BEFORE IT WAS WRIGLEYVILLE
by Mike Fak
Authors Note: I was born in 1948 in Chicago Illinois. Until 1960 I lived at 3824 North Sheffield, just a block and a half from Cubs Park. The following is a compilation of memories that for whatever reason I found myself compelled to turn into this story.
A picture of Mike Fak in 1955 outside Horace Greeley School yard.
By Mike Fak
I wrote ‘Before it was Wrigleyville’ at 2:00 a.m. after an evening of fitful dreams. No longer being able to sleep, I typed a huge jumble of thoughts and recollections triggered by my subconscious before they were lost again forever. This little grab bag of memories lay in a folder I promised to someday rewrite into a cognizant story. Every night for several years as I lay waiting for sleep to end my day, I had a pang of regret that I had not compiled, sorted and brought those pages into story form. It seemed to be of no consequence to me whether the story was any good or not. I only knew that I had to bring it to life, regardless of it having any quality or value.
In 1997, I did just that. Again on a night where sleep was a stranger to me, I took the folder out and this is how the story you are about to read came about. It is about my life as a young body growing up in the shadow of Wrigley Field in the 1950s.
In late 1998, the story again started to keep me awake. I tossed and turned wondering what it was about this simple tale that wouldn’t give my any peace. At last I decided that perhaps it was a call to me to visit the old neighborhood. I often wondered why, in 40 years, I had never gone back to my childhoods stomping ground since 1963. Not once in all those years.
It is just one of those things that from time to time happens to all of us. I had a dream about my childhood. I am not sure what exactly triggered this one. I don’t recall seeing someone I hadn’t seen in a long time. Nothing I can recall seeing in print or on the TV was the culprit. I guess it was just brought on by something I ate. Anyway, I had this dream about my childhood.
The first scene in this vision had me at Wrigley Field in the middle of a snowstorm. The half dozen friends who were with me sitting along the third base line were a compilation of many people I have met over the years.
As with everyone’s dreams, since they were not important to the text, they in a sense remained nameless as well as faceless. The point of my mind’s journey was that I was back home in my first playground. Although there was a snowstorm, the day itself was sunny and bright. I understand this is not possible, but reality has little domain in a person’s dreams.
I believe the winter storm that wasn’t cold was done for effect. There were no ballplayers on the field, nor anyone else save my small group in the stands as I sat and looked and smelled all that was Wrigley.
The fake storm had been the catalyst for the next scene, I now found myself under the stands at the corner of Addison and Clark sipping a coffee, looking in the window of the autographed baseball store, which has never been there. Baseballs with the signature of every ballplayer you could imagine were lined up stitch to stitch in the display cases. As I shuddered and sipped my coffee, an elderly clerk with glasses dangerously close to the end of his nose waved at me through the store window, beckoning me inside. Walking into the brightly lit store, the dream changed again. The small store was now empty except for a single glass case on a walnut pedestal in the center of the shop. In the case was a single baseball with the autograph of Ted Williams perfectly discernible across its face.
I recall having no surprise at the ball carrying the Splendid Splinters name. Ted Williams was my favorite player over all the hall of fame players I saw in Wrigley Field during the late 50s and early 60s. That might seem strange since I never saw him play. My opinion based on memories of my dad having family arguments or just preaching to me about Ted being the best ballplayer ever convinced me Williams was the man.
I recall my dad saying that if Ted hadn’t given up five years of his career to serve his country in World War II and Korea, that his career totals would have been unsurpassed. I was a young boy. He was my father and his word was gospel. My favorite player, like dad’s, had to be Ted Williams.
Staring at the special baseball, I noticed a card requesting $200.00 from whoever wished to purchase the souvenir. As I stared at the perfect signature, a hand rested upon my right shoulder. Forget it kid. That’s way too much to pay for that ball. As I turned to see who was talking to me, the dream shifted into the third person.
I watched from a distance as I became a young boy again, standing and talking to Ted Williams, my hero. Without explanation (which is never needed in a dream), I saw myself walking away with Mr. Williams.
I knew as I watched the two of them leave the ballpark that they were going somewhere to talk about my youth around good old Wrigley. With their backs turned to me, I heard myself say to Ted, You were my dad’s favorite ballplayer. I know. He replied. As the two figures dwindled in the distance, I saw the young boy reach to hold the mans hand. Gently, you could see the older man return the gesture.
