Terror in the City of Champions (15 page)

The Tigers began a rally in the sixth inning. Jo-Jo White walked and Cochrane singled him to third. White scored when Gehringer reached first on an error. No one was out when Goslin bunted. The throw went to third, where umpire Brick Owens, who was facing third baseman Pepper Martin’s back, called Cochrane out. No Tiger fan in the park agreed, and neither did the photos in the late-edition papers. They had been robbed. The Tigers scored two runs but would have added more if not for the bad call, Cochrane said. The umpire—not Rowe or any of the Detroit players—would be blamed for the defeat. On a later play Cochrane tore a ligament and suffered a deep gash above his knee. He limped severely for the remainder of the game. The Tigers lost. In the clubhouse the frustrated manager flew into a fury, flinging his mask and shin guards against a trunk before heading to the hospital, where he would stay the night. A seventh game would be played, but by most accounts the series had been decided. The Tigers were deflated. They had wasted their prime chance.

Billy Evans called his old pal Frank Navin that evening. Evans, a baseball executive and former umpire, tried to lift Navin’s spirits. He noted that on the bright side playing a seventh game would bring Navin $50,000 more in ticket sales. “To hell with $50,000,” Navin responded. “I’d give $50,000 and five times that much to have won today. I’ve been waiting thirty-five years to see Detroit win a world’s championship and here we have one within our grasp, and that umpire blows it for us.”

His sentiment mirrored the dour feeling at the next day’s contest. Forty thousand tickets were sold, yet seats were empty. In the vast ocean of temporary bleachers, wide gaps existed. It was game seven of the World Series for God’s sake. Normally it would be a prized ticket, but scalpers couldn’t dump their inventory even below cost. What a difference one miserable day could make. Yesterday, 20,000 more tickets could have been sold. Today, not so.

Pitchers Dizzy Dean and Elden Auker faced one another in the deciding game. Auker threw submarine style, and his blend of underhand and sidearm kept the Cardinals scoreless for two innings. But whatever smoldering hopes Detroiters harbored that afternoon died in the third inning. Auker surrendered in quick succession a double, a single, a walk, and a bases-clearing double. Cochrane called upon Schoolboy Rowe. After getting one out, he allowed two hits. Two more runs scored. Cochrane brought in Elon Hogsett and he permitted four straight batters to reach base. Two more runs. Tommy Bridges relieved him and he finally ended the inning. The seven-run deficit squeezed the last drop of optimism from the hometown crowd.

In the sixth inning fans’ despair detonated when Ducky Medwick tripled and slid into third base with spikes high. Marv Owen leapt to avoid being slashed and landed on Medwick, who then kicked Owen. Benches emptied and words flew. The Cardinals scored twice more, increasing their lead to nine. When Medwick headed out to his position in left field, he faced a furious army of fans, who bolted to their feet and rained fruit, bottles, vegetables, cups, and pretty much anything unbolted at Medwick. The torrent stopped the game. “I watched the crowd and Medwick and the pelting missiles through my field glasses,” reported Paul Gallico of New York, “and it was a terrifying sight. Every face in the crowd, women and men, was distorted with rage. Mouths were torn wide open, eyes glistened and shone in the sun. All fists were clenched. Medwick stood grinning with his hands on his hips, just out of range of the bottles.”

After workers cleared the garbage, Medwick tried to return to his position. The bombardment resumed. Where were they finding all this food? As it turned out, concessions owner Charlie Jacobs had spotted an opportunity and sent two dozen vendors to the bleachers with tossable treats. Three hundred pies disappeared within minutes. The grass had to be swept three times. Chants rose for Medwick to be removed. To prevent the first forfeiture of a World Series game, Commissioner Landis, sitting field-side, ejected Medwick. The game resumed; St. Louis had prevailed.

Syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler reported: “Those coarse and vulgar Cardinals of St. Louis finally won the World Series in a contest fraught with vulgarity, personal rudeness, and swaggering contempt. They beat the Tigers, 11–0, and dragged the proud spectacle down from its wonted high plane to the level of a contest played with dice up an alley.” Cardinals fans undoubtedly felt different.

A vast contingent of police officers assured that Medwick and his teammates got from Navin Field to the Book-Cadillac to the train station safely. “I never knew a city to take a World Series defeat so bitterly,” said Frisch, the manager.

So as not to have the whole season tainted by the disgraceful last twenty-four hours, the local papers focused on the high points of the campaign. In a page-one editorial, the
News
implored city residents to see the Tigers as an example: “If the spirit engendered in Detroit by a winning ball team were applied to the business of life, if it were expressed in all we do on our own behalf and that of the community, if it gave us half the confidence in ourselves that we have reposed these last few months in a ball team that decided it could not be whipped, there would need be no misgiving about the future of Detroit.”

Free Press
editorial director Malcolm Bingay, writing in character as cantankerous Iffy the Dopester, addressed Cochrane: “There are no regrets in the hearts of real sportsmen, Mickey. You fought the fight; you did your damnedest. You gave a tired and jaded old town the thrill it needed, the call to battle and high courage. . . . We’ll be with you when the robins nest again, Mickey, me boy. And O what a team we’ll have next year!”

Two days after the World Series, Schoolboy Rowe married Edna Mary Skinner in a private ceremony at the Leland Hotel.

