A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (2 page)

The twin cities of Champaign and Urbana are the home of one of the main branches of the University of Illinois, where for thirty-seven years my father was a professor of philosophy. One of his interests was the concept of probability, concerning which he tried to tutor me, using Cubs players like Roy Smalley. Smalley was the Cubs’ shortstop from the fateful 1948 season through 1953. His career batting average was .227. He would come to the plate batting about that, and the Cubs’ radio announcer Bert Wilson would cheerfully say, “Smalley is overdue for a hot streak.” My father would patiently explain to me that Stan Musial batting .227—not that he ever did that—would be overdue but that Smalley was just being himself. In 1950, Smalley did, however, lead the league in two categories: He struck out 114 times and made 51 errors. So, fifty-one times that season the shortstop, the most important defensive player in fair territory (that is, excluding the catcher), gave a major league opponent an extra out in an inning. It is a wonder the 1950 Cubs managed to finish only 26½ games out of first place. I should
have paid more attention to logic, but Cub fans obviously don’t. The Cubs do, however, make many of their fans philosophical, as
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
defines that: “calm or unflinching in the face of trouble, defeat, or loss.”

Champaign and Urbana are cheek by jowl because of the Illinois Central Railroad. It is mostly gone, a victim of a merger and the disappearing railroad blues, but once it was so mighty it moved towns. When the first passenger train arrived in the area, in 1854, it came on tracks laid two miles west of the Champaign County Courthouse, in Urbana—a courthouse in which some cases had been argued by a canny and successful, hence prosperous, railroad lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. The land west of Urbana was cheaper, and the town of West Urbana grew up around the tracks. Soon Urbana tried to incorporate the upstart town, but the upstart had acquired, as upstarts will do, pride. It asserted its independence and took the name Champaign. So it became the stopping point for evocatively named passenger trains—the Panama Limited, the City of New Orleans, the City of Miami, and the Seminole. They steamed, and then were diesel-drawn, from the Deep South to Chicago.

Back in what are now regarded as the Dark Ages of Parenting, before Baby Boomer parents made their original discovery that the world has sharp edges and abrasive surfaces, before society achieved today’s degree of pitiless enlightenment and decided that children should be enveloped in bubble wrap, like Dresden porcelain, lest they get
chipped or otherwise damaged, and forced to wear crash helmets, back then we, the potentially lost youth of central Illinois, would ride our balloon-tire Schwinn bikes down to the railroad tracks and amuse ourselves by clambering over the boxcars on sidings while trains rumbled past nearby. All the while, we thought of the destination of the northbound trains: Chicago.

It certainly is natural and probably is healthy for young people in small communities to have metropolitan yearnings. Many such yearnings have been directed east, toward New York. Mine were directed north, toward Chicago, for two reasons. One reason was those passenger trains, which seemed drawn with their riders to Chicago, as iron filings are drawn to a magnet, by an invisible force. The other reason was radio, by which Chicago reached out to inform, entertain, and entice. For this downstate Illinois boy, the railroad pointed toward a destination from which the most interesting radio broadcasts originated: Wrigley Field.

Baseball fans, an otherwise sensible and agreeable cohort, are given to gushing. It is a grating attribute. Many people in this modern age are relentless in sharing their feelings about this and that, and baseball fans can be especially so. They have a high-octane sentimentality about everything from playing catch with Dad to baseball’s resemblance to heaven—how
do
they know?—or Pericles’s Athens, or the Federal Reserve Board. Is there anything that baseball has
not
been said to resemble? Or to be a metaphor for? And the gushing is never worse than when Cub fans get going about Wrigley Field. It is, they think,
if thinking can be said to enter into such talk, a little foretaste of—you guessed it—the hereafter. The only real resemblance between Wrigley Field and heaven is that the ballpark is indeed the final destination of some Cub fans. Every once in a while someone in the bleachers leans out from the front row and, pursuant to the wishes of the deceased, pours onto the outfield a small billowing gray cloud of dust that is the ashes of Uncle Ralph or Aunt Min, who, one hopes, really meant it when he or she said, “You know, when I die I wish …” This use of Wrigley Field is officially frowned upon, but it is believably said,
sotto voce
, that ushers and other representatives of officialdom have been known to enable this by pretending not to see it.

Never mind that before this heavenly place on the North Side could be built, a Lutheran seminary had to be torn down. Or that the Chicago National League Ball Club wanted to evict the Lutherans so it could escape a neighborhood that contained too many people who were, well, just not the right sort, if you get my drift—immigrants and other members of the lower orders. Never mind, too, that those neighbors included a secular saint of American history: Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House, where you might encounter young idealists destined for greatness.

One such who worked at Hull House was a
New Yorker, Frances Perkins, a social reformer whose zeal, already hot, had been further quickened on March 25, 1911. She had been taking tea in the heart of Manhattan, near the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, when it caught fire. The blaze killed 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women trapped by
locked doors, and ignited a new era of government regulations to improve conditions for working people. Perkins became President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor—America’s first female member of a president’s cabinet.

Another person whose ascent to greatness included time spent at Hull House was Paul Douglas. In 1920, at age twenty-eight, he became a professor of industrial relations at the University of Chicago, which he left in 1942 to enlist as a fifty-year-old private in the Marine Corps, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, for the first of three terms. He, too, lived in the neighborhood the Cubs fled in 1914.

Chicago has a rich history of remarkable people. It also has a deserved reputation as a tough town. Wrigley Field is a green and pleasant jewel that was set, one hundred years ago, in a city with dark, satanic aspects.

