A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by George F. Will

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York. www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Text credits appear on this page.

  Photo credits appear on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Will, George F.

  A nice little place on the North Side : Wrigley Field at one hundred /

  George F. Will.

  pages cm

  1. Wrigley Field (Chicago, Ill.)—History. 2. Chicago Cubs (Baseball team)—History. I. Title.

  GV417.W75W55 2014

  796.357068773′11—dc23

  2013036084

  ISBN 978-0-385-34931-4

  eBook ISBN 978-0-385-34932-1

  Ivy illustration by Fred Haynes

  Cover photograph: Victoria Will

  v3.1_r1

  TO BUD

  AND SUE SELIG

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  First Page

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Text Credits

  Photo Credits

  About the Author

  Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

  —CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

  Acknowledgments

  My assistant Sarah Walton is She Who Must Be Obeyed, not because she is imperious but because she is infallible. Helping with the preparation of this book has quickened her interest in baseball but diminished her affection for the Chicago Cubs. A good exchange. Todd Shaw, my research assistant, brought to the elimination of errors in this book a perfectionism rarely seen on the diamond at Wrigley Field.

  On June 20, 1941, the poet Robert Frost, then sixty-seven, recited for the first time in public his poem “The Lesson for Today.” Its last line is perhaps his most famous:

  I would have written of me on my stone:

  I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

  Frost died in 1963, and this line is carved on the headstone of his grave in Bennington, Vermont. My lover’s quarrel is less spacious than Frost’s. Mine is with the Chicago National League Ball Club. The world is what it is and has been very good to me. The Cubs, however, are another matter. They have been generally disappointing and often annoying for most of my life, which began forty-seven days before Frost announced his quarrel. Why, then, have I, like many millions of similarly vexed and irritated fans, continued to love this team? There are, no doubt, many reasons. Or, because reason rarely regulates love, let us say there are many factors that explain the durability of my affection, and that of others, for the Cubs. Surely the most important ingredient in the chemistry of this peculiar loyalty is the place where the team has played its home games for a century. Wrigley Field really is a nice little place. Granted, few people would care about it if the Cubs did not play there. But a lot fewer people would care about the Cubs if they did not play there. What follows is a short stroll through the braided histories of the place and the team, both of which are facets of one of America’s singular cities. I will begin with my beginning.

  I was born on Sunday morning, May 4, 1941, in Champaign, Illinois. The Chicago Tribune that morning reported that on Saturday the Cubs had been “characteristically docile” through the first five innings while losing to the Brooklyn Dodgers, 4–3, in Ebbets Field. On Sunday the Cubs crossed the East River and lost to the New York Giants, 9–4. It was their third loss in a row. Had I been paying attention then, this book might not have been written. But one thing led to another, as things have a way of doing, and in 1948, when I was still not as discerning as one should be when making life-shaping decisions, I became a Cub fan. The Catholic Church thinks seven-year-olds have reached an age of reasoning. The church might want to rethink that.

  The 1948 Cubs may have been the worst squad in the history of the franchise, finishing in eighth place—which in those days was last place—and 27½ games out of first. The dreadful team inspired a Norman Rockwell cover on the September 4 Saturday Evening Post. Titled The Dugout, it featured a dejected and embarrassed Cubs dugout, behind which fans jeered. Their well-named manager was Charlie Grimm. He was, however, known as “Jolly Cholly” Grimm because he was so cheerful. Why was he?

  On August 30, 1948, the Cubs’ owner, Philip K. Wrigley, ran an ad in the Tribune, which thirty-three years later would buy the Cubs from Wrigley’s estate, to apologize for the team. The ad told the unvarnished truth: “This year’s rebuilding job has been a flop.” You might say that. The last-place Cubs’ record was 64–90. The 1940s, my first decade, was the first losing decade the Cubs ever had. Since then, the Cubs have not had a winning decade. Since May 4, 1941, and through the 2013 season, they have lost 693 more games than they have won. What could compensate Cub fans for such a performance on the field? The field. Wrigley Field. This little book is about a little space. It is not, regardless of what some unhinged enthusiasts say, a sacred space. Wrigley Field’s footprint on a city block is a tad smaller than that of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The enthusiasts think the ballpark is a kind of cathedral, and that Wrigley Field is to baseball what Rome is, or was once said to be, to religion: All roads lead there, or should.

  This book is, in a sense, about a frame around a picture. The point of Wrigley Field is to display baseball games. People go to museums of fine art to see the paintings, not the frames that display them. Few people admire the pedestal more than the statue. Many people do, however, decide to go to Chicago Cubs games because they are played within this lovely frame. And just as a frame can serve, or be inappropriate for, a particular painting, ballparks can display ball games well or poorly. It is frequently noted that Wrigley Field is lovelier than the baseball often played on the field. It is a hypothesis of this book that the ballpark is part cause and part symptom of the Cubs’ dysfunctional performance. How can this high-quality building be partly responsible for the low quality of what has gone on in it? Read on.

