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Legendary Bill Veeck Was Showman And War Hero

By Joe Guzzardi

No Major League Baseball franchise owner entertained his fans better than Bill Veeck, Jr, a true showman. Holiday doubleheaders, especially those played on Independence Day, provided Veeck with six hours to delight his fans. As owner of the Cleveland Indians, he gave away red-white-and-blue straw hats to every man who entered the ballpark, dressed ushers as founding fathers John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, and had them distribute copies of the Declaration of Independence. No cost was spared to put on pyrotechnic displays that were second to none. Veeck knew that for baseball fans young and old, Independence Day was better than Christmas. School was out, Mom and Dad had days off, the weather was warm, patriotic flag-waving parades with marching bands traversed Main Street. Independence Day didn’t begin with gifts around the Christmas tree, but, as pennant races heated up, everyone’s favorite team would play two games in a single, sun-drenched afternoon.

During his six decades in professional baseball, Veeck owned Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns and Chicago White Sox. Veeck’s father, William, Sr, was the Chicago Cubs president from 1919 until 1933, and built two pennant winners in 1929 and 1933.  Bill, Jr liked to say: “I am the only human being ever raised in a ballpark.” At age 10, he worked as a ticket taker and popcorn vendor. When Veeck, 27, bought his first franchise, the AA Milwaukee Brewers, he launched what would be lifetime of gaudy baseball promotions. He gave away prizes almost every night and specialized in handing out animals: live lobsters, pigeons, chickens, guinea pigs, and his favorite, a swaybacked horse. Most of Veeck’s promotions were not announced in advance; he wanted arriving fans to wonder what the evening’s door prize would be. Veeck scheduled morning games for overnight war plant workers and served cornflakes breakfast to all the tired, hungry fans. Veeck believed trips to the ballpark should be fun, the fans, kings and queens. During World War II when nylons were hard to come by, Veeck distributed pairs to Ladies’ Day attendees. If Veeck couldn’t get nylons, he substituted orchids.

In 1951, after Veeck acquired the St. Louis Browns, he orchestrated his most memorable escapade. Browns’ manager Zack Taylor sent three-foot-seven-inch Eddie Gaedel to lead off against the Detroit Tigers. Gaedel crouched to create a non-existent strike zone as the Tigers’ pitcher dropped to his knees and delivered four straight balls. Five days later, Veeck displayed his ingenuity again with Grandstand Manager Night. Ushers handed out placards printed with “Yes” and “No” to cranks sitting behind the home dugout, and at crucial points they were asked to call the plays: Steal? Bunt? Hit-and-run? Manager Taylor watched from a rocking chair, puffing his pipe as the Browns beat the Athletics, 5-3. But Veeck shrewdly built winning teams and helped integrate MLB. His 1948 Cleveland Indians, led by former Negro Leagues’ stars Satchel Paige and Larry Doby—the American League’s first black players—won the World Series. Paige and Doby were eventually enshrined in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame.

Since Veeck had defended America during World War II, Independence Day had special importance to him. After the 1943 Brewers’ season, Veeck enlisted in the U.S. Marines Corp and was stationed in the Pacific on Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea. Approximately 216,000 Japanese, Australian, and U.S. servicemen died during the 1942-1945 New Guinea campaign. During an intense battle, anti-aircraft gun recoil smashed Veeck’s right leg. Veeck spent the rest of the war in hospitals. A few years after Veeck returned from war, infection set in on his wounded leg and doctors amputated below the knee. When Veeck’s artificial leg arrived, he threw a party to celebrate. But the infection slowly spread up Veeck’s stump, and he required 36 more operations in all. Veeck received the Bob Feller Act of Valor Award bestowed on 37 Hall of Fame members for their military service.

Veeck, once he took over the Chicago White Sox, added names to players uniforms and introduced the exploding score board, innovations that endure today. On Opening Day 1976, Veeck revisited the Independence Day meme. Veeck presented a Bicentennial-themed “Spirit of ’76” parade, casting himself as the peg-legged fifer bringing up the rear. But by 1981, he realized that the White Sox couldn’t compete in the free agent, high salary era. Veeck sold the team, his last venture as an owner. Then, he dabbled in announcing and wrote three autobiographical books. A heavy smoker, Veeck underwent two lung cancer operations in 1984. The surgeries were unsuccessful and, two years later, Veeck passed away. In 1991, the Hall of Fame inducted Veeck, a fitting tribute to baseball’s most creative mind.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com

Legendary Bill Veeck Was Showman And War Hero

Biden and Mayorkis Created Largest Child Trafficking Ring in US History Says Senator

By Joe Guzzardi

Unaccompanied alien children (UACs) who cross the border represent a crisis within a crisis, a devastating, contentious illegal immigration subcategory.  Many millions of illegal aliens have crossed the border— the unofficial Customs and Border Protection estimates total more than 10 million, including gotaways. As record numbers of illegal aliens continue to arrive, border authorities are also seeing higher numbers of minors traveling without a legal guardian. In response to the surge in unaccompanied youth, the Biden administration is releasing children to sponsors on an average of every 28 days. Prospective hosts can fill out their paperwork remotely and case workers rarely visit their home to evaluate the children’s safety. Officials are required, within one month, to follow up with the child via a phone call, a clear security risk. Lax monitoring has led to 85,000 UACs unaccounted for—lost in the federal system. 