If Chicago, a no-nonsense city of prose, ever had a poet, it was, of course, Carl Sandburg. Since his death in 1967, at age eighty-nine, his reputation has fallen on hard times, and has fallen from quite a height. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was what now seems like an oxymoron, a celebrity poet. He appeared on
The Ed Sullivan
Show—after Elvis but before the Beatles—and the
Today
show with Dave Garroway, and
Texaco Star Theater
with the comedian Milton Berle, and he was interviewed by the high priest of broadcast journalism, Edward R. Murrow. It is, however, safe to say that almost no one reads Sandburg anymore, and he has become the object of withering witticisms. Clichés, wrote the essayist Joseph Epstein, run through Sandburg’s
writing like calories through cheesecake.
Of Sandburg’s thick and weird “biography” of Abraham Lincoln—no citations, just unoriginal narrative laced with Sandburg’s musings—Edmund Wilson said, “There are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.” Sandburg’s brother-in-law was the photographer Edward Steichen, who said that when God created Sandburg, He did not do anything else that day. Others have said that perhaps He thought he had done enough damage for one day. And yet.

Sandburg helped bring poetry out from the parlor with the white curtains and into the streets that churned up the urban grime that soiled the white curtains that were “white prayers” for gentility in an industrial world:

Dust and the thundering trucks won—the barrages of the street wheels and the lawless wind took their way—was it five weeks or six the little mother, the new neighbors, battled and then took away the white prayers in the windows?

Sandburg’s
Chicago Poems
, published in 1916, the year the Cubs moved into what would come to be called Wrigley Field, contain his most famous lines:

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler,

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders.

Turning, however, from this celebratory tone, he wrote an indictment that begins:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them …

Then, turning again “to those who sneer at this my city,” at this “tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities,” he says:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

When Frank Algernon Cowperwood, the cunning protagonist of Theodore Dreiser’s boisterous Chicago novel
The Titan
, emerges, as he does in the book’s first paragraph, from the Eastern District Penitentiary in Philadelphia, he heads for Chicago, where, Dreiser wrote, thirty railroads terminated, “as though it were the end of the world.” Cowperwood arrived in something made there—a Pullman car produced by the Pullman Palace Car Company of George Mortimer Pullman. He owned the town of Pullman, which has long since been absorbed by Chicago’s sprawl.

Chicago was just the place for a man with Cowperwood’s high ratio of energy to scruples. As his train approached Chicago, he saw “here and there, a lone working-man’s cottage, the home of some adventurous soul who had planted his bare hut thus far out in order to reap the small but certain advantage that the growth of the city would bring.” “Seething” Chicago, with its “snap,” its “swirling, increasing life,” and its “tang of the future,” convinced Dreiser—as it had convinced Henry Adams at the city’s 1893 Columbian Exposition—that “the world was young here. Life was doing something new.” Adams, as he famously recorded in
The Education of Henry Adams
, recoiled in dismay from this something new. Cowperwood embraced it. As did Dreiser, who was stirred by Chicago to some seriously overwrought sentences:

This singing flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin, this rude, raw Titan.… By its shimmering lake it lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering yokel with an epic in its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with the grip of Caesar in its mind, the dramatic force of Euripides in its soul. A very bard of a city this, singing of high deeds and high hopes, its heavy brogans buried deep in the mire of circumstance.… Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.

Good grief. Sandburg was pithier: “Here’s the difference between us and Dante: He wrote a lot about Hell and never saw the place. We’re writing about Chicago after looking the town over.”

Long before Carl Sandburg called Chicago the city of the big shoulders, it was a city of clenched fists. Today, Wrigley Field is called—it is written on the roof of the visiting team’s dugout—“the Friendly Confines.” In 1914, the year
The Titan
was published, “friendly” was not the first adjective Chicago called to mind. And of queasy stomachs and an uneasy conscience: When, in 1906, Upton Sinclair’s novel
The Jungle
depicted the immigrants’ living and working conditions in and around the stockyards and meatpacking plants on Chicago’s South Side, food safety became a federal issue.

Chicago was no stranger to the rawest aspects of this process of accommodation. In 1886, in the city’s Haymarket Square, at a rally of fifteen hundred men and women demanding an eight-hour day, a bomb exploded, killing eleven, including seven policemen, and injuring one hundred. Consider the impression Chicago made on an impressionable eighteen-year-old from Morton, Illinois, in 1917, the year after the Cubs moved into Wrigley Field. David Lilienthal would, in his long public career, serve Wisconsin’s Governor Philip La Follette on that state’s public service commission, would serve President Franklin Roosevelt as a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and would serve President Truman as chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission.
The journal he kept throughout his life contains an entry for July 31, 1917, concerning “one of the most disgusting things I have ever witnessed”:

It had rained violently the day before, and here and there were large puddles of water, which had collected in the low places of the street. Around one of these puddles a large group of men had gathered. I noticed them from a distance—men of all classes, some in Palm Beach suits, others in stylish tailor-mades, and a few messenger boys and errand boys. A cab was standing in the puddle also, so I thought this was what had attracted the crowd. I stepped through the throng and was both surprised and shocked to see what these busy men-of-the-world were watching with such evident enjoyment was but a tiny mouse, swimming around in the pool. Whenever he would struggle to a place of safety—a clump of mud, perhaps—someone would stick out his mahogany cane and throw the poor quivering thing back to its death. When this would happen some portly comfortable-looking son-of-a-gun would shift his cigar and chuckle!

A toddling town, indeed. And one much in need of some friendly confines. But life in the early twentieth century was still rough and raw.
The late Julian Simon, an economist, noted that back then “most people in the
United States died of environmental pollution—that is, from infectious diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, and gastroenteritis.” Healthy people—who might more accurately have been said to be relatively and temporarily healthy—took arduous and hazardous treks across the city to jobs where they worked long, hard, and dangerous days. So they seized their pleasures where they could. Beginning in 1914, many came to the ballpark on the North Side.