by Mike Fak
This story is the continuation of a story published in the August 2005 issue of U.S. Legacies magazine and reflects a dream Mike had about his childhood.
A little further south at Seminary and Belmont was my grandparents, John and Mary Treacys, neighborhood. Like my own, it was a microcosm of the city. Within a few blocks, one of each type of little store that served that specific neighborhood etched itself into the landscape.
Grandma and Grandpa were just three decades off the boat Irish and Grandma never did get used to the fact she had a refrigerator and freezer. Every day she would walk the block to the corner butcher shop and buy just the food needed for that days meals. I recall when I went with her how I hated to see the chickens outside the store in cages, waiting to be chosen for beheading and plucking. The old butcher always showed Grandma the meat as if he was trying to sell her a car. He would tell her how he had saved just this selection for her and didn’t it look lean and tender. He wasn’t doing this just for show. On the occasions that Grandma cooked up an inferior hunk of meat for Grandpa, the butcher darn well knew he would get chewed out the next day.
The one thing I hated about going with Grandma to the stores was our trek over to John J. Cooney’s Funeral Home on Southport just off Addison Street. The funeral home handled all the Irish in the neighborhood who passed away and Grandma considered it very important to go in, see who was being waked, and for us to say a prayer or two, regardless of whether she knew the person or not.
I remember Grandpa, a big barrel chested man, sitting at the kitchen table eating incredible amounts of food in his tee shirt with a towel draped over his shoulders. You’re not eating if you don’t break into a sweat Michael, he would always tell me.
Grandpa Treacy was a dandy. The small house on Seminary that he and Grandma purchased when coming to America had a crawl space under it and Grandpa and Mom’s Uncle Pat decided it needed a full basement. For two years they dug a seven foot tall full basement out from under the house by hand. At night when it was dark, Grandpa would take bucket after bucket of dirt across the street to the grammar school playground until, finally, the basement was completed.
Abruptly my dreams changed again. I was back in the room with Ted. He was smiling and said, Those are good memories of the places around Wrigley, Mike, but I want you to tell me more about the people you remember. I want you to tell me about the sights and sounds of those days.
As he said his last word, a new series of specters formed in line for me to recall. I saw the sharpener man walking down the street, pushing his huge grinding wheel cart and calling out his services to all the wives abandoned for a day of housework in the countless apartments.
Tony, the fruit and vegetable man, his panel truck with baskets hanging over the sides, would slowly drive down the alley, stopping every hundred yards or so to swing out his huge scales and yell, Fresh fruit and a vegetables. The moms would all come down and judiciously select a few perfect fruits for the family table. You could see by the way they smiled and visited with each other, that hanging around Tony’s truck, finding out the latest in neighborhood gossip was a special respite from the days activities. Tony’s fruit truck was more than a traveling store. It was an event.
I remembered the coal trucks driving down the alley and then dumping their coal. All the apartments back then were coal heated. The huge trucks couldn’t get closer than fifty yards to the coal chutes so they got as close as they could, dumped their load and drove on. Soon, down the alley would come this lean chiseled black man pushing a wheelbarrow with a janitors broom and shovel inside. Back and forth the man would go, shoveling the coal in the barrow and then wheeling it to the apartment bin. The job was always done by this same man as best I can recollect. In all the times we saw him, and played around when he was working, he never looked at us once. He never said a word. Just back and forth, load after load until the mountain of coal was gone. A brief sweep of the alley and he was down the block, repeating the job of making the next mountain of coal disappear. I remember trying to catch this mans glance, to say hello or just to confirm our existence together. Always though, his eyes were down, without a glimmer of life. A backbreaking job had taken the life out of this man and the spark out of his eyes. It now dawned on me how hard this man worked. I found myself hoping that his personal life wasn’t as difficult.
As the coal man slaved away, we often played in the cave-like gangways. The gangways on Sheffield were an integral part of our lives. They were shelters in the winter from the cold and snow, as well as a cool shaded place to be in the summer. It was in these caves on hot summer days that we sat and read our mountains of comic books or organized our shoeboxes full of baseball cards. We would swap and study the statistics the back of each card told us. The goal every summer was to get the complete four or five hundred cards to complete the years set. The victory was in this achievement alone. I recall never talking about how much one or another card was worth. I wish this dream had been kinder to me. I remembered putting hundreds of cards folded up on the spokes of my bike to make noise, especially several Mickey Mantle rookie cards that I had no use for at the time. As with most childhood treasures, the comics and cards as well as the toys all lost their importance over the years and were mercilessly disposed of. How different my life, all of our lives might have been if we had been savers in the 1950s.
