Road Trip

Summer is the best time for memories, of the scoreboard message about Clare’s homeruns or the cousins’ picnic Michele and I spent huddled under the roof of a picnic shelter listening on the radio to Tom Seaver win his 300^th game.  Summer is when you remember the old ballpark, the one with all the arches and how you tried to save it from the wrecking ball.

When that failed, I set out to write a book about Comiskey Park, which had to include something on the architect.  Zachary Taylor Davis designed Comiskey and the two Wrigleys (in Chicago and Los Angeles) as well as the Wrigley compound on Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California.  But Davis built better than he was remembered, and he left behind no collection of papers.  In those last years before the advent of the Internet, I had to go digging the old-fashioned way.

Obituaries, a property transfer, some correspondence and phone calls led me to Davis’ sole surviving child, 80 years old in that last season of Comiskey Park.  David Davis lived in South Have, Michigan, where I drove up to interview him one afternoon in late July of 1990.  Davis told me he never saw a ballgame with his father.

The younger Davis had dreamed of becoming a naval architect, as evidenced by all of the ship models he built from scratch.  Then the Depression got in the way and then life.  He had been living in South Haven—where the elder Davis took his family in the summer—for decades by the time I met him.  After our interview, he turned on the television to the Cubs’ game, the sound of Harry Caray’s voice following me back to the car.  It was a long drive home.

I wrote the book, after which we set about starting a family.  Robin Ventura was a rookie third baseman that last summer of Comiskey Park.