July 23, 2014 at 2:10 p.m.
From Portland to the Big Leagues (6/30/04)
Dear Reader
It was a package deal, and I’ll never know exactly what motivated my dad to sign up for it.
Maybe he was following the White Sox that season. Or maybe he just wanted to spend a little father-son time together.
Whatever the reason, he signed up for it.
Someone had put together a train-and-baseball package out of Fort Wayne.
And for kids, few things go together better than trains and baseball.
I’d been, I think, to one or two Major League games before, watching the Reds at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. But this was Chicago, and the White Sox were usually chasing the New York Yankees for the pennant.
Dad suggested I bring a friend along, so Don Starr, a buddy for as long as I can remember, joined us.
We left early on a Saturday morning and drove to Fort Wayne. There, joined by a bunch of other dads and kids (mostly sons), we boarded a Chicago-bound train.
It was the Penn Central as I recall, and its glory days were behind it.
Seats were threadbare. The train cars weren’t particularly clean. And the “dining car” was a place where you could buy an over-priced sack lunch to take back to your seat.
But it was a train, and none of that mattered to Don or me.
And when we rolled into Union Station, our jaws dropped. The train station in Fort Wayne had seemed big to us, but Union Station was enormous. It pulsed with the energy of Chicago, people and locomotives chugging in more directions than a couple of kids from Jay County could imagine.
The package deal group was shunted toward a bus, and after a short ride we climbed down to get our first glimpse of Comiskey Field. Then it was through the turnstile and through a maze to find our seats.
I’ll never forget the green of the grass, greener than any grass I’d ever seen before, as if lit from below to give it a magical radiance.
Who won? I have no idea, though I know the Yankees were in town.
But it made no difference, for as we rattled along the rails back to Fort Wayne and made the drive home to Portland, both Don and I knew something had changed. We’d been to the Big Leagues, and life would never be quite the same again.[[In-content Ad]]
Maybe he was following the White Sox that season. Or maybe he just wanted to spend a little father-son time together.
Whatever the reason, he signed up for it.
Someone had put together a train-and-baseball package out of Fort Wayne.
And for kids, few things go together better than trains and baseball.
I’d been, I think, to one or two Major League games before, watching the Reds at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. But this was Chicago, and the White Sox were usually chasing the New York Yankees for the pennant.
Dad suggested I bring a friend along, so Don Starr, a buddy for as long as I can remember, joined us.
We left early on a Saturday morning and drove to Fort Wayne. There, joined by a bunch of other dads and kids (mostly sons), we boarded a Chicago-bound train.
It was the Penn Central as I recall, and its glory days were behind it.
Seats were threadbare. The train cars weren’t particularly clean. And the “dining car” was a place where you could buy an over-priced sack lunch to take back to your seat.
But it was a train, and none of that mattered to Don or me.
And when we rolled into Union Station, our jaws dropped. The train station in Fort Wayne had seemed big to us, but Union Station was enormous. It pulsed with the energy of Chicago, people and locomotives chugging in more directions than a couple of kids from Jay County could imagine.
The package deal group was shunted toward a bus, and after a short ride we climbed down to get our first glimpse of Comiskey Field. Then it was through the turnstile and through a maze to find our seats.
I’ll never forget the green of the grass, greener than any grass I’d ever seen before, as if lit from below to give it a magical radiance.
Who won? I have no idea, though I know the Yankees were in town.
But it made no difference, for as we rattled along the rails back to Fort Wayne and made the drive home to Portland, both Don and I knew something had changed. We’d been to the Big Leagues, and life would never be quite the same again.[[In-content Ad]]
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