  The story of the ballpark is braided with the story of the baseball team, and of a city. The ballpark has not been merely a passive ingredient in the Cubs’ story. It has shaped what it has framed. And if architecture is inhabited sculpture, Wrigley Field has shaped the scores of millions who have, episodically and briefly, inhabited it. Ernest Dimnet was a French abbé who frequently traveled and lectured in the United States. His business was soul, and he said: “Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.” This is perhaps especially true of architecture that does not set out to work upon the soul—architecture that is unself-consciously utilitarian, as Wrigley Field is. It has been well said that architecture exists not for the structure itself but for the space the structure creates by enclosing it. The space Wrigley Field encloses—the playing field—created Wrigley Field. Because space dictated the configuration of the building, it can be said that baseball built it. Which is why people care about the corner of Clark and Addison Streets.

  The home plate entrance to Wrigley is at that corner. Clark, along the third-base side of the ballpark, is named for General George Rogers Clark, the son of Virginia landowners, who at age twenty went west in search of land and adventure, finding much of both. He distinguished himself in the Revolutionary War by projecting the new nation�
��s power into what became the Northwest Territory, including the state of Illinois.

  A highlight of the Cubs’ first year at Clark and Addison. (photo credit 1.1)

  It is known that, but not why, Addison Street, along the first-base side of Wrigley Field, is named for Dr. Thomas Addison of Guy’s Hospital in London. He identified a form of anemia that now bears his name—Addisonian anemia. Please, let there be no tart remarks about the appropriateness, over the last half century, of the Cubs being associated with the anemic. Additionally, Addison’s anemia is not Addison’s disease, which afflicted John F. Kennedy.

  Balls hit over the right-field wall land on Sheffield Avenue, named for Joseph E. Sheffield, a go-getter who, like many who made the Northwest Territory prosper, came from New England—from Connecticut. In the 1830s, he started a farm and nursery and bought some of the land that became the Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side, about halfway between what now is the Loop to the south and Wrigley Field to the north. But the basis of Sheffield’s wealth was the business that made Chicago boom: railroads. Sheffield was a founder of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad and a builder of the New Haven and Northampton Railroad back in Connecticut. By 1914, many railroads were bringing people, and the produce of the prairies, to Chicago.

  Balls hit over Wrigley Field’s left-field wall land on Waveland Avenue. This name was chosen by Sheffield, the developer and subdivider, because on stormy days some of his land on the portion of the avenue near Lake Michigan was inundated.

  There are no waves in central Illinois. There the land is flat, so some people consider the vistas dull. But, then, there are those who consider baseball dull, and as sportscaster Red Barber once said, baseball is dull only to dull minds. The highest hill in Champaign County is not much more than a pitcher’s mound, but it’s quite high enough. The vast spaces of America’s Great Plains are well configured for endless baseball diamonds, with foul lines extending to far horizons. Thanks to the slow work of glaciers over many millennia, much of the land of central Illinois is astonishingly black, fertile, and valuable. It is also heavy, and for the first farmers who settled there, it was very difficult to plow. But in the 1830s, in the village of Grand Detour, a young blacksmith took up the challenge of designing a self-scouring steel plow to turn the heavy soil. He succeeded, and today his name is on big green machines all over the world: John Deere. And on little green machines, like the riding mowers that trim suburban lawns. And urban infields and outfields.

  The twin cities of Champaign and Urbana are the home of one of the main branches of the University of Illinois, where for thirty-seven years my father was a professor of philosophy. One of his interests was the concept of probability, concerning which he tried to tutor me, using Cubs players like Roy Smalley. Smalley was the Cubs’ shortstop from the fateful 1948 season through 1953. His career batting average was .227. He would come to the plate batting about that, and the Cubs’ radio announcer Bert Wilson would cheerfully say, “Smalley is overdue for a hot streak.” My father would patiently explain to me that Stan Musial batting .227—not that he ever did that—would be overdue but that Smalley was just being himself. In 1950, Smalley did, however, lead the league in two categories: He struck out 114 times and made 51 errors. So, fifty-one times that season the shortstop, the most important defensive player in fair territory (that is, excluding the catcher), gave a major league opponent an extra out in an inning. It is a wonder the 1950 Cubs managed to finish only 26½ games out of first place. I should have paid more attention to logic, but Cub fans obviously don’t. The Cubs do, however, make many of their fans philosophical, as Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines that: “calm or unflinching in the face of trouble, defeat, or loss.”

  Champaign and Urbana are cheek by jowl because of the Illinois Central Railroad. It is mostly gone, a victim of a merger and the disappearing railroad blues, but once it was so mighty it moved towns. When the first passenger train arrived in the area, in 1854, it came on tracks laid two miles west of the Champaign County Courthouse, in Urbana—a courthouse in which some cases had been argued by a canny and successful, hence prosperous, railroad lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. The land west of Urbana was cheaper, and the town of West Urbana grew up around the tracks. Soon Urbana tried to incorporate the upstart town, but the upstart had acquired, as upstarts will do, pride. It asserted its independence and took the name Champaign. So it became the stopping point for evocatively named passenger trains—the Panama Limited, the City of New Orleans, the City of Miami, and the Seminole. They steamed, and then were diesel-drawn, from the Deep South to Chicago.

