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bushville wins! Copyright © 2012 by John Klima. All rights reserved. Printed in the
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ISBN 978-1-250- 00607-3 (hardcover)

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First Edition: July 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 1
david versus goliath
Lou Perini’s secret weighed on him like the water pails he once hauled on
his father’s work crew. He had a plan so extraordinary he dared tell nobody,
not breathing a word to his wife, his seven children, or the Jesuit priest
who routinely passed him while he whispered his daily rosary. But on the
morning of March 14, 1953, when Perini emerged in the lobby of the Dixie
Grande Hotel after an exhaustive all-night planning session, his tousled
hair and crooked collar were barely a shade better kept than the Boston
sportswriters. Perini had a blueprint for the future so bold that it was going
to change baseball forever.
Perini was a forty-nine-year-old bulldozer of a man, the firm son of
Italian immigrants and American prayers and dreams, born and raised on
Boston baseball. He had an eighth-grade education but possessed a natural
ability for engineering and an obsession with efficiency and productivity.
The game was his passion but being president of his family’s construction
company was his profession. He inherited the business from the father
who taught him humility, equality, and togetherness by requiring him to
haul water pails for workers on steaming hot summer days. His father, Bon-
figlio Perini, had arrived in America with nothing, scratched his name into
the Ellis Island registry, and clawed his way to the top. He insisted his sons
speak English and he taught them to appreciate all people and to believe
that wealth should never equal tyranny. After Bonfiglio died, Louis built
the local family construction business into an international corporation, with
savvy befitting a tycoon and the humble gratitude of a man of God.
For all the highways and bridges, and subways and runways that Perini

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john klima

built, almost nothing meant as much to him as building his baseball team,
the Boston Braves. He saw baseball as a bridge to a better world. There were
two teams in Boston then—the Red Sox and the Braves. The wealthy Red
Sox were never for sale; the impoverished Braves were. So in 1944, Perini
and two of his construction pals bought into the dream. Perini’s first sig-
nificant move was to fire manager Casey Stengel. Fast with a quip and
slow with a win, Casey lived in sixth place. Perini wanted to die in first.
Perini and his partners were nicknamed the “Three Shovels,” and even
though the Braves made it to the 1948 World Series, there wasn’t enough
money in Boston to dig the Braves out of obscurity. They went from bad to
worse, their ballpark was a plywood dump in the wrong part of town, and
their players weren’t much better. Their fan base was going strong on the
nostalgia of the 1914 World Series champ “Miracle” Braves. Memories
were plentiful but ticket sales were poor. Perini used to bring his family to
the ballgames just to help fill the stands. The fans were few and dying, so
Perini bought out his partners and began plotting the path to save the
Braves.
He was never happy unless he was building, but he wasn’t happy build-
ing from the boardroom. He abhorred silk suits in favor of heavy wool and
wore the same cheap necktie until it was so worn that his wife made him
throw it out. But when it was time to do business, Perini became a bull-
dozer. He moved ideas and men and he plowed them over if they stood in
his way. But Perini never saw himself as a bully. He invested heavily in a
charity he created called the Jimmy Fund. He was a former sandlot catcher
who wrote large checks for football stadiums and donated large sums of
money to amateur sports programs. Sports were for dreamers and offered
paths to new lives. Perini understood that nobody wanted to be on the
bottom forever. Baseball offered a wondrous opportunity for equality and
a fertile proving ground for the underdog.
When Perini barreled into the lobby of the Dixie Grande that spring
training morning in Florida, he was the underdog. The Boston sportswrit-
ers thought Perini must have made a big trade. They were right in one
sense—Perini was making a trade, but not for a player. He was about to let
the world in on his secret and blow up tradition.

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 bushville wins!

“This was a difficult decision to make,” Perini announced. “But we’ve

made up our minds to take the team into Milwaukee.”
Perini was furiously trying to keep control of a plan he devised in 1950
and hoped to execute in 1954. But time and circumstances were working
against him. If Perini was going to save his dying franchise, the time had
come to plow the earth. The dumbfounded Boston sportswriters peppered
Perini with questions. He avoided the details because he didn’t have time,
and the transaction was complicated. Baseball writers knew how to handle
big news about ballplayers, but this was something else. They were explor-
ing factors none of them had experience with. Instinctively, they resented
that an outsider like Perini defied the baseball establishment. They felt
entitled to the scoop and were furious and insulted that he hadn’t warned
them the day before, when he had denied the rumors of the Braves leaving
Boston. “When I said it I meant it,” Perini shot back. “I was sincere but
things came up that make it necessary for us to move.”
The world sighed in unison: why Wisconsin? The Milwaukee Brewers
had been a minor league team since 1902, one stop below the big leagues
in classification, and a few dozen steps lower in national respect. They had
a short stint as a National League team seventy-five years ago, but that
was before the modern majors existed. In 1950, a dozen American cities
were larger. Milwaukee’s population of 600,000 was less than one-tenth of
New York City’s seven million. Why would Perini betray the proud Bos-
ton baseball tradition in favor of the Germanic Midwestern city they
knew only by stereotype? For many across the country, Milwaukee was the
train station on the way to Chicago—a fine place for a trip to the restroom,
a bratwurst at a minor league game, and a cheese wheel. Old European
prejudices prevailed and archaic images of gruff German and Polish work-
ing sloths who could barely say “Ticket, please” in proper English came to
mind.
As an Italian in an Irish town, Perini had grown up around that sort
of ethnic discrimination. It motivated and guided his conscience. He was
a man for the people, especially when it made good business sense. But
Perini also believed this was about more than money. For months, he had
saturated himself with Milwaukee research. He collected maps and studied

