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138 9 the crying game Nowadays love is a matter of chance, matrimony a matter of money, and divorce a matter of course. —HELEN ROWLAND, 1876–1950, English-American writer While Helen fretted in Skokie, Richard and Emma enjoyed their “empty nest” on Navarre Avenue. With just the two of them, the house was mostly quiet except for Emma’s occasional obsessions over the neighbors’ real or perceived slights. Carl Johnson, owner of the family business specializing in feed, seeds, coal, and furniture moving, kept Dick Stone busy during the week, though he could see that his loyal employee of nearly thirty years had slowed down with the onset of late middle age. On the weekends, it was Richard’s custom to park himself in the front room of the house and listen to his beloved White Sox on the Zenith radio, his tarnished brass ashtray in the shape of a cowboy hat resting on the smoking stand nearby. His South Side team in those years was a chronic loser, and had been losing every season since the beginning of Prohibition, but he loved them all the same. They finished last in 1948 and were likely to lose another hundred games and finish last again in 1949, but in an inspired moment, Helen had an idea. With Oscar’s blessing, she escorted her dad to Comiskey Park to cheer on old Luke Appling in the twilight of his illustrious twenty-year career with the Sox. “He may be older than me!” Stone chuckled, drawing easily on a glass of Hamm’s beer. Together father and daughter rode the Western Avenue streetcar south to Thirty-Fifth Street, where they connected with an eastbound bus ferrying past the factories, grocery stores, and warehouses, directly to the ballpark . The trip took two and a half hours, and it may have been why this was the first time in over thirty years that Richard had set foot in the dank brick and mortar stadium nestled among the houses of the Irish and Italians in old the crying game 139 Bridgeport. He was as giddy as a child, relating nostalgic tales of Ed Walsh, Doc White, Jiggs Donohue, and other heroes of the South Side who bested the hated Cubs in the 1906 World Series when he was still a young blade, unmarried, and in his twenties. How he loved this game! The stories of baseball heroes past and present went in one ear and out the other, but Helen sensed in her dad a lightening of spirit. For a couple of hours his chronic worry about current problems and future dilemmas evaporated, as they sat in the baking sun of the centerfield bleacher. This is where I belong, she thought. It was not her place to raise another woman’s child and live apart from her one and only home. She wanted there to be more days like this, but in retrospect she claimed to sense that it was to be the last happy moment they would share together . They never went back because the hour of her father’s life had grown late. In December of that year, my grandfather made a final break with the past and applied for full U.S. citizenship. Like so many other old Swedes living in Chicago, he had put off this inevitable decision for decades , holding out faint hope that one day before he died he might find the means to return to Sweden. In a clear and flowing hand, his daughter Margaret filled out the application and sent it to the INS, telling her dad what a “swell idea” it was, not comprehending why it had taken him so long. Even after all these years, the shoreline of Lake Vättern beckoned to him and he longed to savor the clean air and feel the warmth and refreshing summer breezes brushing against his skin. It seemed a terribly absurd notion. It would be easier to fly to the moon than scrape together enough money to pay for passage to Sweden and the necessary accommodations . A trip across the ocean had been a once-in-a-lifetime experience and a one-way ticket from the world he knew as a child to the world of the present. Richard sensed it clearly, knowing that he could never leave behind that which he held sacred: this little plot of green earth he owned in Norwood Park—a life stabilizer and his only real achievement in this world...

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