Within a moment, a completely new illusion had formed in my dreamful mind. I was sitting on a sofa in a room that carried no substance. It was like no room I had ever been in, yet it was similar to all the rooms I had called home in my life. Ted Williams was sitting in front of me on a straight back chair, with hands folded, his body hunched over towards me. I felt like I was being questioned by a doctor about some malady I had claimed to have. I kept asking Ted to tell me stories of his playing days. I wanted to know if he really could pick up the rotation of a ball as it left the pitchers hand. Could he really know if it was a fastball or a slider or a curve like people said he could? I wanted to know what went through his mind that last day of the season, when batting 400; he refused to sit out the last doubleheader games of the season and went 6 and 8 at the plate. All my questions to Ted were brushed aside by him. For every question I asked, he said, No, I want you to tell me about your days in the old neighborhood first.
Suddenly the point of my dream became obvious. All of us have things locked in our minds since childhood. Things that we remember but never have had occasion to recall. Some of those memories are sent into deep corners of our mind because they were sad or hurt to remember. There are many good events that have been tucked away in corners of our recollection. These thoughts have helped shape our life’s character, yet have become lost in the innumerable files of memories past. A thousand of these little vignettes of my youth now came forward to be recounted. Things I thought I had forgotten as well as things I had forgotten that I ever remembered now came across my minds eye.
I recalled the old neighborhood explicitly. I mean to the point that I could draw you a detailed map that would be 100% accurate. Every building, every store, every nook and cranny of the one mile radius around Wrigley Field was there for me to see. Each element, like a miniature film that carried its own story to tell, one after the other, flew before me.
The neighborhood was and is made up of innumerable six flats called brownstones or greystones built within a few inches of each other or in some cases having no space between them at all. This strange trait had caused gangways to be cut through the underbellies of the apartment buildings so that residents could go from back yard to front steps without having to walk all the way around those long city blocks. In some areas homes rested comfortably a few feet from each other but that was not the case on the thirty eight hundred block of Sheffield which was lined almost entirely with six flats on the west side of the street.
I remembered the hotel Carlos in the middle of my block on Sheffield. I recalled Mom telling me not to go in there trick or treating at Halloween because the hotel was full of transients. The word scared me. I never asked what it meant.
I thought back to the busy corner where Sheffield turned into Sheridan Rd. as a person heads north. The tough Irish cop who was there every morning and afternoon to help school kids cross the intersections, ruled the corner like a feudal tyrant. Step off the curb before he waved you on and you would find him crouched down on his knees, his face in yours asking you, Who told you to step in the street? You wait till I give you the signal to cross or I’ll whack you on the noggin with my nightstick. All of us got yelled at once a year. None of us got lectured twice. As we crossed the street thoroughly scared, the old cop would rub us on the head and tell us to do a good job in school.
Our quick movement crossing the street would cause the hundreds of pigeons on the huge sidewalk to get spooked enough to take flight momentarily until the leaders of the flock would signal that it was alright to land again and return to checking the area for food scraps. The neighborhood was filled with families but the pigeons outnumbered us ten to one in those days. I recall how everyone in the neighborhood just considered so many big birds as part of life on the near North Side of Chicago.
The memory of my walking down Sheridan in my brand new black suit going to my First Holy Communion came back to me. Proudly walking the four blocks to church I remember a lesser mannered pigeon dropping his waste on the left shoulder of my brand new suit. I remember that being the first time in my life that I cursed out loud.
The next memory on Sheridan going to school was Hanovers Delicatessen. They had a son my age names Larry. He didn’t go to St. Mary’s with the rest of us because he was Jewish, but he was a great guy and was still part of the gang. Even when we were just in third grade, I remember Larry having to work around the store before he could come out and mess around with us. That was no problem. At the age of ten I had a Herald American paper route after school and so did my other buddies. A job, some type of job, was a given if you were a kid in the fifties. Want money to spend? Then earn it, was the rationale of all the families in what we then called the Near North.
A little further down the block was the old Mode theatre. An old timer even in the fifties, the Mode showed movies that my dad would say were already on that newfangled invention, the television. You could always find Foy, Fak, and Flynn in the front row on Saturdays however. That was fifty-cartoon day plus a couple Three Stooges shorts and an old movie classic like King Kong or The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
For some strange reason we always tore the popcorn boxes in a certain way so that they fit on our faces like some type of goggles. I’m sure the three of us were a strange sight. Sitting in the front row, popcorn boxes affixed to our faces as we mouthed the words to shows we had seen a hundred times before. It actually made sense back then for little kids to sit up close to the screen. Women wearing huge hats that they refused to take off in the theatre could make it impossible for a small fry sitting behind them to see the movie.
The show cost a quarter to get in. Popcorn was a dime. We drank from the water fountain to save money.
The rest of the way down Sheridan Rd. was inconsequential except for the El station just before Irving Park. Under the tracks was a great candy counter as well as the home of the second most important item in our lives, the comic book stand.
