5 million with a lot of other people's money including Bob Hope, one of the comedian, one of his partners, becomes the world champion, gets the-- wins the world championship in 48, does it by bringing in the first African-American in the American League, Larry Doby. Eleven weeks after, Jackie Robinson is brought up. He brings up Larry Doby. Veeck was trying to actually hire another-- bring another African-American player in that winter, a guy named Ray Dandridge, who wouldn't come. He was playing in the Mexican League, making tons of money. But he would-- he wanted to bring him in and Veeck also knew he was going to integrate very fast because he hires before that season when Jack-- in '47, when Jackie Robinson was brought up, he hires the first African-American front office person. He hires a PR person who is also Lena Horne's husband. So he's well-known in Cleveland. He's a celebrity in his own right. But he's brought in to get the city ready for integration on the team and it's going to be a tough foe. I mean, a tough row to hoe because Cleveland is multiethnic and there's a lot of resistance. Veeck claims 20,000 angry letters when he brings Doby up. I found a guy who worked on the news paper, he said the calls, the hate calls the newspapers were getting. Veeck just brings up Doby, just brings him up, he's ready to go, Doby is probably has a tougher time in a lot of ways than Jackie Robinson because Doby who has become-- when he comes to Washington, for example, he said, he heard the N word so many times, he start to think it was his middle name. It was just brutal. And one game, he's actually-- he's playing an exhibition game in Houston and they actually drive him off the field. He's in uniform on first base and he's driven off the field with rocks. And he comes back the next day and they're booing, booing, booing, and he hits a homerun. And says "I resent the"-- they cheered and he said, "I resented those cheers 'cause they weren't cheering me as a human. They were cheering my bat." You know, it was-- and Doby was interesting. Doby came from a middle class family. He grew up in a very well to do suburb of New Jersey. He was class-- I think he was class vice president, he was captain of the football team. He played against-- he's in the same school as Frank Lautenberg, the last senator who I think under the GI bill. He played-- interesting enough, he played football against Buzz Aldrin which is a nice paradigm because Aldrin was the second on the moon and Doby was the second African American in baseball. But he doesn't know, he doesn't-- he knows-- then he's also goes to Long Island University and plays basketball on a predominantly white team and he goes in navy but that's, that's segregated but there's no race hatred. It's only when he gets to baseball that he-- that the hatred comes out. And it makes it rougher for Doby. And then what Veeck does to make it even more juicy and interesting-- and Veeck had a special relationship with Doby because Doby had to be protected more because he just wasn't ready for this hate. He just-- that was, you know, he could stand segregation, he couldn't stand the hatred. And so-- then Veeck does the unspeakable, the next day in 48 when he's going, he wants to win the world championship, at 48 he brings in Satchel Paige. And the powers that be are furious, because for decades, they've been saying, these Negro League guys, they can't play with us. They are not as good as we are. They're just show men. They just go out there and clown. They're not great players. All of a sudden he's bringing up an old man, Satchel Paige. And he knows that if Satchel Paige makes it, all these other guys going to have to eat crow because-- or Jim Crow, as the case maybe. But they're all going to have to, you know, realize that this guy is great and he comes up and of course he helps them win the World Championship, he helps them win the World Series. And all those teams that wouldn't integrate, or even saying they're not going to be, New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, the Detroit Tigers, Veeck is now really going after them for this thing. And at 40, he wins the World Championship with those two guys in 48, 49 he brings 14 African American players to spring training, Minnie Minoso, Luke Easter, et cetera, et cetera, some of those guys made it. But he's now become-- he now believes that the salvation of baseball is integration. But he gets huge pushback at this point. And-- but that, I think is, I mean one of his great moments was, the Yankees were saying, we're not going to integrate, has the Yankees and they have Satchel Paige pitching and they put [inaudible] in every seat in the stadium, he said, "It was one of those great days because there's the Yankee saying we don't want to integrate baseball, but Paige could, you know, pack the Yankee stadium. And the-- I know