by Bud Selig
I could walk from the library to the Pi Lambda Phi house and listen to the game the whole way, without even having a radio of my own. It was on in every dorm and every car. Braves baseball was an obsession.
The Braves won ninety-two games that first season in Milwaukee, finishing second to the Brooklyn Dodgers. They drew more than 1.8 million fans, setting a National League record, and in each of the next four years would draw over two million, including 2.21 million in 1957. It was an unbelievable beginning, one that caused other teams to think differently about baseball’s future out west.
I was picked to serve as president of my fraternity my junior year in Madison. I don’t know if I wanted to be the Pi Lambda Phi president. It just happened. Some of the older guys who had been running things came to me and said, “You’re the next president of the fraternity.” They took a vote and that was it. I was the REX. It took a fair amount of time, but I enjoyed it.
Charlie Thomas played on the football team. He was a backup to Alan Ameche, who had led Wisconsin to the Rose Bowl the year before and was on his way to winning the Heisman Trophy as a fullback and a linebacker.
Charlie worked as a waiter at the Pi Lam house to earn a little money. He was African American, and he was a great guy.
I had a routine in those days. I’d go to the library to study after dinner every night. One day he said, “I know you go to the library every night, can I go with you? Would you wait ten minutes, let me clean up?” We walked to the library, studied, and afterward walked to this place, Greasy George’s, and had hamburgers. It was appropriately named. It was plenty greasy.
Charlie and I got to be really good friends. I got the idea one day that he should join Pi Lam, breaking the color barrier in our fraternity the way that Jackie Robinson had in baseball. That had happened in 1947, eight years earlier. Integrating a college fraternity didn’t seem like such a big deal, at least not to me. It was the right thing to do.
Of course, civil rights events around the country were starting to shape my thinking—it wasn’t just Jackie. These were simple times in Madison, for sure, but complicated ones in America. The landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education was handed down on May 17, 1954, and it wouldn’t be long before racial issues rightfully would become impossible for anyone to ignore.
Emmett Till, as I would learn later, was a kid from Chicago who loved little more than to play baseball on the South Side’s sandlots. His mother, Mamie, used to tell stories about the time she sent him to the store for bread only to find him playing baseball with friends as it got dark.
Emmett had family in Mississippi, near the tiny Delta town of Money, outside of Greenwood, and as a fourteen-year-old traveled there by train in the summer of 1955. He was there to help in the fields and to enjoy himself in the country, where he could fish and relax before returning in the fall.
When Till returned, he was in his coffin. He had been beaten, shot, and horribly disfigured before being thrown into the Tallahatchie River, where his body was discovered. His so-called crime was being friendly with a local white woman while visiting her store. It was a horrible tragedy and quickly became a national story, thanks in part to graphic photographs and persistent reports on radio and television from Chicago, where Mamie directed that Till receive an open-casket funeral.
Lynchings were nothing new, sadly. But this one was different because of the attention it received. A TV news bulletin even interrupted scheduled broadcasts after the body was discovered. Till’s heartsick mother seized the opportunity to use her son’s death as a call to action for African Americans and whites with a mind for fairness.
In terms of where I was and how my life was going, I was a million miles away from these horrors. But I can remember being shaken by how anyone in our country could treat a person like this. It just horrified me.
The funeral home where Till’s body was taken in Chicago was at Forty-first and Cottage Grove, not too far from Thirty-fifth and Shields, where the White Sox played at Comiskey Park. I’d been there a lot, especially for Sunday doubleheaders against the Yankees, and I think that connection really brought home the meaning of the story to me. I looked at it as a different world down south, but this was a kid from Chicago.
I couldn’t believe the color of someone’s skin could matter this much. That was not how I was raised. So, I sounded out some of my closest friends in Pi Lam and lots of others about Charlie pledging. They told me there would be some opposition from some of our brothers, which really saddened me, but I thought we could pull this off. I was determined not to let that old mind-set take hold. The guys knew Charlie and they liked Charlie. That was the thing I kept coming back to when I considered whether this could work.
