When I was young and newly married, my then-husband and I would go to the Cubs games early, take the Sunday papers, sit in the bleachers, and watch batting practice before the games. I don’t remember any drunkenness, painted faces, shirtlessness or bleacher bums.
The sun was hot. In the days before sunscreen and common sense, sunburns and red hair helped set me up for my current quarterly visits to a skin cancer specialist.
What would Hemingway and the Paris crowd, all guns and skis, make of the Chicago “boys of summer?” We didn’t know at the time that it was a dream team: Banks, Beckert, Kessinger, Santo, Hundley, Billy Williams, Adolfo Phillips, Fergie Jenkins, Kenny Holtzman, et al. Had they already traded Lou Brock? Who wants to remember that?
When I heard that Ernie Banks had died, and heard his age, it seemed probable, and yet not possible. Trust me, kids, he was a very big deal for Chicago, but he was definitely not in the Chicago style. We like our Capones and Daleys and Emanuels; we like our love-hate relationship with arrogance, and Ernie Banks was anything but arrogant.
With four marriages, he could not have been a perfect human being. And he was not a runaway success in business after his playing career. But he was a Chicago hero.
As I watched the funeral, I was astounded when Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins said that rookies often roomed with Banks … if they could stand the constant talking and optimism. Who would want to put up with rookies every season? Ernie would.
I didn’t cry when I watched the actual funeral ceremony; I thought all the speakers were really nice and thoughtful and appropriate. (Well, one of the soloists had a slit up the front of her dress. In a church. At Fourth Presbyterian. At a funeral.) But I broke down when the old teammates escorted the casket: Billy Williams, Randy Hundley, Glenn Beckert, and the late Ron Santo’s son, along with Ernie Banks’s sons and Lou Brock. How did they get so old?
By the way, am I the only one who remembers that Adolfo Phillips hit four home runs in one day on a Sunday in 1967? And they traded him?