100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (31 page)

100. Talk to an Old-Timer About the Cubs

Everybody has a Gus, or at least everybody should have one.

The one in my family—or at least the family I was lucky enough to marry into—is Gus Kapellas, whose life story blends many elements of the American dream, nearly all of it intertwined with his beloved Chicago Cubs.

Gus, who was born in Joliet, Illinois, on April 29, 1956, truly has lived the American dream, and falling in love with the Cubs and baseball weren’t the only reasons why. In 1952 he met an enterprising restaurateur named Ray Kroc, who convinced Gus to join him in his new enterprise: McDonald’s.

Over the years, Gus built up dozens of McDonald’s restaurants in Chicago and then Arizona, where he moved in 1983. That was only fitting, since Mesa has been home to Cubs’ spring training since 1952.

“One time, my first wife, we were at the ballpark, and it was the 9
th
inning and the Cubs were losing 10–1,” Gus told my wife and I one night at dinner. “She said ‘Let’s go.’ I said ‘No, no. They may win this game.’

“She said, ‘You’re really sick.’ They lost 10–1. We stayed until the last man was out. I’ve never left that ballpark until the game was over. I loved the Cubs.”

That story, and many others like it, came out on a warm April evening near Gus’ home in Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s not hard to get Gus to talk about the Cubs, but on this night it was particularly easy because that’s what my wife and I asked him to talk about. The stories, some dating back more than 70 years, came to him in an instant as if they had happened yesterday.

Gus told us about the days of his youth spent toiling on the vegetable farm his family owned in Joliet, Illinois. The youngest of 11 kids, Gus would work the field while his sister listened to Cubs broadcaster Pat Flanagan on their $19 transistor radio.

“Every so often I would go get a drink of water, and she’d have the scorecard all ready for me,” said Gus, whose favorite ballplayers over the years included Phil Cavarretta, Stan Hack, Guy Bush, Lon Warneke and, among the modern ballplayers, Andre Dawson. “And I knew what was going on.”

He told the story about the day in 1929 when he first saw Wrigley Field. He was nine years old, and the bleachers had not yet been built. He remembers the outfield being roped off so any ball hit into it was a ground-rule double.

What he doesn’t remember is how his brother, somehow, got them tickets.

“I was so amazed to see so many people at a ballgame,” he said. “That made me a Cub fan. As time went on I would do anything and everything in order to go to Cubs park.

Gus worked at the Joliet brickyards, and every once in a while he and his pals would knock off a little early, grab a quick shower, and take a two-hour journey on the train, then the “L”, before arriving at Wrigley Field.

Gus told us about the time in 1945 when he was stationed in Dutch Guyana and the Cubs were about to play Game 7 of the World Series against Detroit. Somehow they configured some wires on a telephone pole and were able to pick up a radio broadcast.

Their ingenuity brought them baseball but also a quicker disappointment as the Cubs lost that World Series and haven’t been back since.

“That was the biggest disappointment of my life,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was in the bag.” Spoken like a true Cubs fan.

Everybody has a Gus. Take the time to talk to yours and get the stories down on paper or video because, like all of us, we won’t be here forever.

But our stories can be.

Acknowledgments

This book may never have been written if the 2011 Cubs weren’t a pretty awful team. Their consistently lousy play saved me from the distraction of paying too much attention to their games during the four months I wrote this book. So to Tyler Colvin, Kosuke Fukudome, Carlos Zambrano, Doug Davis, among many deserving others, I thank you.

It would be great to hear from all the other authors of this wonderful series about how it went for them, but for me coming up with the first 60–70 “things” came fairly easily. For the last 30–40, I want to thank Ed Hartig, Teddy Greenstein, Phil Rogers, Carrie Muskat, and Julie DiCaro for sharing their vast knowledge. And very special thanks to Dan McGrath, who I can’t thank enough for helping make this a vastly better book.
In addition to their advice, I immersed myself in hundreds of books, newspaper articles, and blog posts that span Cubs history. For a baseball junkie, there wasn’t a better way to spend a day.

This opportunity would never have come my way if not for Chris Malcolm, whose creativity and friendship I’ll always admire and treasure. Many thanks to Tab Bamford, author of
100 Things Hawks Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die
for putting up with my DM’s. You don’t know how helpful it was to go through this at the same time as you. Beth Arthur saved me hundreds of hours with her suggestion to stop bothering with microfilm and use Proquest. Beth, thanks for introducing me to the 21st century.

I want to thank several people at Triumph Books, including Scott Rowan for hiring me to write this book, Adam Motin for creating this series, and Karen O’Brien for her careful editing and patience.

To Granny Franny, who always told me I’d find my niche, I miss and love you. To my dad, Michael, and my mom, Rochelle, who are probably smiling at each other and whispering “kvell, kvell, kvell” as they read this, the best part of covering the Cubs and White Sox was calling you from the press box to share those moments. Every son should get to share a dream come true with his parents.

