Most avid baseball fans
know about the three great championship droughts, all broken in the 21st
century. One of them, meaningful to my
family, has a characteristic the others don’t share.
In 2004, when the
Boston Red Sox won their first World Series in eighty-six years, newspaper
features highlighted their oldest fan, Fred Hale Sr., age 112. He had been
twenty-seven when Babe Ruth led them to victory in 1918, before the Bambino was
sold to the Yankees, supposedly putting a curse on the team.
In 2005, when the Chicago
White Sox won after eighty-eight years, Monsignor Richard O’Donnell, a South
Side priest, enjoyed his second championship at the age of ninety-five.
But in 2016, when the
Chicago Cubs finally won it all for the first time since 1908, there were no stories
about fans who could remember the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double play
combination and pitcher Three-Finger Brown, whose mangled hand produced an
unhittable splitter. The fan base’s memory did not span 108 years, the longest
championship drought in any U.S. professional sport.
It was too much for my great-aunt Tee, a
stylish woman who operated a currency exchange on the North Side. She could
remember her father taking her to the 1929 World Series at Wrigley Field, which
of course the Cubs lost. Eventually, she retired to Las Vegas but continued to
watch every game on the WGN superstation, even after glaucoma had taken her
sight. She lived into her nineties and never saw the promised land.
Bud, Dad, Norman, Lyle circa 1963
Sometimes a person has
a memory so distant as to come from another world, as when Samuel J. Seymour
appeared on the popular TV show “I’ve Got a Secret” in 1956. His secret: He
saw John Wilkes Booth assassinate
Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in 1865. Specifically, he heard a shot, then
saw the killer jump from Lincoln’s box to the stage and break his leg. Not
knowing what had occurred, the five-year-old wanted to rush to the stage to
help Booth.
My own first
semi-historic memory also involves a president.
In October 1962, when I
was eight, my sister Tempra and I were spending the weekend at my grandparents’
flat on Chicago’s Northwest Side. My movie-star handsome Uncle Norman came in,
sweaty from his Saturday morning handball game. “Want to go see Kennedy?” he asked.
“Really? I’ve never
seen a president before!”
The Chicago Tribune had the details on the
front page: The president would arrive at O’Hare Airport at 4:30 p.m. His
motorcade would proceed down the Northwest Expressway to a Democratic rally at
City Hall.
We left my Republican grandparents
behind, walked a couple blocks, and scrambled down a grassy hillside to the
expressway’s steel railing. There was no security checkpoint. A single cop stood around, bored, not looking
at us.
A motorcade began
crawling by. The fire engines, sirens blaring, came first, followed by a dozen
or more police cars, lights flashing. Finally, I spotted the open convertible
carrying Kennedy in the back seat. He stiffly turned his head, but not his
injured back, to wave to the crowds on both sides. His face was puffy and pale, not the tanned
look he had on TV. Still, he outclassed Chicago’s saggy-faced mayor, Richard J.
Daley, in the seat next to him.
I was no more than
fifteen yards away. With a skimming
stone from a Lake Michigan beach, I might have been able to conk him.
An
hour later, after his speech downtown, Kennedy canceled the rest of his
campaign swing and returned to Washington. The explanation given to the media
was that he had a bad cold. The real reason was that it was the fourth day of
the Cuban Missile Crisis, though no one except the president and his advisers
knew about it. A few days later, we’d be doing duck-and-cover drills under our
desks and talking about our dads building bomb shelters.
Friday,
November 22, 1963, was unusually warm in suburban Highland Park, with occasional
light rain. I was playing soccer at lunchtime on the Ravinia school field with
a tin can for a ball when somebody said Kennedy had been shot. We rushed into
the classroom. Mr. Detweiler had brought out a small black-and-white TV. After
a few minutes, Walter Cronkite said Kennedy was dead, took off his glasses,
wiped his eyes. Mr. Detweiler couldn’t think of anything to say. School was
dismissed. On the way home, everyone was quiet except for a Republican kid who
shouted an impromptu rhyme, “JFK’s dead/He was shot in the head.”
All
weekend, I watched much of the round-the-clock assassination television
coverage including the shocking shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald on live
television. TV retrospectives show the same clips over and over, and assume the
nation was plunged into sorrow by the death of its gallant young president. I don’t remember grief, though, just shock. Over
the weekend, a consensus had formed Kennedy had been a great man.
Tuesday,
when school resumed, the kid who came up with the rhyme stayed quiet. Friday,
the Chicago City Council voted to rename the Northwest Expressway for Kennedy.
Christmas 1963: Uncle
Nick, Tee’s husband, carried a brown paper bag into my grandparents’ flat. He
raised it briefly. The men went out in back.
