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firing of Billy Jurges. Or, if you prefer, the firing and hiring of Mike
Higgins.
It began in the spring of 1959 when Joe Cronin was named president of the
American League. He was hired because (I) he had always
wanted the job, and (2) Yawkey had confided to his fellow owners that he
wanted to get rid of him and (3) it was a job with such limited
responsibilities that it didn't matter who held it. What followed with the Red
Sox was not so much musical comedy as pure slapstick.
To replace Cronin as general manager, Yawkey hired Bucky Harris-the man Cronin
had replaced as manager twenty-three years ear tier. A neat symmetry there.
Yawkey had always felt guilty about letting Bucky go.
He was, alas, doing Bucky no favor. Bucky had a gorgeous young wife, and until
Yawkey felt the need to go rummaging around in his conscience he had been
living a perfectly happy life. Bucky wasn't an administrator. Bucky wasn't an
executive. Bucky was a falling-down drunk. By 1959, he was so far gone that
the office help had to guide his hand through his signature on official
papers. Dick O'Connell, the business manager, was running the club. "Dick,"
Bucky would tell him, "I don't want this job. I don't want it."
Mike Higgins was in his fifth year as the field manager. He was another of
Yawkey's drinking buddies, but he was also a very strong and solid man, with a
lot of personal problems which he drowned, as he liked to say, with "cherry
bombs." To say he was a player's manager was to understate it. "I love playing
for Higgins," one of the players was quoted as saying. "He never gets mad at
us when we lose." By June of 1959, the Red Sox had fallen into last place, the
anti-Higgins faction of the press was howling for his head, and Yawkey
dispatched Bucky Harris to Washington with orders to fire him.
Already the geography was unfortunate. Washington was Bucky Harris's home
ground, and instead of going to the team's hotel, to make the announcement to
the hastily gathered press, he went roaming off to his old haunts and
disappeared for two days--although "Bucky sightings" were posted periodically
in the press box. From Washington, the Red Sox traveled up to Baltimore by
bus. When they arrived at the Lord Baltimore Hotel they found their missing
general manager sitting in the lobby.
Within thirty seconds, Harris and Higgins were headed out the door
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.
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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
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