One day walking home from Greasy George’s I said to Charlie, “You get along so well with all the guys, it’s like you’re one of the guys.” I didn’t really think much about how I was white and he was black. I didn’t have any bias. I never heard my parents talk about it, nothing. He was a wonderful guy, and I really liked him a lot.
I said to him, “You ought to pledge.” He looked at me like I was nuts. I had studied our fraternity bylaws before I talked to them. They were silent on the subject of race and, if anything, the history of our fraternity suggested inclusion, not exclusion.
About two weeks later, Charlie said to me one day, after Greasy George’s or on the way there, “Were you serious about that?” I said, “You bet I was.” He said, “Well, I’m thinking about it.” I said, “I wish you would.”
He was one of the guys. He said to me a day or two later, “Well, if you want to take it on and do it, I’m willing.” I said, “Charlie, it’s my pleasure.”
We had a big fraternity meeting to discuss Charlie and the other pledges. Of course, that’s not all there is to the story. It was the night a few of our guys got in trouble, and I had to go dig ’em out of jail. That was my lot in life.
Five or six of them dressed up as Hollywood producers, and convinced an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old young lady to pose for photos, saying they could get her a job in Hollywood. Except it turns out she was engaged to a Madison policeman. Here I am in the midst of this very dramatic meeting and I look up and there are two policemen at the door. I thought, well, we’re making too much noise and the girls next door complained. It turns out I had to take our house fellow, the faculty adviser, a man named Art Hillman, who was in law school, with me to get these jerks out of jail.
By this point we’d already had one vote and Charlie hadn’t gotten in. I wasn’t willing to quit on Charlie, so I told the guys, don’t go anywhere. I’m going to the jail, but I’ll be right back.
We went to the jail and there were our nitwits. They had hats on that said PHOTOGRAPHER, and stuff like that. You couldn’t write a script like this. Well, Art helped me and we got the guys. Then I got back to the house.
I said, I know it’s late, but we’re not leaving here, no matter how long it takes, until we get this vote. After many tries, the last vote we took passed. Charlie was in.
I remember calling Charlie to tell him. He was a wonderful guy. He went on to become superintendent of schools in Evanston, Illinois, had a wonderful career. He was as fine a human being as I ever met. He had the misfortune to be behind Ameche, probably the greatest football player Wisconsin ever had, probably the best football player I ever saw. But Charlie was a great friend to have, and we were friends for a lifetime.
A few days later, I got a call from Fifty-second Street in Milwaukee. It came into the fraternity house, where we all took our calls. Usually it was my mother calling, but this time it was my father.
“Buddy, I’ve had some calls from parents, and they’re unhappy.”
“Yeah, what’s that about?”
He said he was just calling to tell me that these parents didn’t like Charlie Thomas in the fraternity. He said it was my decision, he wasn’t saying there was anything wrong with it, and that my mother didn’t even want him to call, but he thought I neede
d to know what was going on. He said it was the right thing to do, that he was proud of me, but that some of the parents didn’t think it was time yet for a mixed fraternity.
“Well, Dad,” I said. “I’m going to graduate next year. This is our time. I’ll be gone. I understand some people are unhappy, but it’s too bad. It’s done. It’s over.”
And I’m so glad I did exactly what I did. It was the right thing to do, without a hint of a doubt, and it was a great lesson for me in how to get the votes necessary to make change even when there’s resistance.
And as it turned out, it wouldn’t be the last time I’d need this skill.
4
“JUST FOR A year.”
I can still hear my father’s words, asking me to come work for him at the auto dealership. I was hesistant, since I had other plans. Of course, if I’d known that selling cars would be a crucial step to me becoming involved in Major League Baseball, I would have jumped at the chance.
