Though they trailed the New York Mets early in the National League Championships Series, two Buffalo Grove devotees were still hoping that this October run could still be the Chicago Cubs’ elusive “next season.”
It’s an understatement to say Al Boime — a North Side devotee for 86 of his 89 years — is eagerly awaiting 2015’s outcome.
A child of the Great Depression, Boime bought into the Cubs despite the fact that his family could not afford a ticket to Wrigley Field.
“They’re like a magnet,” he said. “It’s the only way I can explain it.”
With the ultimate prize tenuously within reach for championship-starved Cubs’ fans, 69-year-old Arlene Kabb’s personal dream won’t come this season, or in any of the young team’s future campaigns. Her lifelong dream involved the late Cubs legend Ernie Banks.
As a girl, Kabb and her friends were all swept away by the powerful North Side teams of the 1960s, clubs stacked with Hall of Famers Fergie Jenkins, Ron Santo, Billy Williams and Mr. Cub himself, Ernie Banks. Those squads were never able to win a pennant, but to Kabb, they represented a connection to her father, and one thing in particular that she hoped for.
“The opportunity never came. And so many people tried,” Kabb said of a grassroots movement to get her to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” with Banks during the seventh inning stretch at Wrigley.
Arlene and Ernie
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“I’m crazed,” Kabb boasted. “Sometimes my kids are embarrassed to go (to games) with me.”
But her youngest daughter, Julie, took her to the Oct. 12 playoff game against the Cardinals, allowing Kabb to witness the Cubs’ six-homer spectacle.
She admits that she has been a fanatic since the days when she and her girlfriends — residents of Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood in their youth —would dash out of Sullivan High School, hop on the Red Line at the Morse Avenue station and head to Clark and Addison.
“We used to wait by the locker room for the players to come out,” she said. “I was loony.”
They brought big signs with them, and a few times drew WGN’s cameras, she said. Kabb said she was an occasional feature of the “Fan in the Stands” in-game interview.
When she wasn’t spending afternoons at Wrigley, Kabb worked for 27 years as the secretary at Buffalo Grove’s Twin Groves Middle School. Betsy Fresen, the public information coordinator for Kildeer-Countryside Elementary District 96, said her “devotion to the Cubs is legend.”
“Arlene Kabb is the proudest Cub fan I know,” Fresen said in an email.
All that pride stems from the man who taught Kabb to cheer for the Cubs —Dave Bluda, Kabb’s father. And it all leads to one player — Ernie Banks — and a wish that was even bigger than the hope of a World Series win.
“That was the last link to my dad,” she said.
The unreachable stretch
While Kabb was married and raising her children in the mid-1970s, the then-retired Banks made autograph appearances at gas stations, grocery stores and, fittingly, banks.
More than any other player from those 1960s teams, Banks was the Cub who reminded Kabb of her father, and all the afternoons they spent together at Wrigley Field. One day, Kabb heard that the Hall of Fame infielder would be signing at a nearby bank. She grabbed her kids and the family camera and went to see him.
She took photos of both of her boys with Banks, and got her own photo with him.
For decades to come, every time she attended the Opening Day game, she wore her picture with Mr. Cub as a necklace. And a dream was born from those afternoons.
As Kabb’s 60th birthday approached, teachers at Twin Groves asked their long-time secretary what she wanted as a gift. She spilled her dream to them: Kabb wanted to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field, with Banks.
It was a tall order as both the Cubs and Banks were likely flooded with similar requests. On a mission to fulfill their secretary’s birthday wish, every teacher in the school instructed their students to write a letter to Banks.
Banks received 627 such letters, Kabb recalled, and he “called the school in amazement.”
Banks called Kabb on her birthday, and sent an autographed ball and photo. Kabb was thrilled to get a call from Mr. Cub — even though it was not quite her wish.
She would get more phone calls from Banks over the years. One of Kabb’s friends spotted him at O’Hare International Airport, and convinced him to call her again. Another friend met him at a spring training game, and convinced him to call Kabb once more. They began to exchange birthday cards annually.