I remembered when Mr. Green on the first floor died and his daughter from another state came to clean out the apartment. Each tenant had a storage shed in the basement and after she had checked it out for valuables she told us we could have whatever was left. I remember an awesome chemistry set that was left by her. With beakers and flasks and all kinds of things to make messes with we all played with that chemistry set. Dad set up a sheet of plywood on saw horses in the coal bin that had been abandoned after the building switched to oil heat and for a year that was our secret laboratory. We always had to be together when we played with that stuff as the basement was dark and dank and foreboding.
Regrettably, I also remembered that we found a shoebox full of old baseball cards in the piles of stuff left by Mr. Green’s daughter. They were stupid tobacco cards of baseball players long retired with just a picture and name on the front with no statistics to read. Agonizingly, I remembered how we just threw them in the trash. There were hundreds of them in mint condition.
I recalled Tuesday’s at 10:30 a.m. That was the date and time each week when the air raid sirens would sound. At the time it wasn’t a question of if we would have a nuclear war with Russia. It was a question only of when. As the sirens wailed I watched adults, who when they thought no one was looking, took a quick glance up in the sky, just to make sure it was a test. My dad always told me that the Russians weren’t dummies. When they did decide to attack us it would be on a Tuesday at 10:30 so that they could catch us all off guard. Watching the adults take quick peaks at the sky, I wondered if they had talked to my dad.
In 1959, the year the Chicago White Sox won the pennant, a poor misguided soul set off the air raid sirens that night to celebrate the Sox victory. Dad was a die hard White Sox fan and I remember Dad later laughing and saying that all he could think of was that his beloved Sox had finally won a pennant and the Russians were going to blow us up before they could win the World Series. Ten days later the Sox went down in six games to the Dodgers, and my dad wished the Russians had bombed us. He was disconsolate.
I remembered the huge summer festivals at St. Mary of the Lake. Not a carnival like today, but more like a giant two-day family picnic. In 1958, the church had a big raffle with the all new Ford Edsel as the grand prize. I remember my dad and I walking around that car on the church lawn and his telling me all about the new technology this auto offered. He talked how some day we would get a new car instead of always driving around in a junker. At the time neither of us knew that would never happen.
I recalled how for several years half of the dining room was a train layout on two full sheets of plywood. I remember Dad continually buying new buildings or tiny streetlights or Lionel cars that did special things when you threw a switch. I also remember Mom being mad at dad for spending so much money when there were other things she deemed more important than another building for the miniature city. As I grew older I came to realize it wasn’t my train set but Dad’s that he continually worked on. Somewhere in his childhood he had dreamed of having a train layout like this one, and I, being born, had been the perfect excuse to go and spend a fortune on these toys. I recalled looking under the apron of the layout at what looked like hundreds of feet of wires and considering my father a genius.
I remembered always having a birdcage in the corner of the kitchen. Canary after parakeet filled those cages as well as the cages of almost every other family in the neighborhood back then. I remembered Happy and Chirpy, and a mean nasty little parakeet who thoroughly enjoyed biting people even when they were putting food in the cage. I don’t remember that birds name but it should have been Lucifer.
I recalled the catwalk running across the back yard from the second floor rear steps to the roof of the six car flat garage that was home to clothesline after clothesline of freshly washed clothes. There was no fence around the perimeter of that roof and I wonder why after so many years of playing on that roof no one had ever fallen off and broken something.
One day for no apparent reason other than age, the roof of the garage caved in causing Mr. Green to lose his model T car that had been stored in one of the stalls for over 30 years. When the garage was completely torn down and removed, we had a great new ball field to play the new game of whiffle ball. Whiffle ball was a huge hit because the ball didn’t travel very far and was perfect for the crowded neighborhood.
As other vignettes in my life moved up in line for their turn in my sleep, they were all whisked away by Ted’s voice bringing me back to the room. Mike, those are some wonderful memories, but I don’t want to leave out old Wrigley from this dream. You’re starting to stir and I wouldn’t want this dream to not be complete.
There, across my sleeping minds eye appeared the famous red Wrigley Field sign at the corner of Clark and Addison. The park was empty now, and I found myself walking around inside the, even then, old ballpark. Under the Clark street stands was the concession counter that always saved us the ends of the popcorn machines offerings. A poor crowd, or a rainout, gave us boxes and boxes of free popcorn plus a hot dog or two. I wish the vendors at that counter had a face. They were the kind ones. The other stands employees would shoo us away and smiling devilishly, throw the food in garbage cans as we watched. We never needed the food. It was just that we loved freebees.
Looking out from the stands I could see on the Waveland side of the park the one truck firehouse where when certain teams with right-handed power hitters came to town we would sit and wait for two things to happen. First we would listen on the firehouse radio for the signal that someone was in the process of parking one over the catwalk and into our waiting gloves. Sometimes when we had missed a few games, one of the firemen would give us a ball that had bounced into the station and ask us where we had been that day. Every once in a while somebody like Mays, or Clemente, or Musial would clank one off the fire engines grills. Those were keepers to the firemen. We understood. We never asked for those special balls. A baseball to us was for play, not a souvenir.