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john klima

its civic planning. He understood its economy and grasped the huge finan-
cial component. And he invited a special guest over to the family home in
Boston for dinner. “I remember coming home from school a few times and
Fred Miller was at the house,” Lou’s son, David, remembered. “My dad
just introduced him as Mr. Miller from the Miller Brewing Company of
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I wasn’t sure who he was or why he was there.”
Perini wasn’t surprised that the Boston writers were crushing him.
They used to call him Lovable Lou, but not this time. Perini knew the
writers hated his decision, but he wasn’t afraid to fight. The Boston Braves
were losing $30,000 a week and losses exceeded one million dollars in
both 1951 and 1952. The Boston Braves had been established in 1876, but
couldn’t compete emotionally or economically with the Red Sox. On man-
tels from Connecticut to Maine were framed images of Jesus Christ and
Ted Williams, though which one walked on water first was debatable. The
Braves’ most popular player was Warren Spahn, a young left-handed pitcher,
whose box-office draw was limited to once every four games, and then only
at home, where Braves Field’s finest delicacy, fried clams, wasn’t enough to
compete with storied Fenway Park. Perini felt the pinch when Braves atten-
dance bottomed out at 281,000 in 1952, his ball club so pathetically dismal
and lacking energy that the home plate umpire jumped a train home before
the end of the last game of the season.
That morning at the Dixie Grande, nobody saw Perini as a visionary.
Always gregarious and warm to the press with a drink and a sandwich,
Perini found himself on the defensive. “Maybe Milwaukee isn’t a major
league city now,” he said. “But I feel it will become one.” He broke up the
news conference and hustled for the elevator. The Boston writers rushed to
the pay phones to call their news desks, quickly dictating breaking news
copy. The elevator couldn’t arrive fast enough for Perini, who hadn’t slept,
and had no time to rest. Imploding baseball history was no small project,
and at that moment he could have used his favorite hard hat and a cool
drink of water. But this announcement was only the first shovel in the dirt
on the way to building a much larger vision of what baseball was going to
look like in the twentieth century and beyond.
Perini’s plan bridged the game between the Victorian era and the

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 bushville wins!

modern age, between wooden ballparks and steel stadiums, between tradi-
tion and geography and between mom-and-pop ownership and corporate
entities. He had sparked a seismic shift that within a decade caused relo-
cation to Los Angeles and San Francisco, expansion beyond the original
sixteen teams, and the increased influences of television, technology, travel,
and commerce. He dreamed of a baseball team with Blacks, Latinos, and
hard-edged, American country good old boys working together for the
common good.
Perini believed that baseball could help him achieve what his father
believed in— an equal society. A corporation could make a killing and
simultaneously benefit the middle class to achieve harmony between the
wealthy and the workers. He refused to take away who they were and
strove to enhance them. Perini loved the utopian idea of balance between
race, class, economics, occupation, and education. Baseball was his con-
crete and Wisconsin was his land.
Over the next five days, Perini had much work to do. He sifted through
telegrams from the mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts
begging him to keep the Braves in Boston, but he refused to cave to civic
pressure. “Somebody has to tell me why this isn’t a good move,” he said. “I’m
sick of pounding my head against a stone wall. This is no sudden thing. I’ve
known for two years that it was inevitable. Boston is simply not a two-club
city.”
But moving to Milwaukee was not a one-man job, either. Perini needed
a business partner to get this done. He found one in Fred Miller who, like
Perini, was an immigrant’s son who had grown his father’s local company
to national levels. Miller loved the thrill of competition and yearned to
bring big league baseball to Milwaukee. He played nose tackle at Notre
Dame, where legendary football coach Knute Rockne inspired Miller’s
leadership style. Miller emerged as a chairman who believed in people as
well as profits. But he also knew he needed to make Milwaukee more eco-
nomically influential if he wanted to make the cash flow like the beer. So
he dreamed big, spent bigger, and held pep rallies. He initiated a corporate
expansion program in 1947 with sports as the centerpiece, launching com-
pany softball and baseball teams, organizing group outings to baseball

