C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editors Emily H. Nordstrom Amanda B. Stenlund Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography John Alderson Jay Crawford On the cover: The valor and teamwork exhibited in Henri Farré’s painting of the Bears illustrates their stadium’s dedication to the armed services. Read how Soldier Field and other sports stadiums have become symbols of Chicago’s identity and collective conscience, page 4.
Publications Interns Catherine A. Gladki Laurie Stein
Copyright 2008 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago IL 60614-6038 312-642-4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life. Footnoted manuscripts of the articles appearing in this issue are available from the Chicago History Museum’s Publications Office.
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TRUSTEES
John W. Rowe Chair
Philip D. Block III David P. Bolger Walter C. Carlson Warren K. Chapman Patrick F. Daly T. Bondurant French Sallie L. Gaines Timothy J. Gilfoyle Cynthia Greenleaf David A. Gupta Barbara A. Hamel Susan S. Higinbotham David D. Hiller Dennis H. Holtschneider Falona Joy Randye A. Kogan Judith Konen Russell L. Lewis Paul R. Lovejoy Erica C. Meyer
Barbara Levy Kipper Vice Chair Sharon Gist Gilliam Vice Chair Paul L. Snyder Treasurer Paul H. Dykstra Secretary M. Hill Hammock Immediate Past Chair Gary T. Johnson President
Timothy P. Moen Robert J. Moore Eboo Patel James R. Reynolds Jesse H. Ruiz Gordon I. Segal Larry Selander Robert W. Swegle Jr. Samuel Tinaglia Noren Ungaretti LIFE TRUSTEES
Lerone Bennett Jr. Bowen Blair Laurence O. Booth Stanley J. Calderon John W. Croghan Alison Campbell de Frise Stewart S. Dixon Michael H. Ebner
Henry W. Howell Jr. Philip W. Hummer Richard M. Jaffee Edgar D. Jannotta W. Paul Krauss Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph H. Levy Jr. Josephine Louis R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Josephine Baskin Minow Potter Palmer Bryan S. Reid Jr. Dempsey J. Travis HONORARY TRUSTEE
Richard M. Daley Mayor, City of Chicago
The Chicago History Museum is easily accessible via public transportation. CTA buses nos. 11, 22, 36, 72, 73, 151, and 156 stop nearby. For travel information, visit www.transitchicago.com. The Chicago History Museum gratefully acknowledges the Chicago Park District’s generous support of all of the Museum’s activities.
THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM
Fall 2008 VOLUME XXXVI, NUMBER 1
Contents
4 26 50
Monuments to Memory Gerald R. Gems
The Literature of the Sox Side Eileen M. McMahon
Departments Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle
As the second oldest Major League ballpark, the Cubs’ Wrigley Field (above, c. 1985) is steeped in history and charm. It has come to define a portion of the Lakeview neighborhood called Wrigleyville. 4 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
Monuments to Memory Chicago’s sports stadiums have been home to storied seasons that have shaped the city’s reputation and its collective memory. GERALD R. GEMS
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ew York, the “Big Apple,” is often portrayed as a city of skyscrapers, a global commercial giant, or the gritty metropolis of television crime shows. Los Angeles is seen through the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, the music industry, and the celebrities they employ. To many, Paris, the “City of Light,” represents a beacon of cultured civilization or nighttime Bacchanalia. Places have reputations just as people do, but popular culture is selective, telling incomplete tales often fostered by a dominant ideology. A closer look at those defining characteristics reveals the manipulation of the past, the invention of traditions, and the construction of “official” versions of memory. With its records and rituals, hope and despair, and franchises across the United States, the field of professional sports is a powerful tool with which memory and identity are used to tell both personal and public histories. Sports’ regulating bodies—and teams’ hometown politicians—have increasingly assumed such strategies to gain acceptance, curry favor, or stimulate the impression of a collective identity as patriotic Americans, civic boosters, and loyal fans. Leagues and team owners have become the custodians of tradition, choreographing an experience to perpetuate the same type of memory, game after game, and evoke nostalgia each time. Every sports arena is full of carefully crafted rituals: singing the national anthem or a rousing respite of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (replaced in some stadiums with the more political “God Bless America”), chants pounded out by an organist, hot dogs and beer, halftime contests, a mascot’s antics, as well as the display of memorials and the sale of logo-stamped merchandise. As lives become more stressful, many people yearn for a seemingly less complicated past. Sport gives the illusion of an experience that hasn’t changed much, where “a day at the ballpark” is the same today as it was fifty years ago. In that sense, a stadium is a symbol of the good old days and can do a lot to resurrect or promote a particular image. The phenomenon of stadium building occurs with much greater frequency today than in
decades past. Between 1989 and 1997, thirty-one professional teams built new stadiums at the public’s expense. NFL teams constructed or renovated fifteen stadiums between 1992 and 2001. Thirteen new baseball parks opened between 1995 and 2000. Milwaukee’s Miller Park and Pittsburgh’s PNC Park accommodated fans by 2001, followed by the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati in 2003. Beyond providing seasonal economic stimulus, new stadiums also include details that bridge past and present.
The Cardinals retroactively added history into their new Busch Stadium. The ballpark was built to incorporate the St. Louis skyline into its environment.
St. Louis inaugurated a new, $365 million baseball stadium in 2006, heralding a renaissance for the midwestern metropolis. Moved from the old stadium, the manual scoreboard remains as a link to the past, while the Gateway Arch and the courthouse loom beyond the outfield walls, tying the players and spectators to a civic and historical identity. The new stadium is part of an adjoining commercial, residential, and entertainment complex known as Ballpark Village. The village includes Monuments to Memory | 5
a Cardinals hall of fame and a theme restaurant, the entirety a celebration of the city’s resurgent population growth after years of decline. Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened as the new baseball home of Baltimore’s team in 1992, while the city’s Ravens of the NFL received a separate stadium. Though Babe Ruth played for Boston and New York teams, Baltimore can claim him as a native son and built the Babe Ruth Museum, which ties the past to the present and has engendered a tourist boom in a once downtrodden harbor area. The retroactive design of Camden Yards invokes nostalgia for the cozy stadiums of the past, and its success has generated imitators in almost every ballpark built since. In 2004, Philadelphia and San Diego joined the construction boom. Some of those sites include halls of fame to commemorate local histories; others claim national or even international status on their own as places of remembrance, where fans make pilgrimages to view mementos of past stars. New sport stadiums and accompanying memorials are more than just functional spaces for competitive events. The memories shared within them link a person to a
Professional sports have long been used to evoke local or national pride. Chicago could pin its own hope for prosperity on this float for the 1915 White Sox.
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larger group, which can provide a sense of identity, especially at older stadiums. Arenas such as New York’s Yankee Stadium (soon to be rebuilt), Boston’s Fenway Park, or Chicago’s Wrigley Field have served as sites of national memory for generations of sports fans. Other cities, or teams, with shorter histories seem to recycle their stadiums with each generation. Reconstructions enable them to reinvent their images, which is perhaps characteristic of the transient American culture. Perhaps the recycling of history is necessary to ignite a remembrance or to create a collective memory. In that sense nostalgia can create bonds that structure, maintain, and reconstruct identities between grandparents, parents, and children who fulfill the roles of spectators across time. Chicago offers great insight into the construction of public memory and stadiums as symbols of urban identity and aspiration. The city has owned up to a number of monikers over the years, from “the Windy City” to “Hog Butcher for the World” and “City of Big Shoulders” to “the Second City.” Chicago’s commercial leaders wrested the rights to the 1893 world’s fair from New York, fully expecting to supersede their rival as the cultural capital of the United States. While Chicago eventually had to settle for second city status, its boosters still dreamed large. As the young nation entered a new century, sports enabled Chicago to remain in the national spotlight. The city’s two professional baseball teams fought for national supremacy and soon faced each other in the 1906 World Series. The stalwart University of Chicago football team challenged eastern powers without a reply—other schools actually refused to play the university for several decades—but it was Chicago’s high school squads that made headlines as they decimated their New York counterparts 105–0 and 76–0 in successive years (1902, 1903). The century-long foibles of the Cubs have long since relegated them to the role of lovable losers, while the Bulls’ string of six NBA championships in the 1990s assumed the proportions of a powerful dynasty and carried the city into a new era of sports history. Early in its growth, the city of Chicago recognized the importance of recreation as a means to foster community and civic pride. The Burnham Plan of 1909 intended to reconstruct the city after the Great Fire of 1871 as a beautiful and commercial metropolis worthy of civic grandeur. One element of the plan was a lakefront sports stadium, which, on a prime site and with a classical design, would rival New York as a host for national spectacles. The result was Soldier Field, forever “dedicated to the men and women of the armed services.” Plans for the stadium ensued right after World War I in 1919, and construction began in 1922 despite the lack of public funding for the operation. Its Doric columns, modeled after the Greek Parthenon, recalled classical ideals of
western civilization. The promotional literature declared that “the erection of this mammoth structure will serve to stimulate a spirit of good sportsmanship, developing contests of physical superiority that will assure new records.” The venue officially opened as Municipal Grant Park Stadium on October 9, 1924, the fifty-third anniversary of the Great Fire. Like a phoenix rising on the lakefront, the stadium proclaimed a new era and a new vision for Chicago. The formal dedication as Soldier Field on November 27, 1926, put a permanent and carefully considered emphasis on patriotism, as did the Army-Navy football game played that day and attended by a crowd of more than 100,000. A year later the Notre Dame–University of Southern California game drew a new record of 117,000. More famed contests followed. Chicago’s reputation as a football powerhouse was led by its college and high school teams even before a professional league was formed. Left: University of Chicago players, c. 1920. Below: Henri Farré’s Chicago Bears at Soldier Field, 1934.
Monuments to Memory | 7
Sporting events provided a very public opportunity for politicians to associate themselves with patriotic sentiment. Above: Vice President and Mrs. Charles Dawes (right) with Rear Admiral and Mrs. Louis Nulton at Soldier Field for the 1926 Army-Navy football game. Right: A ticket from the game.
The famous “long count” heavyweight boxing championship rematch between working-class hero Jack Dempsey and the more refined Gene Tunney marked a boxing resurgence in 1927 and signaled another transition for Chicago. Soldier Field proved a fitting site for the symbolic battle between the represented social classes, because over the past fifty years Chicago had served as the epicenter of the labor movement; the Haymarket Affair, the Pullman Strike, and the founding of the radical Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) labor union all occurred in Chicago. More than 100,000 Chicagoans petitioned the promoter to bring the fight to their city, and an estimated 128,000 witnessed the affair; but their outrage over Tunney’s disputed victory could not change the outcome. The promoters grossed $2.6 million, and Chicago claimed the distinction of a premier “fight town” in America. Soldier Field’s reputation as a battleground continued throughout the first half of the century. It was the venue for a surrogate form of warfare as high school football champions from the Catholic League vied with those of the public school (and presumably Protestant) system for city honors in the annual Prep Bowl. The game’s importance as leverage for the immigrant Catholic community can be measured by the 120,000 attendees at the 1937 contest, the largest crowd ever recorded for a football game, including the Super Bowl. With the gradual acceptance of Catholics within mainstream American society 8 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
Soldier Field’s iconic Doric columns frame a 1926 rodeo, one of many nonfootball attractions hosted inside the stadium.
such confrontations lost their significance. The Illinois High School Athletic Association finally permitted Catholic schools to vie for state championships in the 1970s, relegating the Prep Bowl to a contest for alsorans. A few thousand now show up at Soldier Field for the annual affair, and only the site itself provides any indication of the contest’s past glory. Other football fans harbor nostalgic memories of the College All-Star Football Game, which from 1934 to 1976 brought the best collegiate players to Soldier Field to match their talents against the defending NFL champions. But the stadium has transcended sports. During the course of its history, it has hosted myriad events, including rodeos, circuses, stock-car races, ski jumping, and rock concerts. Its largest gathering, however, occurred on September 28, 1954, when a crowd of 260,000 Catholics celebrated the Marian Year festival. In a city largely marked by ethnic factions, many Chicagoans have found community within the stadium, whether at football games or festivals.
