Category Archives: Life

30 Years Ago At Wrigley, The Day I Fell For Chicago

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The famous definition of insanity, credited to Albert Einstein, is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” A cynic might say that’s also the very best definition of a Chicago Cubs fan. Every spring, there is that eternal optimism that this year will be THE year. Except it hasn’t been for an epic 104 years.

But I’d like to offer what may be the second-best definition of baseball insanity: a lifelong baseball fanatic who decided well into middle age to become a devoted Cubs fan. Even though he was more than old enough to know the tragi-comic history that has unfolded on Chicago’s North Side.

Wait, there’s more. Although this fellow long regarded Chicago as his second hometown — because his wife grew up nearby — and has followed the Cubs as a fan since the 1990s, he only moved to the Windy City last July.

Allow me to introduce myself. Because I am that guy.

Ballpark. Cathedral of Baseball. Beloved House of Horrors for Five Generations of Cubs Fans. And the reason I became, defying all reason, a middle-aged fan of baseball's most star-crossed team.

So how did this happen to a reasonably responsible person who committed political journalism in Washington, D.C.,  for 30 years before relocating here?

Part of it almost certainly has to do with the fact that I developed an attachment to the underdog early on, probably when I realized that my devotion to watching sports was way greater than my ability to play them. I became old enough to appreciate baseball growing up in New York in the early 1960s, and could have opted into the dynastic Yankees of Mantle, Ford, Berra and Maris. Instead, I fell madly in love with the New York Mets, the expansion 1962 Mets, with their historically bad 40-120 record.

Yes, I was a Mets fan for a good part of my life. Don’t judge me. And, during my years living in D.C., I rooted for the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Nationals. So you can see where I’m going with this.

But the bigger part was this: Blame it on Wrigley. Chicago ultimately became my favorite city and a place where I wanted to live out my days. But that old ballpark, with the ivy-covered brick walls and hand-operated scoreboard, tucked tightly into the surrounding residential neighborhood, was the first thing I loved about Chicago.

Today, June 3, 2012, will mark the 30th anniversary of the day that my wife Barb (then my girlfriend) and I attended our first game at Wrigley Field. I had, of course, seen the park many times on TV. Yet when I, at age 26, walked up the ramp and caught my first glimpse of the field and its urban backdrop, I had the same kind of epiphany I’d had at age 5 when my parents took me to my first game ever, between the New York Yankees and Kansas City Athletics at Yankee Stadium in 1961. The old-school charms of Wrigley had me hooked, instantly.

The game itself stuck in my mind because San Diego pitcher Juan Eichelberger, who otherwise had a rather brief and undistinguished MLB career, almost pitched a no-hitter against the Cubs, coming within a bad call by the home-team official scorer from a place in baseball’s history books. A second-inning grounder, which easily could have been called an error on the second baseman, instead was ruled a hit. It turned out to be the only one the Cubs got that day (though they later scored a run on a three-base error and a sacrifice fly).

The Padres won the game, 3-1, and how they won would be called “foreshadowing” in literature. In the top of the 6th, with the teams tied at zero, the Padres loaded the bases with two out. Batter Joe Lefevbre then lofted a long fly ball that slugging center fielder Leon Durham reached near the wall… then dropped, allowing all three runners to score.

Two years later, the Cubs and Padres would meet in the National League Championship Series, then best of five. The Cubs, after winning the first two games and losing the next two, held a 3-2 lead in the bottom of the seventh inning in the decisive Game 5 when Durham, then playing first base, allowed an easy grounder to go between his legs, allowing the tying run to score and sparking a four-run rally that sent the Padres, not the Cubs, to the 1984 World Series.

Fast forward to July 17, 2011. Barb and I had just moved a couple of weeks earlier to an apartment on Lake Shore Drive in Lakeview, among street names with which I first became familiar years earlier because we used to hunt for parking there when we came in for Cubs games. The game that day was a typically dreary affair, a 7-5 loss to the Florida Marlins, in a season already lost. But I will always remember that day as the first time I got to walk HOME from Wrigley Field. (The Cubs ended up 3-3 with me in the stands last year. Not much, but considering the fact that they were 71-91 overall and 39-42 at home, it practically made me a good luck charm.)

