Of course, being a Sox fan on the north side of Chicago is not really an easy thing.  First off, you are surrounded by Cubs fans.  Cubs fans love things like Wrigley Field and they talk about it glowingly and lovingly like they would some long lost love or something.

For me, I never saw the allure.  My times going to Cubs games have been marked by an inability to find a place to park.  It is also punctuated with crowded seating, blocked views, uncomfortable seats and lots of noise.  There is a reason more modern parks have been built a lot of places.

Of course, for the earliest part of my life the Sox played at Comiskey Park.  Many of the things I just complained about at Wrigley were also evident there.  I recall many a time sitting right behind a post when visiting a Sox game.  Of course, getting to a Sox game is a challenge for people who live on the north side of town.

I remember my first Sox game and being taken there by my father.  Of course, this was probably a difficult thing for him, being the Cubs fan and all.  It was also decided that we would take public transportation down to the stadium.  Back then, this was a bit more complicated than it is today.

This was during the late 1970s when the Chicago White Sox were still going through their “Worst Uniforms in the Major Leagues” phase.  They were wearing the uniforms with the very large lapels.  This is also the uniform that, during one memorable game, actually had the players wearing shorts.  It was only done once, but it was enough to go down in Major League Baseball history.

I have no memory of what happened during that game, though.  I mostly remember taking the EL down into the city and transferring to another train.  I remember standing in the last car and near the door and watching the track disappearing behind us.  I have a vague recollection of someone else going with us but I can no longer remember if it was a friend of my father’s from work or my uncle.

The trips to games were few and far between.  I have a vague memory of being taken by my mother once, with my brother in tow.  I also remember parking on a street and the coming out after the game to find the car had a flat tire.  I also remember my mother asking nearby kids to help change the tire.  At least, I think that was a Sox game…

White Sox stadium has always notoriously been in a bad part of town.  The Robert Taylor homes, once one of the largest public housing projects on the planet, are right across the highway and very visible.  Just outside the stadium are more low-cost housing units.  Walking through those neighborhoods has always been a bit risky.

These days, the neighborhood is changing.  The famous neighborhoo of Bridgeport is just a few blocks away.  Now, the Robert Taylor Homes are almost entirely gone.  Developers are turning former rundown housing projects into townhomes and condos that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Before too long, there may not be much difference between the neighborhood around the Sox park and Wrigleyville.

Of course, at some point the Chicago White Sox committed what many consider to be the ultimate sin for a professional baseball team in the city of Chicago.  Someone decided that the old and storied Comiskey Park needed to be torn down and a new, modern baseball park needed to go up in its place.  Of course, the White Sox managed to not only breed more discontent against them from many goody-two-shoes Cubs fans, but then other baseball fans by choosing exactly the wrong kind of stadium to put up.

The stadium turned out to be a kind of giant bowl, but seats that seemed literally bolted into the side of a wall if you got seats way up in the upper deck.  They built such a stadium just as many fans and baseball teams started to look at the “retro” style ballparks that actually harkened back to the kind of stadium the Sox had just torn down.  Those bowl stadiums were suddenly percieved as being “cookie cutter” and “impersonal.” 

Still, there were a few years there when the stadium was considered pretty cool and the Sox even had cool uniforms.

As far as being a fan, well, there wasn’t much to yell about during the 1970s.  It wasn’t until 1983 that being a Sox fan suddenly meant backing a potential winner.

To be continued…

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