Spirit of ’59 Still Is Alive in True Fans

The year, 1959.

Dwight D. Eisenhower soon will have a Chicago expressway named in his honor, as will the man who succeeds him in office. Couples ride a roller-coaster called the Wild Mouse at a decaying amusement park known as Riverview. In front of grainy, black-and-white, domestically built TVs with poor horizontal holds, Chicago children sit cross-legged to watch an after-school program featuring Garfield Goose, a crabby hand puppet and self-crowned “King of the United States,” and adults slouch back in new, vibrating, Naugahyde recliners to view baseball telecasts sponsored by Hamm’s, a beer from “the land of sky-blue waters.”

Transistor radios or the dashboard models of Chevy Bel-Airs and Olds 88s are tuned to the unabashedly upbeat Jack Brickhouse, chirping “Hey! Hey!” after every home-team home run, or to the imperturbably monotonic Bob Elson, who invites his listeners to contact someone called Friendly Bob Adams at ANdover 3-2020 for a “loan by phone” from Household Finance 24 hours a day, tempting pranksters to dial the number at, oh, say, 4:15 in the morning, to see how friendly Friendly Bob is then.

Comiskey Park is an archeological ruin of chipped cement, peeling paint and tender memories nestled in a humble neighborhood known as Bridgeport, where the occupants of row after row of evenly spaced red-brick dwellings include the Honorable Richard J. Daley, political kingpin, mayor of Da City of Chicaggah and baseball fan of the first order. It is he who approves the touching off of the city’s air-raid sirens at the moment his beloved White Sox clinch the pennant, sending thousands of his constituents fleeing toward their fallout shelters in a panic.

Yet this is a very good year, 1959. Forty calendars have been unstuck from the kitchen thumb tack since that no-good rat of a gambler Arnold Rothstein put in the fix and persuaded Eddie Cicotte, Chick Gandil and several gullible others (but no, not Shoeless Joe!) to deliberately bumble and stumble their way through the World Series, restoring gloom to a town still feeling the aftermath of the First World War. It will necessitate the appointment of a stern commissioner and many washtubs of bleach (probably Clorox) to remove the black stain from the city’s Sox.

And suffer ye the children.

An innocent babe of ’59 will know little of baseball lore. Someone much older must eventually inform him that, even with two chances every season, no ballclub representing Chicago has been able to win a World Series since 1917, when there were no such things as expressways, television or night baseball. Forty-two summers of failure, during which visiting clubs from the Coast--there was only one Coast back then--rode into town in Pullman berths with such passengers as Cobb, Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Williams, Feller and Mantle, all of whom made the poor, moth-eaten Pale Hose pale by comparison.

Oh, and that’s another thing. Nobody, and this means nobody, who has ever called Chicago home has ever, ever, ever uttered aloud those vile words Pale Hose or Chisox, which were creations of periodical headline writers, undoubtedly from the Sporting News, found repulsive by everyone who had to endure enough indignity simply by being partial to the White Sox themselves. Next person who uses either of these odious phrases about your Sox, make him sniff yours.

And then, glory, glory, hallelujah. Success at last.

They put this nimble little Venezuelan acrobat named Luis Aparicio at shortstop and partnered him with one Nelson Fox, a human chaw of tobacco with legs, in what the bubble-gummers in those days called a “keystone combo.” Then put the old fire horse, Sherm Lollar, behind the plate and assigned center field to history’s least appreciated player, the great Jim Landis, who was Willie Mays without the bat.

And they won. They ran like the wind of the city, from which the nickname “Go-Go Sox” was born, and played deftly afield. As hitters, punch was somewhat lacking, but at the heart of the order stood a man, Ted Kluszewski, with a steelworker’s build and his sleeves rolled up to his shoulder blades. When a local auto dealer, “Jim Moran the Courtesy Man,” offered a free Ford to any player from the Sox who parked a home run during the World Series, he soon handed the keys of three of these vehicles to Big Klu.

Against a visiting team from faraway Los Angeles, wherever the heck that was, that only recently had come dressed to a World Series at Yankee Stadium in costumes identifying themselves as from Brooklyn, the home nine had a ball in Comiskey’s first postseason game in 40 years. Early Wynn whipped up an eight-hit shutout and Klu klobbered two. The final score was 11-0 and there was no reason to believe the White Sox would not be heavyweight baseball champions of the world.

Then came Game 2 and Johnny Podres over Bob Shaw in a nail-biter, 4-3. Then came Game 3 and Don Drysdale over Dick Donovan in the gunfight of the Double D corral, 3-1. Then a Game 4 that came down to relief pitchers, Larry Sherry over Gerry Staley, 5-4, and suddenly the Sox were at death’s door. Somehow, 92,706 humans got tickets for a baseball game at the L.A. Coliseum, where only a circus catch by “Jungle Jim” Rivera saved the hides of the Sox against the five-hit trickery of Sandy Koufax, 1-0.

But it was too late. The return to Comiskey was a mere formality. Wynn didn’t have it, the Dodgers scored six in the fourth and the White Sox had been beaten by some city that many of them had never even previously visited.

It was a hard thing to swallow, but then again, there would always be tomorrow, and there would always be other opportunities for the Chicago White Sox to win a championship, maybe a year later, or maybe several years later, or maybe 34 years later, when the children of Chicago were still sitting in front of their television sets, waiting.