Wrigley Field has been in the news lately, with the goofy college football game they played there this weekend, and since the Rangers news has been a quiet murmur for the past few days, I thought I'd share about my only trip to Wrigley in Chicago.
When I was a freshman at East Texas Baptist University in the Spring of 2001, we took a Spring Break mission trip to Chicago to help out a new church plant on the north side of town. We took a bus from Marshall, Texas to Chicago, which took about 16 hours, just stopping for gas and potty breaks. We got there on St. Patrick's Day, or maybe the day after, and the Chicago River was still green downtown, and there was a remnant of the recent snowfall still around. It was very pretty.
For a week we spent half of our days doing work for the church, like prayer walking, door-to-door surveying, and sprucing up the joint. With the other part of our days, we got to do things like go to the Sears Tower, Navy Pier, some of the museums, and one night we went to a debate at a mega-church nearby. However, a visit to Wrigley Field was noticably absent from the docket.
I asked our group leader if we could go one day, and he said we could if I could get enough people interested. Out of a bus full of people, I could only find one guy and his girlfriend who wanted to go. Some people actually made fun of me when I was asking others if they were interested in going. Are you kidding me!? How could I make a trip all this way and not be able to at least glance at Wrigley?
So on the night before our last full day in town, I asked our leader again if the three of us who wanted to go could skip out on the museum trip that was scheduled for the next morning and instead take the train out to Wrigley, as long as we were back when we were supposed to be and all stayed together the whole time. I don't think he was too thrilled with me badgering him about it again, but he relented and said it was alright with him.
The next morning, the rest of the group hopped the bus to some random museum, and the three of us went down to the elevated train station and rode it down to the Addison stop. We could see the stadium from the station platform. The neighborhood surrounding the stadium, known as Wrigleyville, was kind of funny. I remember there was a Taco Bell down the street that had a giant Cubs cap hanging from their sign, and there was a 7-Eleven almost across the street from Wrigley. There wasn't a gift shop open at the ballpark, but there was a shop down the street, so we went in and I bought a shirt and some other souvenirs.
There's a reason that when Cubs games are on national TV that they only show a few shots of the exterior of Wrigley, like the red sign above the home plate enterance, and the blue sign on the back of the scoreboard in center field. The exterior besides that is ugly. It is like if a team built a new stadium, and after they had completed the seating bowl, they ran out of money and did not build the external facade. There needs to be an outer shell on that thing, or something.
Anyhow, we went inside the small office near the home plate gate and asked if we could get inside for five minutes just to take a look around and snap off a few dozen pictures to show our friends. We'd heard that most of the time they don't have a problem letting out of town fans do such a thing, but since it was about two weeks until the Cubs came home from Arizona to start the season, they had crews working non-stop to revive the ballpark from hibernation and get it ready for the regular season. They didn't want us to get in the way, so they declined our request.
We were really bummed out. We decided we'd just take a walking lap around the stadium and take pictures of whatever we could. When we turned the corner and started walking behind the right field bleachers, the grounds crew had been going in and out of the field to the street on little John Deere ATVs. (You can see the door I'm talking about in the picture above, in the lower right corner.) We went to the gate and waited for one guy to come in or out, and when somebody did, we asked if it would be ok if we just looked inside for a minute to take some pictures since they wouldn't let us in earlier when we asked. The grounds crew guy said it would be alright, as long as we stayed on the sidewalk and didn't go inside. That was a fair deal for us, so he opened the door and we took as many pictures of the field and stands and press box as we could. We thanked him and he drove off.
As he drove away, we noticed that the ATVs were leaving trails of warning track dirt behind them on the sidewalk. We thought that would make an awesome prize to take home. So we went to the 7-Eleven across the street to get something to hold the dirt. I figured a little paper bag would work fine, so I bought a candy bar and some chap stick just so I could have the little brown paper lunch sack the cashier put my stuff in. I put the chap stick in my pocket and ate the candy bar on the way back to the ballpark, and we scooped up the warning track dirt with our hands and poured as much as we could in our paper bags. It was hard not to giggle.
I was wearing a big overcoat I had gotten for the trip, so I put the folded up bag of dirt in one of the pockets, and we went back to the train platform and took the train back to our meeting place to see the rest of our group. Nobody seemed very impressed with our treasure we had escaped with, but we were still thrilled.
When I got home from Chicago, and when I drove from Marshall back to Cleburne, I put the bag of warning track dirt in an old jar. It filled it up perfectly, and I put a Chicago Cubs sticker on the lid, so it would never get thrown out by somebody who didn't remember what it was. It's still sitting on the shelf in my room at my Mom and Dad's house, and the memory of that day is the most vivid of any from that trip.
I'm glad we didn't have to go to that museum instead.
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