there's probably some people that are hard big baseball fans. But he goes o to own the Saint Louis Browns where he change baseball in another way, he-- one point he brought an actor, a guy who played midgets on the stage as for a living and he's a batter. And Veeck read years-- earlier read a James Thurber short story in which a baseball team-- whenever they needed to get somebody in base, they would have this-- a midget come in and crouch so that their size of their strike zone was about this big. And they would get walks so Veeck does this with a guy named Eddie Gaedel and as politically incorrect as it sounds today. It was sensational at the time, Veeck, I mean Gaedel was not a victim, Gaedel loved this role. He made a huge amount of money for this is what he did for a living. And he had a great South side accent, Chicago. He'd go on the Milton Berle show and he said, "You know, I could have been Babe Ruth." But-- and the Hall of Baseball is up in arms. He's ruined the sanctity of baseball by putting this tiny guy in the game, and of course what happens is the picture of him pitching the-- Gaedel in the game crouching, it just appears all over world, every English speaking newspaper, every foreign speaking newspapers has this picture. And of course what Veeck is doing is getting baseball sort of ready for the television age, all of a sudden, baseball which is losing at the television at that point, all of a sudden gets, you know, this boost from the-- just this idea that's "I go to a ball game and you don't know what's going to happen. There could be a midget, there could be a," and he does a lot of other-- his team, the team. After the Browns were finally brought to-- they can't make it, he can't make it work in financially in Saint Louis, and eventually they're brought to the-- they become the Baltimore Orioles. He is not allowed to bring them to Baltimore but they become the Baltimore Orioles. He then goes later takes on-- buys the Chicago White Sox. In the meantime, actually he does one other real quick thing. He works-- the National League hires him to get baseball ready for the West Coast. And so, he gets baseball ready for the West Coast. That's a huge impact and he gets everything ready so that National League gets Los Angeles and San Francisco, the American League which didn't hire Veeck to set it all up, gets Anaheim and Oakland which are fine cities but they're not the major markets. Then he gets very sick, this part of his life he gets very sick. He is forced to sell the White Sox. This is after having a phenomenal Pennant winning series in 1969 which they ring all of the civil defense alarms go out often. I know many people over there. There's a political guy named Mark Plotkin, and Mark Plotkin, he's watching the television, they win the Pennant [inaudible]. So, they win the Pennant and Mark is on his way to bed, he says, they win the Pennant, I saw on TV and [inaudible] Mark's on his way to bed and all of a sudden, the civil defense siren goes on and he said. The White Sox finally win the Pennant and I'm going to die through a nuclear attack tonight. And again, he does these outrageous things, I mean in 1976 when he does-- takes over the White Sox again. He's got-- they reenact the Spirit of 76, the famous painting of the guy with the flute and the guy, you know, the three guys. And of course he's out there with a peg leg you know on the drum and he's playing the role. He then takes-- gets real sick and he sells-- has to sell the White Sox. He goes down to the Eastern Shore ostensibly to die, he doesn't die. In fact hundreds of reporters would get down to get their last interview with him and of course he would then prevail. And a lot of great stuff, even the reporters who are still alive I talk to them about this. But he ends up with that [inaudible] period. He's out of baseball, he takes out-- buys a race track near Boston, gets involved in saving Finlay Park which was slated for demolition at one point. They were going to make big huge cookie cutter stadium, gets involved in keeping the Patriots in Boston. He can't-- he's involved in everything. When they will not-- when George Preston Marshall will not integrate the Red Skins and they're playing in a federal park, Veeck goes to the secretary of the Interior Udall who was his headache because he's got a Jim Crow team in a federal stadium and the nation's capital and Veeck goes in and says to Udall he says. "Look, it's easy." Throw them out and ill get an American Football League team and we'll bring them in. And of course he never does it but he just would give Udall that tool, you know. And so-- but he-- then he goes back and finally he owns the White Sox again and does pretty well with them, he's fought all of his life against the reserve clause which is the one that sort of the inventured servitude that held a player to one club for his