HOME AND AWAY: Memoir of a Fan.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan
• Position: Review

HOME AND AWAY: Memoir of a Fan by Scott Simon Hyperion, $23.95

I WAS A PEE-WEE BLEACHER burn -- 11 years old during the summer of 1969 when the Chicago Cubs broke my heart by blowing the pennant to the New York Mets. I grew up seven short blocks from Wrigley Field and on dozens of days each summer my mother would heed my pleas to pack me a brown bag lunch and send me off with my mitt and my friend Billy by ourselves to the ballpark. We'd arrive at about 10:00 a.m., early enough to find front-row bleacher seats for barring practice and the game, then spend the afternoon happily corrupted by the profane and profoundly unemployed beer-swilling fans who later entered baseball lore. "Over the years," Scott Simon writes, "I have heard about as many people claim to have sat in those six rows of bleacher seats right along Waveland Avenue as claimed to have voted for John F. Kennedy."

I was there, Scott, I swear, and you actually get some of the details wrong. There were more than six rows of "bleacher bums" (later the title of a play by Joe Mantagna) and admission was $1, not $1.75. You're thinking of the cost of grandstand seats (See, I'm an expert on this). That extra 75 cents I saved sitting in the bleachers was enough for a cracker jack and a "frosty malt" ice cream. The bleachers also offered a better view of Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ferguson Jenkins and my other gods on earth. It took this book to remind me that Ernie once ran for Chicago City Council. Naturally, he lost.

It should be clear by now that although I'm only barely acquainted with the author I have no critical distance from this book. The Cubs' only competition for my affections as a child was one Abraham Lincoln. Scott Simon's step-father, Ralph Newman, a vivid character in this affecting tale of fathers, sons, and sports, was the owner of the legendary Abraham Lincoln bookshop, where my parents began taking me long before I could read. (Newman later was convicted for back dating some of Richard Nixon's papers.) To make matters even more personal, my father informed me recently that the Chicago apartment vacated in the first chapter by the Simon family in 1957 (when Scott was four and I was born) was one flight up from where we lived. Chicago is a very small town.

I hope it is big enough, literally and metaphorically, to give this fine book the audience it deserves. It is about much more than the Cubs, White Sox, Bears, and Bulls. (The Black Hawks are deleted altogether)...