Atta Girl

Mary Beth Hoerner: Writer

By Donald G. Evans

It was much later in life, not when she was growing up in Elmwood Park the youngest of five daughters, that Mary Beth Hoerner realized her father had perhaps been hoping for a boy. But on a subconscious level, little Mary Beth’s emotional attachment to the Chicago Cubs probably related, at least in part, to her desire to connect with her father Jack and fanatical older sister Katie. “As a kid, you don’t realize how deep the family connection is,” says Mary Beth,“—that you don’t have to manipulate it.”

Jack Riley died 16 years ago, but Mary Beth resurrects memories of him in her essay, “Night Games.” Swirling amid the essay’s eddy of charming humor and oddity is a deeper, almost spiritual, aspect. This spirituality, though, is not religious. It’s the type of bumper cars spirituality that occurs in a family trying, out of love, to find ways to run into each other with just the right velocity to jolt but not hurt.

“Usually in my head I think it’s going to be about one thing, but it turns out to be about several other things as well,” says Mary Beth. “I wrote this essay as a light memory, but I think there’s a sadness to it, and that surprised me. [The narrator] is trying to relate to the sister and to the father. It’s kind of that desperate need to have a deep connection to the people around you. How do you go about getting that?”

As the youngest child, Mary Beth was often home with her father, especially on Saturdays when everyone else was out shopping, working, and generally being busy. The two would watch or listen to the Cubs. Jack’s interest in the team gravitated more toward the cerebral—like what mind games Leo Durocher was playing on Fergie Jenkins that day and vice versa.

“My father was a very philosophical person,” says Mary Beth. “He would analyze everything that was going on, and talk to me about more than what a ball was or what a strike was. We had many bonding sessions watching the Cubs, and every now and then—maybe subliminally prompted by the kid-friendly Hamms Bear, he would let me try his beer.”

Meanwhile, Katie, four years older, was obsessive in her devotion to the Cubs, recording statistics, filling out scorecards, chasing down players, and squirreling away memorabilia. “My sister has kept her Cubs stuff with her all these years,” says Mary Beth. “She’s sort of disorganized, but at a moment’s notice she can retrieve all her Cubs stuff.”

Jack Riley died the year Mary Beth’s own son, Riley, was born. “I wanted to connect him to my father since he would never know him, but we couldn’t name him Jack because then he would be Little Jack Hoerner,” says Mary Beth.

Riley does not care for sports, says he would rather watch Real Housewives of Atlanta than a Cubs game. Likewise Mary Beth’s husband, Joe. “I guess all three of us like to watch train wrecks,” Mary Beth says. Still, she drags the two to occasional Wrigley Field outings and subjects them to the radio broadcasts while she’s “putzing around in the yard.”

This summer’s trip to Wrigley with Katie was costly, as they coughed up $40 to park in someone’s miniscule, lean-to of a garage in order not to miss the first pitch. “We were idiots to drive,” Mary Beth says, “but it was money well spent.”

“Night Games” is rendered with a smart-aleck tenderness. The voice, informed with the naïveté of childhood and the wisdom of an adult looking back, does not judge or condemn, but tries to lay out the circumstances of a time, 1969, in which the strangeness in the air was tinged with excitement. Among Cubs fans of a certain age, last names are never used in reference to that 1969 roster, and the fondness they have for that team is wrapped up in the people with whom they shared the experience.

“My father died 16 years ago and I still find it very difficult to write about him,” says Mary Beth. “We were very close. I’m still trying to dip my toe in that water. I think there’s a lot there.”

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