Indulge me to write about some of my feelings on the passing of the joyous Ernie Banks. The greatness of Ernie as a baseball player has been mentioned in other diaries. I want to write about his profound yet subtle impact on a generation of little white boys growing up in Chicagoland when Ernie was one of the greatest players in baseball.
I was born in 1951. My earliest memories stretch back to about the time my parents built a home in Joliet, IL in 1956. It was a typical post war suburb in that there were two, four or six kids or more in each house. In the age of redlining they were all white kids. (As a six or eight year old this was discrimination that I had no clue about or understanding of.) By the time we moved away in 1961, there were five boy occupying one bedroom in our house - middle class prosperity in those days.
I've come to believe Jackie Robinson was one of the most important Americans of the 20th Century. His breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball was profound. He did it with courage, humility and Hall of Fame athletic ability. Once he smashed through that barrier, it crumbled away in a few year’s time. Great players like Ernie Banks, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays quickly made it to the majors.
Ernie Banks was a superstar baseball player by the time my consciousness and ability to remember things clicked on in the mid 50s. He was as compelling a hero a little white boy could have. It didn’t matter what the color of his skin was but it was all about the color of his uniform - Cub blue.
Imagine a world with just a few channels of TV. That was the 50s. Growing up outside of Chicago we got WGN and that meant we got the Cubs. We got to watch the great Ernie Banks play and broadcaster Jack Brickhouse yell Hey! Hey! when Ernie knocked another one into the bleachers. That’s how the bonds to the Cubs and Ernie were forged and lessons on racial equality, while not taught were observed and absorbed into our little kid understanding of the way the world was. In our white subdivision I do not recall any adult or kid ever say a racially disparaging word about Ernie or any of the minority players who made it to the bigs.
It’s not that we didn’t have hate in our hearts - we did! We hated Mickey Mantle because he was a Yankee and if you lived in Chicagoland that’s who you were really brought up to hate! (How easy it is to warp the minds of children, eh New Yorkers?)
One clear string of nearly unending memories of my early years was that my neighborhood of little white boys played baseball in the summer - a lot of baseball. With the blocks we lived on teeming with kids we had no problem fielding nine man teams every day to play hardball. Our ball diamonds were lots on which homes had not yet been built. The bases were tires, bricks, chunks of concrete and boards (sometimes with nails in them).
Us Chicagoland kids all wanted to be Ernie Banks when we played. We dreamed of growing up to play with Ernie Banks. Ernie had this way of how he held the bat with his hands. He kind of drummed his fingers while he was waiting for a pitch and we all copied that.
Ernie was one of the most charismatic, charming and decent people you could watch on TV. The way he treated people had a profound impact on us. It was not just the kids I was playing with who experienced this new relationship with black athletes, but millions of little white boys playing baseball experienced this all across America. If it wasn't wanting to be Ernie Banks; it was to be Hank Aaron in Milwaukee or Boston; or Jackie Robinson in New York or LA; or Willie Mays in San Francisco or New York. An entire generation of white boys and their families accepted these athletes as our heroes without question. I think this had a profound impact on the American culture.
It caused cognitive dissonance in me (and many others I suspect) when the civil rights movement elevated the struggle for racial equality to the national spotlight. As children we had embraced equality in baseball and sports. It seemed to be the way the world was, so why were people being hurt and discriminated against? The logic of children. The athletes who we embraced as heroes in the 50s helped shape our views of what was right and wrong in the 60s.
I don’t know how to end this. I’ll never let go of Mr. Cub. I’ll always remember his joyous spirit. If possible, I hope Ernie’s moved on to an even more ‘Friendly Confines’. I could have never had a better hero.