Terror in the City of Champions (13 page)

Representatives of outstate cities came to present floral bouquets, silver platters, ten-foot telegrams, and fishing rods and reels to favorite players. Five hundred Flint Elks marched onto the diamond to honor Billy Rogell. Every team member, including number-five outfielder Frank Doljack, had his supporters. (Local Yugoslavians from the Serbian Hall in his case.) Wattie Watkins, who had managed Michigan’s 1887 championship baseball team, showed up to shake Cochrane’s hand. “They’re the best of them all,” he said of the 1934 team. Harold Parker, a fifteen-year-old from Mason, was brought to the park to meet Cochrane. In July he had lost his left leg in an accident, ending his baseball dreams. “Keep your chin up, lad,” Cochrane told him. “Remember, there’s a lot more to life than just baseball. So keep your chin up.”

Merchants lavished gifts on the players, everything from new suits and shoes to automobiles. The players’ windfall was a contrast to the reality of average fans. The economy was improving, but one-third of Detroiters still qualified for assistance. And joblessness touched most families. For ordinary folks, nightclub dinners and flashy clothes were the stuff of whimsical dreams. On some days even the twelve-cent-a-pound cost of hamburger meat was a luxury.

Advertisements and endorsement deals abounded for the players. In one campaign Cochrane, Greenberg, Rowe, and several others highlighted the benefits of smoking Camel cigarettes. Everyone on the team appeared in an ad for Grunow radios (and received one in return). The same for Bulova watches. Jo-Jo White was shown being measured for an Alpacuna overcoat by tailor Harry Suffrin. Gehringer parlayed his success into a Standard Service Station on Cass Avenue. (Gehringer used to work for Hudson’s Department Store in the off season but seeing that others needed jobs desperately, he declined the position.) Hudson’s now promoted its wide selection of Tigers sweatshirts, sweaters, polo shirts, and jackets for boys of all ages. Even Cochrane’s children participated in the hype. Little Joan and Gordon Jr. got their picture taken with comic sensation and duck puppeteer Joe Penner, who had almost everyone quacking his radio catch line: “Wanna buy a duck?”

Henry Ford went to his first major league game on September 17. He sat in a box near the Tigers dugout with his son Edsel, Edsel’s wife, Eleanor, and their youngest children, William Clay, nine, and Josephine, eleven. (Thirty years later William Clay Ford would own the Detroit Lions.) Edsel had recently secured a $100,000, first-of-its-kind deal for Ford to be the exclusive sponsor of the radio broadcast of the World Series. At the park Frank Navin made a point of visiting the Fords. “I hope you win that pennant, Mr. Navin,” Henry said. Cochrane came by as well. The Fords liked Cochrane. In August they had hired him to do a radio series of seven baseball broadcasts over CBS stations.

The stadium was packed with 34,000 people, incredible for a Monday. The rival Yankees were in town for four games. Detroit had just swept Washington, putting them five and a half games ahead of New York. All box, grandstand, and bleacher seats were sold, so fans stood on the grass, roped into overflow areas in the outfield and foul territory. Police on horses enforced the boundary. The potential for injury concerned Henry Ford.

“You don’t think they will get hurt out there by a batted ball?” he asked.

“I certainly hope not,” Cochrane said. “I imagine very few balls are going to get past those fielders.”

The Tigers defeated the Yankees 3–0, with Greenberg driving in a run. As Ford left the park, he stopped to sign a scorecard. Instantly, dozens more fans surrounded him. Tigers officials whisked him away.

Frank Navin refused to get his hopes too high. Cochrane had so excited him that Navin didn’t miss the start of any home game. When his Tigers took to the rails, if he didn’t accompany them, he kept tabs by reading ticker-tape updates. A machine in his office provided them. Ever the cautious poker player, Navin didn’t chance a jinx by dreaming out loud of a world championship. He wouldn’t make predictions. “So many things can happen that it would be folly to say we will win the pennant, although the boys are right up there now and look good,” he said. “You never know when a pitcher’s arm may go wrong or when injuries will wreck a ball club. All we can do is wait and hope for the best.”