In between were many other memories, including these:

* A game on June 8, 1987, in which the Cubs beat the Mets, 4-2, on a two-run, two-out walk-off 9th inning homer by infielder Manny Trillo, who had a long and effective career but was no one’s idea of a slugger. (I then was still a Mets diehard and would remain so until the early ‘90s, when potential Hall of Famers Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden dissipated their careers through hard living while the team dumped spark plugs like Wally Backman and Len Dykstra and replaced them with clubhouse head-cases like Bobby Bonilla, Vince Coleman and Bret Saberhagen.)

* The Aug. 13, 1993 game, a 4-1 win for San Francisco, in which I sat right behind home plate in seats I’d gotten from a friend of a friend and watched Giants’ star Will Clark slam a foul ball off his knee so hard that he was sidelined for a week.

* The Cubs’ surprise 12-0 skunking of the World Series-bound Atlanta Braves on Aug. 30, 1996, which I attended after covering the 1996 Democratic National Convention at the United Center.

* Sammy Sosa, fresh off his record-setting “home run derby” with the Cardinals’ Mark McGwire in 1998 and still a hometown hero, belting an eighth-inning homer off St. Louis reliever Heathcliff Slocumb to help the Cubs score a 6-3 victory on May 28, 1999. That was, to my recollection, the only time I saw the Cubs play the arch-rival Cards live at Wrigley until I caught an early-season game this year that produced one of the team’s extremely rare come-from-behind 9th inning victories.

* An early-season game on April 11, 2005 — before the Cubs jacked up the ticket prices — when a friend and I walked up prior to the game and got reasonably priced seats three rows behind home plate. I remarked during the game, which the Cubs lost, 1-0, that it was the first time I’d ever felt compelled to say “Down in front” to the batter standing in the on-deck circle.

* And a mild summer day on Aug. 22, 2010, when I had time on my hands, bought a nose-bleed seat in the upper reserved… and ended up watching Lou Piniella’s last game as Cubs manager.

That game, a 16-5 Braves clubbing of the Cubbies, was one of several I’ve attended — including a couple already this year — that challenged the motto I’ve had about Wrigley Field for many years: It is the only stadium I’ve been to where I can watch a really bad game and still feel like it was one of the best days I had that year.

To steal a line from late blues singer Albert King, this Cubs season was born under a bad sign. The Opening Day loss to the Washington Nationals was the first of five Cubs games I've seen this year. They have lost four of them.

The crosstown rival Chicago White Sox celebrate a 6-0 win on May 20 that completed a three-game sweep of the Cubs at Wrigley Field.

It very quickly became apparent that this was going to be another one of those years for the Cubs. Their 2-1 loss to the Washington Nationals on windy, cold April 5 — my first Opening Day game at Wrigley Field — sent the home team off to a 4-12 start. For a couple of weeks, they appeared to turn it around, playing better than .500 baseball. And then… the deluge, a gruesome 12-game losing streak that included a three-game sweep at home by the rival Chicago White Sox.

Yet Cubs fans are holding out an unusual amount of hope for the future. The team’s new president, Theo Epstein, has two World Series championship rings from his recent stint as general manager of another team that long lived under a baseball curse, the Boston Red Sox. If Theo manages to build a winner at 1060 West Addison Street, he will deservedly be hailed as one of Chicago all-time sports legends.

But I’m prepared to grab some of the credit too. After all, the Cubs never went to the World Series when I didn’t live here.

A Green-Letter Weekend: Spartan Pride and Sadness

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Life sometimes comes at us fast and furiously. I will long remember this weekend for some of the highest highs I’ve experienced in a while, tempered by low lows that made my heart ache.

Late Saturday night, I returned home from a cocktail fundraiser to assist families dealing with childhood cancer — staged in part by friends who I know through my Michigan State alumni activities — when I received official notification of one of the fondest honors that has ever been bestowed upon me. I have been chosen to serve a two-year term on the national Michigan State University Alumni Association’s 35-member international advisory board.

Though I’d actually been tipped off a few days earlier about this election, the email notice pleased me immensely. That is because I learned that the roster of new and returning members includes several people who already are personal friends, some classmates who I have known for almost four decades, others younger people (born well after I graduated from State in 1977) who I have gotten to known through club activities in Chicago and my old hometown of Washington, D.C. And there are others who have become “virtual” friends through my vigorous engagement in social media.