Sports teams have a way of at once uniting and dividing a city. At one time Chicago had two football teams in addition to two baseball teams. Residential patterns usually determined allegiance, splitting the city into South Siders, who cheered for the White Sox and the Chicago Cardinals (the city’s first NFL team) at Comiskey Park, and North Siders, who favored the Cubs and the Bears at Wrigley Field. Comiskey fed the nascent hoodlum image of Chicago with the Black Sox scandal of 1919, forever besmirching the city but fostering a spate of books and movies that commemorate the event and maintain its historical immediacy. The ballpark earned partial redemption as the site for the inaugural all-star games for both Major League Baseball and the Negro Leagues in 1933. In the former, Babe Ruth wrote a dramatic climax with a gamewinning home run, but the separate contests gave indication of an increasingly segregated city. As racial attitudes stiffened outside Comiskey Park, athletic events within it soon began to tell a story of social progress. Joe Louis defeated Jim Braddock there in
Chicago’s working class idolized heavyweight fighter Jack Dempsey (above). His much-hyped match with the more refined Gene Tunney at Soldier Field in 1927 helped Chicago earn the distinction of a premier fight town. Monuments to Memory | 9
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Former Sox owner Bill Veeck was known for his creative attempts to attract visitors. In reaction to Comiskey’s deteriorating neighborhood when Veeck bought the ball club in 1959, he painted the façade of the stadium white (left, c. 1989), kept the lights on around the clock, and hired people to hand out roses on the surrounding sidewalks. Above: Ready for demolition in 1991, a bullpen sign reads “Good bye ol’ Comiskey. Your time has past but your memories will always last.”
Monuments to Memory | 11
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1937 to claim the heavyweight championship. Larry Doby of the Cleveland Indians integrated the American League at Comiskey on July 5, 1947. The next year when the Indians returned to Chicago, the ballpark served as the location for the long overdue debut of Satchel Paige in the major leagues. A decade later, in 1959, the “Go Go” Sox thrilled fans as pennant winners led by the team’s first Hispanic manager, Al Lopez. Despite ardent hopes and prayers, the Sox couldn’t garner the World Series crown, but Comiskey earned a different kind of notoriety thanks to team owner Bill Veeck. The master of publicity stunts introduced a scoreboard exploding with fireworks in 1960 and the illplanned Disco Demolition Night in 1979. The ensuing rampage from the latter caused the team to forfeit one game of a double-header. Without a World Series championship to erase the ignominy of the Black Sox or the futility of the team throughout the twentieth century, the original Comiskey Park took its memories with it when demolished in 1990. Its replacement, U.S. Cellular Field, provided an opportunity to select which pieces of its past would be incorporated into its new identity. The Sox organization chose memorials to the physical Larry Doby space of the former park—a simple inlaid home plate and batters’ boxes in the parking lot where old Comiskey once stood, a shower in the leftfield stands (another of Veeck’s ideas), infield dirt from the old ballpark—and to past heroes with a mural on the outfield walls. In the 2005 baseball season the team adopted the “small ball” tactics of the 1959 league champions, and the White Sox finally won the World Series title. The fans returned Satchel Paige in boisterous fashion. On the North Side, Wrigley Field presents the paradox of losing teams and sellout crowds. Originally named Weeghman Field, it was built as the home of the shortlived Federal League Whales. With the collapse of the Federal League, the Cubs of the National League moved to the stadium. By 1920 it was known as Cubs Park and eventually Wrigley Field, for the team owner. The vast mythology surrounding the storied ballpark started with the still hotly debated “called shot” of the 1932 World
The mythology surrounding Wrigley Field began with Babe Ruth’s “called shot” in the 1932 World Series. Above: Ruth (left) with Hack Wilson (center), 1929.
Series, when Babe Ruth allegedly pointed to the centerfield bleachers and then hit a home run in that location to help the Yankees defeat the Cubs. The Cubs lost numerous World Series in the first half of the twentieth century then failed to even make the playoffs for the next four decades. Each time they got close, fans dredged up perhaps one of baseball’s most well-known myths, the curse of the billy goat. During the 1945 World Series, fan Sam Sianis declared the Cubs would never win again when he and his pet goat were asked to leave the game by the team’s owner, P. K. Wrigley. The Cubs lost that year and have not returned to the World Series since. Still, the longevity of the park and its ivy-covered walls, Opposite: Chicago’s two football teams underscored the city’s division into North Side and South Side. The Bears played at Wrigley Field, the Cardinals played at Comiskey. Below: Eighty years of history are illustrated on a commemorative cup for the Sox’s last season at Comiskey.
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Above: Chicago Whales pitchers at Weeghman Park, 1915. The team and the Federal League folded later that year. The Cubs moved into the ballpark, which was renamed Cubs Park (1920) then Wrigley Field (1926). Below: The Bears’ Bronko Nagurski (with ball) at Wrigley, 1930.
panorama of brownstones behind the outfield, and manual scoreboard are steeped in nostalgia and charm, making it one of Chicago’s top tourist attractions. Like Soldier Field, Wrigley Field has hosted numerous other sports. The mythical football lore of Wrigley Field includes stories of the Chicago Bears’ bruising fullback of the 1930s, Bronko Nagurski. On one occasion Nagurski allegedly ran into and knocked over a mounted policeman and his horse who had strayed too close to the field while engaged in crowd control. On another run, he apparently ran over four defenders, collided with the goalposts, and continued to power his way into the brick wall that nudged the end zone. Upon his return to the huddle he admitted, “That last guy hits hard!” Nagurski’s apocryphal stories of strength were widespread during a time when all Americans were forced to be tough and resilient in the face of a fallen economy. Hearing his name today may send someone from his generation into a reminiscence that leads to the assessment of one’s current situation. According to sociologist Fred Davis, “nostalgia . . . leads us to search among remembrances and places of our past in an effort to bestow meaning upon persons and places of our present.” I have my own fond memories of Wrigley Field, in which the details of the games are fuzzy, but the feelings they induce are clear. I can recall walking to the park for Ladies’ Day games with my grandmother and watching 14 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
the great players of the 1960s. The ebullient Ernie Banks even served as guest speaker at an athletic banquet at my school. My father took me to a Bears–Cleveland Browns game at Wrigley, where Jim Brown, like Nagurski, charged into a host of defenders and emerged unharmed and defiant. On another occasion in the 1970s, when the dismal Cubs drew few fans, a friend and I bought general-admission tickets but managed to seat ourselves right behind home plate. I cannot remember the scores or the dates, but such numbers are of little consequence to me and most vernacular histories. The memories of
Situated in a residential neighborhood with the “L� train rumbling by, Wrigley Field is much the same as when it was Weeghman Park (above, 1914). Monuments to Memory | 15
Wrigley’s outfield bleachers (top) were originally contrived as the cheap seats, but the camaraderie and fanaticism born there earned the section an honorable reputation of its own. Above: Organic Theater’s 1977 play Bleacher Bums paid homage to the rowdy fans.
While the team’s owner, media conglomerate Chicago Tribune Company, couldn’t have planned such a serendipitous development of the neighborhood, it still carefully preserves the nostalgic value of Wrigley Field. Originally intended as the cheap seats with a less-thanperfect view, the outfield bleachers attracted a certain type of fan that gained notoriety and prestige when members of a local theater company, Organic Theater, wrote a play in 1977. Bleacher Bums forever cemented the identity of loud, working-class, beer-drinking fanatics. Today’s bleacher bums are still loyal, windy brethren, but they are also on a pilgrimage to a famed revelry that cannot be achieved by watching the game on television. While flags and pennants within the park commemorate teams and star players of the past, the memorial statue of Harry Caray, team broadcaster from 1982 to 1997, outside the right-field corner of the stadium, signals the club’s priorities for preserving its past. The feisty, beer-swilling announcer who often mangled players’ names was entertainment himself, but he championed fans’ interests in his willingness to confront management and ownership over team failures. Nevertheless, win or lose, Caray led the party with a seventh-inning rendition of the “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” singalong. After his death in 1998, the Tribune Company endeavored to keep the tradition by recruiting celebrities to sing the song at each home game. But the influence of Caray becomes more telling if one realizes that although the franchise is the second oldest in professional baseball, none of its legendary players were memorialized with a statue or plaque of any kind until 2008 when a bronze figure of Ernie Banks was unveiled on opening
my family and friends are the important elements of my own history with the Cubs and the Bears. They interweave the past with the present “in a continuum that ties one’s life together and brings to mind people and experiences that cannot be reclaimed in the present.” Of course, Wrigley Field’s official history is full of legendary dates, records, and names that help ground a collective consciousness. On December 12, 1965, as home of the Chicago Bears, Wrigley Field was the scene of Gale Sayers’s astounding, record-setting, six-touchdown performance. On April 17, 1976, the Phillies’ Hall of Fame third baseman, Mike Schmidt, hit four home runs in one game. Despite the athletic heroics of the place, its greatest attraction seems to be its party atmosphere. Dubbed “one of the world’s largest outdoor saloons,” the entire residential neighborhood of rooftop seating, porch stoops, and sports bars has assumed the name Wrigleyville, synonymous with a raucous festival on every game day inside and outside the park.
A memorial statue of Harry Caray honors the television announcer who defined Wrigley’s lively atmosphere. Caray came to represent the team and the city in homes across the country thanks to the far reach of WGN cable.
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day. The Tribune Company, not noted for its largesse, chose to first honor the merry broadcaster before any of its athletes. On the West Side, the Chicago Stadium was a monument itself, a cathedral of boxing that marked the city as an industrial, working-class metropolis for most of the twentieth century. The stadium opened in 1929, unabashedly promoted as the “world’s greatest indoor arena,” “because Chicago holds the records for largest crowds at American sport attractions.” Its “ultramodern construction” included a refrigerator plant for an ice hockey rink; a mammoth Barton organ, equivalent to a 2,500-piece orchestra; and an air-conditioned arena that also accommodated cycling, tennis, soccer, track, wrestling, skating, motorcycle races, midget auto racing, roller derby, a rodeo, several national political conventions, and a variety of music concerts ranging from Frank Sinatra to the Rolling Stones. Among its oddest attractions was the 1932 NFL championship game held indoors on an eighty-yard field due to inclement weather, where the Bears defeated the Portsmouth, Ohio, Spartans, 9–0. A hulking building, it was the action inside the stadium that earned it the nickname the Madhouse on Madison. The space between fans and players was relatively intimate, and the acoustics were known to create an insanely loud din from cheering crowds. And they In 2008, Ernie Banks (above) was the first Cubs player to be honored with a statue at Wrigley Field. On the west side of the city, Chicago Stadium (below, c. 1950) was the striking Art Deco home to hockey, basketball, and boxing.
