Ah, baseball. The green grass, the crack of the bat, the gentle breeze.
Mmm, islands. The swaying palms, the splash of the surf . . . the gentle breeze.
Two of the best inventions on earth. Trouble is, they just generally don’t go together. Unless . . .
. . . unless there’s a wonderful little secret, a hidden treasure, an undiscovered story. A true story about one of the all-time great baseball teams . . . and a magical little island off the California coast.
True indeed. The team was the Chicago Cubs. The island was Santa Catalina. The time was a unique span of 20th-century America -- a span that included the sumptuous backdrops of the roaring ‘20s, the Great Depression, and World War II.
Corporate mega-giant William Wrigley owned both the island and the ballclub. And from 1921 to 1951, he put the two together. The result . . . is way better than any fiction:
There’s a future president of the United States, getting caught up in a barroom brawl. There’s a rookie standing out in a canyon for hours, all by himself, holding a burlap sack -- waiting for a nonexistent animal to run towards him, earning himself a nickname he’ll never be able to shake. And there’s another young ballplayer -- this one’s already nicknamed ‘Hack’ -- uprooting trees with his bare hands.
There were movie stars, too -- like a saucy young Betty Grable, flirting with a future MVP. Olivia de Havilland, before Gone with the Wind . . . and yes, even Marilyn Monroe.
There were grand steamships, and a grand hotel -- all gone now. There were grand events, like a battle royal between the Cubs and the New York Giants of John Jota McGraw, a roughneck ballplayer immortalized in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea.
There were hunts for wild boar and imaginative pranks -- rookies were often sent belowdeck looking for the bowling alley on the cruise over -- and a forgotten earthquake that killed 120 people.
There was a kid from Brooklyn, Chuck Connors, trying to make the team -- and riding a horse for the very first time, before he became a famous TV Western star.
There was the teenage rookie who asked his manager, "Say, Mr. Grimm. I thought we were going to Catalina Island. Isn’t this Mexico?" There were Big Bands and great galas . . .
. . . and hopes and dreams and exultation and shattering defeat, as young men came to the island as future major-league stars . . . but went home instead to work the factory or the farm.
Booze and broads, World Series rings, a couple dozen Hall-of-Famers, and memories. Grown guys named Gabby and Jolly Cholly and Dizzy and Fuzzy, whose tales would stir any imagination. There’s human drama, laughter and tears tucked into these 35 breezy chapters, filled with oral histories (first-person interviews with more than 50 former Cubs), old newspaper reports, and scores of fascinating photos -- written in the voice of a wide-eyed kid on the isle in those days.
Welcome to Catalina Island, ‘30s-style. Hey, look -- here come the boys...
