The long-suffering Cubs fan is a cliche; in fact, there’s a certain perverse glory in being one. But what glory does Richard Lindberg garner for his lifelong love affair with the White Sox?
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One person who didn’t conform was Lindberg; for a thousand reasons apparent only to his peers at Onahan Elementary School, he became their whipping boy. “I had a really rough time growing up in that school,” he says. “I went through eight years of living hell.” His childhood torments might explain his enduring love for the Pale Hose. All his friends wanted to take the bus to Wrigley Field, but when Lindberg suggested traveling south to see the Sox, he was met with derisive snorts. “The parents of the kids said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to go down there, that’s where all the Negroes live!’”
So one day Lindberg convinced his mother to accompany him and his best friend to Comiskey Park on the bus. “We took the Foster Avenue bus to Western Avenue, the Western Avenue bus to 35th Street, and by the time we got to the park it was about a two-and-a-half-hour ride. I was so excited, so thrilled to see the Sox, that I got sick on the bus. I was 11 years old, and it was my first White Sox game–June 20th, 1964–against the Yankees. I still have the ticket stub and the scorecard.” From then on, Lindberg was hooked. In high school he would travel alone on the bus to take in weekend games at Comiskey. “At each phase of my life they were very important to me.”
“He peers over his glasses and says, ‘Are you tryin’ to hustle me, kid?’ It literally had the effect of slicing me in two. I just stepped back; when one of your heroes says something like that, it deflates you.” Lindberg notes how Veeck snubbed cow-town journalists during the White Sox play-off series in 1983, gutted the Sox farm system after the team won the 1959 American League championship, and committed a hundred other real and imagined sins.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Richard Lindberg photo by Peter Barreras.