My own sons, Casey and Eli, went without their dad on countless weeknights and a summer of Sundays when we could have been playing catch. It was all the more painful because they both fell in love with baseball during the summer I wrote this book. Future summers will be different, if not with the Cubs at least with my availability.

Finally, if I had realized beforehand how much time this book would have taken to write, my wife, Jill, would still have told me to go ahead and do it. While I got to immerse myself in Cubs lore, Jill essentially became a single parent for an entire summer. Everyone who knows Jill loves her, but I get to spend my life with her and that amazes me every day. Jill, I love you and look forward to us watching a lifetime’s worth of gymnastics and figure skating for years to come.

Not to mention a little baseball.

Sources

There weren’t many mornings during the summer this book was written that I wasn’t lugging a backpack loaded with some tremendous books by authors who I came to respect and depend on. As much as my back was in danger of going out, the greater danger was getting sucked into these wonderful resources and reading when I should have been writing.

This book couldn’t have been written without the first drafts of history put forth by the remarkable beat writers, reporters and columnists from the
Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Daily News, Daily Herald, New York Times, Washington Post,
and
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
. I spent many hours poring over
Sports Illustrated
,
Baseball Digest
, ESPN.com and SB Nation’s Bleed Cubbie Blue both to inform the creation of the 100 Things and help guide my research. Just how baseball books were written before the existence of Baseball-Reference.com I’m not sure, it’s an essential resource for any writer or fan.

Here are the books that served as invaluable resources and for which I hope you’ll take the time to indulge yourself.

Ahrens, Art.
Chicago Cubs: Tinker to Evers to Chance
(Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2007).

Billington, Charles N.
Wrigley Field’s Last World Series: The Wartime Chicago Cubs and the Pennant of 1945
(Lake Claremont Press, 2005).

Brown, Warren.
The Chicago Cubs
(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1946).

Caray, Harry with Bob Verdi.
Holy Cow!
(New York, NY: Villard Books, 1989).

Carmichael, John.
My Greatest Day In Baseball
(A.S. Barnes & Company, 1945).

Durocher, Leo with Ed Linn.
Nice Guys Finish Last
(New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1975).

Feldmann, Doug.
Miracle Collapse: The 1969 Chicago Cubs
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).

Freedman, Lew.
Cubs Essential
(Chicago, IL: Triumph Books, 2006).

Grimm, Charlie with Ed Prell.
Jolly Cholly’s Story: Baseball, I Love You!
(Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1968).

Golenbock, Peter.
Wrigleyville: A Magical History Tour of the Chicago Cubs
(New York, NY: St. Martins Press, 1996).

Helpingstine, Dan.
The Cubs and the White Sox: A Baseball Rivalry, 1900 to the Present
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010).

Hughes, Pat and Rich Wolfe.
Ron Santo: A Perfect 10
(Lone Wolfe Press, 2011).

Jenkins, Ferguson with Lew Freedman.
Fergie: My Life from the Cubs to Cooperstown
(Chicago, IL: Triumph Books, 2009).

Kogan, Rick.
A Chicago Tavern: A Goat, a Curse and the American Dream
(Chicago, IL: Lake Claremont Press, 2006).

Langford, Jim.
Runs, Hits & Errors
(South Bend, IN: Diamond Communications, 1987).

Matthews, George R.
When the Cubs Won It All: The 1908 Championship Season
, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2009).

Muskat, Carrie.
Banks to Sandberg to Grace
(Lincolnwood, IL: Contemporary Books, 2001).

Rogers, Phil.
Ernie Banks: Mr. Cub and the Summer of ’69
(Chicago, IL: Triumph Books, 2011).

Shea, Stuart.
Wrigley Field: The Unauthorized Biography
(Dulles, VA: Brassey’s Inc., 2004).

Snell, Roger.
Root for the Cubs: Charlie Root & the 1929 Chicago Cubs
(Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications, 2009).

Stout, Glenn.
The Cubs: The Complete Story of Chicago Cubs Baseball
(Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).

Talley, Rick. The Cubs of ’69: Recollections of the Team That Should Have Been (Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books, 1989).

Thomson, Cindy and Scott Brown. Lincoln,
Three Finger: The Mordecai Brown Story
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

Veeck, Bill.
Veeck—As In Wreck
(New York, NY: Putnam, 1962).

Vitti, Jim.
Chicago Cubs: Baseball on Catalina Island
(Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2010).

Vorwald, Bob.
What It Means To Be a Cub
(Chicago, IL: Triumph Books, 2010).

Williams, Billy with Fred Mitchell.
Billy Williams: My Sweet-Swinging Lifetime with the Cubs
(Chicago, IL: Triumph Books, 2008).