Pinstripe Empire (34 page)

“I feel very honored by it all,” she said. “I’m surprised and frightened.” When asked when she had first met the Colonel, she said “he had been a friend of the family for a number of years.” Asked what her father did for a living, she replied, “He was a businessman, let it go at that.”

Now she owned a third of the New York Yankees.

Her brother Rex, in fact, had been assistant traveling secretary to Mark Roth for the previous three years. (A footnote: Weyant succeeded Roth and had no assistant. Neither did any of his successors. But the popular 1990s TV show
Seinfeld
, which regularly lampooned George Steinbrenner, had the character of George Costanza serve in just that position during two seasons of the show’s run.)

The three women owned the team in equal parts. However, it was a four-person group of trustees who would actually run the team. They included Amanda’s husband, Henry Garrison Silleck Jr.; Jacob’s brother George; Byron Clark, Ruppert’s personal attorney; and Barrow. When George Ruppert stepped aside, he made Barrow president of the team, claiming he was entitled because of his years of service, his stature in the game, and his knowledge of the business. George, although nearly seventy himself, ran the brewery.

George Weiss was promoted to secretary (and heir apparent) to Barrow.

Any decision to sell the team could be made only by unanimous consent of the four trustees, with no involvement by the three owners, although they could request the trustees to vote on it. The club could be sold only as a whole, not in pieces.

____________

DESPITE THE EARLY predictions of an estate worth up to $100 million, by 1945 it was finally resolved that the gross value was just $9.5 million, and the net $4.7 million. Ruppert owed Barrow half a million dollars. According to family historian K. Jacob Ruppert, the unveiling of the final numbers was a shock to many, owing largely to late tax filings, properties mortgaged to the hilt, and not enough cash on hand to meet the deadlines for the estate taxes. It was a far more complicated organization of the estate than was first believed.

Ruppert’s Yankee stock was actually held by the Jacob Ruppert Holding Corporation, which oversaw his real estate, and Manufacturer’s Trust had a lien on the company. Had they chosen to do so, the bank could have become the owners of the Yankees.

Despite the woeful financial setback, the Yankees would continue to be the model for sports operation in America. Barrow, Weiss, and McCarthy enjoyed a wonderful relationship in which no man stepped on the other’s toes. Separating the owners from the management team proved very effective. George Steinbrenner liked to say that “buying the Yankees was like buying the
Mona Lisa
,” which meant Ruppert was Da Vinci.

Ruth Rita Silleck-McGuire died in 1962, and Helen Ruppert Silleck-Holleran died in 1978.

Winnie Weyant never married, lived in Westchester County, and died there in the 1980s. She left her money to various Catholic charities.

SINCE RUPPERT HAD enjoyed the World Series on the radio, the coming at last of broadcasting to Yankee fans in 1939 should not have been a surprise. The three New York teams had resisted this move for a long while. If it was his last “blessing” for Yankee fans, it was a meaningful one.

One could almost hear the dialogue in the Forty-second Street offices: “Radio? Give away the product for free? No one will ever pay to come to a game!”

The forward thinkers who understood marketing could see that properly done, broadcasting could be used to make the in-park experience something to be coveted, to produce “I wish we were there!” moments—and then there was the announcer telling you when the next game was, and how you could get tickets!

With the five-year agreement to black out radio in New York having expired, it was Larry MacPhail of the Dodgers who took the lead, hiring Red
Barber from Cincinnati and broadcasting all 154 regular-season games. It was a masterstroke; Red, despite his unfamiliar southern accent, was a big hit. And there was something “exotic” about listening live to out-of-town games.

The Yankees and the Giants would play it safer. They would do only home games (which seemed like a backward philosophy if they were worried about cutting into attendance). Since they were never home at the same time, the same station—WABC—and the same announcers, Arch McDonald and his young assistant Melvin Allen Israel, could do both teams.

McDonald, the more senior broadcaster, moved to Washington the following year and became a fixture there. As for Melvin Allen Israel, he was Mel Allen on the air, and he would become the Voice of the Yankees.

Just twenty-six when he sat in Yankee Stadium on opening day of 1939, he delivered the game as Barber had—with a smooth southern accent, only not as pronounced. Few New Yorkers could have told you that he was from Alabama.

