and across the street to the Gaiety Bar. Right behind them were three members of the Boston press corps, plus Bill Crowley, then a member of the broadcasting team. Harris and Higgins were at one end of the huge oval bar, arguing. The media guys settled down at the other end. Otherwise the place was empty.
Three scenes are going to be taking place in separate venues. One at the Gaiety Bar, another in Ed Rumill's hotel room, in the hotel, and the third at the rooftop press room at Fenway Park.
Bill Crowley: “The Gaiety had this fat, ugly bar girl, Audrey, who looked like Tugboat Annie. Jake Liston of the Traveler hands her a sawbuck and says, 'Go down and wash some glasses, and come back and tell us what they're talking about.' She comes back in a couple of minutes. 'The little guy keeps telling the big guy he should resign. The big guy keeps telling the little guy to go luck himself.' ”
Off that promising beginning, Lyn Raymond of the Quincy Ledger slipped her another ten spot and sent her back to wipe around the bar. Back she came with her new report. “The little one says to the big one he's fired. The big one tells him he's a little shiI, he can't fire him. The little one says, 'I can fire you, and I have to fire you, because Yawkey wants me to fire you.'”
Meanwhile, back at the hotel, Ed Rumill of the Christian Science Monitor had been taking a phone call from one of his numerous ex wives. The former Mrs. Rumill had been in Duke Zeibert's restaurant in Washington the previous night and had overheard a conversation between George Preston Marshall, the owner of the Washington Redskins, and Bucky Harris in which Marshall, the football man, had been holding forth on the merits of the Senators' third- base coach, Billy Jurges. “I think you're right,” she had heard Bucky say. “He might be just the right man for us at this time.”
Okay, the Boston writers now had it all. Which was more than could be said for Tom Yawkey, back in Boston. Yawkey had called a press conference to announce the dismissal of Higgins. Unfortunately, nobody at Fenway Park had been able to locate Bucky Harris during those two days, either. With nothing to tell the press, Yawkey was at
the bar, drinking heavily. He was also doing something he almost never did, he was taking questions. Unaccustomed as he was to being cross examined, he turned hostile. “There are people here who are trying to tell me how to run a seven-million-dollar operation,” he said, “and there's not one of you who could even run a streetcar.” To show how bad things were going for him, one of the writers delivered a stiff protest. He had worked his way through college driving a streetcar, he wanted Yawkey to know. Through Harvard University yet.
Soon enough, Yawkey retreated to the position that he hadn't called the press conference to announce the name of a new manager but only to inform them that there was going to be a club meeting over the All Star break to decide what direction the Red Sox were going to take.
Right on cue, the phone rang. The call wasn't for Yawkey, though. It was for Hy Hurwitz. As soon as he put down the phone, Hurwitz
said, “You haven't decided who your new manager is going to be?” “I haven't decided whether there's going to be a new manager.”
Hurwitz said, 'Down in Baltimore they're announcing that Bucky
Harris is saying that Billy Jurges is going to be the new manager.“ ”Who? Who?'
“Mr. Yawkey, the Globe is printing that you hired Billy Jurges today. Two hours ago.”
“We did?” said Thomas Austin Yawkey, the sole owner of the Boston Red Sox Baseball Club.
Billy Jurges had been a great shortstop for the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants. He had played for the Cubs, as a young buckaroo, in the Chicago of AI Capone. In the spirit of the times, he had once taken a bullet through the hand while trying to convince teammate Kiki Cuyler's gun-toting girlfriend that Kiki wasn't being unfaithful to her. Obviously he was the perfect manager for the Boston Red Sox.
Wrong. It wasn't Capone's Chicago, and Billy wasn't twenty-three years old. Billy Jurges tried to instill some discipline into the ball club, SOme rules even. A curfew, for crissake. The players hated him. They also ignored him. Let him fine away to his heart's content; they knew
nothing would ever be taken out of their paychecks. Frank Sullivan, the ringleader of the not-so-jolly band of hell-raisers, summed it up perfectly at the end of one road trip. “If a bomb had hit the hotel in Detroit at two in the morning,” he said, “we'd have still been able to put a team on the field.”
In the spring of 1960, as Ted was getting ready for his final year, the former Higgins supporters in the press corps began to print that there was dissension in the Red Sox clubhouse over the way Jurges was running the club. Ted Williams jumped to Jurges's defense and was quoted by Joe Reichler of the AP as saying, “It's all a bunch of horsefeathers. It's those damn Boston writers again. They're always starting trouble.”
But that was almost a reflex action. “I was for every manager I ever played for,” he says, “every one of them.” What he really means is that all he ever wanted from the manager was to be left alone. “My game was right there to play, to hit the best I could, and I tried to do that every time I got to the plate. The manager wasn't going to affect me. I think if I had hated a manager, I'd have hit better because I'd have been mad at him when I got to the plate. You can get too damn happy with it all, and too self-satisfied, and barn, you go down the tubes.”
In June the Red Sox were back in last place, and on their way to Minneapolis to play an exhibition game against their farm club (which had a new kid, just out of Notre Dame, named Carl Yastrzemski). A mediocre sore-armed minor-league pitcher who hadn't won a game all year pitched a no-hitter against them, and by the time they boarded the plane for Kansas City there was a story on the wire quoting an unidentified player as saying that Jurges had lost control of the team.
Everybody knew that the source was Tom Brewer, the team's best pitcher. As they arrived in the hotel lobby in Kansas City, Jurges announced that there would be a clubhouse meeting and he wanted all the players and all the newspapermen to be there.
The newspapermen at a clubhouse meeting? Already disaster was in the air. The players were sitting or standing at their lockers. The writers were scattered around the walls.
Ted Williams, still being protective of Jurges, was glowering at any writer who dared to come near him. Pumpsie Green, who had just been called up from the minors to become the Red Sox's first black player, had just sat down at the end of the table in the middle of the room and been handed an ice-cream bar when Jurges came clomping out of his office.
Bill Crowley was there again: 'The great lesson I learned that day was that if you want to make a dramatic entrance do not wear shower clogs. ' '
