Once upon a time, there was a butcher, who worked at a store in my old neighborhood in Gary, Indiana. The shop was near the school I attended on the southside. My grandmother bought meat and poultry from the man. His name was Charlie. He was a born salesman and went on to found, at the time, the largest national insurance company in the country. In late 1960, Charlie bought the Kansas City Royals, which later became the Oakland Athletics. Singlehandedly, over 20 years of ownership, Charlie O Finley changed baseball forever.
In Oakland, Finley and the A's signed such celebrated players as Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers, and Bert Campaneris, and became baseball's dominant team. The club won five straight division titles (from 1971 to 1975) and three consecutive World Series (from 1972 to 1974). His legacy includes Charlie O the mule, orange baseballs, mustachioed players, hot pants night, green and yellow uniforms, white shoes, the designated hitter, designated runners and playing World Series games at night, so people like his dad, a 47-year steelworker in Gary, could watch the game.
He had cookies delivered to the umpires made by A's employee Debbie Fields, who became the Mrs. Fields cookie empire, and a batboy that went on to star as rapper M.C. Hammer.
But long before all this, well before fame, back in the 30’s and 40’s, Charlie tried many vocations landing on insurance sales in the evenings in Northwest IN. During the day, he worked at the Kingsbury Ordinance Plant, where my mother worked making bullets and bombs during the war. With two jobs a day and little sleep, he was stricken with tuberculosis. It almost killed him. While hospitalized with the disease for two years before being cured, Finley developed a strategy to sell disability group insurance to doctors. That business plan made him a millionaire before he was 40.
I held an Indiana real estate brokers license, and a friend had a property for sale just down the highway from Finley’s sprawling farm in LaPorte, IN. Taking a play from the Finley Showman playbook, I called Charlie at his Chicago insurance company office building at 130 South Michigan, said I was from Gary, and asked for an appointment. Two days later I was on the 40th floor standing in front of his secretary's desk. She pointed, “Walk up those stairs to Charlie's office.”
I made my pitch. “Na, son, I'm not interested in real estate,” I told him thanks and started for the stairs.
Then I quipped, “My mom thinks you’re Gary’s most colorful person ever.”
“Does she now,” he said.
I added, “She says you’ve got more brass than a Chinese gong factory.”
He came around the desk and handed me a ticket to a baseball league banquet honoring him the following week in Chicago. Adding, I should wear a nice suit because I'd be sitting with his friends in front of him at the dais.
Years later, in the early '90s, when I was Police Commissioner in Michigan City, I would drive to LaPorte for meetings at the county courthouse, passing Charlie’s farm, and his renowned party barn on highway 35. Once seeing him on a porch swing. I’d recall that grand day so long ago when I met the man at his office in Chicago. The stairs I climbed to the pinnacle, into his lion’s den, the top floor of his building facing Lake Michigan. There was Charlie in all his charisma with a sunny sky of blue, and the turquoise lake filling the office windows behind him. The man with that thick white mane, furry sideburns, and bushy eyebrows looking like the king of the jungle. Little did I know at the time, he indeed was a king, and the business of baseball is still a jungle.
Charles Oscar Finely died on February 19, 1996, at age 77, and is buried at Calumet Park Cemetery just down Taft Street from where I lived in Merrillville, IN, after moving south from Gary.
Jerry Wilkerson was a CBS radio and newspaper reporter in Chicago, a talk show host, Press Secretary for two U.S. Congressmen, and Police Commissioner in Michigan City, IN. He is a Naval veteran and lives in SaddleBrooke. Email me at franchise@att.net.
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