So here is mine: Back in 1959 - 63, I was a paper carrier for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel newspaper. I lived in the small town of Huntington, IN (the home of James Danforth "Dan" Quayle, the 44th vice president of the United States) which had its own newspaper, the Huntington Herald Press. Dan Quayle's father was the editor.
But I digress... so it being the out-of-town newspaper, I didn't have a lot of customers on my route, maybe 35 customers. My brothers each had their own routes in the neighborhood slinging the paper. Each day a car would swing by the little house at 404 Swan St and dump a couple of bundles of the daily papers onto the sidewalk. We would cut the wire and count out the number of papers for each route. And then we had to fold them so we could stuff them in the big newspaper bags tied to the handle bars of our Schwinn bicycles.
During the summer and into the fall, as we folded our papers, we had our transistor radios blaring the Cubs games. The scratchy play-by-play transmission from WGN, the AM signal surging in and out, captured our attention so much so that often my mother would yell at us to hurry up and get going on our routes. She wanted us home by dark!
One funny thought was that my mother was always yelling at us to shut off the radio when a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer or "Lucky Strike" cigarette commercial came over the airwaves. My older brother remarked that due to those cautions he never took up smoking!
Ron Santos, Ernie Banks, and Lou Boudreau the manager wow... those were the names I remember. Each year we had a newspaper contest to try to get new subscribers and usually the winner won a free trip to see the CUBS... I never won! But that didn't soften my love of the Cubs.
Next to our house was a park with a baseball diamond. We often played neighborhood baseball; one of the teams was always called the "Cubs." And we each took the name of our favorite player... all of us in the neighborhood were white: none of us gave it a second thought not to take the honored name of Ernie Banks!
And all those years of losing the big ones, never going all the way, the perennial losers, those Cubs. Not because they didn't try... it just didn't work out. Maybe it was the big bucks of the Yanks and Mets buying all those star players; whatever it was, I became a fair-weathered Cub fan. I moved to Houston then to Washington DC then finally to San Diego -- all towns with pro baseball but I had no interest. After the baseball strike, I lost my enthusiasm for America's favorite past time.
But tonight I became a big fan! Not necessarily of baseball per se, but the idea that after 108 years, the CUBS WON! The perennial losers won respect again. Happy fans, family and friends all celebrate the way the ball bounced... their way!
