Local Chicago Cubs Fans Remember Baseball at its Finest

Chicago Cubs fans from the Heights and Homewood spent a recent Thursday evening in the basement of the Chicago Heights Public Library. 

Author Charles Billington visited the library to talk about his book, Wrigley Field's Last World Series: The Wartime Chicago Cubs and the Pennant of 1945, but the discussion ventured into the history of America's past time and what the game "used to be."

"I get a lot of older gentlemen who remember this era as the time in which they grew up and fell in love with baseball," Billington said.

One of those gentlemen was Bob Silverman, a Homewood resident excited to hear Billington talk about the Cubs he remembered.

“I saw those Cubs play!" Silverman exclaimed. "Both in Chicago, and, I was stationed in the Army on the East Coast. I saw the Cubs play in New York, Brooklyn, against the Dodgers and the New York Giants. I remember a lot of those players and those names. It seems like it was yesterday.”

Silverman said he even has a special connection to the most successful Cubs team of the 20th century.

"My father was a batboy for the Cubs in 1907 and 1908, the last time they ever won a World Series," Silverman said. His father, Milton Silverman, was only 13 when he sat in the Cubs' dugout and watch history unfold.

Billington, a license geriatrician with a background in mental health and senior care, said he has been drawn to baseball since his days of playing the sport for St. Olaf College in Minnesota.

"It’s kind of America’s secular religion for those that follow it," Billington explained. "A baseball season follows three seasons of the year. There’s a growing of the crops with the spring training. There’s the actual season in which you develop during the year. Then there’s the harvest if they’re good enough to get in the playoffs."

But why the focus on the 1945 Cubs? The author said it was the great snapshot of baseball's connection to American culture.

"Baseball was the premiere sport at the time," he said. "Its budget in the 1940s was approximately 15 times the budget of the National Football League. The National Basketball Association didn’t exist until ’46 or ’47, and the National Hockey League was essentially the equivalent of arena football today."

But Billington said he also admires the unifying qualities ot the sport, delving into the racial separations that normally kept the United States divided in the first half of the 20th century.

"The thing that kind of equalized baseball for America is the fact that it was the one melting-pot recreational activity," Billington said. "If you needed a second baseman and had eight guys, it didn’t matter if the guy who could play second was from Lithuania or Poland or Kenya or France or Russia."

During Billington's talk, it was immediately clear everyone in the room was a Cubs fan, and discussions about the teams of yesteryear were constant, as well as anger about the Cubs 9-1 loss against the Cardinals that night.

Asked to note the most surprising truth about baseball in the old days, Billington said it related to money and not stats.

"There’s a myth that baseball used to be this little tiny cottage sport, that nobody got paid anything," Billington said. "You might hear some of the old announcers say, ‘Oh, in our day we played for peanuts.’ They were very well paid. Some of them did very well money-wise."

Regardless of the income, everyone in the room had a fondness for names long gone, and an evolving sport.