Nick called it Dago Red. The wine was
supposedly made in some friend’s garage, though Dad suspected Nick just poured
a jug of Gallo into a fruit jar and passed it off as bootleg.
Nick was Italian; my
father Jewish, adding some ethnicity to an Anglo-Saxon family that had been in rural
central Illinois since pioneer days, before moving to the big city in the
1920’s. “These Chicago marriages. There ought to be a law,” my grandfather,
Lyle Pritchard, had joked.
To my mother’s embarrassment,
he took a job in the Depression driving a Chicago Transit Authority bus and
held it the rest of his life. It didn’t
bother him. The regular hours left him more time for his hobbies, including clarinet,
photography, skeet shooting, and sailing. When he spotted a rare coin in the
fare box, he added it to his collection.
He was open about
disliking blacks, whom he called “colored.” White and black drivers competed
for the best routes and never shared a table in the lunchroom. In fact, he didn’t even root for the Cubs,
because the National League had too many black players. He preferred the
American League, dominated by the Yankees, who were almost all white.
His attitude came as a
shock. Living in the mostly liberal, all-white suburb of Highland Park, I
didn’t actually know any black people, but the Cubs’ big stars, Ernie Banks and
Billy Williams, were heroes.
The tension between my
mother and grandfather extended to my upbringing. Mother had resisted
television, kept us away from other kids, taught me to read at age two. By
five, I could name the presidents in order, from Washington to Eisenhower, and
identify their pictures. I was so
serious family members called me “our little man.”
She discouraged
television and pop culture influences, but took my sister and me to string
quartet concerts, including difficult composers like Schoenberg, and the Art Institute, with its
renowned collection of modern art. Paul Klee was my favorite.
My grandfather didn’t
approve. He accused Mother of sissifying me. Besides teaching me the history of
baseball, he gave me lessons in shooting, boxing, and fencing.
We sat down to a turkey
dinner, indistinguishable from Thanksgiving except for the additions of Waldorf
salad and Stollen. My grandfather sprinkled Tabasco on lots of dishes including
mashed potatoes, a practice I picked up, but only when the chef was looking the
other way.
After dinner, the men
retreated to the living room and cigars. All five of them, plus nine-year-old
me, wore white shirts, ties, and slacks.
The vinyl-covered chairs and sofas came from Community Discount World,
including my favorite, the vibrating, reclining easy chair. Even in the
all-male setting, there wouldn’t be a swear word spoken, presumably because of
me.
These guys all knew
guns. My grandfather, a bit too old for World War II, was a skeet shooter. Most of the others had served in the Army in
the 1950s.
“Three shots in seven
seconds.” Uncle Nick extended his left
arm, put his head against his shoulder, and closed one eye.
“Bang.” He turned the
imaginary weapon fifteen degrees to the right. “Bang.” He turned again. “Bang. I
don’t think Oswald could have done it. That’s a tough shot from that distance.”
My Dad, who as a
corporal had taught recruits to shoot, closed one eye and tried it with his own
imaginary rifle. “I don’t think it would
be that hard.”
No one expressed regrets—some
of them hated Kennedy, and in any case those men wouldn’t voice a weak emotion
like sympathy in all-male company.
Nick thought it was the
communists who did it. Oswald might have been one of the shooters, but there
was somebody else on the grassy knoll.
Norman, my bodybuilder
uncle, thought it was the CIA taking revenge on Kennedy for failing to support
its ill-fated invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Norman was a supporter of Fidel
Castro. He was also the first person I knew who opposed the war in Vietnam,
shocking to a child who had never heard anything except that the United States
was always the good guy.
Dad told me Norman came
home a few months in the Army on a “general discharge.” That didn’t mean
anything to me. Years later, I figured out he was hinting Norman got kicked out
because he was secretly gay.
I stayed quiet, though
I was convinced Oswald was the lone killer, not part of any conspiracy. My
parents didn’t like it when I argued with adults.
Half a century later, I visited the Sixth
Floor Museum in Dallas and looked out the window toward the X painted in the
street. Dad had been right--he could have made those shots easily. It confirmed
my belief Oswald’s only assistance came from ludicrously inadequate security
measures like the ones I’d witnessed a year earlier. Chicago was lucky the
assassination hadn’t happened there.
The closest I can come to
the way children and adults interacted in 1963 is a black-and-white TV show
made that month, “The Judy Garland Christmas Special,” which I watch every December
on YouTube.
Despite a dysfunctional
family life, and addicted to painkillers, Judy manages to present the illusion
of an ideal family as she invites viewers into a replica of her Hollywood
living room.
