Almost every kid has a story like mine. The story involves them and their father and baseball. For me, I have a bunch of them. I remember growing up outside Chicago and on weekends, before I could go play baseball with other neighborhood kids at the nearby junior high school, I had to help my dad in the yard. My bedroom faced the back and my dad would usually tell me to put the radio in my window. It was an AM radio with a big dial and it was green. The dial would be tuned to AM 720 WGN, the home of the Cubs. Jack Brickhouse would be calling the game along with Vince Lloyd and Lou Boudreau. I'd be in the backyard with my dad cutting the grass, weeding the lawn, turning over dirt in the garden or pruning an apple tree that manged to produce apples only once in the 16 years it was in the ground. Sometimes the yard work was done around my little league schedule. My dad never managed a team I was on, but he almost always coached first base. Anyways, we'd be in the back yard and then you would hear Vince Lloyd yelling after Billy Williams or Rick Monday ripped a homer into the bleachers. My dad would stop what he was doing and look at me because he knew what was coming next. I would drop the rake/shovel/lawn mower and tear into the house and run to the TV, turning on WGN Channel 9 (before it was a superstation) and watch the cheap HEY! HEY! CG graphic flash on the screen as Jack Brickhouse celebrated along with the rest of Chicago.
There were plenty of other stories. Playing catch out front with my dad, which usually resulted in him running up South Milton Avenue multiple times after my errant throws. I remember hanging out with grown ups one day in the backyard. My fathers parents had come to visit from Scranton, PA and they were sitting in the backyard having a beer and smoking. My grandfather was a pretty unlikable fellow who scared the living bejeesus out of me and it still amazes me that my dad and his sisters turned out to be extremely nice people. I don't really think that my dad was very fond of him, but they would still sit out back and talk about the Red Sox. Both were Sox fans, mainly because the Red Sox for years had a farm team in Scranton. My dad said he once saw Ted Williams go five-for-five in an exhibition game. Despite their differences they could still communicate through baseball.
My favorite memories of my dad were rainy weekends. If it were raining and the little league games were cancelled and we (aka, me) couldn't mow the lawn, my dad would grab a beer, a pack of cigarettes a radio and a lawn chair and sit in the garage with the door open and listen to the Cubs play if they were on the road. I would sometimes go out there with him with a soda, a lawn chair, and no cigarettes and listen to the game with him while the thunder boomed in the distance and the rain came pouring down. If the Cubs were in Philly my dad would usually remind me that he had seen the Phillies growing up and that he thought Mike Schmidt was a pretty good player. I never knew how glad I would be later in life for those moments with my dad. My father passesd away in 1990 at the far too young age of 54. I like to think that he's sitting in a garage somewhere while a storm rages outside listening to Jack Brickhouse yell "Hey! Hey!" as a Cub hits another homer.
Happy Fathers Day and I promise I'll write about the Sounds soon.
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