To old men, memories come in black and white. In his memories, Bill “Moose” Skowron, who will turn 70 this year, can see himself hitting a home run.
“The first at-bat I ever had for the Sox was a home run into the upper deck,” Moose is saying to a tableful of season-ticket holders in the Bard’s Room restaurant at Comiskey Park.
“Who was the pitcher?” asks Al Paveza, a label company executive.
“Wes Stock,” says Moose. “Pretty good pitcher too.”
In a major-league baseball career that lasted from 1954 to 1967, Moose Skowron hit 211 homers and he remembers them all. That’s a good thing because these days he gets paid to remember. After more than three decades out of baseball, Moose is back in the game as a member of the speaker’s bureau of the Chicago White Sox, his team from 1964 to 1967.
“We love using ex-players, especially those with strong connections to the community, as goodwill ambassadors,” says Rob Gallas, the team’s executive vice president for marketing and broadcasting.
“Look, everybody knows Moose is first and foremost a Yankee, but he played for the Sox those few years, and above all he’s a Chicago neighborhood guy. He’s a great guy, the most unaffected human being I know. I love being around Moose. And I’ve never heard him tell the same story twice.”
Moose has a million stories.
“I got a good memory and I think I have a good reputation,” he says. “I think some people still remember me. I’m very happy. This is a great job.”
For 20 years, until he took the Sox job in November, he had been working for Crosstown Trucking. For the last five years, most of his duties involved showing up each day at a Cicero bar/restaurant named Call Me Moose, across from Sportsman’s Park racetrack. Many patrons thought Moose owned the joint. He didn’t. It is owned by Crosstown’s owner, Art Kenah. Moose just worked there.
“It was a good job for a long time, and Art’s a good friend. He was good to me,” says Moose. “But the chance to get back near baseball was something I couldn’t turn down.”
Moose spent the winter months telling stories to season-ticket holders, getting on the phone to sell tickets, calling bingo games for seniors, appearing at nightclub promotional and charity events and visiting schools.
“He has exceeded every expectation we had,” says Gallas. “He’s one of the most engaging and hardest-working guys we’ve ever had.”
One day in March, Moose spoke to a group of kids at the Franklin Middle School in Wheaton. Of course, they had never heard of him. But they listened closely as he talked to them about reading: “You should read as much as you can. I didn’t do enough reading. I wish I did more.”
He talked to the kids about drugs: “I don’t know nothing about drugs. Maybe those drug people never came up to me because they thought I had a mean face.”
He showed the kids the World Series ring he wears, one of six he won in his career.
He talked to the kids about smoking: “You shouldn’t do it. It’s a bad thing. I didn’t start smoking till I was 30.”
Later Moose says he started smoking because Camel threw a few thousand dollars in endorsement money his way. “I could use the money, but eventually the deal ended. By then I was hooked,” he says ruefully. “And what do I got to show for it? Double bypass surgery when I’m 64.”
Moose Skowron is from a sports era that seems as distant as two-handed set shots, shoes with steel spikes and players without attitudes. He got his nickname when he was 8 years old, after his grandfather shaved Moose’s head and all the neighborhood kids started calling him Mussolini. Soon, though, he would develop the heavily muscled frame that made people forget dictator and think animal.
He grew up in a house at 2520 N. Long Ave. with his mother and father, Bill and Helen, sister, Jean, and brother, Ed. Because there was no baseball team at Weber High School, Moose played basketball and football. He was very good, earning a football scholarship to Purdue University, where he played starting halfback and punter and by his sophomore season was being touted as a future All-American.
He also played baseball. As a third baseman and shortstop, he batted a scout-drawing .500 as a sophomore and the following summer went to Austin, Minn., to play with the semipro Austin Packers. A few days before fall football practice was to begin, he signed with the New York Yankees.
He chewed up minor-league pitching. His 1952 stats — 31 home runs, 134 RBIs and a .614 slugging percentage — earned him minor-league player of that year honors.
By 1954 he was in the big leagues. In 87 games that season, he batted .340 to lead all Yankee hitters. His salary was $6,000; off-season he worked as a plumber’s helper.
But — is this not the stuff of baseball dreams? — his manager was Casey Stengel and his teammates included future Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra. He hit for power and average and was an important part of that star-studded roster, which won five World Series.
Traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1963, he helped that team trounce the Yankees 4-0 in the World Series. Though he said at the time, “It hurts inside to be playing against them,” Moose also appreciates the serendipitous path of his career. “I’ll never beef about what happens to me in the future, after all the good things that have come my way already,” he says. “You look at it this way: Hundreds of guys play through their careers just dreaming to get to one World Series. I got to be in 10 of them.”
Despite his solid play for the Dodgers, he was traded to the lowly Washington Senators — “First in war, first in peace and last in the American League” — in 1964. In the middle of the season, he was dealt to the Sox.
“It was great for me to come back to my hometown, like a dream,” says Moose. “I met the team in Boston and went three-for-five.”
He played well for the Sox. He was voted to the All-Star team in 1965 and hit 18 home runs and had 78 RBIs that year. But when he was relegated to reserve status by manager Eddie Stanky, Moose asked to be traded. Early in the 1967 season he was, to the California Angels.
