Finding Faith ... in the 'Windy City'

I'm certain that my love affair with the city of Chicago started when I was kid.

Growing up in a small, northwestern Minnesota town, I was a baseball fan. More specifically, I was a Minnesota Twins baseball fan.

I couldn't play the game worth a lick. I was short and pudgy, not athletic in the least. And there really was no athletic tradition in our family. Too poor to give much notion to recreation, my parents just never were available to push us into athletic pursuits.

But as an 8-, 9- and 10-year-old I fell in love with baseball through baseball cards. My friends all collected them, and thankfully collecting baseball cards was a cheap enough hobby that I was still able to participate even though there was little extra money to go around in our house.

Already a nerdy kid because I couldn't find my home in athletics, baseball cards and their stats and their stories published on the backsides, drew me in like a moth to light. They were the perfect vehicle for an introverted, bookish, numbers kid to while away the time. And back in my day, in the '80s, baseball cards were all the rage with kids. ... Well, trading cards in general were, whether sports cards, Garbage Pail Kids, Star Trek, etc. .. You name it, and there was a trading card for it.

And baseball cards were the king of all trading cards.

Well, through transference, my passion jumped from baseball cards to actual baseball to the Minnesota Twins. But there was a problem.

In the 80s, we didn't receive any of the Twin Cities television stations that carried Twins baseball games. So, my only access to following the Twins was listening to them on the radio God bless you, John Gordon!), reading about them in the newspaper and collecting their baseball cards. ... (There was this one magical trip in which the local baseball card collecting club rented a passenger bus and we all went to a Twins game at the Metrodome together. It was the first time I had ever been to a professional sporting event, and one of the few times in my childhood that I traveled out of town! But that is an entirely different story.)

Minnesota Twins fans in our neck of the woods never saw their favorite team on TV unless they made it to the playoffs, or they happened to be playing a team from some big market, and the game might make it onto one of the network Saturday or Sunday sports lineups. But that was rare. Later, Fox Sports North was created and started to televise Twins games, but that was longer after my childhood.

So, if you were a Major League Baseball fan in northwest Minnesota in my childhood, you had two choices for regularly watching pro baseball on TV: One was the Atlanta Braves, which were broadcast on the cable station TNT, and the other was the Chicago Cubs, which were broadcast on WGN.

I fell in love with the Cubs, and tolerated watching the Braves when the Cubs weren't on.

I mean the Cubs were everything the Braves weren't. The Cubs were lovable losers; the Braves were not. (Remember this was a quarter century before the Cubs would actually shock the world and win The World Series.) The Cubs played in the venerable Wrigley Field, a baseball institution; the braves played in a splendid new ballpark supported by the large TNT cable contract. The Cubs had Harry Caray as their announcer; the Braves had slick-looking, made-for-TV broadcasting teams that looked as if they belonged in the movies. The Cubs had teams full of players that belong in the mi

nor leagues on every other pro baseball team; the Braves were perennially packed with All-Stars who would lead their teams to 100-win seasons. And on and on and on.

What can I say? ... I just really, really saw my life in every thing the Cubs exemplified. ... Lovable losers who will never win the big game, but come back every day swinging anyway. Who says that sports doesn't imitate life?

So, in my young years, I discovered and fell in love with everything Cubs, including Wrigley Field and Wrigleyville, the neighborhood that surrounds this baseball shrine. And this was the kindling that would later turn into a love affair with Chicago.

Fast forward another decade, and I found myself in college. ... It just so happened that there was another kid on my dorm floor who grew up in a town next to mine, and so on weekends we'd often share rides to our hometowns and back. In time this partnership grew into friendship, and ultimately one day in my sophomore year, he convinced me to take a media writing class with him with this line: "You're a good writer. You should take this class with me." And, so I did. No kidding. ... I was fishing for what my major was going to be, and it was looking like elementary education really wasn't the route I was destined to go anyway. So, I thought, "Ahh, what the heck. ... Worst case is that I get to take a class with a buddy."

Well, once we started studying mass comm together, it was he who introduced me to the guy that would forever convince me that my life would be spent in newspapers: Mike Royko.

If you're unfamiliar with whom Mike Royko is, I'll give you a quick primer: Royko was a nationally recognized newspaper columnist that spent all of his years in Chicago, riling up politicians, lifting up the every man, and lamenting the woes of the Chicago Cubs. His columns were legendary, and many were captured in books that my college buddy willingly lent me, as he too was a Royko fanatic.

So, combine my love of the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley, with columnist Mike Royko and the crazy history of the city of Chicago, and boom: a full-fledged love affair was borne. ... And to this day, I am a Chicago fanatic.

Coincidentally, my first-ever trip to Chicago would be celebrated with that same friend who turned me onto Mike Royko. We were juniors and a journalism professor offered up to anyone who wanted to go the chance to attend a student journalism convention that was being held in Chicago. ... You can sure as bet that the two of us were going to be on that trip. ... And Chicago did not disappoint.

We didn't see any major tourist destinations that trip, but I saw enough of the city passing by me in transit that it only served to fan the flames of my obsession for the city.

In the ensuing next 20 years, I would get back to Chicago another half dozen times, once on a memorable road trip with the same college buddy that took us to Wrigley to see my first in-person Cubs game, but most for work-related reasons. But in those trips, I've gotten to patch together a fairly extensive list of sites that I saw. And each time that I have been back has been special for different reasons. The most memorable is when the stars aligned and I was able to take our 16-year-old son and his friend with me while I attended a convention. At night, after the convention would close down, the three of us would play tourist. And it was a grand week, one of my favorite moments spent with Carter.

Interestingly, my wife Shelley has had the opposite experience with Chicago. She's only had one meaningful trip there, and it was a bad experience, and so she has feared the city for years. ... I mean to change that!

Well, it'd be hard to write a blog post about each trip to Chicago because there were so many. And my memory is foggy about many of the experiences from those early trips. But I still wanted to document those trips in a photographic way. So, here's a big, ol' sightseeing dump from a half dozen trips to Chicago. ... Maybe over time, I can unpack some of these visits in more depth. But meanwhile, feast your eyes on this bountiful Chicago photo gallery.

We'll be visiting there again. ... And I promise to share more of my Chicago stories and favorites!