Monuments to Memory | 17
Competition was so extensive in the Golden Gloves amateur boxing league that preliminary rounds required three simultaneous bouts in adjacent rings. 18 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
had a lot to cheer about. Home to the Blackhawks hockey team since 1929, the stadium witnessed Maurice Richard’s 400th goal in 1954, Bobby Hull eclipsing the fifty-goal hallmark during the 1966 season, and Stan Mikita’s 500th goal in 1977. When the referees took to the ice for games, the organist alerted fans by playing “Three Blind Mice.” Throughout the contests, the wildly partisan fans threw “fruit, cans, gravel, pennies, eggs, and fists” to express their displeasure, necessitating the surreptitious seating of twenty-five private detectives in the stands to maintain order. Chicago’s new basketball franchise, the Bulls, adopted the stadium as their home court in 1967, but it was the Philadelphia 76ers’ Wilt Chamberlain who inaugurated the season with sixty-eight points scored in a single game. The Chicago Stadium gained its greatest recognition, however, as a venue for historic boxing matches. With 8,000 more seats than the famed Madison Square Garden in New York, it hosted some of the greatest ethnic and racial confrontations of the changing society over the interwar and post–World War II eras. The Golden Gloves amateur tournament paired intercity fighters, with competition in preliminary rounds so extensive that it required three simultaneous bouts in adjacent rings. As professionals, Jackie Fields, Barney Ross, and King Levinsky thrilled their Maxwell Street Jewish patrons, who paraded to the stadium on foot in support of their heroes. Imported Italian favorites Tony Canzoneri, Rocky Graziano, and Jake LaMotta fought some of their greatest encounters at the Chicago Stadium. Graziano’s three bouts with Tony Zale (Zaleski), a Pole from the nearby steel mills of Gary, Indiana, proved to be among the most brutal in boxing history. On May 15, 1953, Rocky Marciano knocked out Jersey Joe Walcott in the first round while many fans still stood in the ticket lines. Sugar Ray Robinson, arguably the greatest boxer of all, fought some of his most memorable bouts in the Chicago Stadium, while Floyd Patterson became the youngest heavyweight champion at the age of 21 with a 1956 knockout of Archie Moore. Cassius Clay (later to become Muhammad Ali) won his Golden Gloves title as a light heavyweight before joining the 1960 Olympic team. Such confrontations in the stadium highlighted the social tensions occurring in Chicago’s changing neighborhoods, a fitting image for a city of tough guys. The Chicago Stadium and boxing conjure more memories for me as I reflect on my own proletarian identity and the ties that bind me to earlier generations. My father was a regimental boxing champion in the army. The neighborhood in which we both grew up had a long history of boxers, producing an Olympian in 1936 and three national champions. My neighbor and my physicaleducation teacher both boxed for the Catholic Youth
Bobby Hull (above, 1959) had five fifty-goal seasons with the Blackhawks. Below: Jake LaMotta (left) and Sugar Ray Robinson sign contracts before their thirteen-round fight known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, 1951.
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Chicago held its reputation as a boxing center for many years, but eventually the action moved to New York’s Madison Square Garden and the casinos of Atlantic City and Las Vegas. Below: Gene Tunney is knocked to the mat by Jack Dempsey in their famous 1927 bout. A supposed long count by the referee would allow Tunney to stand and defeat Dempsey.
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Monuments to Memory | 21
Blackhawks owner William Wirtz and the Bulls’ Jerry Reinsdorf chose comfort over character when conceiving the United Center. While the exterior is criticized as a fortress, the plush interior boasts wide concourses, luxury suites, and more retail operations than its predecessor, Chicago Stadium.
Organization international team that traveled the world. Boxers served as religious, ethnic, and racial heroes, designations that were more than superficial social constructs in an era and a city facing diversity head on. My uncle admitted that Max Schmeling was the favorite among German American neighbors in the bout with Joe Louis. While my father and uncle once watched a televised fight between a black and a white boxer, I asked, “Who do you want to win?” When they gave their reply I asked why. The simple response was “Because he is white!” Although I did not understand the racial, social, and economic histories that influenced their reasoning at the time, that retort has been firmly planted in my memory for more than five decades and has greatly affected my own life as a teacher and a coach. Chicago’s image underwent a transformation in character and appearance with the razing of Chicago Stadium in favor of the adjacent United Center, completed in 1994. The owners of the Bulls and the Blackhawks decided to build a state-of-the-art facility rather than a nostalgic shrine to athletes of the past. Their teams would make new memories. And upon moving onto their new court, the Chicago Bulls did just that by continuing their string of NBA championships to six. Their ascendance as a dominant sports power and the investment by United Airlines—headquartered in Chicago— for stadium naming rights matched Mayor Richard M. Daley’s aspirations for a globally recognized city. The Bulls’ meteoric rise, fueled by the heroics of Michael Jordan, fostered an ebullient and united spirit in the city. With only one basketball team in town, 22 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
Chicagoans were in accord with their cheers. Jordan’s image eclipsed that of Chicago, however, as he quickly became an icon himself. With Jordan’s initial retirement, team owner Jerry Reinsdorf erected a seventeen-foot-tall statue to honor his star player on the east side of the United Center, facing the rising sun and granting immediate glorification to Jordan’s brief career. A twelve-foot bronze figure resting on a five-foot black granite base depicts a graceful Jordan majestically soaring over ambiguous opponents for his signature dunk shot. The sculpture makes up for what the arena lacks in nostalgic charm and is a destination itself. A plaque on the base declares Jordan: “The best there ever was. The best there ever will be.” Following his second retirement from the Bulls in 1998, new plaques on the other sides of the base list his adjusted records, achievements, and honors. The markers state not only his points scored, assists, rebounds and steals, but even the number of minutes played in homage to his discipline and work ethic. The numbers represent the achievements of an exemplary athlete and the achievement of a city. Mayor Daley’s attempts to raise Chicago to a status equal to New York, London, Paris, or Tokyo continued with a beautification scheme throughout the commercial downtown area and the lakefront to shed the city’s industrial legacy and worn images of the past. The area in question was the north end of Grant Park, crisscrossed with old railroad tracks. The planning commission put forth competing visions for the city: one embodied the past, a reclamation of the Beaux Arts and City Beautiful
Jordan’s signature dunk shot is memorialized in bronze outside of the United Center. Monuments to Memory | 23
movements that had borne the Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, and Soldier Field on the south end of Grant Park; another favored technology, art, and futuristic architecture. The latter won out, and in 2004 Millennium Park opened as a cultural mecca and a major tourist attraction.
Soldier Field in 1964 (above) and in 2008 (below). The stadium lost its National Historic Landmark status because of its new seating bowl and other major renovations.
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Soldier Field fell into the hands of modernists, too. Its renovation presented a very contemporary image of Chicago to the world upon its completion in 2003. The sleek, steel-and-glass seating arena implanted within the classic Greek colonnades outraged critics, who likened it to a flying saucer, and cost the stadium its National Historic Landmark status. Perhaps to strike a balance with traditionalists, the new memorials in and around the stadium tie the original edifice to its historic past and traditional values of patriotism, loyalty, and nationalism. A waterfall runs over a 250-foot granite wall encrusted with the emblems of each branch of the military services. Inside a central southern entryway, the World War I doughboy statue invites reflection on benches that encase Medals of Honor. A Wall of Honor concourse exhibits banners of past athletic and military glory. Wall panels inlaid with falling leaves denote the ultimate sacrifice, which is further accentuated by the Gold Star Memorial Park that flanks the eastern wall of the stadium with a list of fallen soldiers. At the northern entrance, a sculpted relief projects traditional poses of a mother with child, a small girl clutching the leg of a stalwart U.S. marine, and a young boy gripping a football, with the distinctive Chicago lakefront and skyline in the background. The ceremony within the new structure is a complement to the stadium’s patriotic identity. During a typical football game I attended during the 2007 season, the pre-game ceremonies featured two members of the U.S. armed forces, both of whom received a Medal of Valor for their service in the Middle East. The public-address
The addition of numerous military memorials to Soldier Field’s grounds in 2003 reemphasizes the stadium’s original patriotic identity from 1924. Above: “Chicago’s Tribute to Freedom,” a fifteen-foot-long sculpture that meets visitors at the north entrance to the stadium.
announcer exhorted the packed stadium to “support the worldwide war against terrorism and support democracy, freedom, and the greatest country in the world.” The ceremony was further embellished by a color guard representing all five military branches, the unfurling of a large American flag that covered much of the field during the singing of the national anthem, a fireworks display of aerial rockets analogous to the war itself, and completed by a screeching flyover by two military jets. In the unlikely event that anyone present could have missed the ceremonial call to nationalism, the video display screens alternated commercial advertising, game replays, and a message honoring all men and women who had served in the U.S. armed forces. The halftime intermission further underscored the message with a band from the nearby Great Lakes Naval Air Station playing assorted martial music and the public-address announcer commanding the audience “to stand and recognize all veterans of the military services.” Soldier Field’s continued dedication to the armed services and the NFL’s deliberately conservative, patriotic image combine to create an emotional game-day atmosphere of “traditional” American values. Despite the modern exterior, the fanfare inside continues to tie spectators to Soldier Field’s original dedication to the men and women of the armed services. Since campaigning for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Chicago has sought to establish itself as an important urban center and shake off its second-city image even before the moniker was coined in the 1950s. Sports have been a successful, quantifiable vehicle to this end. Stadiums invite the masses, and the
storied seasons they have witnessed have shaped the city’s reputation and its collective memory. Today, Chicago longs for the same recognition it won a hundred years ago, but the new playing field is global. To reassert its claim as a world-class city, Chicago has bid for the 2016 Olympic Games. The Olympics has an international legacy of its own as a peace movement and a celebration of athletic excellence, but host cities’ local governments are known to use the games to shape public sentiment or compensate for a dark piece of history. Chicago’s Olympic proposal boasts the city’s numerous existing sports facilities (plus the sprawling McCormick Place) that can easily accommodate the games. If Chicago wins the bid, the strong identities of the Olympics and of Chicago will make a unique connection within the already historic battlegrounds of the city’s stadiums. Gerald R. Gems is a professor of health and physical education at North Central College in Naperville. He is president of the North American Society for Sport History. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All photographs are in the Museum’s collection unless otherwise noted. 4, ICHi-52316; 5, courtesy of Robert Crowe; 6, ICHi-21385aa; 7, left: SDN-062176, bottom: 1981.67; 8, top: DN-0082380, middle: ICHi-38173, bottom: SDN-066166; 9, SDN-062216; 10, ICHi-21143; 11, ICHi-37958; 12, ICHi-38188; 13, clockwise from top right: SDN-069170, 192.222.20, ICHi-59181, ICHi-59182; 14, top: SDN-060451, right: SDN-069573; 15, SDN-059405; 16, top: ICHi-52135, photograph by Diana Fedoryn, middle: photographer unknown, courtesy of the Chicago Public Library, Special Collections and Preservation Division, CTC, Organic Theater, AV, 1976–77, “Bleacher Bums,” bottom: photograph by Jay Crawford; 17, left: AP photograph by Charles Rex Arbogast, bottom: ICHi-51916; 18, ICHi-37082; 19, top: ICHi-59166, bottom: ICHi-59183; 20–21, SDN-066912; 22–23, photograph by Jay Crawford; 24, left: SN-0958c; 25, courtesy of Hugh Forsyth F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on the deconstruction of nostalgia, see Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: The Free Press, 1979) and Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). The evolution of sports in general is thoroughly discussed in Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). For a focused look at Chicago’s legendary upstart, see Lisa Krisoff Boehm, Popular Culture and the Enduring Myth of Chicago, 1871–1968 (New York: Routledge, 2004). A new book with contributions by Gems as well as Chicago History Museum curators Peter Alter and John Russick explores the city’s amateur leagues and its legendary professional franchises, Sports in Chicago, ed. Elliott J. Gorn (University of Illinois Press, 2008) Monuments to Memory | 25
26 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
The Literature of the Sox Side EILEEN M. MCMAHON
For more than a century, authors have captured the larger-than-life athletic ability of the White Sox and the hopes and dreams of their fans.
