A team, tradition a mother could love
My mother is pulling for the Cubs to win the World Series. Nothing new. She pulled for the Cubs in 1945, too.
“That was a good year, 1945,” my mother said.
World War II ended that September, a month before the Cubs and Tigers met in the World Series. Ann Byrne was 19, a student at Mundelein College, now part of Loyola University, and worked her way through school as a bookkeeper for the Chicago Tribune.
The Cubs had lost six World Series in a row (1910, 1918, 1929, 1932, 1935, 1938) entering the ’45 Series, so the North Side of Chicago knew all about titleless baseball long before the drought surpassed the century mark.
With the Cubs having a chance to parade through the Loop and celebrate their first championship since 1908, I checked in with my No. 1 source on all things Chicago.
My mother, who celebrated her 90th birthday in April.
“Never give up hope. What do they say? Persistence will win out,” said my mother, explaining the mind-set of Chicagoans, 55 years after she and my father and the first four of their five sons migrated to California. “They never lost their faith or hope for the Cubs.”
Interest in the Cubs is at an all-time high, and my mother reads everything on the Chicago vibe she can find.
“It’s all over Facebook,” she said.
After World War I, in the early ’20s, my mother’s dad and uncles built three houses on Melrose Street near the intersection of Belmont and Central, six miles from state-of-theart Wrigley Field, which opened in 1914, a mere six years after the Cubs’ last World Series triumph.
They were the first houses on the block. No sidewalks. Just a dirt road. For years, the families lived in the houses, which still stand. My grandmother’s sister, Aunt Ann, lived in one with her husband, Ed.
“Uncle Ed used to like to smoke a big cigar and listen to the Cubs on the radio,” my mother said. “Aunt Ann didn’t like the smell of cigar smoke in the house, so he sat in the car with all the windows open.
“I would pass their house as I was walking home from work, and I could hear the game as soon as I stepped off the streetcar at Belmont and Central. Well, maybe not that loud, but Uncle Ed was very hard of hearing, so the whole neighborhood enjoyed the games.
“He would yell out the score to anyone passing his house. Sometimes I would sit with him and listen to an inning, and my mother could smell the cigar smoke as soon as I walked into the house.”
Chicago in the ’30s and early ’40s was relatively wide open, and my mother joined her two brothers and other kids playing baseball in the quiet streets or nearby open areas they called “prairies,” which were developed into homes and stores long ago. She recalled only four families in the neighborhood that owned cars.
“We always had a bat but sometimes had to improvise a ball, wrap it with string to keep it together,” my mother said. “We’d always be outside. It was rare that a car went by. Can you imagine a street like that now? If a car did go by, we’d all stand and say, ‘What’s the alley for? What’s the alley for?’ Nasty kids, we were.”
My mother worked at the Tribune through most of the ’40s. For lunch, she and her buddies often walked below Michigan Avenue and ducked into what they called the Greasy Spoon, which now is the Billy Goat Tavern.
That’s the dive once owned by Billy Sianis, the fellow who cursed the Cubs during the 1945 World Series because they wouldn’t permit his goat Murphy into a World Series game.
My mother came from a family of Cubs fans. Her cousin was a Wrigley Field cashier. To this day, she calls it Cubs Park, which her parents called it, its name before it changed to Wrigley Field in 1927, the year after she was born.
At the Tribune, she knew some White Sox fans, who also had it tough. Before the South Siders won the 2005 World Series, they hadn’t won it all since 1917.
That was about the time my mother’s mother (Marie Maloney), before she was married, was on a women’s baseball team (it ran in the family, apparently): Illinois Bell Telephone, which played in Lincoln Park at the height of World War I.
My mother has a stash of love letters sent between her parents during World War I and a few other letters family members sent to my grandfather when he was in the Army and stationed in Germany, France and Luxembourg. He received this letter in 1917 from a young nephew: “Dear Uncle Jim, “The Sox and the Giants are going to play the Worlds Series tomorrow and the seats are 75 dollars a piece and two days ago I had two teeth pulled and I took gas.”
(He meant 76 cents; he also didn’t have the luxury of novocaine.)
Two years later, the White Sox became the Black Sox and got busted for throwing the World Series. By then, the Cubs were two World Series into their seven-World Series losing streak through 1945.
Which brings me back to my mother:
“World War II was coming to an end. I was going into my junior year of college, and my brother Jimmy returned from the war in November.
“So many of the baseball players enlisted or were drafted, and it had to be decided when war was declared if baseball should continue for the morale of the people or be disbanded in respect to the servicemen.
“And, of course, it was decided the public needed a diversion, so baseball continued as a national sport.”
It continued. It integrated. It expanded. It turned on the lights. It went on TV. It moved west.
And not much later, so did we.