How to be a Chicago Sports Fan (written in 1975)

Today I have been sorting through the designated Chicago collection that one of my predecessors compiled because many of the books were never cataloged. While leafing through How to Survive in Chicago... and Enjoy It, by Kenan Heise, Charles McWhinnie, Judith Birnbaum, and Juanita Carlson, (the authors loved their ellipsis), I came across this sage advice on how to root for the home team if you're in Chicago:

A Chicago Cubs fan... how to become one

• Know where Wrigley Field is (Addison & Sheffield), that it was originally built for a team in the Federal League, is ivy-covered, and is the only ball park in the majors without lights.
  
• Know that the chewing-gum Wrigleys have owned the team for a long time, and live in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
  
• Live on the North Side and be able to go to the beach or anywhere else on a summer afternoon to hear the game blasting forth from radios. Or else live on the South Side (White Sox territory) and be willing to be treated as a person with an affliction.
• Be accepting of the fact that a team that can go a generation without winning a pennant is still worth dying a little bit for.
  

A Chicago White Sox fan... how to earn the title

• Know what team won the pennant in 1959 and what city's air raid fire sirens went off as a result. It helps to know what years Nellie Fox, Billy Pierce, and Jungle Jim Rivera played.
• Attend White Sox games. In the late 1960s the park was as abandoned as any in either league. Most critics said it was because the stadium was in a supposedly dangerous neighborhood. Well, Blackhawks fans go into one 10 times worse and almost always at night [ooh burn]. The Sox began to win and the myth was totally dispelled.
  
• Share the White Sox fan's mentality about winning. That 1959 pennant followed 30 years losing it.
  
• Hate the Cubs, but hope for a "subway World Series." Just to show those northsiders who will never understand how much greater Luke Appling was than their overoptimistic Ernie Banks.

A Blackhawk fan and what that means

• Be accepting of the most cynical ownership in all sports. Under heavy pressure the owners put in water faucets for the fans. No efforts have succeeded in clearing up the practice of selling tickets so that the average fan over the years will not have to bribe ticket sellers for important dates.
• Enjoy good hockey. The team plays a lot of it even though they rarely win the Stanley Cup.

Chicago Winds

• Just another second-rate football team in Chicago. Many argue that Chicago has just that already.
• An additional chance to root for another underdog.
  

Chicago Bears, or how to be a frozen-toed fan

• Know a little about that crotchety, often-lovable relic of the stone age of professional football, George Halas.
• Be able to recall the 73 to 0 score of the immortal game against Washington on December 8, 1940.
• Know the other teams in the "Black and Blue Division" and accept the fact that they are why so many of the Bears are always in Illinois Masonic Hospital having their knees operated on.
• Live, as other Chicago fans often do, on hope and with the realization that winning cannot be everything.
• Know someone who has a season pass or who hopes to inherit one.

Chicago Bulls... why and how to cheer for them

• To be a superfan, get an old Chicago Zephyr or Stag pennant to commemorate the city's prior attempt at pro basketball. George Halas even attempted a team here in the 1930s (the Bruins). Other teams included the Chicago Majors, the Globetrotters (based here), the American Gears, and the Packers (an earlier name for the Zephyrs).
• Take a course in corporate structure and personnel management to grasp the front-office and player-general manager maneuvers of this fantastic salaried operation.
• Watch the coaching of this operation. It has been a Bull's strength.
• But like any other Chicago fan, live on hope. After all, Chicago does have potential. Didn't it recover from a fire back in 1871?

Note: For scores (1 hour to 2 hours late) of baseball, football, hockey, basketball, call the Chicago Tribune at 222-1234 or the Chicago-Sun Times-Chicago Daily News at WH 3-3080.