Just by coincidence, I had earlier on Saturday received the honor of being elected to a two-year term on the board of the MSU Alumni Association of Metro Chicago, aka Chicago Spartans, to which I was appointed to fill a vacancy not long after we arrived in this amazing city. The fact that I will be able to serve my alma mater both locally and nationally — and that this was confirmed on the same day — is something of which I am tremendously proud.

I may have taxed the patience of some of my friends with how I’ve gone on about my devotion to Michigan State, but I think I now have sufficient evidence that it is as deep as I have previously suggested, and that it’s not just about the success of our football and basketball teams. MSU welcomed me when I was still 17 years old, it provided my first home away from my home in a New York City suburb, allowed me to talk about sports and other matters on radio for four years, and helped me develop the confidence that led to a fair amount of achievement as a political journalist during my D.C. days. All that, and the bonus of friendships that have lasted almost a lifetime.

I have always tried to help out what we’ve come to know as Spartan Nation in whatever ways I could, but this is the most tangible opportunity I’ve had to give something back. My term begins July 1, and I can’t wait to get started.

On top of this, I finished my fourth round of guitar classes Sunday at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Each eight-week term ends with a revue in which each class gets on stage in the main theater and performs a piece of music. And so I, along with teacher Carlos Chacon and my two classmates, performed “Summer Breeze,” a sweet tune from the 1970s group Seals and Crofts. While I don’t think a recording contract is in the immediate future, we played and sang and people in the audience — including my wife Barb — applauded. Not bad for an old guy.

I appreciate how blessed I am to have so many positive things going on in my life, because  like anyone else, there’s bad stuff too, and sometimes it’s right around the corner.

On Friday, I was at a luncheon downtown when I checked my iPhone and saw some cryptic messages on Facebook urging prayers for Rachel Kahan, with whom I’d served briefly on the board of the MSU alumni club of Washington, D.C. I knew that Rachel had been bravely fighting cancer for the past year, but the last I’d heard was that it was in remission, so I was stunned to learn that her situation had taken a turn for the worse… so dire, in fact, that by the time I arrived home, I learned that she had passed away.

Rachel was 26 years old. Life can be beautiful, but it can be cruel and unfair, too. It still is hard for me to comprehend this.

Then, today, I learned that a friend, the wife of a close friend of many, many years, is dealing with the recurrence of a cancer that she has fought off before. In this case, there is much reason for hope: a small tumor, caught early, she is getting the best in medical care, and she will, without exaggeration, have the well wishes of thousands of people. Still, it is another hardship for someone who deserves so much better.

As a cancer survivor myself, I learned a long time ago to appreciate the good things and endure the bad things that occur regularly and often quite randomly. It is helpful knowledge to have on a weekend that delivered such extremes of happiness and sadness.

 

Chicago Whisky Fest — The Anniversary Edition

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Today, Sunday, March 25, is my 27th wedding anniversary and the first since Barb and I became full-time residents of Chicago. I haven’t been too terribly lucky at a lot of things, but I am very lucky with the one thing that matters most.

Now, one of the things about me that Barb has tolerated is the fact that I have over a number of years been building a rather broad base of knowledge about whisky in general and American whisky (mainly bourbon and rye) in particular. It would be much simpler to be able to say that drinking whisky is my hobby, but I’m loath to do so because that can really be taken the wrong way.

Nonetheless, this past Friday night, I attended the annual Chicago Whisky Fest, staged by Whisky Advocate magazine, for the eighth time in the past nine years. As has usually been the case, I was joined by Frank Hodal, a longtime D.C. friend (and northwest Indiana native) who introduced me to this event in the first place.

Unlike my previous Whisky Fest-ing, this year I went with a professional purpose.

I have always been a bit consumed by consumables. I have a lifelong fascination with food, have always done the bulk of the cooking in our household, have taken a number of cooking classes and have participated in a far greater number of food and drink tasting events.

