The Duck and Cover Pennant - Part 1 of 2
Deep inside the Cold War, a rare White Sox pennant inspired Chicago authorities to make a breathtakingly stupid decision.
If we’re being honest, we didn’t necessarily intend to lead into the Christmas holiday with a baseball story of atomic terror; that’s just how the schedule worked out. Schedule-planning is one of the tricker jobs at Project 3.18…we really should pay that guy more...
Well, we’re here now and we’re making the most of it. Think of today’s story as what folks in the television industry call “counterprogramming.” When you burn out on holiday movies, Project 3.18 is here for you with something entirely different.
On September 23, 1959, news outlets around the world carried a niche item of truly global interest: Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Council of Ministers, had eaten his first American hot dog.
According to the Chicago Tribune, “Khrushchev seemed to enjoy the hot dog and pronounced it ‘excellent.’”
This moment of cultural exchange took place at a bologna sausage packing plant in Des Moines, Iowa. The Soviet premier had just arrived in the Midwest in the midst of a 13-day goodwill tour of the United States. The just-concluded West Coast leg ended up kind of a bust when Khrushchev and his wife were denied permission to visit Disneyland, due to concerns on securing his safety in a park with 75,000 daily visitors, many of whom might not appreciate finding the leader of the USSR in the next car on “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”
Speaking at a luncheon full of Hollywood A-listers, the premier sarcastically asked if America was keeping its rocket launching silos in Disneyland. “I personally will accompany anyone anywhere in my country, and there will be no suggestion of his being subjected to anything but respect.”
In Iowa, Khrushchev was more in his element. He toured the packing plant, a factory that made tractors, and a working farm, assuring Iowans at every stop that they would be much happier when communism inevitably took hold in America.
At the first stop, the premier watched the sausage get made with avid interest, and when a worker offered him a cooked sample in a bun, he accepted. Asked if he would like mustard, he replied, “Of course I would like mustard,” and then dug in with gusto.
“We beat you to the moon, but you beat us to sausage,” Khrushchev said afterward. “One is not enough. Don’t change your formula. We could learn a lot about this from you. You Americans are very clever. First you give me a big lunch, then you give me sausage. It should be the other way around.”
He finished quickly, but his escort, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., America’s ambassador to the United Nations, was still eating. “Well, capitalist,” Khruschev said impatiently, “have you finished your sausage?”
It was all extremely charming, but one pre-snack activity hinted at the profound and ominous stakes of the relationship between the two nuclear superpowers, a relationship so degraded that even an exchange of processed meats constituted meaningful progress:
Taking no chances, U.S. security men tested the hot dogs and mustard with a Geiger counter.
On September 21, while Khrushchev wrapped up in California, the Chicago White Sox were also traveling. They had a 3.5-game lead over the Cleveland Indians with four games left to play. The Sox had just lost two out of three at home against the Tigers, and they would finish the season with a three-game series in Detroit, but sandwiched in between those series was an odd-little schedule fragment that ended up being pivotal. On September 22, the White Sox would visit Cleveland, the only other team still in contention, to play a single game. If Chicago won, they won the American League pennant.
A pennant victory for Chicago would be something of a big deal, as the White Sox were in their 41st season since their last pennant, head and shoulders better/worse than any other futility streak in either major league at the time. But it was even worse than that, as memories of the previous pennant brought little joy. That flag was won in 1919 by a group of cheaters who threw the World Series at the behest of mobsters, earning the sobriquet “Black Sox” for the tarnish they put on their team, their city, and the sport as a whole. In 1959 South Side fans longed for a fresh change of Sox.
In the White Sox’ defense, the 1920s through the early 1960s were terrible for nearly every American League team because this was the Age of the Yankees. In just the 1950s, New York had won eight of the nine pennants thus far contested and turned six of them into world championships. The White Sox became competitive in 1951 and spent the rest of the decade jostling with Cleveland for the honor of second place. It became tradition for New York to crush Chicago’s pennant hopes in a pivotal series at Comiskey Park each August.
But 1959 was an outlier for the Yankees, who effectively fell out of the race by midsummer, and both Chicago and Cleveland leaped headfirst at the window New York left open. It had been a close race all summer, and the White Sox had scuffled just enough to make the season’s final days interesting.