D
uring a 2005 World Series game between the Chicago White Sox and the Houston Astros, sports announcer Joe Buck mused that no one had written about the Sox as they had for venerable teams such as the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Although he was mistaken, Mr. Buck can hardly be blamed for the cultural amnesia of the White Sox’s rich literary heritage. Apparently, the sports world does not know what to make of the “second team” from the Second City, except to dwell on the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Suffering indignities such as these seems to be the lot of the White Sox fan. In recent years, media personalities and Cubs fans alike have begun to refer to Chicago as a Cubs Town. Wrigley Field, home to the loveable losers, is nestled in a neighborhood of charming brownstones and trendy bars and restaurants. The stable neighborhood has preserved a sense of continuity, comfort, and ease for the Cubs in the city’s landscape. Until recently, the team dominated local air waves, thanks to the Tribune Company’s longtime ownership of both Cubs and WGN radio. But, with the 2005 World Championship flag flying over the South Side ballpark, White Sox fans can reclaim their rightful position of importance in Chicago’s sports history and take pride in their team’s rich literary tradition. Each season, the Crosstown Classic is a much anticipated matchup for White Sox and Cubs fans alike. Opposite: Sox players Sullivan and Appling pictured with their North Side rivals, c. 1925. Top and left: Playoff memorabilia from the White Sox’s 2005 championship season. The Literature of the Sox Side | 27
Chicago native and White Sox owner Charles Comiskey at South Side Park, the original home of the Sox, in 1907.
28 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
Inspired by the White Sox, writers have covered almost every theme in prose or poetry that can be written about baseball, whether it be the human frailty of ballplayers and their owners; the dreams of young boys yearning for a place in the bigger world; the disappointment and disillusionment with its heroes as well as their redemption; the importance of baseball in the fabric of American life; or the simple love and joy of the game. The Second City’s second team is second to none in the literature of the sport. White Sox fans themselves seem to have forgotten or are simply unaware of this heritage. The White Sox epitomized the American social realism movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a cultural movement that depicted and publicized the struggles of the urban working class. The hard edge often attributed to Sox fans is very complex, but the fans unconsciously reflect writers’ descriptions of the struggles and evolution of Chicago’s tough South Side neighborhoods. The White Sox got their start in the ethnically diverse and hard-scrabble neighborhoods near the Union Stock Yard and the Central Manufacturing District. Their original fan base and the men who wrote about them reflected this gritty urban milieu. Men in these neighborhoods liked the sport’s democratic qualities. Baseball could be played anywhere—in an open field or an abandoned lot in the midst of an industrial landscape. Bats, balls, and gloves were relatively cheap. Baseball appealed to all ethnic groups and defined the American character. It was a team sport, but one in which an individual could shine, and it offered a means to get ahead for young men who only had their athletic prowess to offer. On the athletic field, skill mattered, not social origins. Like churches, schools, and local saloons, baseball created community cohesion in ethnic neighborhoods. When teams organized on the basis of neighborhood, ethnicity, or race, sports also became an acceptable channel for social tensions and animosities. Unfortunately, these friendly competitions sometimes mirrored uglier American social values, particularly in the segregation of African Americans from the sport. Professional baseball in Chicago got its start in the industrial neighborhoods of the West and South Sides. In 1877, the Chicago White Stockings (now the Chicago Cubs) played the Cincinnati Red Legs in the city’s first major league game. Despite the defection of the team to the North Side in 1884, baseball remained firmly rooted in the South Side. This was due in large part to the Cubs, who made it a condition that if the city admitted another professional baseball team the new team would have to remain south of Thirty-fifth Street. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were several baseball parks in and around the Armour Square neighborhood. Among them were the White Sox, who began
In 1910, Charles Comiskey built a spacious and modern baseball stadium among the residential neighborhoods and industrial districts of the South Side. Above: Comiskey Park as seen from the surrounding neighborhood in 1954.
playing ball at Thirty-ninth Street (Pershing Road) and Wentworth Avenue in 1900, and the Leland Giants, an African American team that played just to the west. In 1908, White Sox owner Charles Comiskey purchased a fifteen-acre site at Thirty-fifth Street and Shields Avenue, which had been used for a variety of sporting events, including baseball. The White Sox played their first game in the new ballpark on April 15, 1910. Comiskey laid a green cornerstone in his new park in honor of the nearby Irish community and installed “cheap seats” so people from the neighborhood could afford to attend. The growth in the popularity of baseball coincided with the growth of social realism, and Chicago figured prominently in the literary branch of the movement. During the
late nineteenth century, Chicago earned a reputation as the most American of American cities. It was newer and further removed from European influences than Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and one of the country’s most ethnically diverse urban centers. With fewer established elites, Chicago offered great freedom and opportunity for the newly arrived. Its economy drew its bounty from the American heartland, but it also bore all the ills of rapid industrialization—poverty, slums, disease, high infant mortality rates, labor unrest, and political corruption. Chicago became an attractive topic for many notable writers in this new genre, such as Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Nelson Algren, and James T. Farrell, who hoped their insights might generate a new vision for The Literature of the Sox Side | 29
American democracy, which seemed to be failing its most vulnerable and common people. The all-American sport of baseball was an obvious subject for writers, and the White Sox were located where the city’s heart beat with the most passion and intensity. Finley Peter Dunne and Ring Lardner were the first two serious writers who focused on the South Side and baseball. Each got his start in the rough and tumble of Chicago journalism, which at one time boasted thirty-two daily newspapers. In 1887, Dunne landed his first assignment as a sports reporter, covering the White Stockings for the Chicago Daily News. When the team moved to the North Side, Dunne’s interests stayed with the South Siders. In 1893, while writing for the Chicago Evening Post, Dunne began his Mr. Dooley series. The fictional Mr. Dooley, an Irish philosopher-barkeep, lived on Archey Road (Mr. Dooley’s equivalent of Chicago’s Archer Avenue) and dispensed his wit and wisdom on local and national topics, much like today’s Doonesbury characters. Just as Mark Twain conveyed the sounds of the Deep South, Dunne used local dialect, in this case a heavy Irish brogue, to sharpen the reality of Mr. Dooley’s world. In the series, Dunne provided an insider’s view of 1890s Irish American Bridgeport. Through humorous accounts of the community’s activities—including baptisms, wakes, weddings, and sporting events—Dunne portrayed the foibles of its inhabitants and their grinding poverty. The popular series eventually drew a national audience. Prior to the professional organization of the game, baseball competitions and wagers were a part of Chicago’s South Side working-class neighborhoods. Dunne’s accounts of amateur sporting events in Bridgeport reveal the intensity of these competitions. They are tinged with Irish nationalist sentiment and the interference of politicians in ward-sponsored games. In “Hennessy Umpires a Baseball Game,” Mr. Dooley is disgusted by his friend Hennessey who has “been makin’ a goat iv himsilf impirin’ a baseball game.” Mr. Dooley reports, “Near iv’ry wan in th’ road wint to see th’ game . . . an’ Clancy, who wants to be aldherman, bought a kag iv beer an’ put it on third base.” Hennesey, however, kept changing his mind about balls and strikes. When a player drove a ball over the fence and broke a window in his house, Hennesey refused to rule it a home run. “Come back, ye murdhrin’ young vilyan,” he shouted, “or I’ll have th’ law on ye.” Instead, the players pelted Hennessey with a ball until he lost his teeth and wound up in the hospital. From this setting of intense competition and fierce loyalties, the South Side Irish embraced the White Sox as After the Cubs moved north, local sports writer Finley Peter Dunne (top) remained loyal to the South Side. He covered Comiskey’s White Stockings and later wrote a series of stories about the fictional Mr. Dooley (left). 30 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
Dunne eventually published a compilation of the popular Mr. Dooley series. In this letter, written toward the end of the process, he expressed mild frustration over the book’s publicity and “a natural anxiety” for an update on the project. The Literature of the Sox Side | 31
During his twenties, Ring Larder worked as a newspaperman first at the South Bend Times in Indiana and then for various papers in Chicago. Above: Lardner in Chicago, c. 1913, around the time he began to write “A Busher’s Letters Home.” 32 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
the champions of their city. The Irish, of course, were not the Sox’s only fans. The Germans, Poles, Italians, and other European immigrants who worked in blue-collar jobs in the vicinity also invested their hopes and dreams in the fate of the White Sox. During World War I, African Americans began arriving on the city’s South Side, drawn by the opportunity of wartime jobs. Their initial allegiance was to the American Giants, Rube Foster’s offshoot of the Leland Giants and arguably the best team in the Negro League, who played at the Sox’s former ballpark. With the disbandment of the Negro League, due to the reintegration of major league baseball in the early 1950s, Giants fans gradually transferred their loyalties to the White Sox. Ring Lardner was another White Sox beat reporter who tried his hand at fiction. A native of southwest Michigan, Lardner moved to Chicago in 1907 and covered the White Sox and the Cubs for the Inter Ocean, the Examiner, and the Tribune. Similar to Twain and Dunne, Lardner used vernacular speech to take his readers into the world of baseball players and aficionados of the era. Through his travels with the White Sox, Lardner became intimately acquainted with players, managers, and owners, and these relationships gave him the material for
his fiction. In 1914, he published a series of short stories the Saturday Evening Post called “A Busher’s Letters Home.” The Post’s national circulation of two million popularized the series, which was published as a collection under the title You Know Me Al in 1916. By the time the series ended in 1919, Lardner had written twentyfive installments. Between 1922 and 1925, he turned the stories into a syndicated comic strip with the same title. In appreciation for his work, Comiskey gave Lardner a fourteen-karat gold life pass to the American League. Lardner’s stories were remarkable for their time. Rather than portraying the one-dimensional heroes found in adolescent literature of the era, Lardner wrote about flesh-and-blood men with human frailties and larger-than-life athletic ability. Since it was socially unacceptable to write exposés about real players’ lives off the field—especially in the mainstream press—Lardner did it through fiction. He featured real White Sox players in the background of his stories to provide a dose of reality, but most of the personal details involved fictional characters. Lardner was labeled a misanthrope because of his negative characterizations of these men, but he attempted the first honest portrayal of the sport and the real men who played it. Through the Saturday Evening
In 1917, veteran pitcher Eddie Cicotte, second baseman Eddie Collins, and outfielder Joe Jackson led their team (pictured above) to one hundred victories and a World Series championship. The Literature of the Sox Side | 33
In the 1920s, Ring Lardner journeyed abroad for “professional work and travel.” His passport, issued on September 2, 1924, lists his occupation as “newspaper writer” and indicates that he was accompanied by his wife, Ellis. 34 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and manager Kid Gleason were close personal friends. Gleason coached the Sox for many years and served as manager from 1919 to 1923. Left: Gleason (left) and Comiskey in the Bard’s Room at Comiskey Park, 1919. Below: Gleason at Comiskey Park, 1919.