The second thing we waited for at the firehouse was the fourth or fifth inning. By then it was obvious that no one was going to pay to see the game and the Andy Frain ushers would smile and walk away from the turnstiles. In a heartbeat, we would go under the bar and scoot into the upper deck to watch the end off the game. Some of the Frains were better than others about freeloaders in the park. I don’t think Cub management minded because attendance back then was not very good during the week. I think maybe the Wrigley’s were embarrassed when a foul ball was hit down the right or left field stands and those new fangled TV cameras would show the sphere clanging around and about completely empty sections of seats. Maybe we helped make the place look closer to the always exaggerated attendance figures that Jack Brickhouse and Vince Lloyd would announce every day.
Two areas that were strictly off limits were the box seats and lower stands. These were where the season ticket holders sat, and no one was going to let them think that freeloaders could see the game the same way that they could.
The bleachers were our favorite area back then. Usually half filled, a good seat could still be found except on double header Sundays. I recalled that sometimes when there was a twin bill or a special team was coming to town, we would actually pay to get in. We would arrive two hours before the game so we could get front row seats on whichever side of the field we thought a home run was more than likely. We also got there early because sometimes during outfield practice, the coaches hitting enormously high fungos to the fielders would answer our waving plea to them to hit one a little too far. The result of course would be another ball for us, condemned to the gravel playing field of the Horace Greeley schoolyard as soon as we got home.
In those days roller-skating was very popular, and Wrigley was made for the sport. The smooth concrete walks around the ballpark were great for a maximum head of steam. Sometimes when the Cubs were out of town, the fences around the turnstiles would be open for deliverymen. A quick zoom under the bar and Wrigley’s great concrete ramps were before us. Walking up to the upper level we would put on our skates and zoom down the great ramps. Catch the bar at the end of each level and you could whip yourself in the opposite direction at a still greater speed. The noise of our skates of course would bring someone to chase us out. A quick duck under the turnstile and we were gone. We never once got caught.
I remembered how in the fall the great metal gates on Sheffield were open. Mountains of new turf would lie on the sidewalk waiting for the grounds crew to re-sod the ballpark for the next year’s season. When crews were on breaks or weren’t near the gates, we would gingerly walk into right field. The inside structure of the ballpark was a playground. The field itself was a different matter. We would walk reverently in the outfield, dreaming of a day when perhaps the stands would be filled with fans cheering for us. Hope against hope of being a major league ballplayer filled our minds as we felt the grass under our feet. Thoughts of all the great ballplayers who had walked on this very soil made each step an event.
The Wrigley Field complex was a place to goof around in. The field itself was hallowed ground to be loved and revered. Eventually, someone would see us and yell at us to get out of the ballpark. We would run away, back out the great doors.
One after another of the great memory-making players that I had seen in Wrigley lined up to vie for favorite memory in my recollections. I remember how the players parked their cars by the ballpark, along the railroad tracks off Clark. They needed no special security area. People would always wave and say hi to them, but they were never harassed back then, at least not by the Near North kids. It always made us laugh when, before a game, we would see people hanging over the walls asking any ballplayer to sign something for them. To us, the players were a daily fixture in our lives. We felt no need to collect remembrances or gather souvenirs of the moment. Like our childhood, we thought both would last forever.
Ernie Baks was always the best. Every time we saw him we would yell, Hey Ernie! The man would always acknowledge us with a huge smile and that constant classic retort of his, Hey, how ya doin? Although he said it to all the kids he saw, the genuineness of his manner made every kid feel like they were a personal friend of Ernie Banks.
It probably was a better time for all the ballplayers back then. They could walk over to the stands, spend a few minutes of idle chatter with us and not get deluged with people shoving things in their faces to sign. I think they knew who the Wrigley kids were. So many adoring faces in so many towns they couldn’t remember us individually but they acted like they knew us. This simple if false recognition by our heroes was everything to us. It allowed us to pretend we were friends with our idols. It validated our lives.
Pushing itself to the front of my dream was a remembrance of a day in right field. We must have paid to get in that day because we were in the front row, our drinks precariously resting on the aggregate wall that was the border between a long out and a home run. A young Cub rookie who was having a horrible time not only at the plate but also in the field was on the field in front of us. Once in the game, the rookie was backing up to the wall and having all kinds of problems judging the flight of a hard hit ball in a swirling wind. As we watched in horror, the rookie almost got hit on the head as he dropped the ball for a two base error. The fans, who loved their lovable losers never did seem to warm up to this young man. In a few years the Cubs gave up on the young player and he was traded. Fortunately, the young man never gave up on himself. His name was Lou Brock.
Published in U S Legacies Magazine September 2005
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