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With his team in the World Series, Don DeBat reflects on his 60-year career as a Chicago Cubs fan.
Whether the Cubs win or lose the World Series, tens of thousands of long-suffering Chicago baseball fans still have visions of a championship dancing in our heads. Now is the time to reminisce about a dream come true – reaching the World Series – and not the joy of winning or the disaster of losing. Recently, Gil Muratori, a Hall of Fame Chicago 16-inch softball player who starred for the Big Banjo Bruins in the 1960s and 1970s, and once played for Royko’s Ringers, the famed columnist’s “A” squad, sent this writer the following email…
Like Gil, this writer has been a Cubs fan for more than six decades. I started watching the Cubs in 1954 on black-and-white TV with Jack “Hey, Hey” Brickhouse announcing, but didn’t see my first Cubs game in person until 1956. However, I have been rooting for the Cubs since 1950 when I fielded my first ground ball in the cobblestone alley behind my father’s Halsted Street three-flat in Old Town. Here are some of my fondest Cubs and childhood baseball memories while growing up in Old Town… Maxwell Street mitts My mother, Marie DeBat, who worked as a waitress at Roosevelt Cafeteria on Halsted Street & Roosevelt Road, noticed my early love of baseball and in 1953 purchased a well-worn first baseman’s mitt on Maxwell Street for 50 cents. The next day, my best friend, Rick Kallao, and I were fielding tennis ball grounders on a smooth asphalt patch under the CTA elevated train tracks on Halsted, just north of North Avenue. By the end of summer, I owned a half dozen old gloves purchased for pennies on Maxwell Street and outfitted every kid on the block who didn’t own one.
My first real hardball games were played at age 10 or 11 on weekends in the vacant Midwest Coil’s asphalt-paved parking lot at 1650 North Halsted Street, the site now occupied by Steppenwolf Theater. The games were organized by baseball mentor, coach, and neighborhood hero, Howie “Digger” O’Dell, a young teen who dreamed of playing for Lane Tech High School and even the Cubs. I remember hitting a long one off the factory garage wall and sliding into a cardboard third base and feeling the pain of a deeply skinned knee. The ball also took a pounding. Soon, we knocked the leather cover off the sphere, and it was wrapped in white adhesive tape to prolong its life. Then, there were the summer pickup baseball games in the late 1950s and early 1960s. O’Dell fashioned bases from burlap potato sacks stuffed with rags and dusted with flour. We strung baseball gloves and bats on the handle bars of our bikes and headed to Lincoln Park. The Halsted Street guys – O’Dell, Kallao, Dan Herald, Jim Duffy, and I – would battle the Dayton Street crowd led by Bob Getner and Bob “Desi” Gribbon. All the neighborhood kids were remarkably gifted athletes. Later, fleet-footed Duffy excelled as a running back and punter at Lane Tech. If we couldn’t play on a real diamond, we laid one out in the grass and used a tipped-over picnic table as a back stop. I remember catching batting practice without a catcher’s mask, and suffering a broken nose from a stray foul ball. When I came home with black eyes and a bloody nose, my father said, “Kid, you ruined your looks.” Fast pitch in the school yard In the late 1950s, I learned to throw a curve ball, a two-seam fastball, a sinker, and a knuckle ball while playing fast pitch with a rubber baseball in the Newberry Elementary School playground. A rectangular box outlining the strike zone – from arm pits to knees – was marked in white chalk on the wall of the school. In those days, each player would choose his favorite major league team and rules required you to submit a lineup and bat righty or lefty, depending on how the real player batted. One summer evening, Waller High School pitching phenom, the beefy Dennis Raffalli, was tossing a no-hitter. This writer broke it up with a lucky check-swing line-drive double into Newberry’s right field corner. The no-hitter On May 15, 1960, I paid 75 cents to witness the Don Cardwell no-hitter verses the St. Louis Cardinals and saw Walt “Moose” Moryn make a diving, sliding catch in left field to save the game. Lefty Joe Cunningham hit the slicing line drive and Moose made the catch of his life. Back then, this writer was a skinny, 150-pound 15-year-old sitting in the first row of the left field bleachers. I almost caught a home run ball by Cardinal third baseman Ken Boyer in the second game of that double header, but some greedy old, fat guy wrestled the ball away from me. He snatched the ball out of my glove and stuffed it into his shirt. Today, Cubs bleacher bums would toss Boyer’s homer back. Cubs dream fulfilled My biggest Cubs thrill occurred in May 1976 when Tim Weigel, the Channel 5 sports reporter and my Chicago Daily News softball buddy, asked me to appear on Sporting Chance to take batting practice at Wrigley Field.
Earlier, a TV viewer wrote in to ask Sporting Chance if he could take swings at Wrigley, but the guy failed to perform in his tryout, so Weigel called me at the last minute to fill in. I asked my pal and University of Missouri Journalism School roommate, Don “Garbo” Garbarino, to join me. We arrived at Wrigley Field at about 11 a.m., before a 1:30 p.m. game. I brought spikes and my bat, a 35-inch Ted Williams Louisville Slugger model. The stands would soon fill up with Cubs fans. I knew I only had a few minutes to live out a childhood dream, so I slipped on my spikes and dug in at the batter’s box. The batting practice pitcher tossed about 30 pitches for me to hit. He was throwing about 60-70 miles an hour and laying them in. The wind was blowing in over the scoreboard. I swung at every one, and lined 10-12 singles to left field. Then, finally on the last pitch, I swung hard on an inside fastball and lofted a long, well-hit ball that carried to the warning track on a fly and bounced off the yellow 368-foot sign nestled in the left center field vines. It was a major-league double!
Garbo Don “Garbo” Garbarino, a more gifted long-ball hitter and softball player than I, also was supposed to get some swings, but after my performance, Marshall wisely decided the slumping Cubs needed extra batting practice that day, and ended the event. That always bothered me. I knew Garbo, at 38 years of age, would have put one on the left field catwalk that day. He was at the peak of his 16-inch softball career. In 1974, Garbo, a star left fielder and former Stars & Stripes sports writer, led Mike Royko’s Chicago Daily News team in homers as the squad won the championship versus Chicago Today in the Media Softball League. Later, he played on my Vintage Risk softball team into the late 1980s. Garbo was still hammering homers at age 50, until a shoulder injury ended his career. Garbo, who also starred on the Catholic Youth Organization championship Angels softball team with Muratori in the 1950s, will turn 80 years old in early 2017. For Don Garbarino, Gil Muratori, this writer, and thousands of vintage, die-hard Cub fans, watching their heroes compete in the World Series – win or lose – is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
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