Post, Lardner introduced the great, but fully human, White Sox team of the 1910s to a national audience. Lardner’s fictional entrée into the world of baseball was Jack Keefe, a rookie pitcher for the White Sox. We get to know Keefe through letters written to Al, his friend back home. These vignettes provide a glimpse of real Sox baseball players, such as Joe Jackson, Ed Walsh, Buck Weaver, Eddie Cicotte, Ray Schalk, and Bill Sullivan; managers Jimmy Callahan and Kid Gleason; and owner Charles Comiskey. Keefe, however, is the central character and the embodiment of all the strengths and weaknesses found in many ballplayers. Ambitious and self-confident, he lacks intelligence, modesty, and maturity. One of the pitfalls of life on the road was finding wholesome off-hour entertainment. In the short story “A New Busher Breaks In,” manager Gleason is depicted as the abusive babysitter of his team of overgrown boys. Part of his job is to ensure that off-the-field activities do not interfere with his team’s performance, and he plays tough guy when he suspected Keefe’s extracurricular activities—including overeating, drinking, and womanizing—are compromising his playing ability. To prove his point, Gleason punches Keefe in the stomach, asking him, “Are you in shape?” Keefe, of course, says he is. “Yes you look in shape like a barrel,” Gleason skeptically replies. Keefe insists he is and claims that if he looks The Literature of the Sox Side | 35
Kate Jackson often read and signed documents on behalf of her husband, Joe. She wrote this reimbursement slip for her travel expenses from Waco, Texas, where she had visited her husband during spring training, c. 1919.
bulkier, it is only because his “stumach mussels [sic]” are bigger. He reassures Gleason that with a little working out he will be fine. Gleason retorts, “You bet you are going to get some work because I am going to see to it
myself.” Gleason’s direct approach, however, fails to make an impression. Gleason keeps up the direct assaults when Keefe fails to keep himself on the straight and narrow. He complains to Al, “Gleason has been sticking round me like as if I had a million bucks or something. I can’t even sit down and smoke a cigar but what he is there to knock the ashes off of it. He . . . keeps hitting me in the stomach but I wish he would leave me alone sometimes especially at meals.” When Gleason stops Keefe from overeating at the club’s hotel, Keefe sneaks off to eat at another restaurant at his own expense. He continues, “That is not right because it costs me money when I have to go away from the hotel and eat and what right has he got to try and help me order my meals? Because he don’t know what I want and what my stomach wants.” It apparently did not occur to Keefe that even heroes need discipline. In the story “The Battle of Texas,” Gleason takes on the role of babysitter once again so he will have a starting pitcher for the next day. In the story, Keefe, a married man, secretly plans to take another woman out to a picture show. The suspecting Gleason continues to hound Keefe until he admits his plans. Gleason then declares he will not only join them but will pay too! “Well he went along all right,” Keefe relates to Al, “and it was the worst picture I ever seen and when it was over Gleason asked Miss Krug and I if we wouldn’t have a soda or something.” While they are sipping soft drinks, Gleason asks Keefe if he has the “Mrs. Picture with [him] or either 1 of the 2 kids.” That ends the date, but on the way back to the hotel, Gleason says, “You pitch tomorrow Jack.” Lardner used the Keefe stories to bring attention to the level of control ball clubs exerted over their players’ pri-
Pitcher Eddie Cicotte was one of the higher paid Sox players. Signed by Comiskey, this paycheck represents a two-week period in which Cicotte earned almost twice as much as another pitcher on the team. Comiskey’s use of the well-established Drovers National Bank grounded his team financially as well as geographically in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. 36 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
vate lives. Keefe gripes to Al that Gleason does not have the right “to cut in on my private affairs and try to run them . . . He must think this is the army the way he acts.” When Keefe gets back to Chicago, he intends to complain to the team’s owner: “After that kind of business I couldn’t do myself justice,” he remarks indignantly, “and as soon as we get home I will put it up to Comiskey and ask him to trade me to some other club or else I will quit and go in to some business where a man does his work . . . and when he is through the mgr. of the store don’t go noseing around into your private affairs.” Keefe, of course, got nowhere with Comiskey. Life on the road takes its toll on Keefe as it would on any player. As his home life falls apart so does his pitching. When his wife comes to a game with another man, Keefe immediately suspects she is having an affair. Batters start hitting him, Babe Ruth hits a home run, and Keefe is taken out of the game. He writes to Al, “I am through with the both of them as a man can’t pitch baseball and have any home life and a man can’t have the kind of home life I have got and pitch baseball.” Having a better opinion of his abilities than management, Keefe constantly argues the terms of his contract, as Comiskey becomes the main source of his frustration and rage. Keefe’s salary disputes expose the economic clout owners had over their players. In “The Busher Reenlists,” Keefe tells Gleason he wants a contract for $3,000, a figure substantially less than the $4,000 he believes he deserves. In a rare moment of honest introspection, Keefe realizes the physical limits and short career of a baseball player: “ . . . they’s no use of a man killing himself pitching baseball and then when your arm gives out you haven’t got no business to go in to because business men won’t hire a man that’s 33 or 34 yrs. old and no experience.” When his contract is issued for $2,400, Keefe complains to Comiskey, who arrogantly dismisses him, telling Keefe to talk to Gleason. Gleason in turn tells him to keep his options open in the stockyards. Keefe has no choice but to accept the contract or leave the team. Because of his intimate knowledge of baseball and the people involved, Lardner quickly realized that the 1919 World Series between the extraordinary White Sox and the lackluster Cincinnati Reds was not on the level. In the column “Sox Lack ‘Strategem,’” Lardner used his vernacular speech and fine sense of humor to convey his suspicion that the game was fixed. “As for the game itself . . . The big thrill come in the 4th innings when everybody was wondering if the Sox would ever get the 3rd man out,” Lardner sarcastically commented. “They finely did and several occupants of the press box was overcome. The White Sox only chance at that pt was to keep the Reds in there hitting till darkness fell and made it a illegal game . . .” While Lardner continued to cover base-
James T. Farrell (left) pictured with his older brother, William Earl, c. 1912. In Farrell’s largely autobiographical O’Neill novels, Danny and his big brother invent their own one-man baseball games.
ball through the 1920s, he too suffered from the widespread sense of disillusionment in the wake of the Black Sox scandal. The game was still supposed to be bigger and purer than those who played it. James T. Farrell, one of Chicago’s greatest realism writers, grew up following the White Sox teams covered by Lardner. While Lardner had tried to explain the world of the players to the fans, Farrell wrote from a fan’s perspective, exploring the meaning of baseball in his own life and the lives of his characters. Farrell’s primary literary interest was the Americanization of the Irish as they moved from the poverty-stricken neighborhoods described by Dunne to the middle-class and more respectable neighborhoods further south near Washington Park. Farrell wrote movingly of the emotional and spiritual toll of the immigrant process on the Irish. The struggle to survive in urban, industrial America sucked the spontaneity and joy out of the lives of his characters. In a world where kitchen tables erupted into family arguments and parents struggled to keep poverty at bay, absorb the death of children, and battle alcoThe Literature of the Sox Side | 37
Undated photograph of James T. Farrell. In 2007, Farrell’s Dreaming Baseball was released. The previously unpublished work of fiction examines the Black Sox scandal through the eyes of rookie teammate and native Chicagoan Mickey Donovan. 38 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
holism, the White Sox remained the one bright spot. In 1911, Farrell, an avid White Sox fan, got his first baseball and bat. In My Baseball Diary, readers get a glimpse of the magical transformation this gift had on his imagination. He describes how playing baseball transported him to a world of heroes and adoring fans. As a boy, Farrell and his brother invented their own one-man game played against a wall. Farrell pretended he was the White Sox and picked the Philadelphia Athletics as his opponents. In his imagination, the game took shape. He played alongside the real players, using their real batting averages and order in the lineup.
According to Farrell, the verbal abuse of fans toward both the players and the umpires served as a social safety valve. “It is undoubtedly true that more than one little missus escaped from having her teeth knocked out or her eyes punched black and blue,” he speculated, “because her loving husband could go to a ball park to insult Ty Cobb.” These contradictory aspects of the game inspired Farrell’s fictional writing. His Studs Lonigan and Danny O’Neill novels explore the coming of age of Irish American boys. Seemingly small day-by-day choices determine each boy’s fate. Studs chooses the world of the streets where a false, tough-guy persona leads him I was entranced and lost in it. I visualized Comiskey into an existence of pool halls, drinking, brothels, and Park, with roaring and cheering fans, the players eventually an early death. In contrast, Danny looks swinging, running to the bases. I imagined myself as a beyond the narrowness of the neighborhood and dreams player and also a spectator seeing all of the action . . . of a better world. Baseball in particular absorbs Danny The sounds around me, of traffic on Grand Boulevard, and gives him hope for the future. an occasional horse and wagon, electric car or autoFarrell placed Danny in the home of his mother’s mobile on Fiftieth Street, of the elevated train . . . these family—with his grandparents, Aunt Margaret, and all came to me as though muffled. They might have Uncle Al—because Danny’s own father, an unskilled been the roar of the crowd at Comiskey Park. worker, struggled to keep food on the table for his To Farrell baseball was about hope. He saw in it a poetry growing family. While Danny is familiar with the poor that appealed to one’s higher nature. Through its spectacle, Irish in the old neighborhood, he grows up in relative its sounds, its variations between routine dullness and comfort in a neighborhood southeast of the Union Stock sheer excitement, baseball became a part of him. While Yard. Yet life with his grandparents, aunt, and uncle Farrell was deeply disappointed by the Black Sox scandal, becomes difficult as they have to negotiate their way into he later reflected that he was glad to be a fan of baseball the world beyond their Irish community. His grandparboth for its simple pleasures and its influence on his life. ents’ repression of painful memories of Ireland and their Farrell also recognized baseball as an important outlet to shame of being greenhorns leave them unable to underchannel aggressive and competitive feelings into a socially stand or sympathize with Margaret’s and Al’s searches acceptable venue. While he sympafor new morals and guidelines thized with the bone-weary, aging in a city where old world and hero being booed by fans as he local parish values seem outdated. walked off the field in defeat, Farrell Margaret succumbs to alcoholism, understood that “the fan sometimes and Al, a traveling salesman, flees goes to the park not to be a genthe constant arguments. Danny’s tleman but to be the exact opposite only escape is baseball. of one.” In “The Fans’ ‘Inalienable’ In 1911, Farrell saw Ed Walsh Right,” he explained, “Baseball is pitch a no-hitter against the Boston the national game,” but it: Red Sox. This event became a key moment in his first Danny O’Neill can become a national hypocrisy. book, A World I Never Made, when Because a man pays a few bucks the boy experiences the historic to see a ball game, he does not game. Farrell describes Danny’s become St. Francis of Assisi. excitement: “And by the eighth Because he plunks his dough inning, he couldn’t stand it. Each into the box office and pushed time Walsh pitched, the ball might through a turnstile, he does not be hit safely. When he drew his become wise, tolerant, clear hands to his mouth to spit on the sighted and infallible. Even a ball, all the fans were quiet. They box-seat ticket is not a certificate that a man has been transformed Ed Walsh’s no-hitter against the Boston Red waited, just as Danny did, holding into one of those rare persons Sox in 1911 was a celebrated moment in their breath, while Walsh pitched.” who are the pure of heart. Farrell’s childhood. In the ninth inning with two outs, The Literature of the Sox Side | 39
Walsh threw his last pitch. “A bounder. [Danny] held his breath. Amby McConnell had it, the throw to first base. Out! Whee! He stood up on his seat and gave all of himself in a last yell . . . Just think of it, he had seen Ed Walsh pitch a no-hit game. And some day he was going to be like him.” For an afternoon, Danny left his troubled family and neighborhood to enter a perfect world and share in the glory and excitement of a historic moment in baseball. Like Farrell had as a boy, Danny loved to play baseball, even if it was by himself against a wall in his backyard. Sometimes Danny played with his older brother Bill “pretending that these were big-league games.” Each boy “represented a big-league team and batted according to that team’s lineup, hitting right-handed or left-handed just as the real players in the lineup did.” Danny always represented the White Sox. Danny’s fictional counterpart, Studs Lonigan, however, cannot see beyond the world of the ethnic neighborhood streets. In Young Lonigan, Studs mocks Danny’s fascination with baseball. In one encounter between the two boys, Studs watches Danny “playing a baseball game by himself with a golf ball.” As Danny played happily, oblivious to his surroundings, “Studs stood across the street, hands on hips, watching, shaking his head because he couldn’t make out goofy O’Neill.” When Danny finally notices his onlooker, he asks Studs to join him. Danny, of course, easily beats Studs, who rarely played the game. In this encounter, Farrell reveals Studs’s character: “Studs didn’t like to get beat at anything, so he quit playing. He pulled Danny’s cap over his eyes, almost bending the punk’s glasses, and said: ‘You’re dizzy!’” Studs then proceeds to give Danny an unwanted lesson in street fighting. Studs is a poor sport and a quitter and cannot see how Danny uses his baseball fantasies to focus on his future. Similar to Farrell, however, Danny is not cut out for the big leagues. In Father and Son, published in 1940, Danny emerges as a disappointed high-school player: “For three years he had daydreamed of how he would be a scintillating high-school baseball star and how he would hit a homerun with the bases full.” Instead, in one game, Danny strikes out with the bases loaded: “Yes, after kidding himself about his destiny, and having the nerve to think that he would be a star like Ty Cobb or Eddie Collins, he was a miserable failure.” Yet, baseball teaches Danny to dream of a brighter future and adjust to his disappointments. By the time he realizes his goal of being a professional baseball player is impossible, Danny has developed enough character to redirect his ambitions from the brick façade of Comiskey Park to the gothic gray halls of the University of Chicago and a career in writing. In Farrell’s view, baseball served Danny O’Neill well. 40 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
Nelson Algren was another venerable Chicago writer and an avid White Sox fan. While baseball was less integral to his fiction than Farrell’s, Algren’s 1951 short story “The Silver-Colored Yesterday” discusses the effects of the Black Sox scandal. In the story, Algren’s family has just moved from the South Side to the North Side, where he has the difficult task of trying to fit in with the Cubs fans on North Troy Street. When asked to name his favorite player, Algren thought about “the suddenly far-distant White Sox [who] had a competent sort of athlete at short and I considered myself something of a prospect in that position too.” So he answered, “Swede Risberg,” and pulled out a Comiskey Park program from a game he had recently attended. Despite his predilection for shortstop, the young Sox fan was only allowed to play right field—the worst position. Right field placed him on “a coal-shed roof with an American League sun suspended directly overhead. A height from which I regarded with a quiet scorn the worshippers of false gods hitting scratchy little National League bloopers far below. There wasn’t one honest-to-god American League line drive all summer.”