Interesting how some things never change:
To be a Cubs fan, you must know more about the park than about the team itself; the really big fans don't even live in Chicago.
To be a Sox fan, you must hold on to trivia and titles while dodging bullets in your apparently really ghetto neighborhood.
To be a Hawks fan - I think this one has actually drastically changed for the better recently - you needed to fight an owner completely out of touch with his fan base.
To be a football fan in Chicago, you need to realize that your team is going to get beat to hell by stronger teams, and getting tickets will be next to impossible unless to know someone.
To be a Bulls fan, you need to also know your history, and watch the politics of the home office -not being a Bulls/basketball fan, I can't really comment on how accurate that is today.

Charged up

This may sound silly coming from a future librarian, but my resolution as of right now is to use the library system more. For ages I have been an Amazon addict, having to buy every singe title I wanted to read because I've always valued having a good collection at home. Thing is, even when books are priced at under a dollar, once you factor in shipping and all that, it gets pretty expensive when you have a habit like mine. Ordering all those books, and having them shipped also creates a lot of garbage in packaging and paperwork, not to mention the fumes from the planes and other vehicles that get them to me in a matter of days.

Aside from the mess and the cost, having an actual due date will make me actually read what I've ordered up. I have shelves of books that I know I'll get to, post grad school, but it doesn't make them any less of a space-waster as they sit around collecting dust. So, now is the time to end my own hypocrisy - to stop complaining about librarians losing their jobs, and to start making them work for me. If even future librarians refuse to utilize the services offered by their peers, how can they expect there to be jobs waiting for them when they graduate? Time to do my part in keeping my industry a valued one.


What's first on the list? I am not ashamed to say, my inner dork just put a copy of Twilight on hold (thanks Em).

Austounding feats of animal strength and cunning

In the last 48 hours, my place of employment has gone from quiet library to amateur hour for Wild Kingdom; I guess that's not all that surprising, considering that one of my closest work friends blows up snakes (literally) and scrutinizes jars of pickled reptiles for genitalia for a living.

Yesterday it was The Great Escape, starring one very large and determined millipede from the entomology collections department. At about 1pm, during a lull, my boss noticed what she believed to be a fat pen cap begin to move of its own power on the floor of the library reading room; upon closer analysis, she determined that the possessed writing accessory was actually a medium-sized brown diplopod creeping its way across the burgundy carpet. The AWOL millipede was quickly scooped up, not by me, and taken back to his lair about three halls over. Three halls may not sound like a long way to anyone else, but in a massive building like The Field Museum, to a small critter, it's probably a full day's journey. That's a lot of determination shown on the part of one little bug; undoubtedly he was drawn to the library by the smell of my fear.

Today it is The Field Museum Library's adaptation of The Birds, featuring one very cunning sparrow that is currently hiding out in the main stacks. The threat of the intruder has been minimized, and pest control has been called, but it remains to be seen whether or not the bird will be camping out here over the Thanksgiving holiday break. While all of this initially struck me as being pretty funny, the novelty quickly wore off when the icy reality hit me that as the circulations grunt, the task would fall to me to clean all the bird shit off the books after all is said and done. God's speed, Sergio the pest guy.

Not much to report here lately in the city of Chicago. We've been experiencing some unseasonably warm weather the last couple of weeks yet, inexplicably, where I work within the museum is holding it down at an unbearable 50F. Needless to say, I've been shelving books while wearing two hoodies (both hoods up to cover my Dumbo ears) while in the main stacks, only to have to peel all those layers off when I head elsewhere in the building. You have to love the state-of-the-art climate control we have it; it was a million times worse when I worked in Anthropology storage, especially considering it was summer (shorts and flipflops) and the temps would sometimes fluctuate between the 50's and the 70's in different areas - you never knew what you were going to get, so you couldn't dress for the weather in there.
So, here I am, now sitting at the reference desk in the main library, doing circulation statistics and drinking weak tea from an over-used teabag in order to fight off hypothermia (yes, I am too cheap to just go get another bag). Thankfully there is cake featuring prominently in the foreseeable future because it is one of my co-worker's birthdays. Bless her for feeding my sugar cravings; perhaps that rush of chemically-induced energy that I'm about to get will cause me to feel somewhat above arctic in terms of body temperature for the rest of the day.
If you're reading this, happy birthday M., and thanks in advance for the cake!