career. And Veeck, in 18 writes a letter to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and says that the reserve clause is immoral and illegal. And he fights for it all his life to get rid of it, the reserve clause. And he actually testifies at Curt Flood's trial which is the trial that leads up to the whole change and free agents, creating free agency. Then when he takes over the White Sox, all of a sudden there is free agency and he can't afford the players. So he's bitten by his own morality, or lack of a better-- his own principles. But he does a magnificent job. He has [inaudible] player, he takes guys in their last months off being in the reserve clause. And he again, sort of ingloriously he and Mike, his son Mike Veeck who has done very much of a character. He owns a bunch of ball clubs with Bill Murray, Mike does the same kind of promotions, his father did. Mike when he took up the Saint Paul's Saints he says he couldn't afford instant replay so he hired mimes in leotards to reenact the play. So-- but they hold this thing, ill conceived idea in the history of baseball. The other thing called disco demolition night between the halves of a double header they're going to burn this huge bonfire with disco music, with this wacko disc jockey and Mike come on with this idea and Bill is having still another amputation. He comes out of the Mayo clinic to come to see this thing and of course, everything goes, everything goes wrong. And the records have been thrown from the upper decks, it's like the blades from a buzzsaw. And there's fires being built and Ernie Harwell, I think maybe the last interview, he gave-- he was in the booth and he said, There was so much booze and so much pot, emphasis on the pot that he said there was a cloud over Comiskey Park that night. There was so much marijuana and the crowd was there, they built fires and it was a disaster. And then he goes on and becomes sort of the-- he sells the White Sox. He sort of becomes the great old man of baseball. But-- I went through a lot of this and a lot of other things in the book. But I think just like a final things about Veeck and what [inaudible] the questions and I'm probably running-- I'm not. I'm probably just on time. The thing that Veeck did was he changed baseball. Hank Greenberg, the great Detroit Tiger slugger and businesses associate of Veeck's says at the end of his life, he said, when Veeck dies, he said, "You know before Veeck, it was just going to the ball game and winning or losing. Veeck made it fun. Veeck did stuff nobody is expecting. You know, when he's just-- and I think-- one of the things he did in the process is create this huge fan base of women and children and minorities that didn't exist before him. And I think one of the reasons the Los Angeles Dodgers sold a couple of weeks ago for 2 billion dollars is because Veeck had built this enormous fan base. And what he did-- I have one other example of this thing with women, he-- right in 46, nylon stockings are a black market item. You can't get them, they're just, they're nowhere, they're [inaudible] short supply. So Veeck somehow commandeers a truckload of nylon stockings and he has a nylon stocking night, you know. Any woman who comes to the ball park that night, gets a nylon stocking, there's almost riots, and all the powers that be in baseball are saying, "What's going to-- what's next?" You know, "What's-- if you are handing out-- what's, there is going to be panty hose night? What's going to be next? Well, how far can you go with this guy?" And of course, then he does, then he gets-- on Mother's Day, he flies in a huge-- a planeload of orchids and dancers, why, every woman gets an orchid-- but it was just the fact that he saw just one other thing in Cleveland because I interviewed a guy who was at his first ball game or two, Veeck builds a nursery, a huge nursery in the ballpark and clears out all these executive office to build a nursery so you can bring an infant to the game [laughs] then what happen-- and then, you know. So I think he did that, I think the other thing that he did, the owners hated him and I asked Andy MacPhail who was-- they hate him because he was so progressive, he really nailed them on race, he really nailed them on free agency, he really nailed them on even tax codes, he was way ahead of everybody, he learned to depreciate the value. He looked at the older [inaudible] and he learned to devalue the value of a pitcher. As a pitcher got older, he could take more of a tax right off of the picture because he was-- and of course, that upset the other owners because they thought it would cost him the anti trust exemption. But when the dust settled, I asked Eddy McPhail who's father and grandfather had been great baseball people, both in the Hall of Fame, I asked him growing up with him and I, I said, "Why did they hate him so much?" And