But she held out the hope for next season. Maybe both Banks and the Cubs would have an opening in their schedules. But by the end of the 2014 campaign, Kabb knew that her pen pal’s health was failing.
On Jan. 23, Kabb was on vacation in Florida when her phone lit up with texts, emails and Facebook posts, from friends and colleagues, offering condolences to the biggest Banks fan they knew. Mr. Cub died of a heart attack at age 83.
“I felt like we were friends,” Kabb said. “Kind of, anyway.”
And though her lofty dream is gone, she got a glimpse of it last week. She was at Wrigley Field during the Cubs’ 8-6 defeat of the Cardinals on Oct. 12. For that night’s seventh-inning stretch, the organization played on its video board a years-old recording of Banks singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
At last, there they were. Kabb was at Wrigley Field, singing to the crowd along with Banks — the player who reconnected her to her father, and the days they spent in that stadium. She wept.
“My allegiance will always be to the Chicago Cubs,” she said.
Al and Dorothy
Al Boime grew up on Chicago’s West Side, ina neighborhood that had belonged to the Cubs in the days before Wrigley Field. By 1929, though, it was a baseball battleground.
“You could go for either team, but I was always a Cubs fan,” he said.
What brought him to Cubbie blue was the 1929 World Series. At age 3, he said he was old enough to listen to the World Series on the radio and get a grasp of what was going on.
The North Siders were playing the Philadelphia Athletics, and held an eight-run lead in Game 4, until a fly ball lost in the sun led to a three-run inside-the-park homer, which fed a shocking collapse. This was 16 years before Billy Sianis brought his goat to the 1945 World Series — no one called the Cubs “cursed” in 1929.
“By ’35, I was older —I was 9, and I could follow the game a lot better,” he said.
That summer, he followed a 21-game winning streak, another National League pennant, and another World Series loss. No one could have foreseen the decades of misery that were to come. Boime had grown up cheering for one of baseball’s most respected franchises.
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This fall’s victory over the club from St. Louis was satisfying to the clan that Al and his wife, Dorothy, have raised. He smiled as he spoke about his grandson, Matthew, who has taught his 2-year-old great-grandson, Jacob, a fun trick.
“Whenever anyone mentions St. Louis, he says, ‘Boo, St. Louis!'” the patriarch explained.
He talked about the National League Championship Series, and watching it on his couch, inside Buffalo Grove’s Belmont Village retirement community, with Dorothy. Even if his team is eliminated, Boime said he is making fresh new memories, just like the postseasons of 1929 and 1935.
Boime has never rooted harder for his team as it’s unknown how many more postseason runs he and his wife will be able to watch together.
Personal victories
On Oct. 14, Boime experienced a come-from-behind victory of his own: he walked up seven steps. He said it had been years since he made it up a flight of stairs on his own, but that day, he was out with his oldest daughter, Susan, and feeling like his two back surgeries were long gone.
More than anything else, Boime’s persistent back problems and a series of falls were what motivated he and Dorothy to move into the retirement community. With Al’s back problems and Dorothy dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, it became too dangerous for the couple to stay alone in their home. They moved to Belmont Village earlier this year.
Al’s health is improving, but Dorothy’s battle with Alzheimer’s has been more difficult to treat.
“Yesterday, that was the first time in a couple of years that I went up steps,” Al said. “But she doesn’t know anything about it.”
Nor could he share with her his joy in the Cubs’ unexpectedly strong season.
“She is deteriorating so fast,” he said. “She doesn’t know what’s going on.”
Boime, who has seen strong Cubs squads stumble before, wonders what fate holds for this promising, young squad.
“How many years do I logically have left?” he asked. “They went 107 years as it was, and from ’45 to now … that’s 70 years. I would like to be able to think to myself that I finally got to see another World Series, and hopefully a win. I could say, for however long I have, ‘I finally saw them win a World Series.'”
But what if he could see it with Dorothy at his side?
“It would mean a lot,” Al Boime said.
Twitter @RonnieAtPioneer