My Dad and the Chicago Cubs

In the 1920s and early 30s, enterprising young Cubs fans like my dad could 

avail themselves of the ultimate cheap seats

My father, born in 1922, grew up in Chicago’s North Side, not far from Wrigley Field.  In the 1920s, memories of the Cubs’ 1908 World Series Victory — and the Cubs’ overall competitiveness — were still very much alive.  Thus Cubs fans were generally more hopeful than they’ve been in my lifetime (except for rare and wonderful times like now!).  Add to this the 1919  Chicago Black Sox scandal, which caused many Southside Chicago fans to jump ship to the North Side: growing up idolizing the Cubs was neither quixotic nor pathetic.  

For my dad, the Cubs were beloved next door neighbors, and Wrigley Field was the preferred destination for father-son outings and solo adventures.  My paternal grandfather, also a Cubs fan although originally from Kentucky, would take my dad to games on Saturday afternoons — Grandpop dressed properly in suit and hat, Dad dressed in knickers and cap.  These excursions mattered a lot to my dad.  Grandpop had endured crushing family tragedies and financial setbacks that made him an unreliable and certainly an unhappy father, and trips to Wrigley were usually fun, positive activities that also provided uncontroversial things to talk about at home.  (Being quizzed on baseball statistics at an early age gave my dad a real head-start in mental math skills, which he tried [with middling results] to pass on to his own children.)

I don’t have a picture of my dad and Grandpop at a Cubs game, 

so here’s another father-and-son photo from the same era:  

Al Capone and his boy (they no doubt had better seats than my relatives ever had)

In the 1930s, my father expanded his Wrigley Field jaunts.  He and his stick-ball-playing friends would shinny up the trees that, before the bleachers were expanded, afforded a free view of the game.  My favorite story was how Dad — at ten or twelve years of age — would blend with the crowd waiting for Cubs’ game tickets, find a respectable-looking man, and ask him in his best street-urchin manner:  Hey, mister, could you pretend to be my father so I can get into the game?  Ah, innocent times, and less financially grasping times as well: children were admitted free.  I’m not sure what the age of paid admission was then, but my father was a cute little guy, so he probably worked this scam well into his teens.

Dad’s crowning achievement as a young Cubs fan was witnessing Babe Ruth’s called shot.  It’s unclear whether he was there with Grandpop or with a random man willing to walk up to the ticket booth holding the hand of an enterprising and unrelated kid.  The point, for my father, was that he was really, truly there — a witness to history.  He saw the Bambino point to center field (where, in some versions of the family story Dad was sitting), and then he watched the home run sail over his head.  How could you not be a life-long Cubs fan (or at least Wrigley Field fan) after that?

In the 1932 World Series (Cubs vs. Yankees), Game 3 at Wrigley, Yankee Babe Ruth pointed to center field, then rocketed it out there.

There were potential roadblocks.  Dad married my mother, whose downstate Illinois father was a committed White Sox fan.  Heresy!  Fortunately for their union, Mom didn’t then care that much about baseball and easily converted to Cubs fandom.  Part of the her pliancy was due to the way her father lived his baseball allegiance: he would retreat to his car and listen to the Chicago White Sox games on the radio.  I remember many times visiting my maternal grandparents, and someone would ask: ‘Where’s Dave’?  ‘Out in the car with the White Sox’ would be the reply, and the rest of us would go about our business.  

This whiff of apostasy had ramifications in my childhood.  I knew that not everyone in my family was a Cubs fan (and that the Cubs weren’t very good at that time); wasn’t I free to choose my own team?  I did so, one rainy, cold summer when I was about eight years old. We were all stranded in Northern Wisconsin’s Pine Beach with nothing for children to do except read library books and listen to the radio.  During the latter activity, I decided to become a baseball apostate and root for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The expected opposition from my dad did not happen, as he and my mother were enjoying partying with their friends and anyway, the Cubs were horrible that year (surprise!).  The next summer, though, we all went to a Milwaukee Braves game in County Stadium, which was wonderful and baseball-star-spangled: Warren Spahn, Eddie Matthews, and Hank Aaron immortalized in my pink leatherette autograph book! I added the (Milwaukee, not the turncoat Atlanta) Braves to the Dodgers (and, even though I wouldn’t admit it, the Cubs) on my favorite-teams list.  

Aaron, Spahn, and Matthews in 1958, before the Milwaukee Braves ultimately lost the post-season to the New York Yankees.  

My father and, by then, my mother remained steadfast Cubs fans. I became a teenager, college student, wife, and mother . . . and although a less attentive major league baseball fan, a baseball fan still (heck, I was an assistant little league baseball coach on Okinawa).  Later, as a university professor, I would go with my graduate students to Durham Bulls minor league games and occasionally act as umpire in intramural graduate squad matches.  Meanwhile, my parents retired from Wisconsin to North Carolina.  After a few short years, my father experienced major health setbacks, and he couldn’t play golf, tennis, ping-pong, jarts, bridge, or even fifty-two-card-pickup any more.  His formerly active life was radically curtailed, and about the only sports activity he could enjoy was . . . watching the Cubs.  

Thanks to WGN at that time (NOT NOW, so merci beaucoup not, ‘America’s Network’), Cubs games were broadcast widely and frequently.  My dad would organize his day around those broadcasts, and when classes and meetings allowed, I’d join him and my mom in viewing and rooting . . . and thus restoring my life-long albeit sometimes-under-the-radar Cubs fandom to fully active status.  

Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, pretending to be friendly competitors.  

Less than two years before he died, Dad was able to savor the exciting home-run-record race waged by Mark McGwire, (for a time) Ken Griffey Jr., and (YES!!!!) the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa.  As a team, the Cubs were vaguely competitive then, but the real fan thrill adhered to the 1998 home-run race.  My father, whose love of the Cubs began when there were no Hispanic or Black ballplayers in the major leagues — not even a thought that there could be — was as absorbed in this quest as health allowed him to be. The last book my father ‘read’ was a graphic-novel biography of Sammy Sosa.

Dad really believed that the Cubs would win the World Series in his lifetime.  That didn’t happen.   As his daughter, I’m especially savoring the Cubs’ run this year — hoping that if the Cubs are champions in 2015 (or almost champions), and I’m totally into it, and having a fine time watching games with good friends, my father is holding up a ‘W’ banner, somewhere in the skies above Wrigley Field.

[Update courtesy of my sister, re Babe Ruth's called shot:   Dad and his parents had a little lunch outside of Wrigley Field before Grandpop went in to watch the World Series game with the other men in the crowd.  Luckily, our grandmother was able to snag makeshift bleacher seat tickets from a scalper as they began to walk home and thus could surprise Dad with the perfect birthday present (he was turning ten years old).  So, instead of paying $15 each (as Grandpop had), they got in for $2 each, and happened to be in the perfect position to see the called shot.]