As the team’s charter flight prepared to depart on September 21, a photographer finishing his work onboard called, “Lots of luck in Cleveland!” “There’s no such thing as luck, daddy,” came an anonymous, period-specific reply from the back of the cabin. “You just gotta keep smashing.”
“Just Keep Smashing,” didn’t really suit the 1959 White Sox. They would finish sixth in an eight-team league by batting average, and their 97 home runs were the fewest in baseball. Only Sherm Lollar, the catcher, had more than 20.
“Keep moving,” would have fit much better. The White Sox took their walks by the bushel and had shortstop Luis Aparicio and his league-leading 56 stolen bases. Each time he got on base, Sox fans would begin to chant “Go, go, go,” and eventually the whole team became known as the “Go-Go” White Sox.
Things went right on the pitching side, too. Early Wynn finished with 22 wins and the Cy Young Award (there was only one at the time). Behind him, Bob Shaw didn’t make a start until mid-May but still finished 18-6. Shaw would never be as good again, but there was no better year to be great for the White Sox than 1959, while the Yankees’ machine was on a lift in the shop.
Chicago went 35-15 in one-run games and took the season series against the Yankees, 13-9, something they hadn’t done since 1925. They took hold of first place in late July and “nursed their lead” through the rest of the summer.
Anticipating a White Sox pennant was unfamiliar territory for almost everyone in Chicago, and the City Council sought to join in the fun. As the final week opened with the team still in first place, the council passed a unanimous resolution, urging that “bells ring, whistles blow, and bands play” when the White Sox clinched the inevitable victory. It was just a bit of legislative frippery—the kind that appears whenever a local sports team does well—urging Chicagoans to bang a few pots, honk a few horns, and remember to vote for fun-loving Democrats in the next election.
Wynn’s turn in the rotation had come up at the perfect time. He was the White Sox’ ace at age 39, having a remarkable late-career renaissance after coming to Chicago in a legend-for-legend trade in 1957. The White Sox gave up none other than Minnie Miñoso to get Wynn, but the team’s manager, Al Lopez, worked hard to sell a shocked fanbase on the trade of their franchise player. Lopez had managed Wynn in Cleveland for four seasons earlier in the decade. “If there was one game I had to win, my pitcher would be Early Wynn.” Such a game had finally materialized for Chicago.
Wynn was also the answer if you needed a game from Cleveland, specifically, having gone 5-1 against his old team that season. He would face—small world—Jim Perry, Gaylord’s older brother, who was having a great rookie season for Cleveland at age 22.
The Indians were having a weird moment. Their manager, Joe Gordon, had submitted his resignation on September 19, effective at the end of the season, capping a long feud with his boss, Frank Lane, the Indians’ general manager (and a renowned frenetic). Instead of accepting the resignation as submitted or firing Gordon on the spot, Lane had announced that because the club was still in a pennant race, the manager would stay, but the very day they were eliminated, he would be “summarily dismissed.” Yep, all very healthy, professional stuff.
Al Lopez’s position wasn’t that much better. In 1959 the White Sox were under new management, having been purchased by a group led by Bill Veeck, Jr., a lifetime baseball man on his third team. Veeck had inherited Lopez from the previous owners and was in the process of forming his own opinion of the manager. Winning a pennant or blowing a pennant was going to go a long way in making up Veeck’s mind on Lopez.
54,293 showed up at Municipal Stadium, excited to see which manager would emerge from Cleveland’s Thunderdome with a job. The massive ballpark was one of the most mercurial venues in baseball. Cavernously empty in slow times, filled with more echoes than people, it became one of the toughest places to play big games on the road, when baseball played to deafening football-size crowds, a rarity in the era before multipurpose stadiums became widespread.
Chicago fans got a big break when WGN announced it would televise the game, “as a public service.” This would be the first time the network broadcast a night game and the first time they’d show an away game. Announcers Jack Brickhouse and Lou Boudreau would work this Halley’s-Comet-level event in faraway Ohio.
Perry the Elder and Early Wynn traded a few early zeroes, but the White Sox struck in the third with two run-scoring doubles by Aparicio and third baseman Billy Goodman.
