Sex! Lots of sex! (your attention?)

Below is another sports article when publications started offering me real money. I do well with Chicago sport pieces, eh? Maybe because I was a Chicago Honeybear then Luvabull. Seriously, I felt the pulsing energy of Chicago fans at those venues.

Do you think life is pre determined or do you think we pave our own way?

Better Than A Night At Wrigley Field
By Sheila Cull
July 2005

REVIEW: Wrigley Field’s Last World Series: The Wartime Chicago Cubs and the Pennant of 1945. Written by Charles N. Billington.

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It's 1945. Baseball really is the favorite, the greatest and the All-American Pastime. And in 1945, America can celebrate again as it begins to walk away from the ever-pervasive depression of World War ll.

The Chicago Cubs vs. Detroit for the World Series title. Loyal Cubs fans in an intense pennant race are delivered a seed of hope: The infamous pet goat is rejected before Game 5.

Cubs lose.

Sixty years later, on a sweltering summer evening -- Friday June 24, 2005 at Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel -- Charles N. Billington signs his book about Wrigley Field’s Last World Series, one that was inspired by Chicago’s elderly -- senior citizens who remember.

I walk into a picturesque room, reminiscent of what it used to be like at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, and I am greeted by that old song from the 1940’s: “I’ve got rhythm, I’ve got music … who could ask for anything more?”

As I look around, people are enjoying Vienna beef hot dogs from an old fashioned hot-dog vendor. They’re drinking beer, throwing popcorn into open mouths, cracking peanut shells and chilling out in an area that looks like bleacher seating, flipping through pages of Billington’s book, smiling, and talking baseball.

The charming, antiquated Edgewater Beach Hotel -- at 5555 N. Sheridan in Chicago -- and baseball history reach back in time along parallel lines. On a round table sat photos of old time baseball players at Edgewater Beach in the 30’s and 40’s; like a 1932 Chicago Tribune picture of Babe Ruth, relaxing in a room at Edgewater while in town for the 1932 World Series.

Author Charles N. Billington, a longtime Chicago resident, is a baseball historian. He played baseball at the collegiate level and holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Illinois in Chicago as a licensed clinical social worker. His close contact with senior citizens, two of them former baseball players, gives his account a special sweetness.

Meshing his interest in sports and history, he produced this nostalgic look back at the last time a World Series visited the “Friendly Confines,” and will serve as a worthy primer for what the Cubbies faithful hope will be a return engagement.

One of the manuscript’s many highlights is a foreword by Andy Pafko, a 1945 Chicago Cubs outfielder, who later gained baseball immortality watching the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” sail over his head as the Giants Bobby Thomson’s home run doomed the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Billington’s Wrigley Field’s Last World Series: The Wartime Chicago Cubs and the Pennant of 1945 is 321 pages long, and a page-turner. The book features 25 historic photos, statistics, analysis, bibliography and index. Published by Lake Claremont Press, it is available at online bookstores, at Chicago bookstores, and from the publisher directly at a cost of $16.95. Lake Claremont Press can be reached at (773) 583-7877 or lcp@lakeclaremont.com.

Having the chance to learn first hand from Charles Billington about the storied Cubs of yesteryear and the significance of the Edgewater Beach Hotel, I felt the beating hearts of Cubs fans present and past. And it felt exhilarating. And since the heat index was 101 degrees in Chicago that night, for me it was better than a night in the park.

-SFM-

Sheila Cull is a writer based in Chicago.