flashquake Nonfiction

The Friendly Confines
by Charles West

"Whatever you do, don't mention the 1919 World Series."

This was the only preparation my father gave me before meeting my long lost relatives. Actually, they weren't so much long lost as we were. My father left Chicago many years before to pursue a military career that took him, and eventually his family, all over the U.S. and the world. He currently lived in Alameda, California, on the east side of San Francisco Bay. He was attending a conference at Glenview Naval Air Station near Chicago.

In the meantime, his brothers and cousins had stayed in Chicago to become butchers, policemen, and bartenders. They gave me a tour of their south side neighborhood. The main points of interest were places where relatives I never knew existed had met, fallen in love, been beaten up or stabbed, or had beaten up or stabbed someone else. Strangely absent from this tour of the Big Shouldered Hog Butchering Windy City, were the Magnificent Mile, the Loop, Lakeshore Drive, Lincoln Park, and Lake Michigan.

"It's too bad the Sox aren't in town," my uncle Vince apologized, "or we could go see a ball game at Cominsky."

Since I followed the National League, I suggested that perhaps we could go see the Cubs at Wrigley Field.

Nothing could have prepared me for the stunned and hostile silence that suddenly surrounded me. I now believe I could have gotten a more positive response had I suggested that we all get naked, paint our bodies red, sacrifice a goat and spend the rest of our lives worshipping Satan.

"I don't think so," was Uncle Vince's terse response to the Cubs idea. I was regarded as a curiosity until that moment — someone with the same last name who was born in Virginia, lived all over the world, and now lived in California. But now I was categorized with such other questionable California products as Richard Nixon, Charles Manson and avocados.

My father's duties completed, we said our goodbyes. My father declined offers of a ride to O'Hare and mysteriously opted for the El, Chicago's famed elevated train. As we traveled north, I noticed that we missed the O'Hare transfer. I figured Mr. Chicago Native was lost. Years of experience, however, had taught me not to point out navigational errors on his part. More and more people got on the train as it traveled through downtown, near Loyola and DePaul Universities. By the time we got to the Addison Street Station the cars were fairly packed with people.

We got off, and only when we walked down the stairs from the track did it dawn on me. These people were Cub fans. And a block from the train, there it was, the famous red sign, "Wrigley Field: Home of the Chicago Cubs."

My father told me that growing up, his family almost never went north of Madison, the street that divided South Chicago from the rest of the world. When he joined the navy, his mother cried, not because he was going off to war, but that he was first going to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in North Chicago, a suburb just south of Waukegan.

He wasn't sure why the hatred of the Cubs, and the whole north side in general, existed. He speculated that it could have been a socio-economic thing, and that the southsiders considered the Cub fans to be spoiled, rich snobs. Who else could take off on a "workday" to see a game? This was a time when the Cubs still played only day games.

Once inside the "Friendly Confines of Wrigley Field," we saw the Cubs play the Pirates. That year the two clubs were in a heated race for biggest losers on the planet. The Cubs won it 5-4 in ten innings. It remains the best baseball game I have ever seen in my life.

Copyright 2002 by Charles West

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