Among the 10 million border surgers are about 430,000 illegal alien minors who have crossed the Texas/Mexico border since President Biden’s inauguration. The Congressional Research Service once estimated that 75 to 80 percent of unaccompanied minor immigrants are smuggled into the U.S. Others make the dangerous journey alone. Because U.S. immigration law requires CBP agents to transfer unaccompanied children who are not from Mexico to HHS custody, usually within 72 hours, parents entrust brutal cartel operators to deliver their children to the border where they assume the federal government will care for them and place them safely with family members.

After Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA), UAC arrivals spiked. Section 235 of the TVPRA divvied up UACs into two separate groups: (1) children from contiguous Canada and Mexico and (2) minors from all other nations. Predictably, the number of UACs from non-contiguous countries soared, as parents and astute smugglers realized that section 235 virtually assured that any child who could make it illegally into the U.S. would be released into the U.S. to rejoin his family.

Look at the stats: the Congressional Research Service reported that in FY 2008, the fiscal year before the TVPRA was passed, CBP encountered fewer than 10,000 UACs at the Southwest border, mostly Mexican nationals. By FY 2009, when the TVPRA bill was signed, the UAC number grew to around 20,000, 82 percent of them Mexican nationals, and just 17 percent from the non-contiguous Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The number of UACs entering illegally kept growing thereafter, with Border Patrol apprehending more than 68,500 of them in FY 2014. By then, however, just 23 percent of UACs came from Mexico and 77 percent from the Northern Triangle.

UAC arrivals rose dramatically in 2021 when President Joe Biden exempted unaccompanied minors from Title 42, the COVID-19 no-entry policy that allowed immigration authorities to immediately return illegal immigrants to Mexico. In August, border officials referred an average of 431 children per day to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) which forced the Biden administration to reopen a former work site in Carrizo Springs, Texas to house children as traditional shelters reached capacity. This marked the second time in less than two months that HHS reopened a so-called “influx care facility” for unaccompanied children. Last month, HHS restarted housing migrant children at another former work camp for oil workers in Pecos, Texas, shuttered in 2021.

The number of children placed with distant relatives increased between 2021 and 2022, according to a June 2023 HHS audit. The audit also found that HHS released 344 children to sponsors who were already hosting three or more unaccompanied minors, contributing to advocates’ fears that some patrons allow children to be exploited for cheap labor, a concern that a New York Times investigative report confirmed. Among the jobs the minor children were tasked to perform, The Times found, were dangerous slave labor positions like mopping up on slaughterhouse floors, operating heavy machinery, and prostituting their under-age child prostitution. The minors obtained their industrial jobs by presenting stolen Social Security cards or falsified Social Security numbers.

Last year in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Josh Hawley grilled ORR director Robin Dunn Marcos about UAC exploitation. Hawley pressed for answers about the ongoing child migrant crisis at the southern border and the 85,000 children that the Biden Administration cannot locate. Marcos could not answer any of Hawley’s questions. But the hearing revealed that ORR routinely failed to perform background checks on the adults in the homes, does not do home visits, and that Xavier Becerra, HHS secretary, ignored and then fired subordinates who warned of risks in the placement process. The secretary told Marcos that if she “could not increase the number of discharges, he would find someone who would,” and “This is not the way you run an assembly line,” an inference that the priority is placing children, and their safety is secondary. Senator Hawley expressed dismay over the administration’s criminal neglect of UAC’s. He said “The kids are in danger. The kids are in slavery. They are being exploited. And it should not happen in the United States of America.” The senator concluded that the U.S. is, to its shame, the biggest child trafficker in the world, Last year, Senator Hawley introduced the Corporate Responsibly for Child Labor Elimination Act of 2023” and wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding that his agency locate the missing 85,000 children. But congressional hearings, investigative reports, and proposed legislation will not end the child border crisis. While Biden dawdles on border security, his administration will continue to allow criminal child abuse, human trafficking, and the enrichment of Mexican cartels.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org

Biden and Mayorkis Created Largest Child Trafficking Ring in US History Says Senator