At the time my father said these words to me, I’d just gotten out of the army, which had been a story in itself. I’d enlisted after graduating from Wisconsin and headed off to Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, near the Ozark Mountains, for basic training. The Korean War had ended three years earlier, but Israel had just invaded Egypt in a tug-of-war over the Suez Canal, so if you were a man of draft age you had to consider the possibility that the armed forces could be in your future.
Fort Leonard Wood is about three hours southwest of St. Louis, and you wouldn’t call it a tourist attraction. I reported there for basic training, under Sergeant Nelson Morris. I liked him, liked the guys—a lot of them were from Milwaukee—and saw the whole thing as a necessary adventure, doing my part. I tried hard at everything but didn’t always bring a lot of skill to the tasks I was assigned. This was clear on the shooting range, as rifles were new to me. “Do me a favor,” Sergeant Morris said one day. “Put the gun down. You’re shooting at everyone else’s targets!”
After about six weeks at the base I wasn’t feeling well. I was weak. I was skinny. I’d lost a lot of weight that summer. One Friday night we were cleaning up for inspection the next morning and it was clear something was wrong with me. Sergeant Morris sent me to bed. I think I ate two hamburgers that night, with raw onions, and had two big Cokes. That’s not too smart when your stomach’s a mess, and my stomach was a mess.
Luckily for me, my commanding officer, Major Beliveau, was a doctor, and he recognized that there was something significantly wrong with me. It turned out I had a bleeding ulcer, which had apparently started my senior year at Wisconsin. I remember having stomach issues then but never thought it was serious. Major Beliveau ordered blood transfusions for me. He told me afterward that I might have died if it had gone untreated one more day.
I became close to Major Beliveau. He had me work as his administrative assistant after I got released from the hospital. He said I could get a medical release to go home, but I didn’t want to be seen as shirking my duty. He taught me a lot about medicine, which I’d think about when I got involved in baseball and was dealing with the health of players.
I enjoyed what I was doing at Fort Leonard Wood, but when my time was up I knew going home to Milwaukee was the right thing to do. I had responsibilities there.
For one thing, while I was in basic training, my longtime girlfriend, Donna Chaimson, came to visit me and we impulsively got married. Her sister Marsha had married my brother Jerry and we’d been dating in Milwaukee and during my time in Madison, so we’d been together for a while by that point. It was what we wanted to do, even if it didn’t thrill everybody back home. My mother strongly felt I was too young to get married, but I was ready. I never really asked myself if I was too young to make such a commitment, even if that was the summer I turned twenty-two. In those days that was what you did. You went to school, got a degree, and got married. I never thought anything about it. I just did it.
For another thing, my original plan had been to return to Wisconsin for graduate school, but now my father was presenting me with a different idea, asking me to join him in the auto business. It wasn’t what I had in mind, but his words “just for one year” made sense. In those days when your father asked you to do something, you did it.
So just like that I was a newlywed working in a new job, doing anything and everything my dad needed at the family business. He was a hard worker—six days a week, five nights a week. So that’s what I did, too. I never really sold cars, but I did everything else. I worked hard and rooted for the Braves just as hard.
They had finished behind the Brooklyn Dodgers all four years they had been in Milwaukee, finishing second in the National League three times and third once. They had won ninety-two games in 1956, only one less than the Dodgers.
Not surprisingly, my mom was as big a fan as I was. One time during my senior year at Wisconsin I was speaking to a big luncheon at school. There were a lot of kids there and many of their parents. In the middle of my talk, there was a commotion in the back. There was my mother holding a radio to her ear and she shouted, “Buddy, [Joe] Adcock just hit a homer to beat the Dodgers!” That’s the kind of fan she was.
The ’57 season was the first time I was able to be in Milwaukee for a full season. I couldn’t have picked a better year. They were loaded. Hank Aaron, only twenty-three but already in his fourth season, had an MVP year, leading the league with forty-four homers and 132 RBIs while hitting .322. It was truly a privilege to have a chance to watch Henry hit.