Detroit was baseball crazy. Having weathered the worst of the Great Depression, city residents invested their hearts in the Tigers. Everyone talked about the ball club, especially Cochrane. Even before his team had clinched the pennant, he predicted a World Series win—the first in Detroit history. It would be the crowning achievement of Navin’s distinguished career. It didn’t seem a stretch. The Tigers owned baseball’s best record. “I’ve been on four championship clubs but never have I been so confident of winning the world championship as right now,” Cochrane said.

In the final week of the regular season, Detroit celebrated its team. Nearly every day in late September, Cochrane appeared at a luncheon, a dinner, or both. They were often in his honor. He ate with Navin’s Rotary Club members one afternoon—“If we don’t win the pennant, look for me at the bottom of Lake Erie,” he said—then partied at a last-minute supper with one hundred admirers on Monday, September 24, at the English Grill. Golfer Walter Hagen spoke at the gathering, which Ford’s Harry Bennett had organized. On Thursday Cochrane and Greenberg addressed a thousand fans for the Community Fund Exposition, a charity dear to Clara Ford, Henry’s wife. That night the Tigers and their dates danced heartily with nearly four hundred celebrants at a ball staged by the Civic Pride Association. Greenberg, Gehringer, and Goslin—nicknamed the G-Men by one news reporter—were all bachelors with a preference for blondes, one observer noted. Gee Walker demonstrated the most daring moves. But the biggest burst of applause erupted when Edna and Schoolboy took the floor. Days later, Cochrane was before a luncheon of police lieutenants and sergeants. They bestowed upon him an ebony nightstick. In the evening at the exclusive Detroit Athletic Club, Edsel Ford and his peers made Cochrane an honorary member.

The most elaborate pre-series celebration, a testimonial dinner, occurred on Saturday, September 29, when a thousand admirers packed into the Statler Hotel. Cochrane and the Tigers sat at a long head table with owners Frank Navin and Walter O. Briggs, Mayor Frank Couzens, and Governor William Comstock. Even Whitey Willis, “the world’s best batboy,” had a seat. The team had literally brought the city together. The biggest names in Detroit business mingled with ordinary fans who had paid seven dollars apiece to attend. As a show of appreciation, $3,000 of the proceeds would go to buy diamond rings for all team members. In addition every Tiger would be receiving thirty gifts donated by merchants: shoes, ties, suits, clocks, radios, and more.

Guests dined on filet mignon and hashed creamed potatoes—no bacon-grease sandwiches here. William Finzel’s Orchestra and “singing milkman” Harry A. McDonald, president of a creamery company (and future chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission), provided the musical entertainment. They performed the old standard “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” as well as newer regional tunes: “The Tiger Team Song” (
. . . With Mickey riled, the Tigers wild are pretty hard to tame; Mister Navin, flags are waving, one for every name . . .
), “Tigers on Parade” (
. . . Mickey’s aces have sure gone places, around those bases on parade . . .
), and “Fight With the Fighting Tigers” (
. . . Fight till the battle’s over and the Giants put to rout . . .
).

The last lyric was now suspect. In the National League the Giants had been in first place from July 1 through the last week of September. Sports fans had assumed they would be facing the Tigers in the championship. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was looking forward to seeing a World Series game or two—and perhaps Schoolboy Rowe—at the Giants’ Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan. “Yes, sir, you’ve got a great pitcher in the Schoolboy,” he told a Detroiter. Cochrane had been anticipating a New York match-up and felt the Tigers would do well. “I’m going to make a prediction,” he had said a week ago. “We’re going to win the World Series. I have every respect for the Giants, but I have a feeling that we’re going to take them.”

Except it turned out that the Tigers wouldn’t be playing the Giants. In St. Louis the Cardinals had been rampaging. They had won thirteen of their last fifteen games while the Giants had lost their last five. Two days before the end of the regular season—the very day of the testimonial dinner—the Cardinals overtook the Giants and won the pennant. Navin’s Tigers would be facing a wild, streaking St. Louis team, the Gashouse Gang, so nicknamed for the scrappy folks who lived on the poor side of town. The Dean brothers were coming to Detroit with Leo Durocher, Ducky Medwick, and Pepper Martin.