After studying at the University of Alabama, Mel worked his way to New York for a job with CBS before winning an audition to do the joint Giant/Yankee assignment. After McDonald left, he did Yankee games with screen actor Jay C. Flippen and Giants games with Joe Bolton, who would later be “Officer” Joe Bolton on WPIX children’s programming.

Mel went into the army in 1941 and returned in 1946, when the two teams separated their broadcasting (the Yanks on WINS) and Mel worked with Russ Hodges for three years. There were few Yankee games broadcast during the war, so Red Barber and the Dodgers owned the New York air-waves. But from 1946 until he departed after 1964, Mel Allen was as big a star as any of the players he reported on. He got almost as much fan mail—and responded to all of it. So big did he become in broadcasting circles that it would be unthinkable to have anyone else known as the Voice of the Yankees, even a half century following his initial departure from the booth. (He would later come back to do cable broadcasts from 1978 to 86.)

And “man, oh, man,” could he sell that Ballantine beer and those Yankee home games. Giant fans and Dodger fans couldn’t stand to hear his voice. They were convinced that Mel was a Yankee fan through and through, and all of his broadcasts showed that prejudice. But he never said “we” or “us” about the team; he delivered it very straight compared to his contemporaries elsewhere. It was just that his voice so often translated into a Yankee victory, and the ones who rooted against the Yanks couldn’t stand the sound of it.

As important as radio and then television advertising would be to baseball, it is worth noting that stadium billboard advertising in its time, appearing in newsreels and newspapers, was the major place for advertisers to put their money before broadcasting truly caught on. No billboard advertiser was more prominent in Yankee Stadium than Gem razor blades, which dominated the outfield billboard signage, and before that, the fronting of the left-field bleachers right at field level, going back to opening day of Yankee Stadium in 1923 and on through 1957.

LOU GEHRIG WAS clearly slipping in 1938, but that was considered the normal aging in the life of any athlete. No one realized he was playing with a serious illness.

But in spring training in ’39, he played like someone who would be cut in the first round of roster trims, if he hadn’t been Lou Gehrig. He was unsteady. Doc Painter saw him fall down when he couldn’t lift his leg high enough to slip it into his trousers. No one moved to help him; “He was lying there like a helpless puppy,” said Painter. “We dared not help him up. He finally crawled to his feet … There was a tear in his eye.”

He made errors on simple plays. He had no oomph in his bat. Teammates were patting him on the back if he hit a routine fly ball. His great musculature was clearly diminished.

The press wasn’t being discreet. Everyone was writing about his awful spring and signs that he might be done.

The Iron Horse just wasn’t cutting it. Babe Dahlgren, who was going to play some third base and spell Rolfe, was quietly taking ground balls at first—just in case.

Gehrig took some days off during spring training but hadn’t improved by opening day. Still, he was out there: He was the team’s captain, and he hadn’t missed a game since 1925. If he was going to come out of the lineup, it would be his call, not McCarthy’s. He deserved that.

On April 30 in New York, he played in his 2,130th consecutive game. He went 0-for-4. The team then boarded a train for Detroit. Lou knew what had to be done.

In the lobby of the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, sitting next to sportswriter Charley Segar, Gehrig spotted McCarthy and asked if he could talk to him in his room. The two men went upstairs.

There, Gehrig told him that he was taking himself out of the lineup “for
the good of the team.” In his mind, he thought maybe he’d take two days off, maybe play after the Detroit series.

There were probably tears in the room. Gehrig was a sensitive man, and both he and McCarthy had been in baseball a long time. They knew the significance of what was happening, and they probably understood that there was more to this story. How could this great man have deteriorated so quickly?

McCarthy returned to the lobby, gathered the New York writers around him, and informed them that Lou would not be playing that afternoon.

“What Lou had thought was lumbago last year when he suffered pains in the back that more than once forced his early withdrawal from games was diagnosed later as a gall bladder condition for which Gehrig underwent treatment all last winter,” wrote James Dawson in the
Times.
“There had been signs for the past two years that Gehrig was slowing up. Even when a sick man, however, he gamely stuck to his chores … out of a driving desire to help the Yankees, always his first consideration.”

