A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (22 page)

More than twenty major league ballparks that opened
after
Wrigley Field did have been demolished. In fact, more than ten parks that opened as recently as the 1960s and 1970s are gone. Wrigley endures, and about 140 million people have watched games there, a lot more than the approximately 99 million persons who lived in America in 1914. Wrigley has lasted because it is, like a clipper ship, elegantly practical. If architecture is, as Goethe said, frozen music, then Wrigley Field is a rendering, in bricks and structural steel, of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

With that sentiment I have come perilously close to the cardinal sin of gushing, so I shall subside. But not before urging you to take the El to the Addison stop and see for yourself what all the fuss is about.

I began this rumination on Wrigley Field with the words of a poet. I will conclude with words from another one: “
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.” Forlorn Cub fans waiting for a World Series may agree with William Butler Yeats, but what he wrote is not quite right. Life
is
what happens, whatever it is. Anticipation of what might happen next is part of the fun. And life, which has its ups and downs, is leavened by the pleasure of passing time now and then in nice places, like the little one on the North Side.

Notes

1
“Architecture is inhabited sculpture”:
Robert I. Fitzhenry,
The Harper Book of Quotations
, 3rd ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 42.

2
“I would have written of me on my stone”:
Ibid., 123.

3
The
Chicago Tribune
that morning reported:
Edward Burns, “Cubs Waste Two Home Runs in 4 to 3 Setback,”
Chicago Tribune
, May 4, 1941, B1.

4
The ad told the unvarnished truth:
Display ad,
Chicago Tribune
, August 30, 1948, B3.

5
“Architecture, of all the arts”:
Ernest Dimnet,
What We Live By
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1932), 141.

6
Clark, along the third-base side:
Don Hayner and Tom McNamee,
Streetwise Chicago: A History of Chicago Street Names
(Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1988), 1, 23, 117, 131.

7
Champaign and Urbana are cheek by jowl:
Dannel McCollum, “Champaign: The Creation of a City of Champaign,” City of Champaign,
http://ci.champaign.il.us/about-champaign/history/creation-of-champaign/
.

8
If Chicago, a no-nonsense city of prose:
I draw on several collections of Carl Sandburg’s works, including
Chicago Poems
(1916) and
Smoke and Steel
(1920), available here:
http://www.bartleby.com/people/Sandburg.html
.

9
Of Sandburg’s thick and weird “biography”:
Sean Wilentz,
The Best American History Essays on Lincoln
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 51.

10
The journal he kept throughout his life:
David Lilienthal,
The Journals of David E. Lilienthal: The TVA Years, 1939–1945
(New York: Evanston, 1964), 2.

11
The late Julian Simon, an economist:
Julian Simon,
The Ultimate Resource 2
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 236.

12
Lou “the Mad Russian” Novikoff, who played:
Richard Cahan and Mark Jacob,
The Game That Was: The George Brace Baseball Photo Collection
(Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1996), 234.

13
When Eddie Sawyer, who managed the Phillies:
W. C. Heinz, “Stan Musial’s Last Day,”
Life
, October 11, 1963, 98.

14
“Boston is mourning”:
Peter Levine,
A. G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 21.

15
A Chicago chauvinist:
John Thorn,
Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 155.

16
As Peter Levine writes:
Levine,
A. G. Spalding
, 23.

17
“One of his less successful ideas”:
Peter Golenbock,
Wrigleyville: A Magical History Tour of the Chicago Cubs
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 23.

18
An 1889 editorial in the
Spalding Guide:
Ibid., 62.

19
Golenbock notes that Chicago’s shopping center:
Ibid.

20
But long before any ballpark had lights:
Ibid., 62–63.

21
This was pursuant to Spalding’s insistence:
Ibid., 91–92.

22
According to Golenbock, at about this time:
Ibid., 99.

23
According to one of baseball’s durable myths:
Art Ahrens,
Chicago Cubs: Tinker to Evers to Chance
(Charleston: Arcadia, 2007), 73–74.

24
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby:
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
(New York: Scribner, 1925), 71–73.

25
In his 1962 memoir
,
Veeck as in Wreck:
Bill Veeck,
Veeck as in Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck
, with Ed Linn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 35–36.

26
When Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis:
Roberts Ehrgott,
Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club: Chicago and the Cubs During the Jazz Age
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 263.

27
The student who invited him:
Ibid., 78.

28
Wrigley’s father made soap:
Golenbock,
Wrigleyville
, 173–74.

29
Wrigley was excessively fond of saying:
Ibid., 200.

30
To be sure, the Supreme Court:
See:
Federal Baseball Club v. National League
, 259 U.S. 200 (1922).

31
But as the late Jim Murray:
Thom Loverro,
Home of the Game: The Story of Camden Yards
(Dallas: Taylor, 1999), xii.

32
Radio stations were multiplying rapidly:
Herman S. Hettinger,
A Decade of Radio Advertising
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933).