As a young boy, Nelson Algren looked up to Sox shortstop Charles “Swede” Risberg. Printed in 1989, this card was one in a series of Black Sox trading cards, which commemorated the seventieth anniversary the scandal.
In “The Silver-Colored Yesterday,� author and Sox fan Nelson Algren (above in downtown Chicago, n.d.) described his childhood move to the North Side, which was made all the worse in the wake of the Black Sox scandal. The Literature of the Sox Side | 41
Algren’s sense of superiority did not last. The 1919 scandal led to his mortification of being a Sox fan in Cubs territory. “The Black Sox were the Reds [Communists] of that October and mine was the guilt of association,” he lamented. “What kind of American are you anyhow?” accused one of his playmates. “He had me,” recounted Algren. “I didn’t know what kind I was.” Baseball was America’s game. It symbolized the purity of the American dream, and the scandal went to the core of all that was dear to Algren. The Black Sox were “Benedict Arnolds!” They were “betrayers of American boyhood, not to mention American Girlhood and American Womanhood and American Hoodhood.” The mortality of his heroes, Algren claimed, elicited a latent selfrighteousness in every envious nobody: “Every bleacher has-been, newspaper mediocrity and pulpit inanity seized the chance to regain his lost pride at the expense of seven of the finest athletes who ever hit into a double play. And now stood stripped to the bleacher winds in the very sight of Comiskey and God.” To add to his tormented boyhood, Algren’s playmates were ready to ban him for life from their game too. “Choked with guilt and penitence . . . I pleaded to be allowed, with all my grievous faults, to go along with the gang.” Young Algren traded his Risberg bat for a softball bat “and flipped the program from that hot and magic Sunday when Cicotte was shutting out everybody forever . . . into the Troy Street gutter.” While it seemed as if the White Sox and baseball were lost to him, Algren, like many, kept a soft spot in his heart for outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson. Jackson was one of eleven children of a sharecropper on a decrepit plantation in South Carolina. When the family moved to Brandon Mill, Jackson got his start on the mill team, where he acquired the nickname “Shoeless Joe” because he played one game without shoes due to blisters. In 1915, he joined the White Sox, and through natural talent and hard work became a .350 hitter and a hero to Sox fans. Many wondered how he could have been part of the conspiracy when he batted .375 in the postseason. Algren’s poem about Jackson expresses tremendous sadness in recalling both his talent and his gullibility. Do not be remembering the most natural man ever to wear spiked shoes. The canniest fielder and the longest hitter, Who squatted on his heels In a uniform muddied at the knees, Till the bleacher shadows grew long behind him. Who went along with Chick and Buck and Happy Because they treated him so friendly-like, Hardly like Yankees at all. With Williams because Lefty was from the South too. 42 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
Fans purchase tickets to a White Sox–Yankees game at Comiskey Park in 1951. The Literature of the Sox Side | 43
After the White Sox captured the American League pennant in 1959, the city sounded its air-raid siren and held a parade on LaSalle Street (above). The celebratory siren frightened many Chicagoans, who assumed it signaled Russian invasion during the Cold War, and may have inspired Paul Molloy (opposite) to write A Pennant for the Kremlin. 44 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
And with Risberg because the Swede was such a hard guy. Who made an X for his name and couldn’t argue with Comiskey’s sleepers. But who could pick a line drive out of the air ten feet outside the foul line And rifle anything home from anywhere in the park. For Shoeless Joe is gone, long gone, A long yellow grass-blade between his teeth And the bleacher shadows behind him . . . Baseball enthusiasm on the South Side wilted but did not die out after the Black Sox scandal. Humor is sometimes the best way to deal with disappointment, and Chicago Sun-Times columnist Paul Molloy did just that with his 1964 book, A Pennant for the Kremlin. During the Cold War, Americans were obsessed with dissecting what made America American in contrast to Soviet Communism. What better way to explore this than by examining America’s game through the eyes of its Russian comrades? In Molloy’s spoof, the Soviets take
control of the White Sox due to an odd twist of private property ownership and inheritance laws. Of course, Americans are horrified by the Communist ownership of an American baseball team. Fans urge the United States government to seize the estate, and White Sox players face a barrage of hostility. But, as cooler heads prevail, American League officials and the White Sox management decide to finish out the season with their new owners before determining the future of the team. The Kremlin’s Communist leaders, on the other hand, perceive owning an American baseball team as a public diplomatic opportunity second only to the Olympics. They send the deputy chairman “Mikhail Deborin” to oversee the new acquisition. The Russian, of course, knows nothing about baseball, except what he can crib from baseball cards. Nevertheless, he insists on co-managing the team, which he referred to as the belye chulki or white stockings. With Russian owners, the White Sox fear they will be the laughingstock of the game. The novelty of the situation, however, brings sellout crowds to Comiskey Park, forcing management to turn people away. Through the use of cultural misunderstandings, Molloy interprets the complexity, excitement, and drama of the American sport. Deborin has a difficult time understanding why there are three bases instead of one at three times the distance. The Sox manager Horace Bratton explains that the three bases account for “about ninety percent of the action, including the excitement of running, sliding, the pickoff and base stealing.” Deborin is horrified. “They steal bases? . . . It is the mark of decadence in this country . . . Crime is everywhere.” Eventually, the belye chulki crack the Iron Curtain while trade unionists in Russia take to their new team. The Russian news agency TASS is forced to provide continuous coverage of a sporting event. Besides listening to game results, the Russians are also able to scrutinize American society in a way that was previously impossible. Flaws in American democracy are glaring. In one report, a TASS correspondent exposes the elitist and racist dimensions to the sport writing, “There is reason to believe that sports enthusiasts the world over may have been duped by a gigantic American hoax.” The exorbitant price of tickets excludes many poor and working-class fans, and despite the ground-breaking introduction of Jackie Robinson into baseball in 1946, the game still had not fully embraced African Americans. While perceptive on many issues, the TASS reporter does not understand the social utility of insulting the umpire. “This correspondent was left aghast at the unruly conduct of the rabble in the audience,” he writes. “Time and time again the judges were hissed and jeered loudly, and subjected to terms of derision which reflected on their honesty and eyesight—a boorishness The Literature of the Sox Side | 45
In 1920, a grand jury indicted eight White Sox—seven current players, including “Shoeless” Joe Jackson (above in Chicago, 1913), and the recently retired Arnold “Chick” Gandil—for throwing the 1919 World Series. Although eventually acquitted, the players were banned from professional baseball for life. In recent years, some of the blame for the Black Sox scandal has shifted to Comiskey for keeping players’ salaries low, making the temptation of gambling hard to resist. Left: Shoeless Joe’s shoes.
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happily not permitted in the U.S.S.R.” The reporter should have been referred to James Farrell. In Molloy’s tale, the White Sox rally from all the attention and win the American League pennant. Gradually, the Russian deputy comes to enjoy the game for “the thrill of the play and the challenge of outwitting rival managers,” rather than for “the glory of the Soviet Republic.” The belye chulki, however, fall to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, and Deborin defects to the United States. “To everybody it is known what happens, in my country, to losers,” he sadly explains, “ . . . Soon they are in Siberia.” Chicagoans, on the contrary, have come to accept the seasonal defeats of their teams as easily as a routine grounder. For Molloy, baseball’s greatest contribution to American society was to learn to accept a loss and prepare to succeed the next time. W. P. Kinsella certainly believed that baseball offered the possibility of personal renewal and redemption from shame. His 1982 book Shoeless Joe presents baseball as a spiritual odyssey for an Iowa farmer named Ray Kinsella (the book was later made into the movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner). Ray’s journey begins when he hears the mysterious voice of a sports announcer whispering in his ear, “If you build it, he will come.” His love of the game—with the “tension, the strategy, the ballet of the field, the angle of the bat”—provide the magic to bring the 1919 Black Sox to his cornfield-turned-ballpark. Like Algren, W. P. Kinsella believed that “Shoeless Joe became a symbol of the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless” and the name of Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the first-ever baseball commissioner who banned Jackson from the game, “became synonymous with the Devil.” Shoeless Joe captures the imagination of many fans who feel that Jackson deserved redemption. Ray knows that the left fielder had taken money from gamblers, but he, like many others, does not believe Jackson deliberately threw the series. “Never!” Ray insists. “Shoeless Joe Jackson led both teams in hitting in that 1919 series. It was the circumstances. The circumstances. The players were paid peasant salaries while the owners became rich.” Ray’s passion for baseball creates a magical world that reaches these disgraced players and finds the purity for the game that resides in their hearts. When Ray conjures him up, Jackson explains his feelings for the game: “I loved the game . . . I’d have played for food money. I’d have played free and worked for food. It was the game, the parks, the smells, the sounds.” He continues, “I’d play for the devil’s own team just for the touch of a baseball.” Before long, Jackson brings the rest of the 1919 team to play in the field. Ray tells us:
They’ve all come now—Chick Gandil and Shoeless Joe Jackson; the pitchers, Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams; the rest of the infield: Fred McMullin the utility player at second, Swede Risberg at shortstop, Buck Weaver at third. Happy Felsch stalks center field. Only the right field and the catcher are ghostgray in the afternoon sun. Each player seeks redemption for his past venality by proving his love of the game. To Jackson and his teammates, the cornfield becomes heaven despite Ray’s insistence that they are in Iowa. By redeeming the Black Sox, Ray and his author restore the innocence and importance of baseball in the social psyche. “Growing up is ritual,” Ray explains, “more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time. But baseball can soothe even those pains, for it is stable and permanent, steady as a grandfather dozing in a wicker chair on a verandah.” At the end of the book, this purified form of baseball saves Ray’s bankrupt farm. People from across the country, and even across time, come to watch these mythical men play for the sheer joy of the game. “The
A skeptical young Sox fan attends a game at Comiskey Park with his dad, 1988. Photoprint by Tom Harney, Changing Chicago Project. The Literature of the Sox Side | 47
On September 30, 1990, the White Sox played their last game at Old Comiskey Park. After the game, players circled the field, waving good-bye to their fans, before returning to the dugout. Photograph by Melody Miller.