In fact, I have said for years that the person I’d most want to emulate when I grow up is R.W. Apple Jr., a legendary journalist familiarly known as Johnny Apple. For years before he settled in for domestic assignments in a career capped by a stint as the New York Times Washington bureau chief, Apple traveled to hot spots domestic and international, providing excellent coverage for the paper and its readers. He was also famous for running up prodigious expense accounts dining and drinking finely on the Times’ dime.

The payoff came when he retired from hard news in the late 1990s and spent the last few year of his life touring the United States and the world to eat and drink, and produced some of the most evocative prose on the culinary arts that I have ever read. I remember reading one of his pieces, about the dining scene in Charleston, South Carolina, that not only described the food but the city’s ambience in exquisite detail, and feeling as though I had been transported right there.

So with Johnny Apple as my inspiration, I am trying to develop at least a substantial portion of my freelance career in the direction of food and drink, and am just starting an online course in food writing.

One of the areas I’m very interesting in exploring is the rise of microdistilling, nationally and around the Midwest where dozens of alcoholic beverage producers have sprung up in recent years. That is why I spent much of Whisky Fest in the microdistillers’ corner of the vast ballroom in the basement of the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Wacker, which was mainly dominated by big-name producers of long standing that are familiar names to even casual whisky consumers.

The rise of microdistilling is very recent, spurred by the repeal in many places of bans that dated back to the Prohibition era and earlier. In fact, one of the newer locally based producers, FEW Spirits, is sort of a back-handed reference to one of the long-ago leading citizens of the suburb of Evanston, where the distillery is located. F.E.W. were the initials of Frances E. Willard, a Northwestern University dean who for many years in the late 19th century was the leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement.

Because they are generally so young, most microdistilleries have initially focused on clear liquors such as gin and vodka, which don’t age in wood and therefore spend a very short time between the fermenter and the bottle. I currently have in my cupboard a bottle of Wheat Vodka from the Grand Traverse Distillery, located in the beauty spot of Traverse City, Michigan and headed by Kent Rabish, a friendly gentleman who invariably urges folks to visit the distillery (something on which Barb and I hope to take him up this year).

A couple of examples of Midwestern microdistilling that have found their way into my kitchen: Wheat Vodka from Grand Traverse Distillery in Traverse City, Mich., and Distiller's Gin No. 9 from North Shore in Lake Bluff, Ill., a suburb of Chicago.

But we are starting to see an increasing number of stabs at bourbon, rye and even single-malt whisky, with many producers experimenting with smaller barrels in which the liquor matures more quickly.

One noteworthy example I tasted was the Ravenswood Rye produced by Journeyman Distillery, located in Three Oaks, Michigan, almost directly across the lake from where I’m sitting. Journeyman only opened its doors a few months ago but prepared by doing some production runs over the past couple of years at Koval, a pioneering local microdistillery that is not far from here, in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago. Journeyman’s Ravenswood won’t yet replace Van Winkle’s 13-year old Family Reserve Rye from Kentucky as my favorite brown liquor, but it drinks well and tastes like it has spent more time in the barrel than it has.

I will have more to say in detail about these products in months to come, as I plan to tour around to many of the Midwestern micros.

The Lake Shore View: Chicago, Ready For Your Close-Up?

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I can’t really say that I have reached a state of nirvana on my first birthday as a Chicago resident. I am, for instance, still trying to figure out exactly what shape my “second career” is going to take. But I also know that I am a very, very lucky guy.

I get to spend each day with the woman who has put up with my many idiosyncrasies and seen me through the best of times and the worst of times for more than 30 years. A Facebook feed jammed with birthday greetings from near and far reminds me how fortunate I am to know so many people who are both very talented AND very kind.

And every clear day, we can look out our west-facing windows and see this…

… and every morning, we open the blinds and see something like this.

And now, thanks to the new toy I got for my birthday — a telephoto lens for my Sony Nex-3 camera — you’ll get to see lots of new views of my new hometown… up closer and more personal.

Here is how the Chicago skyline, about four miles from our apartment, looks through the original short lens:

Now, take a gander at how it looks in the maximum range of the telephoto.

Now, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might remember that I mentioned that we had guys washing the windows outside our 30th floor apartment a couple of weeks back. At the time, I said that the only way you could ever get me to do something like that once  is if you paid me enough money that I’d never have to work another day in my life. And now, thanks to the miracles of telephotography, a graphic illustration of what I meant — because the window washers happened to be out, about 300 feet up, working on the high-rise across the street.