Perry departed for a pinch-hitter in the fifth, a move that contributed to Cleveland’s first run, but quickly backfired when reliever Jim Grant gave up back-to-back solo home runs to Jim Rivera and Al Smith in the White Sox’ sixth. Cleveland scored again in their sixth, on a sacrifice fly by Rocky Colavito, but Al Lopez was playing for his job, and he brought Bob Shaw, the No. 2 starter, to relieve Wynn.
The move worked perfectly until the bottom of the ninth inning, when Cleveland managed to load the bases on three consecutive singles. With one out, Vic Power, one of the team’s better hitters, came up to bat.
Lopez went to his best grizzled reliever, Gerry Staley. “Here we go,” Jack Brickhouse said on WGN, “Power is 1-for-4, an infield signal—there’s a ground ball!” Staley threw one perfect sinker, low and outside, and Power chopped it into the dirt. Aparicio swept to his left and cleanly grabbed the ball.
Aparicio has it! Steps on second, throws to first—the ballgame is over! The White Sox are the champions of 1959! The 40-year wait has now ended!
The White Sox’ 4-2 victory featured none of their usual hallmarks. They stole no bases, they led the whole way, and they won by more than one run, using two home runs to do the job. As the anonymous charter-plane prophet had predicted, the Go-Go Sox had to smash their way into the World Series.
The triumphant White Sox surrounded Staley and swept him up in a careful celebration (Staley was also 39, apparently a very good age for White Sox pitchers) before retreating to their clubhouse and the stock of beer and champagne Bill Veeck had sent traveling with the team.
(We found a lovely little bit of footage from the game, including the ending, and some of the clubhouse celebration afterwards. Jim Rivera dancing is a highlight.)
The Indians had kept the crowd in the game with 11 singles, but little did they know that their multi-decade pennant drought was just getting underway. As promised, now that Cleveland was officially eliminated, Frank Lane told Gordon to clean out his office1.
At first, the celebration in Chicago was pleasingly familiar, filled with people caught up together in a moment of profound and uncomplicated happiness. “Automobiles with shouting citizenry streamed downtown,” and everyone seemed to converge at the “world’s busiest corner” at State and Madison Streets. “News of the victory turned the Loop into a bedlam. Cavalcades of cars and people paraded onto State Street and nobody bothered about the traffic lights.”
Neighborhoods on both sides of town erupted in pandemonium, and at Cook County jail, where inmates had been permitted to listen to the game on the radio, tin cups began battering cell bars in celebration. That was as close as anything got to a riot, which was not very close at all. Chicagoans had done their city proud.
The Sox clinched the pennant at about 9:45 pm local time and the celebrations were in full swing at 10:30 pm, when the entire city was blanketed in an eerie, piercing wail.
Chicago’s 110 air raid sirens had come to sudden and surprising life. Everyone recognized the sound from the test alarms that sounded on the first Tuesday of every month at 10:30 am, but the next test was two weeks away and the sky was the wrong color. Throughout the decade, a generation of Americans had been told over and over that hearing that sound meant the Cold War had just turned hot—and it was headed your way.
To many Chicagoans, the world ending before the World Series made a sick kind of sense. “If you were a White Sox fan,” Bill Veeck wrote, “you had to figure it was just your luck for The Bomb to be dropped right after the White Sox won the pennant. What else could follow 1919?”
Next week we’ll tell you what Chicagoans did and said in response to their government’s warning of an imminent nuclear attack, do our best to explain why those sirens started going off, and check in with the White Sox as they flew back into a rather frazzled city in the middle of that same night.
On December 23: This is Not a Drill
Frank Lane had a replacement manager all lined up, but when talks with Leo Durocher fell apart days later, the general manager had a “change of heart,” and offered Joe Gordon the same job he’d just been fired from. Even more incredibly, Gordon took the job, the same one he’d just resigned from and been fired from.
This is really wonderful stuff, told with a richness that evokes the particulars of a time and place, with more than a little humor tossed in.
Brent, I couldn’t have said it better! I just love a double-play! Thanks, Paul for providing that footage; it was so exciting!