McPhail said, "You know, they really hated was he sat in the bleachers with the fans." Every game, he sat in the bleachers and a kid would come up and say, "Hey, Mr. Veeck, the [inaudible] lousy and Veeck would give him-- here's a couple of bucks, get another one [laughs]. You know, he would, you know, he did this. He would-- if a team lost, he would be, you know, Cleveland, they're running for the World Championship and they lose one night and he goes out of the gate and shake hands with everybody and thank them for coming. And McPhail said, "If an agent-- if one owner today sat in the cheap seats with the fans, it would be revolutionary," you know. And I think what's so-- I think what Veeck-- I think Veeck's influence is tremendous but I think one-- I think the final-- and so the bottom line for me is that he put a smile on baseball's face. It was just a different game after he finished with it. So we have a few minutes for questions? >> Anybody have questions? [ Applause ] >> Yes, sir. [ Inaudible Remark ] >> He couldn't care less. He didn't-- he thought it was-- he just thought it was-- he thought it was unfair to the other sports and he also, at one time, Emmanuel Seller [phonetic] is on the committee that's looking into the antitrust. And he says something about the-- all the other owners are just petrified that [inaudible]. And Emmanuel Seller says that Veeck is not playing his players enough. Instead of saying, "Oh, thank you for that bit of advice", he tells them, "Hey, it's none of your business whether I play my players." And one of the-- I think they were petrified, they lose that from him. And I think that was-- that's what made him so dangerous. And the-- when he-- even when he depreciates the value of the players, that's-- very few people got this but the-- this year's basketball strike, that was part of it because from then on, these professional teams were depreciating the value of an athlete as their talents declined. And the basketball players are saying, "Wait a second, the owners are making more money on us as our-- as we deteriorate as players. Hence, why aren't we getting a piece of that action?" That was sort of only a couple of writers really picked up that that was one of the points of real anger between the players and the owners in the basketball strike. And that was something that a bomb that, you know, Veeck had lit a fuse for. Yes sir? [ Inaudible Question ] Well I can give you two examples. I think he had a tremendous eye for acquiring players and developing. And I think he used to use-- he used to hire college kids in the summer to go to the library and look up, do statistical analysis almost like a precursor to the Saber [phonetic] concept. Two examples are great. One is-- the second time he owns the White Sox, he needs a manager, he hires this lawyer, everybody goes nuts, you're hiring a lawyer, you should be hiring somebody, you know, go-- way back in baseball history, you hire this lawyer, nobody has ever heard of him, it's Tony La Russa, he pulled him out of nowhere. The other one when he's out in the Eastern Shore, he's quite sick but he still goes to the little league games, the high school games and he spots this guy, player just-- he said, "This guys is going to be a great-- he's going to be a hall of famer. And so he basically follows the guy, gets to the back of the White Sox the second time. The equivalent of the draft then comes along and the first guy he picks is Harold Baines. Everybody says, "Who's Harold Baines?" He said, "He's a guy-- I've got my eye on him for 8 years." And to complete the picture, when Harold Baines-- he brings in Baines, who is a tremendous player. Just-- and the first thing he does with Baines from this little town in this Eastern Shore, he bring-- he gets him an agent so that Baines can get good money, and then he hires a financial adviser. And he says, I don't want to see this man lose, see so many young athletes lose all the money because they don't-- they've never been, you know, given the-- and adviser to watch them. And the Baines family now, has significant properties on the Eastern Shore. Mrs. Baines, his wife, is now partner in a major real estate firm down there. He basically-- he took care of his players. That was-- somebody said the other day, "How was he different than Charlie Finley?" The big difference was, he really-- he loved his players. And so there's an interview on the beginning of the book with Virgil Trucks. [Inaudible] fired five times. Veeck is the only one who called me into his office. There is always a second one? Okay. >> Second question would the. If Veeck [inaudible] nationals. [Inaudible] [Laughter] >> He would've I mean-- you know that's a good point. They probably would've like let Teddy [phonetic]-- I ended-- Jonathan Yardley wrote a piece when the nationals first came saying that what it really needed