  Back in what are now regarded as the Dark Ages of Parenting, before Baby Boomer parents made their original discovery that the world has sharp edges and abrasive surfaces, before society achieved today’s degree of pitiless enlightenment and decided that children should be enveloped in bubble wrap, like Dresden porcelain, lest they get chipped or otherwise damaged, and forced to wear crash helmets, back then we, the potentially lost youth of central Illinois, would ride our balloon-tire Schwinn bikes down to the railroad tracks and amuse ourselves by clambering over the boxcars on sidings while trains rumbled past nearby. All the while, we thought of the destination of the northbound trains: Chicago.

  It certainly is natural and probably is healthy for young people in small communities to have metropolitan yearnings. Many such yearnings have been directed east, toward New York. Mine were directed north, toward Chicago, for two reasons. One reason was those passenger trains, which seemed drawn with their riders to Chicago, as iron filings are drawn to a magnet, by an invisible force. The other reason was radio, by which Chicago reached out to inform, entertain, and entice. For this downstate Illinois boy, the railroad pointed toward a destination from which the most interesting radio broadcasts originated: Wrigley Field.

  Baseball fans, an otherwise sensible and agreeable cohort, are given to gushing. It is a grating attribute. Many people in this modern age are relentless in sharing their feelings about this and that, and baseball fans can be especially so. They have a high-octane sentimentality about everything from playing catch with Dad to baseball’s resemblance to heaven—how do they know?—or Pericles’s Athens, or the Federal Reserve Board. Is there anything that baseball has not been said to resemble? Or to be a metaphor for? And the gushing is never worse than when Cub fans get going about Wrigley Field. It is, they think, if thinking can be said to enter into such talk, a little foretaste of—you guessed it—the hereafter. The only real resemblance between Wrigley Field and heaven is that the ballpark is indeed the final destination of some Cub fans. Every once in a while someone in the bleachers leans out from the front row and, pursuant to the wishes of the deceased, pours onto the outfield a small billowing gray cloud of dust that is the ashes of Uncle Ralph or Aunt Min, who, one hopes, really meant it when he or she said, “You know, when I die I wish …” This use of Wrigley Field is officially frowned upon, but it is believably said, sotto voce, that ushers and other representatives of officialdom have been known to enable this by pretending not to see it.

  Never mind that before this heavenly place on the North Side could be built, a Lutheran seminary had to be torn down. Or that the Chicago National League Ball Club wanted to evict the Lutherans so it could escape a neighborhood that contained too many people who were, well, just not the right sort, if you get my drift—immigrants and other members of the lower orders. Never mind, too, that those neighbors included a secular saint of American history: Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House, where you might encounter young idealists destined for greatness.

  One such who worked at Hull House was a New Yorker, Frances Perkins, a social reformer whose zeal, already hot, had been further quickened on March 25, 1911. She had been taking tea in the heart of Manhattan, near the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, when it caught fire. The blaze killed 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women trapped by locked doors, and ignited a new era of government regulations to improve conditions f
or working people. Perkins became President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor—America’s first female member of a president’s cabinet.

  Another person whose ascent to greatness included time spent at Hull House was Paul Douglas. In 1920, at age twenty-eight, he became a professor of industrial relations at the University of Chicago, which he left in 1942 to enlist as a fifty-year-old private in the Marine Corps, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, for the first of three terms. He, too, lived in the neighborhood the Cubs fled in 1914.

  Chicago has a rich history of remarkable people. It also has a deserved reputation as a tough town. Wrigley Field is a green and pleasant jewel that was set, one hundred years ago, in a city with dark, satanic aspects.

  If Chicago, a no-nonsense city of prose, ever had a poet, it was, of course, Carl Sandburg. Since his death in 1967, at age eighty-nine, his reputation has fallen on hard times, and has fallen from quite a height. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was what now seems like an oxymoron, a celebrity poet. He appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show—after Elvis but before the Beatles—and the Today show with Dave Garroway, and Texaco Star Theater with the comedian Milton Berle, and he was interviewed by the high priest of broadcast journalism, Edward R. Murrow. It is, however, safe to say that almost no one reads Sandburg anymore, and he has become the object of withering witticisms. Clichés, wrote the essayist Joseph Epstein, run through Sandburg’s writing like calories through cheesecake. Of Sandburg’s thick and weird “biography” of Abraham Lincoln—no citations, just unoriginal narrative laced with Sandburg’s musings—Edmund Wilson said, “There are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.” Sandburg’s brother-in-law was the photographer Edward Steichen, who said that when God created Sandburg, He did not do anything else that day. Others have said that perhaps He thought he had done enough damage for one day. And yet.