Living in France these past ten years I do not think I have watched a single inning of baseball. I have lost much of my interest in part due to the overpowering political correctness, corporatism, militarism, and money (largely due to forms of localized crony capitalism) of sports. So when I watch occasionally it is to pass some time during my middle-aged insomnia (watching North American sports in Europe) or to have a sense of total relaxation apart from work, family, and the future. That is until this season where the Cubs have clinched the division. Their excellent performance has captured my imagination as it was in 1969 when I was 11 years old, rekindling memories a la Proust’s madeleine of my youth growing up in Chicago.
I was born in the city at Michael Reese Hospital in 1958. We moved to Skokie in 1960 where I attended elementary school. Junior high school was at Skiles in Evanston. Our neighborhood was all white, and almost all Jewish. My kindergarten class had the same demographics, but in first-grade black children were bused in. This early experiment in integration worked rather well as best as I can remember in that we all got along well. The junior high in Evanston was in a black neighborhood. By then many of my best friends were black. But the ultimate results of the social engineering experiment were typically unsatisfying in that I do not recall a single good student who was an African-American, most were near the bottom. Unfortunately, I lost track of all of my friends from that era when my family moved away when I was 14. I truly hope they are all doing well.
My 6th-grade class picture (1969). I am on the right end of the 2nd row.
Three of my grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine arriving in the early 20s. I suppose they were fleeing the pogroms or civil war of the period. I think a great grandfather was killed by the communists, but this is not at all documented. I never saw two of my grandparents. My only recollection of my maternal grandmother was that she often made strudel for us. My parents were both born in Chicago. I never heard a word about Ukraine. My mother told me when she was about 70 that she spoke only Yiddish until she went to school yet I do not recall hearing her speak a word in any language other than English. I understood we were Jewish but more in the sense of ethnicity than religion; we never attended synagogue and I did not have a bar mitzvah. We loved many Jewish dishes, but we never explicitly ate kosher; that is, we ate corned beef and ham. Thus, I felt totally assimilated as an American and a Chicagoan. Yet now, I am an immigrant to another country where I have had to learn a new language and I scheme of ways to get my daughter to speak English.
A downside is evident. I know very little about my family history. A few years ago we spent the weekend in Picardy in northern France with friends who had the use of an old priory that was on the grounds of the chateau of the Hauteclocque family. The current occupant of the chateau is the nephew of Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, the famous le maréchal Leclerc, who commanded the 2e Division Blindée; the armoured division that liberated Paris in 1944. The Hauteclocque are a military family that can be traced back to the crusades. The graves were in the chapel adjoining the priory. We were invited to a barbeque at the chateau that weekend. The discussion wandered such that I forget the topic of the conversation other than my making the point that the Hauteclocque family history was known for about 800 years and in contrast, I really did not know the history of my grandparents. But even more, at that moment I did not know that Katz was a name given or chosen at Ellis Island to my grandfather. This last remaining grandparent I did not see after 1967 stemming from a dispute between my mother and my father’s family after his death.
I do not care very much for skyscrapers or modern architecture in general. However, I think today Chicago is an impressive town. Nonetheless, my strongest mental images of the city from the 60s are the dead fish (alewife die-off) and the yellow cloud around the lake over Gary Indiana. Now the salmon are back in the Great Lakes to eat the alewives and the steel industry in Gary is long gone.
My recollection of Lake Michigan.
I did not care or know very much about politics in those days. For example, I remember the television announcement of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination and my thinking it was the son of the civil rights leader because I had not realized he was a junior. I had a notion of the uproar surrounding the Democratic Convention in 1968. But that was summertime and I was following the Cubs. We also watched the moon landings as my older brother was and is totally enthralled by the space program and aviation. He has worked at the Kennedy Space Center for 40 years. Watching the Cubs now I often think of my other younger brother who died in 2012, in part because late in his life he very much enjoyed watching the good Tampa Devil Ray teams managed by the current Cub manager Joe Maddon.
In those days we received the afternoon Chicago Daily News and I recall many anxious moments waiting for the paper to arrive to read about the team. On Sundays, I would study the hitting and pitching statistics to the point of memorizing the batting average and earned run average of every player in both leagues. Later in life I became a SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) member for many years. My only research activity was to find box scores of Carolina League playoff games for the league. (I was given a league pass for my efforts). I was living in Durham and my favorite summertime activity when not playing softball (slow and modified pitch) was going to Bulls games. But whenever possible I would escape from the lab and go to the library to read old Durham Morning Herald editions from the 30s and 40s. I enjoyed these history lessons. One day I was captivated by the accounts from the fall of 1939 on the pursuit of the German cruiser the Graf Spee in the South Atlantic (I had seen the film with Anthony Quayle as a child). Many years later on a trip to Argentina my host drove us into the hills outside of Cordoba. We stopped at a quaint German village where we drank artisanal beer. He described coming to this village for years and drinking with sailors from the scuttled cruiser who stayed in Argentina.
My first baseball memory was going to Wrigley Field with my father. That brief memory must be from 1964 or earlier because the game was against the Houston Colt 45s who became the Astros when they moved into the Astrodome in 1965. I really started following the Cubs in 1967. I went to games only with my brothers, friends, or even alone at 9 years old; no adults. Logistically, I went to the Howard St. station by bus or bicycle and by the B El train to Addison St. In those days I could bring a sandwich and pass the whole day (there were no night games) at the ballpark; watching batting practice before the game and waiting for autographs after the game. Even for a kid the cost was not bad: $1 for a ticket (to the bleachers or the grandstand), $0.25 for a coke and $0.50 for transportation.
1969 was special to me as I lived and died by the Cubs results that year because they were destined to win the pennant, or so I thought. The Cubs lineup: Kessinger, Beckert, Williams, Santo, Banks, Hundley, are like the line of a poem that I will never forget. Of course this year is already better than 69 when the team collapsed down the stretch. The sense of loss was complete and formed my stoic outlook on life perhaps even more than the death of my father the two years previous. Like all Chicagoans old and new, I hope this year is really the “next” year. But if it isn’t it will not bother me.