The Attorney down the Street

Maurice and Jane Sugar lived on Second Avenue in the Winchester Apartments, one of several three- and four-story dark-brick residential buildings that faced Cass Park. Developed in the 1800s, the park occupied a full block amid the homes of some of the city’s most prominent early families. It featured a statue of Robert Burns, a water fountain at its center, and crisscrossing paths lined with benches that provided a lovely vantage point to witness the changing of seasons. In spring the park burst with budding trees and flowers. In summer it provided a shady haven of green. In fall it burned with autumnal color. In winter it looked pristine beneath the snow. By the 1930s many of the old-money mansions had disappeared. In their place had risen two major buildings: the wondrous Masonic Temple and the world headquarters of the S. S. Kresge dime store empire. The Sugars’ apartment complex sat in the middle of the Second Avenue block, flanked on one end by the splendid temple and on the other by the Black Legion’s fatigued Little Stone Chapel.

Maurice Sugar had grown up on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the tiny lumbering town of Brimley, where his Jewish family—the only one in town—operated a small store. They moved to Detroit before Maurice began high school. At the 2,200-student Central High, Sugar ran for student government and lost. (Fellow students told his gentile campaign manager that they liked Sugar and would have voted for him if not for his religion.) He was a studious young man who read literature, fiddled with music, and played quarterback on the school’s reserve team.

Sugar went to the University of Michigan to study law. At a gathering of socialists in Ann Arbor, he met Jane Mayer. She was on her way to becoming a physical education teacher. Their lifetimes of political activism flowered on campus. Two years after they married, he ran and lost as a socialist for Wayne County district attorney. During the Great War he spoke against the Conscription Act and refused as a pacifist to register for military service. The government prosecuted him. After his appeals had been exhausted, he spent ten months in jail. His sentence began weeks after the war ended. Sugar was disbarred because of the conviction. But he regained his law license. The experience emboldened him. He consulted with Clarence Darrow in the defense of Ossian Sweet, a black dentist who had moved into a white neighborhood and used weapons to defend his house from an angry mob. In 1932 Sugar represented families of the young men shot and killed in the Ford Hunger March. Afterward he traveled to Soviet Russia. Impressed by what he saw, he toured the United States and lectured at Friends of the Soviet Union events.

Maurice and Jane were now in their forties and they remained politically absorbed. They still had their sturdy physiques and their most distinctive physical features: he his dark-browed, deep-set eyes; she her short-cropped red hair. Though Maurice often wore a serious courtroom business suit accented with a pipe clenched between his teeth, he loved to be less formal and spend time in the outdoors. He had learned to hunt and fish at a young age, and with Jane he enjoyed canoeing and tent camping up north. They had no children. Their work and activities consumed them.

Sugar’s practice revolved mostly around labor law. He fought for strikers, defending in 1933 those who had picketed at one of Walter O. Briggs’s plants, and he regularly represented black Detroiters. Earlier in the year, as the Tigers were pursuing the pennant, Sugar had drawn headlines as the defense attorney in an incendiary assault case against car washer James Victory, who was accused of slashing and robbing a white woman in an alley. Sugar contended that Victory, who had a tight alibi, was being framed by police. He told the all-white jury: “There are a thousand times more illegal arrests by police than legal ones. . . . You know that. You know it if you read the newspapers at all. And it’s pretty tough on the colored people. The police don’t treat them very gently. They treat them even worse than they do whites.” His words amounted to an attack on the integrity of Col. Pickert and his police force. Sugar won a not-guilty verdict and soon the Detroit and Wayne County Federation of Labor formally called upon him to run for judge. In December 1934 he launched his candidacy.

Sugar had always loved music, dating to his boyhood when his mother enrolled him in piano lessons. Though of middling talent, he plugged along, carrying his interest into adulthood, where he found a way to combine it with his activism. At the height of the Depression, he penned “The Soup Song,” which would become a union hall standard. (
I’m spending my nights at the flophouse, I’m spending my days on the street . . .
) Encouraged by its success, he wrote a musical response in 1932 to an official, G. Hall Roosevelt (Eleanor’s brother), who said a worker could eat adequately on $1.75 a week. One stanza declared:
To hell with your plan of starving a la Roosevelt, to hell with you and your dollar seventy-five. We’re strong enough to fight to keep from starving, and you will learn that we are still alive.
Sugar took pride in his songs. He had fun composing them. He felt a good song could build unity within a movement.

The prospects of an election campaign must have filled Sugar with high spirits, for on the last day of 1934—New Year’s Eve—he wrote a new piece called “Be a Man”:
There’s a cry that starts them shaking as they sit upon their thrones. . . . There’s a cry that serves them notice that they can’t do as they like. It’s the workers’ call to action, it’s the workers’ call to strike!

Black Legion leaders knew of Maurice Sugar. They realized that one of the city’s best-known radicals and most prominent leftist attorneys lived in their midst. Sugar took on the kinds of cases that irritated, exasperated, and angered legionnaires. Every few months, he seemed to do something that thrust himself into the spotlight on the side of someone whose rights had been violated. Sugar staged rallies and fought passionately. While doing so, he made enemies of powerful men like Col. Pickert and Harry Bennett, Henry Ford’s confidant.

Radio magnate George Richards put together a business group in the spring of 1934 and bought the Portsmouth football team for $15,000, moving it north to Michigan. Known in Ohio as the Spartans, the team had struggled financially through the Depression, so much so that star Earl “Dutch” Clark had sat out the 1933 season because he needed to earn more money doing something else. “We’d get 5,000 people out to watch the practices because they were free. . . . But we’d only get about 2,000 out for the games. . . . They couldn’t afford it,” said Clark.

Richards changed the team name to the Lions, figuring it would fit nicely with the popular Tigers. When they debuted in the fall of 1934, wearing silver leather helmets and Honolulu blue uniforms, they weren’t the city’s first professional football team. Others had tried and failed. Richards, who had helped introduce Father Coughlin to America, figured that as owner of WJR he would be able to give the Lions a boost through radio promotion. (Even Coughlin would hype the team in his broadcasts.)