Bookish

You can never have too many books, I always say. Especially if they’re about the White Sox. For a while, I’ve wanted The Go-Go Chicago White Sox by Tribune sportswriter Dave Condon, who also did the “In the Wake of the News” column. Growing up, I read Condon all the time, and every so often the byline belonged to his daughter, Barbara. If memory serves, she’d start off by saying she was twelve before moving on to the subject of the column that day. The thing is, the prose didn’t read like it belonged to a twelve-year old. Anyway, Condon wrote the Go-Go book in 1959, a time when Chicago could go crazy for teams other than the Bears. It was a history of the franchise that went up to the six-game heartbreak of the 1959 World Series loss to the Dodgers. Condon made sure to include the players before Nellie Fox and Luis Aparicio, like Smead Jolley, who once made three errors on a play, and Jackie Hayes, an infielder whose eye infection led to blindness. A fan should know these things and the players they happened to. I bought a copy on eBay last week; it cost all of $7, considerably less than other copies I’d seen for sale. The book arrived yesterday, along with a mystery: Where is Pretty Prairie High School, whose library had the book, carrying a Dewey Decimal number of 796.357? Why, Pretty Prairie, KS, of course. Located in south-central Kansas, Pretty Prairie is home to some 660 people, down 20 from an all-time high of 680 per the 2010 Census. No one seems to have taken the book out since 1964, which helps explain how it got to be deaccessioned. Pretty Prairie’s loss is my gain, thank you, very much. Among those he thanked in the dedication, Condon mentioned the “late Mrs. Grace Comiskey, who was and always will be baseball’s first lady.” Different times, perfect to recall on a snowy day in early December.