Loyalties

The late Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens grew up in the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park, home to a certain prominent university.  Walk down 53^rd Street or Woodlawn Avenue, and you’re just as likely to pass a White Sox fan as a Nobel Prize winner and in the case of Barack Obama, both.

But not Stevens.  He said he became a Cubs’ fan in the 1920s because they were good and the Sox weren’t.  I’ll forgive Stevens his disloyalty to place on account of his never forsaking the North Siders once they turned bad.  I wonder, though, if Stevens ever bumped into another Hyde Parker by the name of Robert Merriam, who was 2-1/2 years older.

Robert was the son of Charles Merriam, and like his father, he would grow up to be a Chicago alderman and (unsuccessful) Republican candidate for mayor.  Doing research on Chicago politics, I ran across a letter the son wrote to his father in 1927.  The eight-year old reported that the Sox looked to be pretty good, and he was right.  They would go a season-high fourteen games over .500 by early June before fading to a 70-83 record.

Stevens eventually learned that being a fan entailed following a team through both good seasons and bad.  I imagine Robert Merriam and countless other Hyde Parkers knew that, too.