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john klima

games, and plastering the Miller name inside taverns from one end of
Wisconsin to the other. He was determined to bring major league baseball
to Milwaukee and to forever connect the Miller brand with the strong
civic pride that would assuredly arrive with a major league team. To prove
Milwaukee was a major league town, he was influential in the construc-
tion of County Stadium. Miller’s blueprint between beer and baseball would
be emulated around the country, but he had to entice a team to move to
Milwaukee first.
Miller had two choices: the National League’s Braves or the American
League’s St. Louis Browns, the worst team in each division. He was also
picking which owner’s personality fit his plans best. His preference was
Perini, who owned territory rights in Milwaukee because he had wisely pur-
chased the Brewers in 1946 and stationed the Braves top Triple-A team
there. Ownership of the Brewers gave Perini the right of first refusal to
move into Milwaukee’s new stadium or to block anyone else from moving in.
Miller’s other option, Bill Veeck, never dreamed that the tidy profit he
turned on the sale of the minor league Brewers in 1945 would come back to
haunt him when the next owner sold the team to Perini a few months later.
Veeck desperately wanted back into Milwaukee, where he had owned the
Brewers in the 1940s, especially when Milwaukee County began building
the ballpark in 1950, spending millions to fund the project. Perini helped
Milwaukee work around the steel shortage caused by the Korean War to
build the country’s first postwar ballpark. Miller saw the excitement that
building the new ballpark caused and believed the city was ready for major
league baseball.
The citizens sensed the big leagues coming. Along with the rest of the
city, Bobby Uecker, then eighteen and an aspiring big league catcher,
watched the new stadium rise above the downtown skyline, a modern mar-
vel amid the smokestacks, and thought there was no way this palace could
possibly be for the Brewers. “This couldn’t be a Triple-A park,” Uecker said.
“People used to drive past the ballpark as it was being built, just to say,
‘Holy Jesus, look at this place!’ ”
When Milwaukee County Stadium was ready to open in time for the
1953 season, Miller wanted the Boston Braves immediately but Perini

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 bushville wins!

thought it was a year too soon. That wasn’t good enough for Miller. Anxious
to never have a minor league team play in Milwaukee’s new stadium, Miller
invited Veeck’s St. Louis Browns to move in for the 1953 season instead,
but because Perini controlled the territory rights, he exercised his power to
block the move. That infuriated Wisconsin.
Miller let the people scream for him, and the implication was clear: he
would never forgive Perini for blocking the Browns. For the first time,
Perini felt the ire of the Wisconsin people, who turned on him for depriv-
ing them of a major league team. Perini never forgot the note from the
twelve-year-old Milwaukee girl who closed her letter by writing “I hate
you!” In their anger, Perini saw their passion and pride, and he decided he
would rather be with the people of Wisconsin than against them. Unwill-
ing to jeopardize his relationship with Miller and alarmed that he had so
antagonized the Wisconsin people, Perini decided on that March morning
that the Braves would speed up their plans and move now.
The Wisconsin people were jubilant when they heard the news. Their
anger turned to love, and Perini was happy to have the support of Miller and
to be on the right side of Wisconsin’s fierce independence. The city threw a
big party, “like World War II was over,” said Uecker.
But one major obstacle remained. Perini needed the approval of Na-
tional League president Warren Giles and the seven other team owners. He
knew he couldn’t win the vote without Miller backing him. He asked Miller
to call Giles and voice his support for the new Milwaukee Braves.
Miller appealed to the Milwaukee public and the next morning Giles had
116 telegrams waiting for him, including one from the statehouse in Madi-
son, where Gov. Walter Koehler urged:

a matter of tremendous importance to the state of wisconsin

and the city of milwaukee. i sincerely hope that the interest
of the public will not be overlooked.

Perini needed all the muscle he could get, because he was seeking per-
mission to do the unprecedented. Though comparatively new to baseball
politics, Perini understood how old boys operated. If he was going to ask