She is joined on the sofa
by her younger children, ten-year-old Lorna Luft, in a lace-trimmed dress, and
eight-year-old Joey, in an over-the-top fur-trimmed smoking jacket with tie. Others
begin arriving, including her teenage daughter Liza Minnelli and singer Jack
Jones, who performs the wistful “Lollipops and Roses.”
Lorna (coming up to
him): Excuse me, Mr. Jones.
Jack: Yes, Lorna.
Lorna: Would you please
sing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town?”
Jack: You know,
actually it’s a children’s song.
Lorna (giggles): I was hoping you’d say that.
Jack (smiling): Oh. So you’d like to sing.
Lorna sits on Jack’s
knee. The polite little girl transforms into a miniature version of her mother,
belting out the song confidently. At the finish, he congratulates her with a
squeeze.
February 1964-- I came
to school on Monday and everyone—even the teachers—was talking about the
Beatles’ appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” the night before, seen by a
record 73 million viewers.
One boy, already
growing his hair long, brought his acoustic guitar. As we waited at the
entrance to get in out of the cold, he performed “Please Please Me,” laboriously
arranging his fingers to make the chords.
It seemed everyone had
watched, except me. I didn’t even know
it was happening, or even who the Beatles were.
We had only a small
black-and-white television and were limited to 10 hours a week. I watched
little besides news and sports, especially the Cubs.
Mother spoke
beautifully, with no trace of the Chicago accent used by most of the “hunnerts”
of people I knew. She played only classical music on the hi-fi. Her taste was
ascetic, preferring chamber music, particularly Vivaldi, to symphonies or, God
forbid, opera. Despite an obvious lack
of talent, I was forced to struggle through three years of violin lessons.
Sometimes other parents
congratulated Mother on keeping us insulated from a shallow popular culture.
Still, they didn’t do the same thing with their kids. I had only a vague notion
I was missing something important.
In the months ahead,
while many boys grew their hair to resemble the mop-top Beatles, I kept my crew
cut. I never wore jeans to school, only button-down shirts and slacks. I didn’t
make the jump to the ‘60s until they were two-thirds over.
Even in relatively liberal
Highland Park, red-lining by the real estate industry and banks kept blacks
from buying a home. A petition came around urging a Fair Housing law that would
ban racial covenants. Mother signed. Dad
refused for some reason, probably property values. She was angry about that
forever.
In December 1966, we left
Highland Park, and its economic and social pressure my parents couldn’t quite
keep up with, and moved to a rented 52-acre horse farm in an unincorporated
area called Half Day (now part of Lincolnshire). The community was in transition
from farmland to suburban. Some of my classmates were culturally rural, with thick
Kentucky accents.
1967 was the worst year
of my childhood. I was made fun of for my formal way of speaking, my dress
slacks, my out-of-date crew cut. I got into a few fights. In those days, they
didn’t suspend boys for fighting, they just broke it up and life moved on. If a
kid got bullied, the solution was to get stronger and tougher.
The main compensation
of the year was the Cubs. After being terrible for twenty years (an eternity to
a thirteen-year-old), their young talent came together, posting a winning
season and the prospect of better things to come.
In self-defense, I did
100 push ups a day, roughened my accent and grew bangs to the top of my eyes. My
popularity improved after I hosted a party designed to prepare decorations for
a pep rally, which spun out of control after some kids raided the liquor
cabinet and couples started making out in the swimming pool control room. Dad
was furious, but really, what other parents wouldn’t think of monitoring the
party, or at least locking up the booze?
Over the next few
years, we slowly moved toward the mainstream, never quite getting there. By the
time my parents divorced, it was obvious whatever they’d been aiming for hadn’t
been achieved.
The most distant famous
memory belonged to the person documented as the oldest who ever lived, Jeanne
Calment, who lived to 122. She became famous at age 113 when reporters visited
Arles, France, to write about the 100th anniversary of Vincent Van
Gogh’s yearlong stay.
Calment told reporters she
remembered Van Gogh visiting her father’s shop to buy canvas. She recalled him
as ugly, alcoholic, and a customer of prostitutes, an unexpected impression of
the post-Impressionist. If Calment could still remember Van Gogh just before
she died, that memory would have been 109 years old.
By coincidence, direct
memory of the Great San Francisco
Earthquake also lasted 109 years. Ruth Newman was a four-year-old girl living
on ranch in Healdsburg, 70 miles north of the city, on April 18, 1906. She recalled
her grandmother being upset because they had just milked the cow and separated
the cream, only for it to be shaken all over the floor. Newman died in
2015.