Oh, Those Dean Boys

Dizzy and Paul Dean stretched out across a bed in the Book-Cadillac Hotel, a mile down Michigan Avenue from Navin Field. They were partially dressed and puffing on cigars. It had been a good year so far, especially for Dizzy. Just twenty-four years old, he had won thirty games, something only two other pitchers had done since 1920. Paul, two years younger and a rookie, had won nineteen. They were baseball’s newest famous siblings, overshadowing the Waner brothers, “Big Poison” and “Little Poison.” Dizzy and Daffy, as some reporters insisted on calling Paul, were stars on the St. Louis team that would be facing the Tigers in the World Series.

The Book-Cadillac, standing thirty-three stories tall with 1,200 rooms, served as the unofficial Detroit headquarters for the series. It was where the Cardinals and many Tigers stayed, along with umpires, league officials, and celebrities like Mae West and Will Rogers. It was where saxophonist and bandleader Ozzie Nelson and singer Harriet Hilliard took up residency for an eight-day gig at the Mayfair lounge. It was where in a few days umpire Bill Klem would shove his way through a crowded lobby and profanely castigate outfielder Goose Goslin for some past indiscretion. The press room was at the Book-Cadillac, equipped with twenty Western Union circuits for relaying game stories. (Officials installed another ninety circuits at the ballpark.)

Hundreds of reporters, photographers, and cameramen had come to town. About a dozen of them gathered in Dizzy Dean’s room, sitting on chairs or the floor or leaning against the wall, occupying whatever spot they could find. Dizzy, as usual, did the talking. “I know just what you want me to say. You want me to pop off a lot of bragging about how me and Paul are gonna knock the Tigers off like a bunch of semi-pros. Well, I ain’t gonna say it. I ain’t gonna brag. All I’m gonna say is that I aim to plow that ball through there and Paul there is gonna fog ’em through. Ain’t that right, Paul?”

“You’re telling the genuine truth, Diz.”

Dizzy Dean was, in fact, a master at bragging and he didn’t mind popping off. He did it all the time, delivering gutsy challenges in his jolly, aw-shucks, homespun persona that left his targets more confused, unsettled, and baffled than angry. Otherwise they might have round-housed him.

When St. Louis manager Frankie Frisch looked around Detroit, he “never saw a city wilder,” he said. Part of it could be traced to the Tigers’ twenty-five-year absence from the playoffs—and part to its painful, ongoing climb out of the Depression. The city hungered for something to celebrate and the Tigers had provided it all summer. “Detroit is as crazy about the Tigers as a lovesick schoolboy is about his teacher,” wrote Bill Corum,
New York Evening Journal
columnist.

Hundreds of fans had spent the night outside the ballpark, warming by hobo fires, waiting for 17,000 bleacher tickets to be put on sale. In the early morning hours, police on horses had to repel twenty young men who formed a wedge and tried to ram their way to the front of the line. At nine o’clock when the bleacher gates opened, early arrivers rushed to claim their bench seats. The temporary bleachers were massive. They ran two hundred feet in a straight line from foul territory in left field to dead center and stretched upward fifty-five rows. The layout, open to the skies, resembled an immense, horizontal cookie tray tilted sideways. For the enemy outfielder in left, it would be an intimidating place to be, separated from a potentially angry horde by a flimsy-looking stretch of fence. It was more than three hours before game time and the bleacher fans, mostly men in hats and coats, sat biding their time. Odds were that at least a few Black Legion members, maybe dozens, were among them. They were fans too. They followed the team like everyone else in Detroit, even with the Jewish Greenberg and the Catholic Gehringer in starring roles. An on-field band of trumpets, trombones, and a sousaphone roused the fans to their feet, helping them pass the time with cheers and songs. All across the city people had adopted the “Tiger Rag,” a Dixieland tune, as the team’s theme.
Hold that Tiger, hold that Tiger
, they sang.