Mary Frances and Bill Veeck on March 10, 1959 when Bill purchased 54 % of the White Sox for $2.7 million. (Photo courtesy of the Veeck family.)

Mary Frances Veeck is surrounded by a garden.

She is sitting with her daughter Marya on a mid-August morning in the patio of her Hyde Park retirement home. There are red begonias, sunflowers, and gold daisies. A visitor brings yellow flowers, just as he used to do with his mother. Mary Frances’s life has been a bouquet of joy, dancing, tears, and long summer nights. She was married to Baseball Hall of Famer Bill Veeck from 1950 until he died in 1986.

Mary Frances helped design the player’s blue shorts for the 1976  White Sox. When the Veecks lived in Maryland in the early 1960s they hosted civil rights leaders at their home during marches in Washington, D.C. At her retirement home, Mary Frances befriended Wyonella Smith, a fellow resident and the widow of Chicago journalist and civil rights leader Wendell Smith. Wendell Smith was credited with recommending  Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, which broke baseball’s color line.

Mary Frances Veeck turns 100 years old on Sept. 1.

Think about that. She was born four days after the certification of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote. She was born one year after the Black Sox scandal.

Mary Frances Ackerman was born outside of Pittsburgh, Pa. Her father was an accountant, her mother raised four children. Mary Frances met Bill Veeck in 1949 when she came through Boston as a publicist for the Ice Capades. Sportswriters pegged her as “The World’s Most  Beautiful Press Agent.” Veeck proposed to her a week after they met.  And they were engaged a week after that. They were married in 1950 at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi (founded in 1610) in Santa Fe. N.M, after Bill converted to Catholicism.

Life can be short.

Bill had three children from his previous marriage. Bill and Mary Frances had six children:  Marya is an artist who has operated her  August House studio in Chicago since 1987, a remarkable run in the art world. Mary Frances’ son Mike is an owner of the St. Paul Saints, co- owner of the Charleston River Dogs with actor Bill Murray, and a chip off the old block who helped hatch Disco Demolition. Gregory is a  geography professor at Western Michigan University and Lisa just started her Clean Communications company in Chicago.

Daughter Juliana Veeck-Brosnan died of cancer in 2010. She was a clinical psychologist and mother of three children. Juliana was 48 years old. She was born on the Fourth of July. Christopher Veeck died of a heart ailment in 1995. He was head of the Pavilion and Summit sports complexes in Houston, Tx. He began his career working at Comiskey Park. Christopher was 32 years old.

From L to R, Julie, Marya, Mary Frances and Lisa Veeck at Marya’s 2002 wedding (Photo by Joseph Ficner.)

Bill Veeck endured 33 operations before succumbing to emphysema.

These moments are not to be revisited during a sunny morning in the garden.

One of Mary Frances’ fellow residents stops to water some flowers. She holds on to her walker and takes her time. A cool breeze rolls in off of nearby Lake Michigan. Cars head north and south on Lake Shore Drive. They are all going somewhere, but Mary Frances has probably been there. A magic carpet cannot contain a century of memories.

Although her guests are masked up and maintaining some social distance—can you imagine a Veeck buying into social distance?– there is no mention of a pandemic, seven-inning doubleheaders, or a corrupt president. Instead, Mary Frances remembers bringing gerbils onto a flight from New York to their home in Maryland as a gift for Gregory. The Veecks also had a pet armadillo, pet hamsters and at one time 18 dogs in the house on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Raven, a Labrador Retriever, had a litter of nine pups. The more heartbeats the better. Marya has even brought along Quincy, her well-mannered Beagle mascot from August House for this garden visit.

“I won one dog in a raffle at school,” Marya recalls. “Liza Doolittle. She was a border collie mutt. Remember, Mom? That’s when my  father said, ‘What was first prize, an empty beer can?” The Veecks were also known for annual family Easter Egg hunts with 144 eggs. “We had a basset hound Purgatory who could unshell an egg beyond belief,” Marya says. “We had to put him in the garage for every Easter Egg hunt.”

“I remember,” Mary Frances says. There is so much to remember.

Marya reminds her mother about being made to wear white gloves to baseball games when she was five years old. Mary Frances is a woman of impeccable style. She would buy Bill’s white sport shirts and blue sport coats on an annual basis. Except she did not buy ties. Bill  Veeck did not like to wear a tie. “She taught us how to wear hats,”  says Marya, who is wearing a wide-brimmed California sun hat to visit her mother.

Style and grace; Mary Frances and Marya Veeck (Photo by Jim Matusik)

In honor of Mary Frances’ 100th birthday, a certain guest does something he has never done before. He wears a black White Sox cap circa 1959. More than 25,000 fans met the White Sox at Midway Airport on Sept. 22, 1959 after they clinched the American League pennant.  Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg was Vice-President and General Manager of the ’59 White Sox and a friend of the Veecks.

