Happy Springs the Lip

Baseball Commissioner Albert Benjamin ("Happy") Chandler was not mad, just terribly hurt. The sportwriters had swung him around their heads with gay, unremitting abandon for his summary suspension of Leo Durocher over a Polo Grounds dust-up with a loudmouthed fan (TIME, May 9). In Cincinnati last week, Happy Chandler exonerated himself and "The Lip"--in that order.

Newsmen cooled their heels for two hours while Chandler mulled things over with National League President Ford Frick, New York Giants officials, members of Chandler's staff and a stiff upper Lip. Finally, he called them into his office and issued a terse communique.

He had suspended the Giants' bad-tempered manager as a "preventive" not a "punitive action." The evidence assembled against Durocher had been "contradictory" and he was lifting the four-day suspension.

The next day, back in uniform and full of grace, The Lip walked modestly across the Polo Grounds to the Giants' dugout. The public-address system blared a recording of When You Were Sweet Sixteen ("I love you as I never loved before"), and his team clobbered the visiting Pittsburgh Pirates 11-4. This week, on advice of counsel, Fred Boysen, the young Puerto Rican who tangled with Durocher, dropped his charge of simple assault.

The Lip was in the clear, but there was a surprise left for Fred Boysen. Police stepped up and arrested him on a charge of theft. A Negro nurse had seen his picture in the papers, thought he looked like one of the men who had swiped her purse.

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