And, of course, I will now be able to take extreme close-up photos of my favorite subject: Gracie the Cat.

So thanks again for the kind birthday greetings, and I hope you’ll enjoy the pix I’ll be posting.

For convenience sake, I’m going to dispose of the latest installment of the Cooler on the Lake Shore Chicago vs. D.C. Weather Smackdown.

On Sunday, according to Weather Underground, Chicago O’Hare recorded an unseasonable high of 70 (just three degrees short of a record set in 1989), with a low of 47, no rain and some pretty gusty winds. Washington Reagan National reported a high of 64, a low of 44 and no rain. Just on the basis that it could be the last time we see 70 degrees here for a very long time, yesterday’s point goes to Chicago, putting its overall lead in the Smackdown at 60-42.

The Lake Shore View: In Praise of Steve Jobs, and Perseverance

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Like so many people, I was stunned to learn that Steve Jobs, the founder of the Apple computer company, had died at the age of 56.

Not that it was an out-of-the-blue surprise: He had been fighting for his life since being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, and it seemed a bad sign when he stepped down as CEO a couple of months ago. Still, to lose someone who had so dramatically changed the way the world works and communicates and plays — and to have him pass from among us at such a young age — is hard to comprehend.

I don’t need to go on at length about all of his technological achievements — the personal computer, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and more — which will be covered in all the obituaries and media tributes.

And I won’t lie, I was not an early or frequent adopter of Apple products: I am writing this on yet another of a series of home PCs, I worked mainly on PCs during my CQ career, and while I think my iPhone (which I’ve had three years and is overdue for an upgrade) and my iPad (which I’ve had for a year) are mostly wonderful, they amount to all of the Apple products I have personally owned (though Barb, who listens to more music than I do, also has an iPod).

While giving due deference to his technological and business brilliance, what moves me most about Steve Jobs is how much of this he accomplished during his last years, when illness and the possibility of early death were always present in his life.

Steve Jobs was born in 1955, the same year as me, though he arrived that February and clearly received a disproportionate share of the creative genius that was being handed out that year, to the extent that there wasn’t much left for me when I fell to earth that November. Regrettably, the thing we most had in common was that, in our late 40s, we were both diagnosed with cancer.

Fortunately for me, the prostate cancer that I contracted was more treatable and not as malignant as the disease that numbered Steve Jobs’ days. Still, trust me, it has been no picnic, especially since it was accompanied by a series of existential kicks in the head, including the deaths of all three of our remaining parents.

I don’t know where whatever steel I have in my spine came from, but I do know that I drew inspiration from people who persevered — not just celebrities and public figures who showed courage under fire, but the everyday people (and especially those brave children) whose paths crossed mine when I was undergoing treatments.

And whatever personal reserves of strength Steve Jobs had, I’d be shocked to learn that he did not draw encouragement from others who stared adversity in the eye and triumphed.

Since Jobs was famously reticent about his private life, including his illnesses, I’ll have to turn to Jim Valvano, the famous college basketball coach whose courage in fighting terminal cancer still resonate almost 20 years later. Though weakened by his illness, he spoke from the podium at ESPN’s 1992 ESPY awards show, at which the creation of the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research was announced.

Citing the organization’s motto, “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up!” Valvano said, “That’s what I’m going to try to do every minute that I have left. I will thank God for the day and the moment I have.” And he said…

“I urge all of you, all of you, to enjoy your life, the precious moments you have. To spend each day with some laughter and some thought, to get you’re emotions going. To be enthusiastic every day and as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Nothing great could be accomplished without enthusiasm,” to keep your dreams alive in spite of problems whatever you have. The ability to be able to work hard for your dreams to come true, to become a reality.”

Thank you to Steve Jobs, and Jim Valvano, and everyone else who has stood strong as role models for people dealing with life’s vicissitudes. In doing so, you have given many of them the courage to persevere, and to make their dreams come true.

To uphold the tradition of this little blog, here’s what the Lake Shore View looked like earlier today. We’ll resume the Weatherspiel at a more appropriate time tomorrow.