Read A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred for Free Online Page B

Cubs still ran ads in the Tribune saying, “The Chicago National League Club wants every woman to acquaint herself with the joys and thrills of baseball.” Some ads offered reassurance to the timid: “You don’t need an escort.”
    There were, however, occasions when people neededprotection from the ladies, who could be disorderly in their rush for admission to the ballpark and for choice seats.Wrigley, who said, “It is easier to control a crowd of 100,000 men than of 10,000 women,” told this story: “One Friday, shortly after the gates were open, and there were 45,000 spectators inside and thousands outside, an usher came upon a little old woman who was crying. He assured her that he would find her a seat somewhere. ‘I don’t want a seat,’ she sobbed. ‘I want to get out. I came to visit my daughter, who lives near here. Before I knew it I was caught in this terrible mob and swept inside.’ ”
    Which is why a Chicago newspaper ran the following doggerel:
I saw a wounded baseball fan tottering down the street,
Encased in bandages and tape, and bruised from head to feet;
And as I called the ambulance, I heard the poor guy say:
“I bought a seat in Wrigley Field, but it was ladies’ day.”

    In July 1926, the Chicago Tribune carried this little item:
WHIPPED FOR STAYING OUT LATE, GIRL RUNS AWAY
Violet Popovich, 15 years old, 4516 E. Harrison Street, was whipped for going to a movie with a boy and staying out late last Sunday night. Monday she ran away from home and yesterday the Fillmore Street police were asked to find her.
    Violet ran away from home—such as it may have been; she spent much of her childhood in an orphanage—at age fifteen. At seventeen, when she started calling herself Violet Valli, she became a dancer in a chorus line. At eighteen, she married. And along the way she became rather too interested in the Cubs. Or at least some of them. And some ballplayers who were not Cubs. Ehrgott found that a Chicago paper had reported that before she met Billy Jurges, Valli had been “friendly” with at least one other major league player, one with a Cubs uniform in his future: Leo Durocher, then a Cincinnati Reds infielder.
    When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin , the novel that added fuel to the slavery controversy, he supposedly (this comes from Stowe family lore) addressed her as “the little lady who started the big war.” Violet Valli was the spark that lit the fuse that led to the most famous event in the history of Wrigley Field, an event that almost certainly did not happen.

    Leo Durocher: Nice guys need not apply. ( photo credit 1.4 )
    Not that that matters. The fact is that most baseball fans believe that Babe Ruth actually hit a “called shot” during the 1932 World Series. So it is part of the ballpark’s story, even though no one will ever really know whether Ruth pointed to designate the spot in the center-field bleachers where, a moment later, he hit the pitch thrown by the Cubs’ Charlie Root.

    Ruth hits the “called shot.” Or not. ( photo credit 1.5 )
    A good tutor about this episode is Leigh Montville, who, in his 2006 biography, The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth , begins the story with “Violet (What I Did for Love) Valli—the Most Talked About Woman in Chicago.” That is how she was billed during her scheduled twenty-two-week vaudeville show. In 1932, she was twenty-one and smitten with Billy Jurges, twenty-four, the Cubs’ shortstop. His affections may once, or occasionally, have been as ardent for her as hers were for him, but his were decidedly less constant.
    So on July 6, 1932, Violet, packing a .25-caliber revolver, went to the room at the Hotel Carlos where Jurgeslived during the season.Having written a farewell note telling her brother that “life without Billy isn’t worth living,” she intended to kill Billy and then herself. Jurges admitted her to his room, and when she began to execute her plan,