No quit in mom
Her last 15 years were difficult, but former Post-Tribune employee and Sox fan Beverly Hutton didn’t stop living well
My favorite reader is gone. My mother, Beverly Drohan Hutton, a 1956 graduate of Gary Edison High School, died Wednesday. She was 82.
She had a special connection to the Post-Tribune.
She worked there in bookkeeping after high school before meeting my dad in 1960.
She loved being a Post-Tribune alumnus, and she, of course, thought I was Red Smith. Everything I wrote was Pulitzerworthy to her. It was her hometown paper, and I was her guy.
The last 15 years of her life were a struggle. She had pulmonary hypertension; spinal stenosis, which required four back surgeries; and diabetes. She beat cancer twice.
She was Steel City tough, refusing to give in to the seeming arbitrariness of her health problems.
She attended first communions, confirmations, school concerts, and high school and college graduations for her 11 grandchildren, even though she barely could walk the past few years.
She was furious when my father decided it no longer was safe for her to drive.
She resisted a wheelchair until about the last year of her life, when she’d use it only when needed.
A couple of years ago, she wandered away from my dad in the airport on a trip back from Florida and fell face-first onto the hard marble floor, busting up her glasses. Both her eyes were black. She looked like she had just lost a prize fight when she came home.
“What happened?” I asked when I saw her.
“Mike,” she said. “I really did a number this time.”
I’m convinced my mother never really thought she was dying, even in her final hours. She just didn’t know how to quit.
My mother was a die-hard White Sox fan.
Her brothers, Jim and Mark, had played baseball and basketball for Edison.
In the 1950s, everyone from Gary’s west side had one team. It was the Sox.
Somehow, I took a wrong turn and came out a Cubs fan.
The extended family would go to a Sox game once a summer in
the late 1970s and early ’80s.
They are the best memories ever.
My mother would keep score, and my uncles — who were hypercritical of whatever the Sox were doing — would do a running play-by-play.
I’d like to think the roots of my sports-writing career were spawned in moments like that.
There were four kids that arrived in a span of a little more than six years: my older brother Joe, me, my sister Melissa and Tony, the youngest.
We were boisterous, energetic, competitive and constantly vying for her attention.
She was the coach, the chief referee and the traffic cop.
She’d try to discipline us when we were young, but we’d just laugh at her when she’d yell at us.
She didn’t have a mean bone in her body, and we knew it.
She was big-hearted and generous.
It was never about her, but she wanted to be in the middle of whatever was going on.
And she loved to watch sports with my father and me.
We had an unwritten rule for sports on TV. You had to be all-in for your team.
Notre Dame football, the
Bears, the Cubs or the Sox — or whatever other team — needed your total commitment for the big game.
This involved a level of immersion that sometimes included screaming senselessly at the TV, jumping up and down, or kicking the occasional chair.
If you weren’t spent after a tight game, you weren’t working hard enough.
My mom always was there, jumping up and down with us.
She’s somewhere else now, jumping up and down for us.
It’s better this way. No more pain. She can relax now, knowing that hers was a life well-lived.