was Veeck. They needed spontaneity in it. And I had this-- this is a little bit risque but I'll just do it anyhow. So my idea, when-- those early days when those-- the seats behind home plate were empty, if Veeck got on the nationals. He would've had male and female inflatable, people back there [laughter]. And then anyone who came, any single person in the game got to take one home as a date. So yes sir? >> Are there any owner today that could have an impact to change the way the game operates? >> Now, I think there are a lot of-- lot of it is now in the minor leagues but I don't think-- I think they keep more Cuban out, but I think there are people who-- but there's-- nobody really like him anymore. And there's no, you know, Veeck would've looked to tell you this jumbotrons spewing commercials and these over amp rock and roll between innings they can't talk to anybody. That-- to them that wouldn't be spontaneous or shooting, you know, t-shirts into the stands, I mean, he would've done wild stuff, he would've had belly dancers for the 7th inning stretch and he would have done stuff that would be, you know, he would've had horses on the field and camels, and, you know, it would be different. Yes sir? [ Inaudible Remark ] Yeah, I think it was pretty much Mayor Daley who is-- we had the dancer and there's a story in the book where they're-- again, Mark [inaudible] is running, Eugene McCarthy is campaigning. McCarthy wants to come in and pitch for the White Sox and it just have a just have a try, you know, get in uniform and just warmup with the team then leave the field then Mark calls up Veeck and Veeck says, "I got to say no", he said, "Mayor Daley would never allow it." He said [inaudible] [ Inaudible Question ] He did-- the shining example is the Indians which he buys at 46 and sells in 49. One of the reasons he has to sell the Indians is because he was being taxed at a 90 percent confiscatory tax rate at that time. It was because-- and his tax record was a 90 percent and he just had the-- get some money together. He's going through a divorce, he had a lot of other thing-- but he-- when he sold the Indians to guys like Bob Hope, and some people from Chicago who were investors, he-- they got 20 dollars on the dollar. And so he always sort of came out with more money and he never had much money himself but he always got a lot of people to invest in the club. And he got people like-- and it was a diversity, I mean he grows up in a very rarified atmosphere in a Episcopalian country club, Hinsdale, going to the best private schools in the country, you know. And-- but he gets into baseball and he basically, he loves people who are not like himself. So guys like Hank Greenberg become a partner, and Abe Saperstein, and Doby becomes a really close friend. So he-- and he brings these people into the ownership, he brings Greenberg in. He brings the first African-American owner into the-- the publisher of Ebony magazine [inaudible] Johnson. He brings him as the first-- he's a part-owner but he's the first African-American owner. So he-- and then now-- and now, everybody who ever invested with him leaves with a smile on their face. He sometimes doesn't get as much because he got to pay off certain debts. But I think he was successful. Yeah, sir? [ Inaudible Question ] He would read 45 books a day-- a week. He would be-- he would come to the American Booksellers Association in here and quote [inaudible] and quote from Shakespeare. He could be as erudite as anybody you've ever-- he was extraordinarily well-read. His key, he loved art. He must have built 700 or 800 models you know the moving sculpture that exhibits in Chicago at the end of his life of mobiles that he had built. And loved to dabble with painting, loved growing greenhouses when he's in [inaudible]. He bred orchids, he bred-- worked on hybrid plants, he was on the-- everything was his oyster. The world-- everything in the world was something to be explored. He could be reading the goofiest comic novel at the same time he rereading War and Peace or and-- but he would, you know, he would talk to-- he could talk to anybody. And he would never have a office. He would-- so he took over a club, he just-- he'd leave the office to somebody he'd go out in the court and set up in the court or, you know, groundskeeper would come in and say, "Boy, I had a rough day." Veeck would sit him down and, you know, talk to him. But then, some other guys, some, you know, professor in the University of Chicago would come over and say, "What do you think is the best of the Shakespearean plays?" And Veeck would go on about Leer, you know, at length. >> Any other questions? [ Inaudible Remark ] Thank you. >> I can't wait to start reading, thank you. >> Thank you. I got a Twitter from him last night. >> Okay. >> Or a tweet, a tweet. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.