A short, gaunt man with a perpetual cigarette in his mouth always stood behind the counter. He didn’t seem to mind our spending so much time practically reading all the comic books. He knew we would never steal any of them and although we might have read the comic, we would still buy it. A good comic was worth owning and reading over and over and over again. They cost a dime back then. When they skyrocketed to 12 cents in price, we had our first lesson in inflation.
One of the only debates that put any stress on the friendships of the gang was the argument over whether Superman or Batman was the coolest superhero. Anyone who came up with Green Lantern or The Flash as their choice was quickly admonished by the rest of us.
Going down Sheridan road the next two blocks had many apartment complexes in a u shape formation. These buildings, called courtyards by us back then, made the neighborhoods still more crowded than the six flats as they allowed twice as many apartments in the same amount of space. Parking would have been a nightmare back then if every family had a car, but most didn’t. I recall never knowing anyone back then who had two vehicles.
The walk down Sheridan finally brought me to the corner where my school and church, Saint Mary of the Lake was located. I always did the last half block to school at a run because I had to first go by Konitzer-Rowland funeral home to get to the streetlight. Both grandma and grandpa Fak had been waked inside that building and I carried a great fear of the structure all my years in the neighborhood.
St. Mary’s Church was a huge classic greystone building with broad sweeping stairs leading up to its three sets of massive doors. Behind this awesome structure was the convent and beside that the school that I went to until seventh grade. I remembered how the playground was a forest with dozens of trees until a sixth grader during recess fell out of one of the trees and broke his arm. The next memory I have of the playground was nice, neat, completely harmless asphalt. I guess even back then a lawsuit here and there would raise its angry head.
The memories of my time at St. Mary’s Grammar School revolved around two events. First the news that the Russians had launched the Sputnik satellite into space in 1957 scared everyone with the thought of nuclear weapons raining down on us from the stratosphere. I recalled how we would scurry into the hallway or be told to get under our desks and put our hands over our heads as we practiced air raid drills all the time. I remember by fifth or sixth grade wondering what good it would do to be under my desk if the Russians dropped an atom bomb on the school, but I followed directions explicitly lest I catch a wack across the back of the head from a nun.
I also remembered the Our Lady of Angels fire when I was ten years old that had the entire city in mourning. The west side school being old and not properly alarmed, like most schools back then, had burned down early one winters day taking 92 children and three nuns to their deaths before the blaze could be extinguished. Not much for news reading back then, I remember the Chicago American printing the pictures of all 95 victims on the front page a few days later. Even to a ten year old the enormity of the tragedy hit home with all those young faces looking at me as I stared at the paper. After OLA burned, we had fire alarm drills several times a week. Nuns in the hallways with stop watches would time the evacuation procedures looking to shave off precious seconds all the while telling us to move quickly but not to run.
Going north past St Mary’s was rare back then except for occasional jaunts to the Lawrence Hotel. We went there sometimes on Saturdays to swim all day in the hotels indoor pool. A buck back then, which is what it cost to get into the pool, was an extravagance that we only incurred when the heat of summer made spending a dollar more comfortable than sweltering through another summer Saturday. The neighborhood the Lawrence was in was called Uptown. Not being our domain it could be dangerous as the early formations of gangs more interested in violence than playing baseball together were starting to rear their ugly heads, especially in Uptown around Lawrence and Halsted. Curiously we never used the beaches off Lake Michigan back then. I know our parents couldn’t have come with us as the dads were always working and the moms were raising other kids in our families. Perhaps our younger age meant we were told not to go there by ourselves. The St Lawrence pool always had a lifeguard and I believe that was why our folks didn’t mind us going all the way over to Uptown.
The strange area of the lake front called the rocks popped into my dream. Huge stair stepped walls of great stones along a deep part of Lake Michigan was where my father took me smelt fishing a few times. I didn’t like to fish and after dad had spent a huge sum of money on all kinds of fishing gear, he realized he didn’t like to fish either.
On summer days, a right turn on Sheridan going east would take us on a mile and a half bike ride to the lakefront. For some strange reason we would climb into the bramble bushes that fronted and grew up and over the fence line surrounding the Waveland golf course. I can’t recall if we thought we were Tarzan in the jungle or some type of soldier in the bush, but for several years we would park our bikes at Sheridan Rd. and crawl through this growth on our hands and knees for nearly a mile all the way to Belmont. When we walked back, our unlocked bikes were always still there, and we were always filthy from head to foot. A few years later, unlocked bikes would disappear in a matter of minutes if left unattended.
