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player ready...Walter “Lefty” Herald has good days and bad days in his fight against colon cancer.
“His bad days are when the Cubs lose,” says daughter Joan Miller, the third of his 10 children.
Herald, 74, a one-time Cubs minor-leaguer, has used a wheelchair for nearly two years. Radiation, chemotherapy and surgery weakened him considerably but did little to slow his cancer. In the spring his family began preparing for the worst.
“He was hospitalized with an infection and was very disoriented,” says daughter Anne Zatorski. “It was scary.”
Herald survived the infection, and then a funny thing happened. The Cubs became one of the surprise teams in baseball, shooting to the top of the NL Central, and suddenly Herald didn’t seem so tired. He seemed energized, in fact.
“He realizes he’s not going to be around that much longer, so he’s enjoying every moment that he is around,” Miller says. “He’s more talkative and in better spirits. The Cubs are very uplifting to him. It excites him completely.”
“I don’t think I’ve missed a pitch,” Herald says. “It’s just been fun. It doesn’t put a nickel in your pocket, but the enthusiasm that you have as you’re watching them . . . I love it.”
Herald has had a seat on the Cubs’ bandwagon most of his life. A native of the South Side, he remembers lying on the living room floor with his father, Walter Sr., himself a one-time minor-leaguer, listening to Cubs radio broadcasts in the ’30s.
Throughout his youth he played 16-inch softball, developing a reputation as a fearsome hitter. Tall for his age on his way to 6 feet, he was snapped up by a men’s team at 13.
“Here I was playing against guys 30, 35 years old,” Herald says. “I thought I was the king.”
He never played hardball until he went to Japan with the Army at the end of World War II. He tried out for–and made–his division’s baseball team, which allowed him to hang up his spoons and spatula after six months as a cook.
Listening through static to the Cubs play in the 1945 World Series from half a world away, Herald couldn’t have dreamed that he’d sign with the Cubs the following year.
A big left-handed hitter, he caught the eye of a Cubs scout while playing a game against prison inmates in Joliet. He was invited to a tryout for the Cubs’ Class D team in Centralia with 34 other players and was one of two survivors.
One of his fondest memories of his time in southern Illinois came when the major-league Cubs stopped to play Centralia on their way back to Chicago from spring training. Herald remembers approaching Cubs center fielder Andy Pafko.
“I was cocky,” Herald says with a laugh. “I said, `Hey, Andy, you’re going to have to learn to play right field. Center field is mine.’ He said, `Yeah, sure kid.'”
Herald was 21 and having the time of his life. He was ripping the cover off the ball, making $165 a month and sharing a big, old house with seven teammates.
“Never a dull moment,” he says.
It all ended abruptly, however, the day Herald took a fastball to the head.
“We didn’t have helmets then,” he says. “It bounced right off my head and I was down and out.”
The concussion knocked Herald out of the lineup for three days. When he returned he was crippled by the fear of getting beaned again. His baseball career was effectively over.
In 1949 he was offered a tryout with the St. Louis Browns, but newly married with the first of his children on the way, he chose to take a machinist’s apprenticeship at U.S. Steel on the South Side.
He loved the work but the 3-11 p.m. shift interfered with softball, so after six years he quit and embarked on a 35-year career selling life insurance.
He played softball five nights a week for years. He still had some pop in his bat at 50, when he joined his son Danny’s team in an industrial league.
“This man in the stands said, `The only player on that team is the old guy,'” says Rosemary, Herald’s wife of 51 years.
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When his sons were ready for baseball Herald jumped at the chance to coach. He did it for 12 years in his adopted hometown of Calumet City, from Catholic Youth Organization through Connie Mack.
“I felt sorry for some of these kids. A lot of them didn’t know anything about baseball,” he says. “To watch these kids progress over two, three years, it was just a thrill.”
Now Herald’s thrills come from time with his 27 grandchildren, his Monday night pinochle game with his five sons and watching the Cubs.
With Steve Stone gone from the booth, Herald watches the games in silence–sort of.
“It’s like he’s the manager,” Miller says. “He’ll sit there and analyze the game, tell you what they should be doing.”
He arranges his sleeping schedule around Cubs telecasts. For a West Coast game, when he’ll be up past midnight, he takes “a nice long nap” during the day. Does he ever nod off during a game?
“He dozes off during everything else,” Rosemary says. “But not the Cubs.”
Herald’s zeal for the Cubs has the whole family into baseball.
“The Cubs are a big, big part of his life right now,” Zatorski says. “I don’t even care about the Cubs. I just want them to win because I want them to win for him, for my dad.”