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For more than a century of White Sox baseball, Chicagoans have reveled and anguished over the results. The literature produced by that often-painful relationship exposes the core identity of the White Sox fan in particular and perhaps all of sports fans in general. For Ring Lardner it was a game played by boys too human in their frailty to be trusted with our dreams. For James T. Farrell it was a metaphor for hope and transcendence. For Nelson Algren and Paul Malloy it was about learning to live with losing, and for W. P. Kinsella it was a green field where lost innocence was reclaimed. Each spring, White Sox fans approach yet another baseball season with a mixture of all of the complex thoughts and emotions expressed in the city’s literature. This literary tradition is a rich reminder of the human dimensions of hope, disappointment, and even the occasional triumphs that breathe new life into every opening day. Eileen M. McMahon is an assistant professor of history at Lewis University. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum collection, unless otherwise noted. 26 top, 2008.60.8, reprinted with the permission of the Chicago White Sox; 26–27, ICHi-52139; 27, 2008.28NA, reprinted with the permission of the Chicago White Sox; 28, detail of SDN005834; 29, ICHi-52032, photograph by J. Sherwin Murphy; 30 top, ICHi-10168aa; 30 bottom, ICHi-19649; 31, ICHi52138; 32, reprinted with permission from the Ring Lardner papers, Newberry Library, Chicago; 33, ICHi-20696; 34, reprinted with permission from the Ring Lardner papers, Newberry Library, Chicago; 35 top, SDN-061761; 35 bottom, SDN-061763; 36 top, ICHi-51810; 36 bottom, ICHi-51809; 37–38, reprinted from the Farrell-Paturis papers, Newberry Library, Chicago, with permission of Cleo Paturis; 39, x.3391.2008; 40, 1989.461g; 41, ICHi-37366; 42–43, ICHi22418; 44, ICHi-52131; 45, as published in The Chicago SunTimes. Reprinted with permission; 46 top, SDN-058463A; 46 bottom, courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame/Milo Stewart Jr.; 47, ICHi-52137; 48–49, ICHi-52133.
one constant through all these years has been baseball,” Ray insists. “America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time with America . . . It is a living part of history.” Through this magical cornfield, a symbol of American wholesomeness and innocence, W. P. Kinsella redeems the Black Sox and baseball itself.
F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For a complete discussion of Finley Peter Dunne’s work see Charles Fanning, Finley Peter Dunne and Mr. Dooley: The Chicago Years (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978). A compilation of the work of Ring Lardner is available in Ring Around the Bases: The Complete Baseball Stories of Ring Lardner (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992) which is edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and includes a forward by Ring Lardner Jr. In 2008, the University of Illinois Press republished all five volumes of James T. Farrell’s Danny O’Neill series with forwards by Charles Fanning; for more information, visit www.press.uillinois.edu. The Literature of the Sox Side | 49
M A K I N G H I S T O RY E
Banking on Chicago: Interviews with Edgar Jannotta and Martin Koldyke T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E
E
dgar Jannotta and Martin Koldyke epitomize the impact of investment banking on Chicago philanthropy and education. Both made personal fortunes as financiers and parlayed that success for civic improvements. For several decades Jannotta has served in leadership roles at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, the Chicago Community Trust, the University of Chicago, the Lyric Opera, and the Chicago History Museum. Similarly, Koldyke has been a board member for WTTW Channel 11, the Brookings Institution, Choate Rosemary Hall, the Joffrey Ballet, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His Golden Apple Foundation, established in 1985, led to the creation of the Academy for Urban School Leadership, and he remains a leading figure in efforts to reform the public schools of Chicago. Edgar “Ned” Jannotta was born in 1931 to Ramona Dalzell Skiff and Joseph Jannotta. The youngest of three children, Jannotta spent his entire childhood in the North Shore suburb of Kenilworth, mostly on Roslyn Road. His father owned a road-construction business on the West Side of Chicago and later opened a stone quarry near the Jannotta (left) and Koldyke have parlayed success in finance to major civic improvements in Chicago. Fox River.
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Jannotta attended the Joseph Sears School from kindergarten through eighth grade and then New Trier Township High School. “Everybody could walk or ride their bike to school, and there were a lot of after-school activities,” he remembers fondly. “It was an ideal place to grow up.” Martin “Mike” Koldyke was born in 1932, the son of Martha Lukens and Martin Jesse “Dutch” Koldyke and the grandson of Dutch immigrants to the United States. When Koldyke was a small child, his father operated the Twin Pines Farm Dairy near Detroit. “Farmers came to the dairy and delivered their milk each day, and then they processed it there and took the butter, the cottage cheese, and the milk and shipped it to Detroit and delivered it to people,” Koldyke explains. Koldyke spent his early years in Northville, Michigan. “At the time, Northville was really a little town, a wonderful little place,” Koldyke remembers. “I started out at Baseline School, which was a one-room country school about a mile down the road.” When Koldyke reached the eighth grade, the family moved to Indianapolis where his father operated the Mutual Milk Company, a dairy founded by his grandfather. As a teenager, Koldyke devoted much of his time to sports, playing on his school’s baseball and football teams. Jannotta’s participation in sports proved to be his first success. At New Trier High School, he competed on the football, baseball, and swimming teams. His senior year, Jannotta was the captain and starting tailback on a football team that lost only one game all season.
An early success that would propel Jannotta through college was football. At New Trier High School (above, 1948), he played three unbeaten seasons. Below: Koldyke’s family moved near Indianapolis when he was a boy to operate the family business, Mutual Milk Company.
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Jannotta (far left) with Princeton teammates.
At Princeton University, Jannotta continued his gridiron pursuits, playing behind Heisman Trophy-winner Dick Kazmaier his first two varsity seasons. “It was hard to beat him out. He was a real good player,” admits Jannotta. “But I got to play a lot because we had a good team and got big scores.” During his three-year varsity career, Jannotta’s Princeton teams recorded two undefeated seasons (losing only a single game in the other) and sixth-place national rankings in the final Associated Press polls in both 1950 and 1951. After graduation, Jannotta spent four years as a lieutenant and naval aviator. For a time, he was stationed on the USS Intrepid, which inadvertently sparked his interest in investment banking. Prior to embarking on a mission, he and an intelligence officer decided to organize a mutual fund for their squadron. “We didn’t know anything about stocks,” he now admits. “I was lucky I didn’t end up in jail.” Jannotta and his friend bought stock in companies that made airplanes: McDonnell, Douglas, North American Aviation, and Drummond. “The idea would be at the end of the cruise, we would sell them and liquidate the fund,” Jannotta explains. “Thank God when we got back the stocks were up a little bit, so everybody got a little bit of a profit. Nobody in those circumstances wanted to lose even a hundred bucks.” Jannotta’s successful dabbling in stocks was fuel for his next endeavor. He entered Harvard Business School and earned a master’s in business administration in 1959. Koldyke followed a similar path and joined the military after attending Purdue University, where he majored in education and served in the 52 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
Below left: Jannotta (right) with his brother and mother, 1954. Below: While a naval aviator, Jannotta first dabbled in stocks for his entire squadron.
Reserve Officers Training Corps. He entered the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps and reached the rank of first lieutenant. At that time, the Army stationed soldiers as close to their hometowns as possible. With Koldyke hailing from Indianapolis, he was sent to Chicago. “For all practical purposes, I’ve never left.” While stationed at Fifth Army headquarters in Chicago, Koldyke briefly worked as a substitute teacher in the city’s public schools. The experience, little regarded at the time, later proved instrumental in defining his life’s work. A seemingly inconsequential job as a young adult also shaped Jannotta’s future. Parker Hall, a family friend and treasurer of the University of Chicago, learned Jannotta wanted to work in Chicago and advised, “You ought to go work for William Blair and Company.” Jannotta remembers his immediate reaction: “Geez, I’ve never heard of them.”
William Blair and Company was established in 1935 in Chicago as Blair, Bonner and Company by William McCormick Blair and Francis Bonner. The investment bank followed a philosophy of making long-term commitments to its clients. When necessary, Blair was even willing to have a partner join a client’s board of directors. In the 1930s the firm financed the growth of such companies as Household Finance Corporation, Continental Casualty, and Continental Assurance companies (the latter two are now CNA Insurance). In 1961, William Blair’s son Edward McCormick Blair succeeded his father as the managing partner. Jannotta spent a summer at William Blair and now remembers how he almost forfeited the opportunity. “Ed Blair offered me a job in corporate finance at $500 a month,” Jannotta explains. “I wrote back and said I’m very interested, but I need $550. As soon as I sent it, I thought, Why did I do that? What if he says, ‘Sorry you’ve turned me down. I wish you good luck.’” Jannotta weighed his
Koldyke’s first Army assignment was at Fifth Army headquarters in Chicago. The unit operated out of the Chicago Beach Hotel (above, undated postcard) on the South Shore.
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William Blair and Company was one of the first tenants in the Field Building, 135 S. LaSalle Street (above, 1932), where Jannotta began working in 1959. Coincidentally, Koldyke’s Frontenac Company works out of the same building. 54 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
options: Call ahead and ask him to ignore the letter? Send him a telegram? “I needed the $500,” he now admits. “It would be nice at $550, but I needed $500, and I needed a job.” To Jannotta’s relief, Blair agreed to the $550. Jannotta never left. He joined William Blair as an associate in 1959, became a partner in 1965, assistant managing partner in 1973, managing partner in 1977, senior partner in 1995, and senior director in 1996. In 2001, Jannotta was named chairman of William Blair and Company, LLC, and chairman of its executive committee. After the Army, Koldyke initially pursued a career in publishing, briefly working at McCall’s in New York. He quickly grew disenchanted, decided to switch careers, and took a job at a small investment bank. He then moved on to Paine Webber and Dean Witter where he became fascinated with the growing importance of venture capital. “I could see that there was something happening,” he recalls. “My boss at Dean Witter knew that I had the bug.” Koldyke convinced his superiors that he could raise venture capital on his own, and they granted him a five-month leave to test the waters. Koldyke never returned. In 1971, he founded Frontenac Company, a venture capital firm. “In those days, seventy to one hundred million dollars was a big deal for us to have under management.” The firm now manages over one billion dollars of direct investment capital. Frontenac and William Blair reflect Chicago’s importance in the early history of American banking. Clearing-house examinations of banks and exchanges originated in Chicago. City bankers created affiliates to deal specifically in securities, a technique called “the Chicago plan” that was later copied by New York competitors. At one point, Continental Bank of Illinois was the nation’s largest commercial and industrial lender. By the early twentieth century, First National Bank of Chicago was the oldest national bank. William Blair and Company added to Chicago’s reputation as a financial center. Historically and strategically, the company focused on smalland medium-size firms with strong earnings potential and developed long-term relationships with such clients. Molex, Oil-Dri Corporation, and Safety-Kleen were companies introduced to the public by William Blair during the 1970s. In 1985, Forbes reported that William Blair had the best record of any investment banking firm from 1975 to 1985 in underwriting initial public offerings of stocks—a 132 percent gain, or $2,320 for every $1,000 invested.
Koldyke at left with wife Patricia and right with their children Laird, Carl, and Elizabeth.
