A Happy 100th Birthday

             My father would have turned 100 today.  He died in December of 2000, when Clare was in third grade.

            I don’t know of anyone who worked harder than Ed Bukowski.  He dropped out of school in seventh grade to help his mother with the mortgage on their new bungalow (where I grew up, though my grandmother had moved back to the old neighborhood of Bridgeport long before).  He spent the 1930s working the assembly line at the Ford Torrence Avenue plant before joining the Chicago Fire Department in 1943.  Where other men stormed the beaches at Normandy, my father spent 35 years fighting fires in and around the South Side.

            The Fire Department employs a 24-shift, one day on followed by two days off.  This set-up allowed for something called “hobby jobs,” though with three kids, my father found it to be more of a necessity.  Periodically, his schedule meant working 13 straight days between both jobs, at the firehouse and Wesco Spring, where he drove a delivery truck and pitched in to help keep the machines spitting out metal springs for whatnot purpose.  As I said earlier, he came home too tired to play any catch.  But he made sure I grew up a White Sox fan.  Bill Veeck wrote, "If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan freed a man from any other form of penance."  My father must have wanted me to experience the absolution afforded at 35th and Shields.    

            He took me to my first game on June 15, 1962, Sox vs. Angels; I was the only kid in a group of workers from Wesco.  We had what were called loge seats, in the upper deck right along the first base line and close to the railing.  You have to understand that the upper deck at Comiskey Park didn’t occupy the stratosphere as it does at the Cell; those obstructed-view causing posts also made it possible to have the upper deck virtually hover over the field.  Yes, it did feel like I was at church, in part because architect Zachary Taylor Davis also designed churches, which could explain the arches that circled the park; they could have passed for stained-glass windows, sans glass.  The Sox won, 7-6.

            The first major-league ballplayer I ever laid eyes on was Angels’ outfielder Albie Pearson.  He stood all of 5’5”, one inch shorter than Clare.  As to anyone who stood taller than my father, I can’t think of a name.