His last moment of on-field glory came on May 14, when his solo home run ruined a no-hit bid by White Sox pitcher Gary Peters.
“Moose is a nice guy, but not that nice,” said Peters after the game.
Skowron’s baseball career ended after the 1967 season. His stats: 1,566 hits, 888 RBIs and a .282 lifetime average. His highest yearly salary: $50,000.
After baseball, Moose sold real estate in Florida, was a salesman in the printing business and worked in the bicycle program for the Illinois secretary of state’s office before taking a job with Crosstown Trucking.
For most of today’s players, there will be no need for a job after baseball. They’ll more likely be monitoring their stock portfolios or working on golf technique. One might expect Moose to be resentful of the gold-plated salaries that even modestly talented players now command.
Surprisingly, he isn’t. But he was.
“Yeah, for a while I used to get mad,” he says. “But then a friend of mine said, `Moose, what if it was your kid makin’ that kind of money?’ That made me change. Now I say, `God bless ’em.’ “
But sometimes Moose indulges in financial fantasy. He estimates that his stats — let’s say those from 1957, not his best all-around year, .304, 17 HRs, 88 RBIs — would warrant a current salary of about $5 million a year.
“And I’d try and get a multiyear deal,” says Moose, a smile crossing his face. “Yeah, $5 million a year for four years.”
Sometimes he’ll share these fantasies with his wife and she’ll joke, “Oh, Moose, couldn’t you play for one year now?”
“What do you want?” Moose says. “I can barely walk.”
His wife is named Lorraine. She is his second wife, and everybody calls her Cookie. She’s a Chicago girl, Augusta and Western, and she met Moose on a blind date. They went bowling.
They have been married for 34 years and have lived in Schaumburg since 1975. There are three children. Greg is in the trucking business. Steve is an executive with USA cable network. Lynnette works for USS Holland trucking company. She has a border collie she named Maris, after one of her father’s most famous Yankee teammates.
“I miss Roger. I miss all the guys that died. But I miss Mickey (Mantle) a lot,” says Moose of his friend who died in 1995. “He always had me come with him to card shows (where collectors pay money for autographed memorabilia). He was a hell of a nice man and the best ballplayer of my time.”
Mantle was also a legendary carouser, most often in the company of teammates Billy Martin and Whitey Ford — men with boys’ names.
“I only went out with them guys once in nine years,” says Moose. “They had me dress up like a chauffeur and drive them to all these bars. We were still out at 4:30 in the morning. It was fun but, yeah, that was the only time I ever was with those guys for something like that.”
He knows that the game and its players have changed.
“We always played as a team. No one was jealous of nobody else. It was almost like being in a family. We helped each other out,” he says. “Not everybody’s like that now. Most of the modern guys never heard of me. But that’s OK.”
Of his new job, he says: “I don’t bother the players or the coaches. I just say hello. I don’t want somebody thinking I’m taking their job. I’m not interested in coaching. I’m not out for no job in baseball. I just want ’em all to know that I’m on their team. I’m just interested in winning and drawing people to the park.”
That’s a big job. The White Sox attendance last season was 1.34 million, the third worst in baseball. Moose will be on hand for all of the team’s 81 home games doing, he says, “whatever they want, talking to whoever.”
He loves it, make no mistake. Seeing him share a table and talk at the Bard’s Room with season-ticket holders Paveza, Michael Martin, who owns a bakery, and Rick Jung, who owns a noodle company in Chinatown, is to understand that memories for Moose are an elixir.
“I was on the bench when (Don) Larsen pitched his perfect game,” says Moose, as enthusiastic as if talking about something that happened last week rather than during the 1956 World Series. “That was in the sixth game. In the next game we won when Yogi hit two home runs and I hit a grand slam.”
Martin has attended the 3-year-old fantasy baseball camp Moose runs in late October in Ft. Lauderdale with former Yankee teammate Hank Bauer. It’s called Heroes in Pinstripes and it is a place where older men can play baseball, pretend their bodies are again fit and firm and where they can rub shoulders and bend elbows with the heroes of their youth.
“If you don’t have fun at Moose’s camp, it’s your own fault,” says Martin. “Moose goes the extra mile. He’ll stay out on the field longer than anybody else and spend more time with the campers.”
“Them guys pay a lot of money to be there,” says Moose.
In minutes Moose and the three men appear to be close friends, old buddies. It’s a genuine bond but not as strong as the one between Moose and the men who gather on the first Tuesday of every month at Call Me Moose.
That’s when Skowron hosts a lunch for his former Weber classmates. The school closed last year, and the boys from Moose’s high school days now number 30 white-haired men. They talk of youthful games played for the Portage Park Rebels, of softballs flying through the air at North Town stadium. There is affectionate banter among them.
“Some of these guys still got their First Communion money,” says Moose.
As the men slowly make their way out of the restaurant, they often pause to look at the pictures that line the walls.
The one that gets the most attention is a black-and-white shot of three young, strapping Yankee sluggers: Mantle and Maris and Moose.
“I love looking at these pictures,” says one of Moose’s lifelong pals.
“Yeah,” says Moose. “They bring back good memories, don’t they?”