Koldyke (left) in the early days at Frontenac Company.
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Friends since high school, Jannotta ran Donald Rumsfeld’s campaign for a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives in 1961. Above: Rumsfeld (center) celebrating his victory with Jannotta (left of Rumsfeld).
Jannotta offers one telling example. “We got to know Pat Ryan in the late sixties. He was selling insurance products to automobile dealers, and we took him public.” Ryan’s business evolved into Aon Corporation, one of the two largest reinsurance firms in the world. “If you can find a couple of those, they stick to you,” emphasizes Jannotta. “If our clients succeed, our success will follow.” That philosophy—and Jannotta’s adherence to it—was essential to William Blair’s survival during two traumatic and nearly devastating economic events. First, in the 1970s, the market value of securities and underwriting dropped precipitously, forcing many firms out of business. According to Jannotta, investment banking compensation was previously based on a thirtycent commission rate, which eventually dropped to less than five cents. “All of a sudden, commission rates became competitive,” he explains. “With size, rates came down, and then, just absolutely, rates came down for institutions.” The firm also weathered the stock market crash of 1987. Jannotta remembers hearing the news during a trip to visit a Michigan client and quickly hopping on a plane to Chicago. “I got back around two o’clock, walked in, and it was a free fall. I mean, the market looked like it was going to zero.” 56 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
Koldyke named his company after a boat owned by his first investor, Laird Norton Company.
William Blair’s relationship-based portfolio helped the company weather the stock market crash of 1987. Above: Chicago Board of Trade, 1954.
Local Chicago financial firms were hit hard by these downturns. “When I joined Blair in Chicago, there were several firms: Halsey-Stuart, Glore Forgan, A. G. Becker, A. C. Allyn, they were all major firms. There’s not a trace of any of them,” remarks Jannotta. “Blair is the only one standing. It’s quite amazing when you think of the change and the consolidation in the business.” William Blair survived, in part, because of its resistance to junk bonds, hostile takeovers, and arbitrage investing. The company believed such activities generated inherent conflicts of interest by putting an investment firm in competition with its own investing clients. Jannotta and his partners maintained their belief that “the best way to make money for William Blair was to make money for its clients.” Making History | 57
Feeling a personal responsibility to help his community, Koldyke focused on public education and established the Golden Apple Foundation to recognize and promote outstanding teachers. Above: The annual Golden Apple Awards, 1998.
“The trick in this business is to survive the troughs, survive the valleys,” advises Jannotta. “The guys who got hurt are the guys who got washed out, and never got to the other side of the valley.” Under Jannotta’s guidance, William Blair indeed survived the valleys. In 1977 when Jannotta became managing partner, William Blair had $250 million in client assets; in 2006, the figure was $40 billion. At the same time William Blair was making history, Frontenac was establishing itself among middle-market businesses, but Koldyke’s professional success left him unsatisfied. “I wanted to be a good citizen,” he concedes. He was especially disturbed by a growing inequality in the United States. “The way we’ve evolved as a society is grossly unfair. The accident of birth makes a very fundamental difference in your opportunities,” he believes. “It’s a rough go if you’re out in certain neighborhoods of Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.” Koldyke turned his eyes to Chicago’s educational system. In 1985, he founded the Golden Apple Foundation. Koldyke believed that effective teaching was a key component of successful education. But he was perplexed: how does society attract, reward, and keep good teachers? Koldyke’s solution was to treat teachers like movie stars. He created the Golden Apple Awards for Excellence in Teaching to annually reward ten outstanding teachers. The award ceremony is modeled after the Academy Awards and is broadcast each spring on Chicago public television station WTTW (where he serves as a 58 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
The success of the Golden Apple Awards fueled Koldyke’s ambitious spirit. He established the Golden Apple Scholars Program to attract young people to the profession and the Academy for Urban School Leadership as an innovative training center. Above: In 1992, Koldyke was honored for his achievements by IndustryWeek magazine as “one of the nation’s ten unsung heroes.” Making History | 59
Mayor Richard M. Daley named Koldyke chairman of the Chicago School Finance Authority in 1992.
board member). As a trustee at Northwestern University, he arranged for the award recipients to also receive a free sabbatical at the school, an Apple computer, and a $2,500 gift. The success and popularity of the Golden Apple Awards motivated Koldyke to do more. Within a few years, he launched the Golden Apple Scholars Program to recruit well-meaning and committed teachers to the public-school system. Over the ensuing two decades, the foundation’s programming has grown to include numerous teacher workshops, as well as an alternative certification program for adults seeking second careers as teachers. “We go by the three Rs,” Koldyke proclaims: “recognize, recruit, and renewal.” In 1992, Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley and Illinois governor Jim Edgar named Koldyke chairman of the Chicago School Finance Authority, the oversight panel for Chicago Public Schools (CPS). The experience discouraged Koldyke. “We didn’t have any real power to change anything,” he remarks. “If the budget wasn’t balanced, we could shut down the school, and that’s the last thing you want to do.” After two years on the board, he realized, “this has got to change.” In 1995, Koldyke joined forces with the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and convinced the Illinois legislature and Governor Edgar to give the mayor greater control over Chicago’s public schools. The new law provided the mayor with more appointment power over the school board and administration, access to more money, relief from many union restrictions, and authority to intervene at failing schools. Local school councils retained their power, but the public schools Jannotta has served on the board for the Lyric Opera since 1987. Above: An ovation for Ardis Krainik (seated) in 1996 when the Lyric renamed its theater chief executive officer was empowered to veto in her honor. contract renewals. 60 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
For Koldyke, this was a green light. He believed that the current system was failing too many students and improving neighborhood schools was possible. Koldyke wanted to remove administrative red tape, allow for experimentation and change in troubled schools, hire and fire teachers, adopt stricter disciplinary codes, and set agendas unique to individual student needs. Koldyke also envisioned greater involvement from the business, corporate, and philanthropic communities, especially in providing private donations for building renovations, scholarships, and extracurricular activities. Jannotta has also been a leading civic activist. He served as president of the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Economic Club of Chicago and as a trustee of the Chicago Foundation for Education. Jannotta’s devotion to his native Chicago is perhaps best exemplified by his work in higher education. Even though he is an alumnus of Princeton and Harvard Universities, Jannotta served for more than two decades as a trustee of the University of Chicago. There he led the search committee that recruited Don Michael Randel as president in 2000, served as chair of the university’s $2 billion, five-year capital campaign, and chaired the board of trustees from 1999 to 2003. His financial gifts have ensured an endowed professorship, undergraduate scholarships, and the renovation of the Oriental Institute, the latter resulting in the Edgar and Deborah Jannotta Mesopotamian Gallery, which opened in 2003.
In addition to Jannotta serving the University of Chicago as a board member for more than twenty years, he and wife Deborah (below) were principal donors to the renovation of the university’s Oriental Institute. Above: The Mesopotamian gallery named in their honor.
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“There’s a long tradition of businesspeople becoming trustees” at the University of Chicago, Jannotta points out. He notes that Yale University graduates Edward McCormick Blair and Gaylord Donnelly served on its board. Ever since John D. Rockefeller’s founding gift, insists Jannotta, “there has always been a business community connection with the university.” Koldyke continued to build upon his accomplishments in the school system, and in 2001, founded the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL). Located at 3400 North Austin Avenue in the neighborhood of Portage Park, the academy represents a unique approach to improving and reforming the teaching profession. In Chicago, a teaching career lasts only three to four years on average, shorter than that of a professional football player. Koldyke argued that teachers need the same intensified training as doctors, lawyers, and other high-level corporate positions. Investing in teachers would push them to think of their profession not just as a job but a career. The program’s design was modeled, in part, after the medical profession. Young teachers are required to serve a year-long campus-based residency in a Chicago public school that includes training, education, certification, and mentorship. In 2001, CPS contracted with AUSL to manage the Chicago Academy (pre-K–grade 8), the city’s first “contract” school and teacher-preparation institution. AUSL combines the operations of a public school and a charter school: all district regulations and the salary pool are the same, but the school is directed by an independent board of directors composed of a variety of civic leaders. Shortly after the Chicago Academy, two more contract schools were added to AUSL’s supervision: Dodge Renaissance Academy and the Chicago Academy High School. AUSL places teams of its graduates in schools with proven leadership and the potential for improvement. AUSL has partnered with CPS on its most ambitious educational projects, Renaissance 2010 and No Child Left Behind Turnaround Schools, both of which aim to provide high-quality learning in needy communities. In 2005, the Tarkington School of Excellence opened in Marquette Park. It was AUSL’s first Renaissance collaboration and the CPS’s first LEED-certified school. In reminiscing about his financial career, Jannotta is struck by the dramatic changes in investment banking. “In the 1970s, [investment banks] began to change in character: they became corporations, they were public, there were lots of mergers, and they got to be quite big,” he summarizes. “All of a sudden, investment banks were getting to be so they could go toe to toe with commercial banks in size.” As firms increased in size and were restructured, the culture of banking changed. “In the old days, it was not good form to call on somebody else’s client,” Jannotta remembers. “It was not expected.” But investing changed from a business of collaboration with other financial partners to one of independence. “In those days, the firms weren’t big and rich,” he explains. “They needed underwriting participants to finance and take the risk of an offer. Now, people are able to do the whole thing.” Given that new reality, Jannotta believes his greatest success is simply the existence of William Blair and Company. “Frankly, this may not be the most glamorous, but the fact that William Blair is still here and doing well is the best satisfaction. I wish I had another forty years to go.”
The Tarkington School, managed by AUSL, was the first Chicago public school with certification in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) from the U.S. Green Building Council. 62 | Chicago History | Fall 2008
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Jannotta continues to be in a leader in his business and civic endeavors. Left: A break from both while on vacation in Alaska with Deborah.
Like Jannotta, Koldyke shares a boundless optimism about the future. His achievements in changing the status quo of education are clearly his greatest source of pride. “I think we’re on a roll now with some things that can make a fundamental difference,” he believes. “The best thing is that when I walk through places like Dodge and Sherman and Tarkington, and I see a little kid who’s in third grade, I think that maybe some of us really helped that kid. That’s what keeps me going.” Timothy J. Gilfoyle is the author of A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of NineteenthCentury New York (W.W. Norton, 2006) and Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (University of Chicago Press, 2006). He teaches American history at Loyola University Chicago. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 50, left: photo by Dan Rest, right: courtesy of Mike Koldyke; 51, right: courtesy of Ned Jannotta, bottom: courtesy of Royal Food Products, LLC; 52, all courtesy of Ned Jannotta; 53, ICHi-59249; 54, HB-01325b; 55, all courtesy of Mike Koldyke; 56, top: courtesy of Ned Jannotta, right: courtesy of Mike Koldyke; 57, HB-17513a; 58, courtesy of Mike Koldyke; 59, courtesy of Mike Koldyke, used with permission by IndustryWeek magazine; 60, left: courtesy of Mike Koldyke, right: courtesy of Ned Jannotta; 61, top: photo by Jean Grant courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, right: courtesy of Ned Jannotta; 62–63, © James Steinkamp, Steinkamp Photography; 64, courtesy of Ned Jannotta F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The best introductions to Edgar Jannotta and Martin Koldyke appear on the websites of William Blair and Company and the Golden Apple Foundation, respectively. F. Cyril James, The Growth of Chicago Banks (New York: Harper, 1938), 2 vols., is a good introduction to the early history of Chicago banking. A useful summary of Koldyke’s ideas and impact appears in Meg McSherry Breslin, “Charting Their Own Course: Three Educational Entrepreneurs Step Outside the Box,” Chicago Tribune, August 10, 2003. A recent overview of Chicago school reform is found in Dorothy Shipps, School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago, 1880–2000 (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
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