Known as “The Hebrew Hammer” during the 1930s, the Detroit Tigers’ first baseman was regarded as baseball’s first Jewish superstar. After clinching the pennant, the Veecks and Greenberg hit the town like a line drive to the Comiskey patio. “We went to places that are closed now,” Mary Frances told me during a garden visit in 2005. “The Singapore (on Rush Street) was one. We stopped at Fritzel’s for dinner (in the Loop), too. That was one of our places. We were insanely happy. We danced all around town. We always danced. Our kids always talk about seeing their mother and  father dancing in the kitchen.”

Bill Veeck had a wooden leg.

He lost his right leg in a 1946 accident while in the Marines. Always one to think on his feet, Veeck turned part of his wooden leg into an ashtray.

White Sox choking up on the bat–and the pants.

The Veeck children loved Greenberg. He would visit the Veecks in the early 1960s when they lived in Easton, Md. The kids would ask the 6’4″ Greenberg to stretch out on the floor. The kids would name him Gulliver and they would take on the roles of the tiny Lilliputians.

Mary Frances smiles and squints and remembers those days. She recalls the family’s love of old classic hotels like the Drake and the Palmer House. And she remembers dancing. Bill wore out the 1962 soundtrack to “The Music Man.” Did she like Frank Sinatra?

She nods her head and eloquently  states, “I’ve had a lot of lives according to the music.”

When the White Sox opened the 1959 World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Comiskey Park, Mike Veeck was the only Veeck child old enough to go to the game. He was 8. “We sat on stone steps in the upper deck on the third base side,” Mary Frances said in 2005. “People couldn’t believe we weren’t in the owner’s box. We never had a box. The Comiskey family had the owner’s box (for the game.) Neither of us thought we were so wonderful. It was just the right  thing to do. Bill was in the press box.”

Mike Veeck and his daughter Rebecca. Rebecca died on Sept. 30, 2019 after a battle with Batten disease, a rare genetic condition. She was 27. She loved baseball and horses.

The Veecks always knew the right thing to do. After the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Veeck stood in line for hours to pay respects at the Atlanta, Ga. viewing and then joined 50,000 people on the four-mile walk from the Ebenezer Baptist Church to Morehouse College as part of the funeral procession. He walked on his wooden leg.

“We were in Maryland when H. Rap Brown practically burned down the town of Cambridge (Md.), Marya recalls. In the summer of 1967 civil rights activist Brown gave a speech in Cambridge, then a struggling canning factory town on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. His speech ignited riots. Marya says, “There was General George Gelston (the Maryland National Guard leader who preached peace). He had been at the house at one time or another. My father knew Jesse Jackson. Our parents were active in the movement.”

Comedian-activist Dick Gregory and Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League visited the 19 room house the Veecks called “Tranquility.”

Bill Veeck was seriously ill when the Veecks moved to Maryland in the summer of 1961. He had lost 50 pounds and was thought to have a brain tumor. It turned out his headaches were caused in part by his smoking habit. Mary Frances uplifted the family and oversaw Bill’s construction of a greenhouse where he began to grow orchids.

I attended the 1976 White Sox home opener.  Bill Veeck, manager Paul Richards and business manager Rudie Schaffer marched around the park before the game as a drummer, fife player and flag carrier from the Revolutionary War.  During the game, Bill and Mary Frances made their way around Comiskey Park talking to fans. They spent an inning talking to me and my girlfriend in the center field bleachers. We were nobodies, but we were somebody to them. The Veecks were always looking for the common ground.

Mary Frances and Marya Veeck getting their steampunk on; 2019 (Photo by Jim Matusik)

Bill would call Mary Frances every night when he was on the road. Oh, and there were gardens. After all, he helped plant the Wrigley Field vines of ivy in 1937. The Veecks celebrated Christmas, New  Year’s  Eve and…… Arbor Day. Bill once planted a bed of daffodils that formed Mary Frances’s initials. MFV, almost like MVP. And then he did that every spring for 35 years right outside their front window.

In 1985 Bill showed Sun-Times columnist Ron Rapoport a garden catalog and proclaimed, “The greatest investment in the world is a seed.  Where else can you get a return like this? Much more than $1.3 million for a third baseman who can’t field or hit.”

Mary Frances liked to say, “Every woman should have the chance to be  courted by Bill Veeck.”

In her later years Mary Frances helped raise money for the Chicago Theological Union and the Illinois Masonic Medical Center, which became something of a revolving door for Bill Veeck in 1976. The Veecks have made Chicago a better place. Mary Frances’ century on this earth has been filled with style, resilience and a benevolent heart. She is a champion.

Her love is forever in bloom.

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