White Sox Summer

 That was the year the Sox won the Pennant, it must have been in the '50s because I was still in elementary school.  It was Jimmy Next Door who got me interested in baseball, not that either one of us played it, we just watched most of the games on TV at either his house or my house.  I never saw much of Jimmy during the school year because he went to the Catholic school, but there was a summer or two when we hung out together like that.  One time his mother took us to see a live game in person at Comiskey Park.  I guess it was fun if you had nothing better to do, which neither Jimmy nor I did at the time.   I must have lost interest at some point because I forgot to watch the last game of the season when the Sox clinched the Pennant.  I was walking past a local bar on 51st Street when I heard a lot of hollering inside.  Then the air raid sirens went off.  Since it was not the normal time for their weekly test, I figured it meant that either the Sox had won the Pennant or we were all going to die in a nuclear attack.  Nothing I could do about it either way, so I just kept walking.  Although they won the Pennant, I don't think the Sox won the World Series that year, seems I would remember something like that.

I do remember that guys behaved better when there were girls around, but that was a long time ago and I don't think it holds true anymore.  When I was driving school busses the girls gave me just as much trouble as the boys.  It used to be that boys settled their differences by fighting and girls settled their differences by tattling.  Last I knew, girls and boys were both fighting and tattling equally.  Big improvement!