Unrequited Cubbie Love

In my Chicago family, spring was ushered in by an annual ritual. On an inevitably cold (and likely snowy) late March morning, our mothers called us in sick to school. And in the early hours of that always gray morning, we’d bundle up, in our red-and-blue caps and layers of hopeful spring clothes, and make our way into the city for the ultimate day of playing hooky. The first destination: the McDonald’s parking lot at Clark and Addison, where our extended clan would gather—aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents—equipped with windbreakers and blankets, seat warmers and mittens. While the moms sorted through the necessities in the back of someone’s wood-paneled station wagon, the cousins and I skipped around the parking lot, singing, “Take me out to the ball game…,” and dreaming of peanuts and malt cups (complete with shivering hands and purple lips on a forty-degree day). Then someone would give the orders, and off we were to the ultimate destination, across the street, where the red sign beckoned us to cheer on our beloved Cubs at their home season opener.

Countless March afternoons were spent at Wrigley Field. These were followed by evenings down Clark Street at the Swedish American Club, where my grandpa and his fellow Cubs fans plied their grandchildren with hot chocolate while they slurped Old Milwaukee and lamented the inevitable fate of their neighborhood team.

Twenty-some years later, for me at least, a trip to Wrigley Field is no less monumental. My Chicago-transplant husband, however, can’t understand the obsession. “It’s nothing but a bunch of drunk, Lincoln Park Trixies and their stock broker boyfriends. They’re too drunk to even know what’s happening on the field. At least with the White Sox,” he boasts, a fully converted devotee of the South Side’s grinders from before they won the World Series, “you hear ACDC at least twice, and every working man in the city is keeping track of the stats on his own scorecard.”

I’ll concede: Wrigleyville has become somewhat of a drunken wasteland, where the twentysomethings are more interested in who they’ll hook up with than Lou Piniella’s managing magic. The ancient, dark den of the Swedish American Club has long been converted to the late-night Improv Olympic, and the Cubby Bear attracts more Big 10 migrants than the working class crowd that hung out there a generation ago. And since this is the only Wrigleyville that Ross has ever known, I can forgive him. But what he doesn’t understand—and what the thousands of young Chicagoans about to cheer on the Cubs in their postseason berth don’t understand, either—is that it hasn’t always been this way. Despite Wrigley Field’s having grown into the world’s largest outdoor bar, it is still hallowed baseball ground, at least for families like mine.

My grandfather grew up down the street from Wrigley Field during the Great Depression. As he shuttled from boarding house to boarding house with his younger sister in tow, his parents evaded their responsibilities in the neighborhood bars. I can only imagine what the fabled baseball team just around the corner meant to him. In those days, the Cubs won pennants, made it the World Series, and broke baseball records. And that 1905 World Series championship was fresh in the city’s memory. This was a great ball club, and to a boy trying to find his way in the world, it offered hope.

So my grandfather, Vern, spent his childhood within earshot of the park, mimicking the greats inside of it. He played youth ball with the first Boys’ Club in Chicago, on Addison, and later went on to star on Lane Tech’s baseball team. While his parents had offered him little in the way of support or direction, the Cubs’ example had more than made up for it. After high school, Grandpa gave his life to baseball. He spent his early twenties traveling around the country playing not for the Cubs but their South Side rivals, the White Sox, showing up in Mobile and Peoria and hoping they needed him that day to play a farm team game…and hoping, after that, he’d finally make the big time, and eventually play in Wrigley Field.

He never did. World War II came, his girlfriend became his wife, and his inevitable Major League future was lost. Alas, the Cubs mirrored his lost hopes. In 1945, they made it to the World Series yet again, only to lose. This must’ve been particularly heartbreaking for my grandpa, who in a way was shamed by his baseball talent during the war. Because Vern was a promising baseball player, the military kept him stateside as a “morale booster,” fixing planes in New Haven and touring Army bases playing baseball rather than fighting on the front lines. He had lost a brother-in-law at Normandy and friends across the Pacific, but he’d never once been in harm’s way himself. He never really considered himself a vet; he was embarrassed by his sheltered wartime status. Never mind that his retirement buddies who’d actually fought in the Good War tried to explain just how important he and the other “morale boosters” were to their efforts. He’d been both saved and embarrassed by baseball; with this bittersweet service record fresh on his mind at the end of the war, he was let down by baseball yet again with that 1945 World Series loss.

People like to joke that loving the Cubs is the ultimate act of masochism, and maybe it is. Despite his personal and National League disappointments, Grandpa’s love of baseball and the cursed Cubs got passed onto his progeny. His unrequited love became my own right of passage. As a kid growing up in the suburbs with a family firmly rooted in the North Side, I looked forward to our annual spring pilgrimages to the Friendly Confines, to the malt cups I ate with chattering teeth and to Harry Caray’s gravelly voice, and then to the inevitable post-game drive through the old neighborhood and the former family house on Berteau, while my mom and her sisters reminisced about their childhood. I marked the passing of each summer by days spent on Grandpa’s knee, an Old Mil in his right hand, watching the Cubs on Channel 9. We’d watch together silently for most of the game, interrupted only by the occasional critical grumble from Grandpa about Don Zimmer’s managing and by the seventh-inning sing-along. (It wasn’t until high school, when I attended my first non-Wrigley game—at Comiskey—that I discovered the lyrics were not universally, “Root, root, root for the Cubbies, if they don’t win it’s a shame…”).

By the 1990s, when my grandparents had retired out to the country and our baseball watching was no longer shared in time and space, the genetic defect of Cubs love had been fully passed on. My cousin and uncle owned a restaurant across the street from Wrigley, and they’d ply me with standing-room-only tickets. Leaning against the railing in the Upper Deck all by myself, I’d laze away the afternoon, just as happy as I’d been on those spring mornings a decade ago. When I was thirteen, I was offered free tickets to a Cubs fundraiser; despite being a teenybopper suburbanite supposed to be afraid of the dangerous city, I quickly mastered the CTA, just to get my picture taken with Ryno and Marc Grace. Those pictures later graced the walls of my high school bedroom, my college dorm, even my wedding slide show.

The older I got, the harder it often became to talk with my grandpa. Generations apart and existing in totally different worlds, our lives had diverged. And so every time I visited or called, I’d hopefully initiate a conversation with the one thing I knew we’d always share: “What do you think, Grandpa? Is this the year? Are the Cubs gonna do it?” He’d guffaw, take a swig of beer, and mutter some insult at the team he’d devotedly followed since a boy. But the veneer of cynicism was just that: a veneer. Deep down, he desperately wanted his team to win. We all did.

In 2003, in my twenties and finally living within my beloved city, I called him from the corner of Addison and Clark, just after the Cubs beat the Braves: “They’re gonna do it, Papa! This is it! This is the year they’re going all the way!” He laughed and answered wryly, “We’ll see, Brat. Probably not gonna happen in my lifetime.”

He was, unfortunately, right. In spring 2005, my grandpa passed away. He never did see the Cubs make it all the way, thanks to that fatal catch in the Marlins series. And as the Cubbies’ record continued to plummet in the years since that near-triumph, I’ve worried that I won’t get to see them go all the way in my lifetime, either.

But you’ve done it, Cubs: you’ve clinched the division and given us yet one more chance to celebrate. This time, you’ve got to do it. For Vern and for his lifetime of skeptical devotion, passed on to his offspring—and inevitably, to be passed on to our own—you’ve got to do it. For the hundreds of thousands of fans who have come to Wrigley Field, rain, snow or shine, win or lose, generations on. Even for the Lincoln Park Trixies and their stockbroker boyfriends. You’ve got to do it.

This must be the year.