At the ballpark, Lou dressed. Yankee uniforms that season had a sleeve patch for the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens. Photographers gathered around him, taking dramatic shots of his peering onto the field from the dugout. The Tigers would play in this field for another sixty years. It would always be hard to look at the small visitors’ dugout without recalling those photos.

Dahlgren and Gehrig met privately before the game, and Dahlgren reportedly tried to talk Lou out of his decision. But Lou slapped him on the back and said, “Go on, get out there and knock in some runs.” Dahlgren hit a homer.

Gehrig, as he often did as captain, took the lineup to the plate at the start of the game. There were 11,379 fans on hand as Detroit broadcaster Ty Tyson took the public-address microphone and said, “How about a hand for Lou Gehrig, who played 2,130 games in a row before he benched himself today!”

The fans cheered as Lou walked to the dugout. He tipped his cap in appreciation, took a drink from the water fountain, and welled up in tears. Remarkably, one of the fans in the stands that day was Wally Pipp, who lived in Grand Rapids and had come to see his old team play.

Lou continued to travel with the team, and even went with them for a June 12 exhibition game with the Yanks’ Kansas City farm team. Phil Rizzuto was the Blues’ shortstop. Lou decided to play. Maybe something magical would happen.

He grounded out meekly to second base in the second inning. He made two errors at first base. A line drive “knocked him down and he fell on his back,” wrote Kansas City catcher Clyde McCullough in 1982. At the end of the inning he left the game, and at the end of the day, he left the team and flew to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for a thorough analysis of his condition.

He spent a full week at the clinic. If amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was suspected, no one discussed it—yet—with Gehrig. ALS had been first diagnosed in 1874, but was so rare that only deeply schooled physicians would have even pondered it. It was likely that by the time he left Rochester, he had some awareness of the possibility that he had the disease, and what it meant.

In 2010, a report emerged that certain brain traumas could result in symptoms that mimic ALS. A review of his career indicated a few times when he received head trauma—a pitch that resulted in a concussion in a 1934 exhibition game in Norfolk, Virginia, being especially noteworthy. Today it would be unthinkable to come back and play the next day, but that’s what Gehrig did, calling it just a bump on the head. Was it possible that the disease, which came to be called Lou Gehrig’s disease, was not the cause of his decline? A medical mystery was raised.

Lou returned to his apartment at 10 Chatsworth Avenue in Larchmont, about a half mile from Barrow’s home on Howard Street. There he composed letters to his doctors, asking key questions, trying to get a better read on his fate and on possible treatment. His wife, Eleanor, became a wonderful life partner through this strange journey. Lou’s parents, in nearby Mount Vernon, were part of “Team Gehrig,” with him at every turn.

A doctor at the Mayo Clinic prepared a letter for Lou to share with the Yankees, which was released to the media. The term
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
was used, and it said, “In lay terms … a form of infantile paralysis.” Said Barrow to the press, “We have bad news. Gehrig has infantile paralysis … The report recommends that Lou abandon any hope of continuing as an active player.”

Polio was a disease the public was familiar with, and that was what was generally used to describe his condition. Nowhere was “fatal” uttered. Lou himself didn’t know, at least then, whether it was curable.

But with his career over, the Yankees made plans for a July 4 Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. He had batted .340 with 493 home runs. He had the love and admiration of the nation. He was a shining star to every parent who wanted his child to have a hero. In a way, Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day had
been every day for baseball fans. Now one would take its place in the pantheon of historic Yankee moments.

July 4, a warm summer day in New York, saw more than sixty thousand pack Yankee Stadium for a tribute to Lou and a doubleheader with the Senators. This wasn’t called Old-Timers’ Day, but it would come to be considered the first held by the Yanks. All of Lou’s living teammates from the 1927 team were invited back, lining home plate to the mound, facing current players—two of the greatest teams in baseball history.

From the ’27 team: Combs (a Yankee coach) and Bengough (a Washington coach); Pipgras (umpiring that day); and in street clothes, Lazzeri, Pennock, Koenig, Dugan, Hoyt, Shawkey, Meusel, plus Schang, Pipp, and Scott from earlier teams. And there was Babe Ruth, looking robust in a white suit. Ruth and Gehrig hadn’t spoken in years. Their relationship had ended on a tense note due to some slight involving their wives. It was a shame. Although so different in temperament, they had at first been wonderful pals.