Every August, I celebrate two dates that are meaningful in my personal history.
The greatest, most exciting moment of my sports fandom life occurred on August 19, 1969. My sister and her then-husband took me and their kids to the Cubs game at Wrigley Field. I’d been staying with my sister’s family that August because Riis Park day camp was finished and my mother, who worked at the local dime store, was afraid I might burn down the house if I were left alone. The Cubs had just come back to town from a successful road trip. They were far out in front in their division, 31 games over .500. The whole city was ecstatic. Everyone knew — knew — the Cubs were headed toward their first World Series since World War II. I actually had a six-inch-diameter Cubbie pin (see a pic of me wearing it in 2016 in the gallery below):
The gang of us were just about the last people in the ballpark that day. The place was packed. The only seats we could find were high up in the centerfield bleachers, underneath the scoreboard. Wrigley was rockin’. The sun was shining and Kenny Holtzman was on the mound. He actually lived just across the Little League diamonds from my sister in Schiller Park, near O’Hare Airport. He had a white Pontiac convertible. Every time we saw it in his apartment building parking lot, we loitered around it in hopes he’d come out and invite us to come inside and become his best friends. And, of course, Ron Santo was a fixture at third base, the best third baseman in the National league and proprietor of his eponymous pizza parlor in Park Ridge. Santo hit a first inning home run with a couple of guys on base and that’s all the Cubs needed that day as Holtzman pitched a no-hitter. After the last out, fans jumped over the bleacher walls and stormed the field. The Cubs mobbed Holtzman as if they’d just won the final game of the World Series (which we all knew — knew — they were going to do that year). I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
The other date, actually a week of dates, was August 26-29, 1968. The Democrats came to town that week to nominate Hubert H. Humphrey as their candidate for president. He’d go up against the Republican Richard M. Nixon, whom we all knew was a punchline. Bobby Kennedy had been killed nearly three months before but, damn it, we were still gonna win the election. And we were all still mourning the death in early April of Martin Luther King, Jr. Nevertheless, the good guys would win. We knew — knew — it. Who’d be loopy enough to vote for Tricky Dick?
Only the SDS, led by Tom Hayden; the Yippies, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin; the Mobe (National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), led by David Dellinger; and many others converged on the city to protest the godforsaken, idiotic war in Southeast Asia. Mayor Richard J. Daley was panicky. He wasn’t about to let the city be taken over by long-haired, commie, radical, beatnik, drug-taking, sex-enjoying hippie-dippie punks. His cops already had beaten the hell out of peaceful anti-war protesters one April Saturday afternoon in the Loop and they were itching to break more heads. The National Guard backed them up with fixed bayonets attached to their loaded rifles. This time, the world’s television cameras caught all the action. It would be labeled a “police riot” by the Walker Report.
Both August events in successive years when I was 12 and 13 helped form the adult me. The Cubs in ’69, immediately after Holtzman’s no-hitter, would go into a swoon and lose to the heretofore risible Mets. That taught me all joy was fleeting and disappointment was something I not only needed to prepare for, I had to learn how to accept it and move on. The convention and the protests in ’68 radicalized me. I came to detest The Man and always identify with the rebels, the outsiders, the ones who risked life and limb to raise hell against those in power. That lesson is coming in awfully handy now, in the year 2025.
August, when I was a kid, was always the last month of summer vacation. Except for me, for two formative years of my life, it was the month of my schooling.