33
“By mid-1929”:
Ehrgott,
Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club
, 95.

34
One farmer within range of a Chicago station:
Ibid, 50.

35
This was dramatized on the city’s lakefront:
See, for example: “Figures and Facts on the Fight Tonight,”
Chicago Tribune
, September 22, 1927, 1, and “Famous Fans at Famous Battle Air Their Views,”
Chicago Tribune
, September 23, 1927, 12.

36
Ehrgott reports that during the 1920s:
Ehrgott,
Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club
, 3.

37
The idea was Ladies’ Day:
Ibid., 53.

38
“I spend $1.5 million a year”:
Ibid., 55.

39
But the Cubs still ran ads in the
Tribune
:
Ibid., 48–49.

40
Wrigley, who said, “It is easier to control”:
Golenbock,
Wrigleyville
, 214.

41
Which is why a Chicago newspaper:
Ibid., 215.

42
In July 1926, the
Chicago Tribune:
Ehrgott,
Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club
, 288.

43
When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe:
See, for example: Susan Belasco, “Harriet Beecher Stowe,”
New York Times
,
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/harriet_beecher_stowe/index.html
.

44
A good tutor about this episode is Leigh Montville:
Leigh Montville,
The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth
(Broadway Books, 2007). For Montville’s full explanation, see pages 309–12.

45
Having written a farewell note:
Ibid., 309.

46
The judge presiding over a dispute:
Ehrgott,
Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club
, 346.

47
The Cubs, Montville writes:
Montville,
The Big Bam
, 309.

48
But the Scripps Howard News Service:
Paul Dickson,
The Dickson Baseball Dictionary
, 3rd. ed. (New York: Norton, 2009), 157–58.

49
In his 1955 autobiography
,
The Tumult and the Shouting:
See Montville,
The Big Bam
, 312–13, for Grantland Rice’s autobiographical account of Ruth’s story.

50
The headline on the obituary:
Bruce Weber, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer,”
New York Times
, March 24, 2013, A22.

51
He was a human fireplug:
Arthur Daley, “Sports of the Times: A Tragic Figure,”
New York Times
, November 25, 1948, 52.

52
An often-told story:
See, for example, Richard O’Mara, “Like a Bat Out of Hell,”
Baltimore Sun
, September 4, 1998,
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-09-04/features/1998247062_1_hack-wilson-baseball-robert/2
, and Bob Herzog,
“Wilson’s Record May Be the Most Awesome of All Time,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 2, 1998,
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/aug/02/sports/sp-9571
.

53
Wilson said, “I never played drunk”:
Glenn Stout,
The Cubs: The Complete Story of Chicago Cubs Baseball
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 128.

54
But Bill Veeck remembered one instance:
Veeck,
Veeck as in Wreck
, 32.

55
After the game, when a boy:
“1929 World Series,”
Baseball-Reference.com
,
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/1929_World_Series
.

56
“In modern baseball”:
Bill James,
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
(New York: Free Press, 2001), 736.

57
Recalling the winter of 1930:
Ira Berkow, “On Baseball; Hack Wilson’s Lesson Still Valid,”
New York Times
, September 5, 1998, D3.

58
Shortly before his death, Wilson:
Clifton Blue Parker,
Fouled Away: The Baseball Tragedy of Hack Wilson
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 2.

59
When, in 1934, he became:
Andrew Steele, “Philip Wrigley,” Society for American Baseball Research,
http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/1043052b
.

60
Carefully parse the words Philip said:
Ibid.

61
In 1958, Wrigley told
Sports Illustrated:
Robert Boyle, “A Shy Man at a Picnic,”
Sports Illustrated
, April 14, 1958.

62
Charlie Grimm, who played for the Cubs:
Golenbock,
Wrigleyville
, 271.

63
“It was,” Wrigley said:
Boyle, “A Shy Man.”

64
Loyalty to a Chicago friend:
Ibid.

65
This venture inspired the 1992 movie:
A League of Their Own
; quotations taken from Internet Movie Database,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104694/quotes
.

66
An ad Wrigley placed in Chicago newspapers:
Display ad,
Chicago Tribune
, August 30, 1948, B3.

67
Winning was not central:
Steele, “Philip Wrigley.”

68
“His slogan was ‘Come Out and Have a Picnic’ ”:
Golenbock,
Wrigleyville
, 357.

69
He told
Sports Illustrated:
Boyle, “A Shy Man.”

70
In 1958, Wrigley explained:
Ibid.

71
“A doctor can bury his mistakes”:
Fitzhenry,
Harper Book of Quotations
, 43.

72
Its origin story is told by Bill Veeck Jr.:
For quotations throughout this section, I drew on Veeck,
Veeck as in Wreck
.