Blake Cullen talked to strangers
I have many lovely books about Chicago baseball in my library.
One of my top ten favorites is “You Should Have Seen The Ones I Turned Down (Tales from a Life Spent in Hotels and Locker Rooms with everyone from Jerry Vale to Leo Durocher),” a 2008 autobiography by former Chicago Cubs traveling secretary Blake Cullen. I found the 156-page paperback in 2012 in the corner of Prince Books in downtown Norfolk, Va.
I couldn’t turn down a book with that title.
I learned that Cullen was born in Chicago and that his father George Thomas Cullen was hotel manager at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. When his father moved to the Mayflower Hotel in Akron, Oho, a 13-year-old Cullen broke into the entertainment business by working with Randolph, the Silent King of Magic.
Cullen recalled the splendid nature of Ernie Banks. He wrote, “I remember Yosh Kawano, the clubhouse guy, one day pointed at Ernie Banks in the clubhouse and said to me, ‘You know what’s the best thing he does?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, he hits home runs!’ But Yosh said, ‘I mean besides baseball. You know what’s the best thing he does?
“Talk to strangers.”
Blake Cullen died on March 8 at Sentara Virginia Beach General Hospital. He was 85. He had suffered a stroke on Oct. 31, 2011, several months before I tracked him down.
Never married, Cullen was living in a condo in a former warehouse next to the historic USS Wisconsin battleship and just a few blocks from Prince Books. He had lost the use of his right side but was walking with a cane. He was in the hospital for five weeks but his speech therapist graduated him after three sessions.
“She had lists of things,” he told me in March 2012. “One of the things was to name ten singers. I said, ‘That’s easy. Jerry Vale, Mel Torme, Al Martino, Vic Damone, and she stops me and goes ‘Whoa, I never heard any of those people. You rattled them off so fast I have to think they’re real.”
Cullen was the real deal.
He was traveling secretary for the Cubs between 1965 and 1975. He made travel arrangements, booked hotels for the team, kept statistics, assigned uniform numbers, wrote press releases, and handled daily business management. Today, that’s at least six different departments.
Cullen assembled press conferences for the Cubs at the Sheraton Chicago and the Edgewater. In the mid-1960s some members of the Cubs coaching staff lived at the Edgewater. “When I was hired they looked at me as someone who knew the hotel business part of it, which was important,” he said. “The only other person who applied for the job was Brent Musburger. I beat him out. Then when I would see him in New York, he would pick up my lunch tab and say, ‘Thank God you came along. I wouldn’t be making all this money with CBS. He wanted to be a general manager and he thought that would be his entree.”
Cullen was good with numbers so he handled the Cubs arbitration cases. “John Holland was the ‘general manager’ and he wasn’t in the best of health and effort, it seemed like’,’ he said.
“I was a numbers guy,” Cullen continued. “We gave Paul Popovich number 22 because his nickname was ‘Po Po.’ I gave (pitcher) Bill Bonham 33 because he was from UCLA and that was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s number. (Pitcher) Dave LaRoche wanted 17. Well, only
infielders and outfielders get 17. We gave him 37 and he couldn’t stand it. I remember a game where he got pretty ripped in relief. Yosh calls me and says, ‘You gotta come down to the clubhouse, something is going on.’ I get down there and LaRoche is taking a shower with his uniform on. He hated that number so much.”
Leo Durocher managed the Cubs between 1966 and 1972. Durocher didn’t get along with many Chicagoans outside of the Goldblatt family, but he hit it off with Cullen. “People said he was always good to his traveling secretaries,” Cullen recalled. “He had a lot of style, the way he dressed. He hung out with Sinatra and the movie stars when we went to Hollywood and he patterned himself after them.”
I’ve heard a lot of Durocher stories, but Cullen delivered the best one I never heard. Cullen was part of the dust-up in the 1970 All-Star game where National Leaguer Pete Rose plowed into American League catcher Ray Fosse to win the game and end Fosse’s career. In his book, Cullen wrote that the main reason that play happened is that Durocher wanted to catch an 11:55 p.m. flight out of Cincinnati, the host city.
“I’m afraid to promote that story,” Cullen said. “Ray Fosse will come after me. Leo was coaching third base at the all-star game. He kept looking at me. We were sitting behind the third-base dugout, three or four rows in. He kept pointing towards his wrist, like a watch. It got to be the eleventh inning and it was getting close to midnight. Leo gave (Cubs all-star) Jim Hickman the hit and run on the first pitch. Everybody takes off. When you see the film, Leo is running down the third base line with Fosse.
“We were in the limo five minutes later going to the airport.”
The next day Cullen called me and asked me to downplay our conversation (even though the getaway story is in his book.) He remained a gentleman from the stylish 1960s.
Cullen moved on to become Administrator of the National League between 1975 and 1985. He prepared the league schedule and managed the umpire corps. In 1989 he became the owner of the minor league Norfolk Admirals hockey team and from 1997-98 he owned the Daytona Beach Speed Kings of the Eastern Indoor Soccer League.
“You Should Have Seen The One I Turned Down” was written in 2008 with Newport News (Va.) journalist Mike Holtzclaw. It is an unfiltered account of Cullen’s days in hotel management, his homage to Chicago nightlife history and his time during some of baseball’s golden years. He wrote how Cubs coach and Negro League legend Buck O’Neil never allowed himself to become bitter and how he should be in the Hall of Fame. (O’Neil, who died in 2006 still isn’t a member.)
Cullen graduated with a degree in hotel management from Cornell University. In 1959 Cullen was sales manager at the Sheraton, across the street from the Wrigley Building on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Visiting baseball teams stayed at the Sheraton as well as entertainers who were performing at the nearby Chez Paree. That’s how Cullen became friends with Henny Youngman, Jackie Leonard, and others. He wrote, “Jackie Leonard was staying with us while he was playing Mr. Kelly’s. We got in the cab and the cab driver said, ‘Hey, Jackie Leonard! Where can I take you? And Jackie said, ‘You can take me to a bigger cab’.”
The Cubs were the last team to hold out on playing the National Anthem daily as late as 1968. Cullen wrote that owner P.K. Wrigley didn’t think it was appropriate to play the anthem before every game, just as Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban recently said. Wrigley did greenlight the anthem in 1968 because of the Vietnam war. In 1969 Jerry Vale recorded his iconic version of the National Anthem with the Percy Faith orchestra. Vale was a huge baseball fan and sent a copy to Cullen. It was played a few times at Wrigley but was popularized at Yankee Stadium until the Robert Merrill recording came into play during the George Steinbrenner era.
In 2012 Cullen confessed it was bittersweet to return to Wrigley Field. “Too many memories,” he said. “When Yosh Kawano retired in 2008, that was the last time I came back. Yosh threw out the first ball and Koske Fukudome was the catcher in a strange way. We had a reception afterward for Yosh across the street at (the since-closed) Harry Caray’s and Kerry Wood was the only current player who came over. That was very nice I thought.”
I told Cullen he should come back for the Cubs Convention. “I haven’t been invited,” he said. “I’d be happy to go if I could make it.” His participation would have been valuable.
Blake Cullen was a man who understood the joy of talking to strangers.
Blake Cullen is survived by a sister, Georgeanne Cullen. Burial is planned at the family plot in Newport, R.I. A celebration of life will be planned at a future date.
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