Those two cases show it
would have been possible—barely—for a particularly long-lived Cubs fan to have
had memories of both 1908 and 2016, though it didn’t happen.
If we take 109 years as
the limit of memory, and build in a five-year margin of safety, the Cubs should
have until at least 2120 to win again and still have a fan who can remember the
2016 championship. Even for them, that should be doable.
Memory can be measured
in ways other than years. Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir “Speak, Memory” contains
the memorable line “Our existence
is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” For Nabokov,
the crack revealed an astonishing amount of light.
The author takes readers to the vanished
world of his youth, the aristocracy of pre-Revolutionary Russia, with tales of childhood
pranks on sad middle-class tutors and governesses. He describes passing by a
pretty peasant girl on his family estate who called him “the young master,” giving
a sly indication he got an erection—a precursor, perhaps, of his most famous
character, Lolita.
Nabokov’s world disappeared with the
Revolution, along with his family’s fortune and some of his relatives. He never
returned to Russia, even though he could have done so as a U.S. citizen.
My grandmother Lena’s
childhood world also vanished, though she sometimes went to the physical place.
She had grown up without automobiles, electricity, indoor plumbing, or central
heating. The absence of a furnace was particularly important—children got the
sniffles all winter. The technological distance from her horse-and-buggy
childhood to old age, with all those things plus television, atomic energy, jet
and space travel, and the personal computer, seems far greater than the gap between
my childhood and now.
The main distance from
my childhood is social. In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, the pursuit of money,
respectability and social conformity was supplanted by a do-your-own -thing
attitude and a widespread sense of social justice. Money rushed back in the
room with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, remounting its accustomed throne, where
it remains today. But respectability,
high standards of dress, and children’s deference toward adults were left sputtering
outside the door.
I got away from Chicago
winters and my fighting parents at age eighteen and have long lived in the Bay
Area. Still, my longest-lasting ambition was to see the Cubs win it all.
Most of the 2016
season, the Cubs had the best record in the National League, but that had also
been the case in 1969, 1984, and 2002, and it hadn’t led to anything but
heartbreak. Some people blamed a curse uttered by the owner of the Billy Goat
Tavern after his pet goat was banned from Wrigley Field. More likely, it was dumb
management that even in good years never acquired enough pitching to survive
the grueling season.
Early in the decade,
the Cubs brought in Theo Epstein, the executive who had broken the curse in
Boston. He cold-heartedly tanked a couple of seasons, trading the best players
to obtain younger talent still in the minors and all but admitting he was
trying to finish last to get top draft choices. One of those picks, third baseman Kris Bryant,
blossomed into the league’s Most Valuable Player in 2016.
By luck, the Cubs’ first opponents in the
playoffs were the San Francisco Giants. Jacquie and I took the train to
AT&T Park in Cubs gear. People in our
car were surprised we paid with fare cards designed for commuters, having
assumed we were part of the army of traveling Cubs fans instead of locals who
didn’t happen to share their allegiance to the Giants.
Baseball fans are highly
superstitious. During the playoffs, if the Cubs won, I kept the same t-shirt on
for the next game; if they lost, I’d finally throw it in the laundry.
About the time the World Series began, I
learned the family that owned the Cubs were major financial backers of Donald Trump’s
presidential campaign, and I had a premonition
the Ricketts family would get both their wishes or neither. I told myself I’d accept the tradeoff.
The World Series came
down to a decisive seventh game. Tickets in Cleveland were going for $10,000. I
was content to watch on TV in my “Just Once Before I Die” t-shirt, hoping the
wish would be fulfilled that night and thinking I might have a fatal heart
attack if it weren’t.
The game was long and
tense. The Cubs took a 6-3 lead into the eighth but had to bring in overworked
relief ace Aroldis Chapman, who was throwing well below his normal speed. He
gave up a game-tying home run, an echo of past pitching collapses.
The game went into the 10th inning.
A shower moved in, causing a 20-minute delay that gave the Cubs time to
regroup. They came out strong, retaking the lead on a double by my favorite
player, Ben Zobrist. Final score, 8-7. Pure joy! I fielded congratulations from
friends from all over.
Six days later, Trump
won. I still feel guilty.
None of the ten adults around
the 1963 Christmas table got to see the Cubs’ triumph. Mother had been the last
survivor. She had gotten a cancer diagnosis early in the year, at age
eighty-seven, and a few days later took her own life, not even waiting to hear
a course of treatment. Late in her life, I could sense her disappointment her
remarkable little man had grown into such a conventional middle-aged adult.
She had no interest in
sports, but I suspect she would have cried for Aunt Tee.
