Free A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred by George Will Page B

frequently played in front of such small crowds that Veeck used to joke that when a fan called to ask what time that day’s game would start, he would answer, “What time can you get here?” The ivy he planted probably drew more fans to Wrigley Field than his Browns team drew to Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis.
    On September 17, 1937, the Chicago Tribune carried a story with this headline: “New Wrigley Field Blooms in Scenic Beauty—and Scoffers Rush to Apologize.” One of the scoffers was the author of the story, Edward Burns, who had written a series of grumpy reports about changes under way at the field, including enlargement of the bleachers. Now, however, he was prepared to “emboss an apologetic scroll to P. K. Wrigley, owner of the most artistic ballpark in the majors.” Burns estimated that the park was valued at $3 million.
    Paul Dickson is the author of a 2012 biography of Veeck that contains some fascinating details about Veeck’s job supervising Wrigley Field’s concessions. Veeck hired vendors to sell programs, peanuts, and other ballpark staples, and one of his hires was known as a “duker,” meaning a sort of hustler. This young fellow, named Jacob Leon Rubenstein, had been born in 1911 and had developed some disagreeable tricks of the vendor’s trade, such as bumping into a startled fan, placing the program in his hand, and thendemanding a quarter in payment. Rubenstein also hawked paper birds tied to wooden sticks. The birds chirped when the sticks were twirled, and he would foist them on children in the hope that they would pressure their parents into purchasing the birds.Veeck said the Cubs assigned someone with binoculars to monitor this vendor “to make sure they were getting their share of his nefarious sales.”
    This vendor did not linger in Chicago. Rubenstein went west, changing his name to Jack Ruby. In 1947, he settled in Dallas, where he opened several seedy nightclubs. On November 22, 1963, distraught about the assassination of President John Kennedy, the former vendor put his snub-nosed Colt Cobra .38-caliber revolver in his jacket pocket and headed to the Dallas police headquarters, where Oswald was being held; there, he passed himself off as a newspaper reporter to attend a press conference about the assassination. Two days later, he returned to that building and fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruby was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to death. His conviction was overturned, and he succumbed to lung cancer while awaiting a new trial. He died at Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy had been declared dead, and where Oswald had died from Ruby’s gunshot. Ruby is buried in Westlawn Cemetery in Norridge, Illinois, nine miles from Wrigley Field.
    Veeck’s supervision of Wrigley Field’s concessions also brought him into contact with a short, stocky go-getter salesman of paper cups and Multimixer milk-shake machines. The salesman was an ardent Cub fan. He was also apest, constantly badgering Veeck to stock up on more cups. Born in 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, Ray Kroc was a cheerful Willy Loman. The son of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, he was as unpretentious as a hamburger, as salty as a French fry, and as American as frozen apple pie. In 1945, after sixteen years of the Depression and war, Americans were eager to get into their cars and hit the road, which is what Kroc did to hawk his cups and machines. In 1954, when he got an astonishing order for eight milk-shake machines from a restaurant in San Bernardino, California, owned by two brothers, he went there to take a look. One look was all he needed.
    The Second World War had accustomed many millions of American palates to the standardized fare of Crations and factory canteens. Standardization was what the San Bernardino brothers offered. Kroc convinced Richard and Maurice McDonald to accept a small percentage of his gross revenues, if there were to be any, in exchange for his use of their name and business model, which