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john klima

them to change the way the game had always been structured, he had bet-
ter have a lot of money ready to come into the league. Perini could build all
the highways he wanted, but he knew that nothing whetted the appetites
of owners like cash.
On March 18, 1953, Perini’s pitch lasted an hour. Behind closed doors,
he argued that baseball could not survive in its present state. That the Red
Sox were squeezing the Braves out of Boston was only a symptom of the
gross inequity Perini believed existed. He argued that too much power
and money was in New York City, and that too much of it belonged to the
Yankees, which was not only to the detriment of the Braves, but to the New
York Giants, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the National League as a whole.
Perini geared his arguments to sway Giants owner Horace Stoneham and
Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, predicting that within a decade, New
York would no longer be a three-team town. Either some teams were go-
ing to have to find new cities with new stadiums, or they would be buried
under the rotting wood of their ancient ballparks. Perini, with his fist on
the table and his eyes on Stoneham and O’Malley, said the Braves would
go first and, in the process, prove that baseball was growing bigger than
the original sixteen teams that had founded the modern major leagues
in 1903.
Stoneham could smell the money. He had the best young player in
baseball, but even if Willie Mays returned from the army in time for the
1954 season, he was not optimistic about ticket sales. His ballpark, the Polo
Grounds, was a horse-and-buggy trapped in the atomic age. He was tired
of playing in the shadow of the Yankees and embraced Perini’s desire to
escape the Red Sox. He dreamed along with Perini and wanted his own
territory far away from the Northeast. Stoneham wiped the lenses of his
thick glasses and saw the new frontiers Perini was seeing. He threw him
his support, and now Perini was one vote away.
O’Malley was the most stubborn and most powerful owner in the Na-
tional League. His best players were in their best years and he didn’t want
to break up a good thing, but he also knew that they wouldn’t play forever,
and when it was over, Ebbets Field was as good as dust. Though O’Malley
hated tampering with tradition, he hated the termites in his ballpark more.

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 bushville wins!

When he agreed with Stoneham, Perini had New York cornered. The other
five owners waved their cigars and voted yes, giving Perini the unanimous
decision he needed and Giles the power to ratify. Lou Perini owed Horace
Stoneham the first case of Miller High Life. The Boston Braves were now
officially the Milwaukee Braves.
Perini emerged from the meeting drenched with sweat, fatigued but
victorious. Fred G. Fleig, Giles’s assistant, marveled at Perini’s abilities. “I
have listened to a lot of good sales talks in my time, but none better than
Perini’s,” Fleig said. “He’s baseball’s greatest salesman.” David Perini de-
scribed his father as a man whose energy allowed him to “stand and talk to
people until they were exhausted.”
The bulldozer dislodged a team that had been in Boston for seventy-
five years and made the National League’s first move in fifty years. No
team had ever moved so far west. He held his head high and remembered
his father. Now it was his turn to take the wagon. When a reporter asked
him how he was able to win the other owners, he noted, “All I can say is
that I’m glad Veeck isn’t in our league.”
Perini was jubilant but nostalgic. He still had the heart of a Boston
Braves fan, but his business sense prevailed. “I feel certain that Milwaukee
will make a very fine representative in the National League,” he said. “It is
a major league city in every sense of the word . . . manufacturing, the
people, the surroundings, everything about it. They had the fortitude to go
out and build facilities for a major league club. Other large cities can take a
page from Milwaukee’s book.”
Much of the country couldn’t see Perini’s vision yet, starting with the
sportswriters, who were the first to rip Milwaukee. The baseball writers
were a rigid and archaic New York–based establishment who demanded
East Coast supremacy. The departure of the Boston Braves endangered
every storyline they built their daily game reports upon, which, taken after
decades, constructed a historical narrative they felt Perini jeopardized in
favor of a hick town. They believed baseball lore needed the Dodgers
against the Giants, each striving to beat the Yankees in the World Series.
What would happen if one of those teams left New York? The Yankees
needed the Red Sox to bully and the Red Sox needed the Boston Braves to

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john klima

feel better about life. Perini refused to buy into the storylines. This en-
deared him to Milwaukee fans and made their city a target for the East
Coast, which could be every bit as hostile as a hard-throwing headhunter.
Prejudices permeated baseball on and off the field. It was easy to detect
subtle traces of ethnic bias, from the “deeply tanned construction magnate”
Perini, a nod to his Italian blood, to the working-class German Milwau-
kee population only eight years removed from World War II. The East
Coast, as seen through the eyes of the press, simply could not view Mil-
waukee as an equal. They were somehow a lesser form of life, working
stiffs in a factory town, the little people who deserved little respect. Wash-
ington Post columnist Shirley Povich was a vocal critic. “A big league park
doesn’t make a big league town,” he wrote, insisting that Milwaukee was
not a “lush new territory,” that “Milwaukee fans are not noted for being
fast with a buck,” and that the “strongly German-American town, the last
outpost of the 10-cent bottle of beer,” should never be confused with Bal-
timore, where Veeck planned to move the Browns instead, “who take a
team to their hearts.”
In New York, where Casey Stengel’s Yankees were in the midst of win-
ning the World Series in five consecutive seasons, the skeptical response
was expected. No members of the 1950s media were more powerful than
the big-city sports columnists, whose words swayed the city, and whose cir-
culation figures gave them the impression that small-town America
thought big city America did all the thinking for them. “Good or bad,
Milwaukee will support the Braves until the novelty wears off,” New York
Daily News columnist Dan Parker predicted. “They’d better be good or else
it will be off to Buffalo or maybe Cedar Rapids.”


 THE  BURNING

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