Word: bats
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...wall of suspicion came down in the late 1970s, when Stansfield Turner and William Webster--classmates and friends at Amherst College--were appointed to run the CIA and FBI. "We made a pact right off the bat that we were going to work well together," Webster recalls. William Casey, the current CIA director, has continued this approach...
...later years, Bill Veeck had second thoughts about his most famous stunt, sending a midget up to the plate in a major league game. "Were it in my power to turn back the clock, I'd never send a midget to bat," he declared two decades after the fact. "No, I'd use nine of the little fellows, including the designated hitter...
...squab while watching a ball game." The son of a sportswriter who became president of the Chicago Cubs, Veeck planted the first ivy at Wrigley Field and once sent a letter to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis warning him that the reserve clause was doomed. He invented season tickets and bat days, and started the practice of printing players' names on the back of their uniforms. In 1947 he hired Larry Doby, the first black to play in the American League, and mercilessly taunted the Yankees for delaying integration of the New York team until...
Veeck's flair and zest almost eclipsed his reputation as a shrewd baseball man who managed to build contenders on low budgets. He predicted that his tombstone would inevitably bear the message HE SENT A MIDGET UP TO BAT. Once he asked that the epitaph be cleaned up a bit to read, more piously, HE HELPED THE LITTLE MAN. --By John...
...laying eyes on a '54 T-Bird has the old boy felt such a tingle for a machine. In time, hot, rank desire draws him to Edwards Air Force Base, a copy of Chuck Yeager's autobiography tucked into his kit. He aches to see this needle-nosed supersonic bat in the flesh, touch it. Let us just say that happens...