The Braves’ infield had Frank Torre at first, Red Schoendienst at second, Johnny Logan at short, and Eddie Mathews at third. Warren Spahn told me years later that they never would have done what they did without Schoendienst, who was acquired in a trade at the deadline (it was June 15 then).
Hurricane Hazle became part of the story late that summer.
Bob Hazle, a left-handed-hitting outfielder promoted from Triple-A Wichita, picked up the nickname Hurricane when he went on a two-week tear in August, hitting .473 with five homers and nineteen RBIs in fourteen games. The Braves were already in first place but being threatened by the Cardinals. Hurricane Hazle served noticed against them in a three-game sweep in St. Louis, pushing the Milwaukee lead to five games, and the state of Wisconsin was thrown into a raging case of pennant fever.
I was at County Stadium as much as I could be and always had the game on the radio when the team was on the road. I was taking an accounting class, at my father’s urging, but the last place I wanted to be that fall was a classroom.
There was a class scheduled the night of September 23, when the Braves had a chance to clinch the pennant against the Cardinals. I’d almost never skipped a class in my life. Maybe never. But I did that night, after first starting to drive to the school. I pulled the car off the freeway and headed to County Stadium, which was beyond capacity. I think I parked nine miles away and the only ticket I could get was an obstructed-view seat behind a big metal post. It was cold that night, but I loved every minute.
It was a 2–2 game through nine. The Braves had a chance to win in the tenth, loading the bases, but Billy Muffett got Torre to hit into a double play. I about died. But it only made the eventual ending even sweeter in my memory.
In the eleventh inning, Aaron hit a laser to center field, the deepest part of the park. Wally Moon chased it, but the ball cleared the fence. Milwaukee had clinched the pennant. We were going to the World Series.
This was big. Enormous. Gigantic.
The image of the great Aaron, deliriously happy, being hoisted onto the shoulders of his teammates was burned into my memory and hasn’t faded. That photo was carried on the front page of the New York Times the next day, opposite a picture of the National Guard being ordered into Little Rock because Arkansas governor Orval Faubus was defying courts by not letting nine courageous African American children enroll at Little Rock Central High School.
Those two contrasting photos, one showing unity in Wisconsin and the other showing division in Arkansas, made t
he same kind of impression on me that the Emmett Till murder had. I’ll never forget looking at that front page and seeing the sociological significance. My father would teach repeatedly, “Nothing is good or bad except by comparison.” The comparison between the ideals being shown by Aaron’s place in baseball and the ugly politics of race in America couldn’t have been any clearer.
I was as joyful in the first weeks of October as I’d ever been. My first child, Sari, a beautiful daughter, was born on September 30, the day the Braves were heading to New York for the World Series.
My emotions were thoroughly tested by both events, I’ll admit. I put in a full week at work, too, although the day games didn’t help. I was hardly alone in being preoccupied by baseball, however, as Milwaukee essentially shut down when the World Series games were televised on NBC, with Mel Allen and Al Helfer providing commentary.
Here’s an amazing fact about the support the Braves received in 1957: they not only outdrew the Yankees; they outdrew the Yankees and New York Giants combined. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Milwaukee is a great baseball town, which was why Aaron and many of his teammates settled here to raise their families rather than returning to their old hometowns in warmer parts of the country.
In fact, Milwaukee was such a great baseball town in ’57 that fans booked all the hotel rooms downtown for the World Series. Casey Stengel was furious when his Yankees wound up staying in Browns Lake, a tiny community thirty miles southwest of town, which prompted Stengel to call our city “Bushville,” as in bush league.
Stengel wasn’t happy at the end of the World Series, either. Lew Burdette beat Whitey Ford 1–0 in game 5 and came back on two days’ rest to shut out Mickey Mantle and the Yankees again in game 7. The Braves had given us a championship in their fifth year in town.
