Picking Garbage for the Chicago Cubs

Picking Garbage for the Chicago Cubs

By Paul C. Rosenblatt

In 1948 I was ten years old and idolized the Chicago Cubs. I went to games when I had time, 20 cents for streetcar fare, and 60 cents for a bleacher seat. At a game in June an older boy told me that I would receive passes to future games if I helped clean up garbage after games. That seemed to me like a wonderful deal, and so I became a garbage boy for the Chicago Cubs.

I was thrilled that picking up garbage after games got me close to the field where my idols played—Phil Cavaretta, Andy Pafko, Johnny Schmitz, Hal Jeffcoat, Gene Mauch, and all the other Cubs. But my work was unpleasant. A big part of it was picking up filth with my bare hands. I would work my way around the grandstands from extreme right field to extreme left field on one particular row of seats. Then I would do another row. I was dragging a filthy, foul-smelling burlap sack into which I stuffed beer and pop cups, food wrappers, food scraps, scorecards, newspapers, cigarette butts, used Kleenex, and much more. What surprised me most was that I sometimes found hot dogs that apparently nobody had even nibbled. For a boy with a big appetite who had grown up in a clean-your-plate household, those hot dogs were disturbing. It all stank of stale beer. Each time my bag was full, I would drag it beneath the stands behind third base and empty it into a large, rusty trash bin. 

After some games I also “pulled chairs,” going from the right field wall to the left field wall on one level of box seats, pulling each seat in the row below me up onto the row I was on. Unlike the grandstand seats, which were bolted into concrete, the box seat chairs were loose. So part of the cleaning process in the box seat area was to pull every chair back to the next higher tier. With a row cleared of seats an older boy with a broom would push all the debris into a heap for easy pickup. Chair pulling made my hands bleed and blister. But after a few weeks I started developing calluses, of which I was very proud.

I typically worked for two hours after a game, but more after a well-attended game or a doubleheader. Occasionally I saw a Cubs player on the field taking extra batting or fielding practice, and that thrilled me. But I had little time to watch; garbage clearing and chair pulling required close attention. Working in the stands always made me feel close to the Cubs. They were, for me, the gods of baseball.

Usually I was paid with one 60 cents bleacher pass for my work, but if I worked much more than two hours or if it was a particularly heavy garbage day, I received two passes. I imagine that the work would have been a violation of federal and state child labor laws, but there was no hint from anyone in the Cubs organization that it might be illegal for me to be a garbage boy. Indeed, Jim Gallagher, the general manager of the team and the person who coordinated our clean-up work, acted as though child work was completely appropriate. At the end of a game he waited under the stands behind third base, where would-be garbage boys gathered. He gave out assignments, handed burlap bags to younger boys and brooms to older boys, and supervised us. At the end of the workday, it was he who paid us our bleacher seat passes.

I would eagerly cash in a bleacher seat pass at one of the next home games, getting there hours early to watch batting practice from a seat at the front of the bleachers, with nothing between me and the outfielders but the ivy-covered brick wall. Every time I went to the ballpark I became painfully sunburned from hours in the bleachers and hours working as a garbage boy. But that didn’t stop me from returning again and again. To me it was the best place I could possibly be, so close to my baseball idols. I worked to earn a chance to be near them again. 

That was my first job. It taught me lasting lessons about the dues one pays with physical work. I’d come home filthy, stinking, exhausted, aching, with bloody hands, and painful sunburn. I’m amazed that I was willing to work so hard for so little. I am sure my devotion to the Cubs drove what I did, but my devotion had its limits. Before the 1949 baseball season my parents bought a small, black-and-white television set. That changed everything for me. I could watch games in the comfort of home, not damage my hands, and not become exhausted, filthy, and sunburned. Televised home games ended my career as a Chicago Cubs garbage boy.

I haven’t been back in decades. But if I catch a Cubs game on television, I see Wrigley Field, despite all the ways it has been remodeled, as a sweetly familiar and still sacred place. 

Paul C. Rosenblatt is an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota.  His teaching and academic writing have focused on couple and family relationships, culture, and how people deal with loss and other difficulties.  His recent literary works have appeared or will appear in Streetlight Magazine, Avatar Review, Writing Disorder, Shark Reef, and Copperfield Review.