A left turn at Sheridan off Sheffield would mean that we were now going west on Dakin. A trek up Dakin would take us to the railroad tracks and Graceland Cemetery. We were always being told to stay away from the trains. Story after story from our mothers told us of some boy we never heard of getting maimed or killed by pretending the huge machines were toys to play around. We never knew if the stories were true or if our parents were trying to prevent us from hoping on and off the slow moving rail cars back then. True or not, the stories didn’t work until a kid we knew from another neighborhood got his leg cut off by a slow moving railcar. That bit of fact did work as we never rode the railcars again.
The cemetery, now considered a tourist attraction due to all the governors and mayors as well as famous people entombed there, had a long fieldstone wall about four feet high running all along the Irving Park side of the cemetery. We had to walk that wobbly old wall whenever we could. Slips followed by cut knees, elbows and an occasional tooth knocked out never slowed our enthusiasm for walking on top of that wall.
The cemetery itself however, started before the civil war, wasn’t a place to play in. Huge looming statues of fierce looking angels guarding graves and dark above ground crypts made the place too scary even on the sunniest days for ten or eleven year olds.
Off Dakin, heading back south to Grace was a very strange, one block long street called Alta Vista. Cobble stoned with dimly lit streetlights, this one block of homes was an anachronism in a neighborhood full of subtle incongruities. Many of the tightly joined homes had gothic, and to a youngster, foreboding embellishments. From stone statues of lions and gargoyles, to iron fences with tall sharp spires, Alta Vista was a street to stay away from at night. I recall an early test of manhood was to be able to slowly walk down the street alone at night as your friends watched from a safe distance. I recall now that I was eleven before I could make that trek. I recall that I was scared crapless the whole time.
A few blocks up Sheridan to the east was Marigold arena. Then it its death throes, The Marigold had been famous for years as a coliseum to professional wrestling. A strange character of the 50s called Gorgeous George had helped put the Marigold and Chicago pro wrestling on the map. A huge twelve-chair barbershop across the street from the arena was adorned with picture after picture of George in his heyday. I saw and heard so much about the man that after a while I was certain that I had seen all his thousand or so choreographed matches.
Once I remember going to the Saturday night matches and watching a tall thin Jamaican called Beachcomber Rockhead get pummeled for about 20 minutes by this bad guy with hair on every part of his body except his head. Finally Mr. Rockhead had enough and knocked the bad guy out. How did he do it? He did it with a head butt of course.
Across the street from our apartment was Horace Greeley Grade School. The huge four story red brick building took half the city block. The gravel covered schoolyard all the remainder. The rear of the school facing the playground was chalked with a dozen batters boxes on its walls. A game called fast pitch with a rubber ball was all the rage back then because you only needed two people to play. The small rubber balls cost a dime back then and every store in the neighborhood carried them. The constant bouncing off the school wall plus the wear and tear as the balls skidded along the harsh gravel meant they didn’t last more than an hour or two at best.
When there were enough of us for a league game we would switch to a hardball and use the diamond that had been etched into the ground by thousands of games played by as many kids over the years. It took no time at all for the ball to need a wrapping of electrical tape to keep it from disintegrating. Getting balls, which cost a buck and a half, was a constant concern to all the neighborhood kids. I remember that there were four sports back then on the Near North. There was spring baseball, summer baseball, fall baseball and winter baseball.
Moving west on Sheffield towards the ballpark at the corner of Sheffield and Grace was the Antiseptic Laundry building. More like a factory, the doors were often open to dissipate the heat from the huge pressing machines. I always stopped for just a second and looked in on all the people sweating and toiling in the steam. I vowed never to do that kind of work when I grew up.
One more block and you were at Sheffield and Waveland where the turnstiles for the bleachers are. Earliest recollections of the big sign over the gates stated 75 cents for a seat which quickly went to one dollar. My dad thought the Wrigley’s had gone crazy with their prices. Especially for a team that seemed to have little problem losing a hundred games a year. Still, the bleachers at a dollar, was cheaper than the upper decks at $2.50. I can’t recall what the box seats were in those days. Having no means of ever affording them, I just never bothered finding out how much they cost.
Past Wrigley, with a left turn on Addison were the old pawnshops that littered the area all the way to Halsted. As long as I can remember I was fascinated by all the World War II souvenirs in all the windows. I often wondered why anyone would hock in a medal they had received from their country for being in the war. I never realized the sign of poverty and need that pawning those medals probably meant.
Around this area, nearly six blocks from my home was the music studio where I took three years of accordion lessons. I truly hated that accordion. Weighing a quarter of my own weight, the trek to the studio was exhausting. To rub salt in the wound, the studio was on the second floor at the top of a set of stairs that seemed to never end. I remember mom saying I could switch to the piano but dreading the thought like the plague. When it dawned on my fourth grade intellect that I didn’t have to push a piano all the way to the lesson and back, I switched in a heartbeat.
Copyright 2005 Mike Fak
Published in U S Legacies Magazine August 2005
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