Still Waiting?

Lin Brehmer: Radio Jock & Cubs Fan

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By Donald G. Evans

Lin Brehmer's Fall Ball Broadcast (photo by Will Byington)It was late August 1984, and Lin Brehmer, then working at a radio station in Albany, New York had a decision. He could become part of a morning team at WLIR near New York City or move to Chicago to become the music director of the legendary WXRT. Program Director Norm Winer offered that rarest of incentives: come work with us and we’ll take you to see the Cubs play in the World Series.

Lin’s childhood, set firmly in those bittersweet days of Billy, Ron, Ernie and Fergie, had seemingly been an endless Long Island stickball game between the Cubs and the Yankees with his transplanted Oak Parkian friends David, Benjamin and Adam Keehn, all of whom were charter members of the Cleo James Fan Club.

He summoned his enormous reservoir of affection for the North Side team—and took the job.

“So I moved here under the worst of possible pretexts, to see the Cubs win the World Series,” Lin says.

Ever since, as Lin’s attachment to the Cubs has grown, he has, along with all us fans, waited. This is the genesis of his radio essay, Waiting, which is one of the two pieces Lin contributed to Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting for Next Year.

Lin says Waiting is “for the sentimental cynic,” which is what makes it a perfect gateway into Cubbie Blues. The essay pinballs between anger and joy, humor and frustration, and the whole time it blames the Cubs for their failures it also invites them to participate in their own success. It is not really a humor piece, nor is it deadly serious, and as it rambles along it finds a sweet spot that’s less flippant than it seems on the surface and yet, charmingly, still flippant. This, I think, is part of the pleasure in reading this essay, and more generally listening to Lin’s commentaries: anything goes.

“Every Cub fan at his most bitter is also at his most vulnerable,” Lin says.

Waiting originally aired on “Lin’s Bin,” a thrice-weekly segment in which Lin uses listeners’ questions as a springboard to explore, in his characteristically sardonic style, a broad range of topics that includes, seemingly, anything. He has reminisced on his family vacations to Florida in a 1964 Bel Air station wagon, and ranted about the Terri Schiavo case, and paid tribute to New Orleans after Katrina, and memorialized the one-year anniversary of 9-11.

Lin even did a segment on sending your twins to college, in which he helpfully told a father that his son should learn to play guitar well enough to attract a dormitory front-steps crowd and that his daughter should avoid guys playing guitar.

“I had once dreamed of being a writer,” Lin says. “It should seem obvious to everybody it didn’t work out. At the same time, this radio essay I do three times a week has returned me to a pursuit I thought would consume my life, and you know what? It really does. I throw myself into these essays with every fiber of my soul, because it’s the only way I can get it done.”

Lin ran headlong toward the music culture as a high school student at New York City’s McBurney High School, now gone but still remembered as the alma mater of Henry Winkler and Richard Thomas, of John Boy Walton fame. He was once in a Bob Dylan tribute band as a teenager, which meant, “I couldn’t find a band that wanted me, so I played Bob Dylan songs by myself.” In the late 60s, he was in the Roundabouts, a band that played songs like the Monkey’s Stepping Stone and Them’s Gloria (45-minute version, according to Lin) in his friend Edgar’s garage.

But at Colgate University, Lin studied literature, while also dabbling in philosophy and Asian religion. He was, he says, “Just another child of the 60s looking for True Enlightenment.” Still, there was room for his love of baseball. Lin tried out, unsuccessfully, for the freshman baseball team. “I still think it was because my hair was too long,” Lin says. “In 1972, I looked like Duane Allman. The baseball coach looked like Sergeant Carter in Gomer Pyle.”

Lin says he spends on average several hours researching a “Lin’s Bin” piece and several additional hours writing it. That does not include time for creative procrastination. “When I get really stuck, I listen to trance-inducing, 12-string acoustic guitar picking like John Fahey,” he says. “It really works.”

There are many Cubs fans among Lin’s listeners, and they’re aware of his attachment to the team. He’s chronicled his adventures, from his early days in the right-center field bleachers to his season tickets in aisle 239 (which he’s held since 1989). He’s shared war stories about his adventures with Johnny Mars and Wendy Rice and Marty Lennartz. He emcees a live pre-game WXRT event, including bands, every Home Opener for the last 15 years at Yak-zie’s on Clark Street, and also hosts a pregame party at Vic Theatre as part of the Les Turner ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) Foundation’s Lou Gehrig Day at Wrigley Field for nearly as long.

“Especially in the springtime, somebody usually comes up with a question about our hopes for the future,” Lin says. “At a pretty bleak, desperate time in my fandom, I got one of these. It was one of those moments that all Cubs fans have, where they feel they’ve made their contribution to the whole waiting idea – time to move onto a better idea.”

Lin reworked the essay to make it pop more on the page than over the airwaves. It’s a fun play on the concept of waiting, which Lin feels is different now than in the early 20^th century. In classic Lin Brehmer style, the piece samples seemingly divergent thinkers Root Boy Slim and Andrew Marvell, references classic Cubbies like Juan Pierre and Wade Miller, and along the way riffs on childhood and sex, as well as baseball. It is a carnival of wit, intelligence and pop culture—an embodiment of the kind of writing with which I’d sought to fill the entire book.

“The original question was, ‘Is there always a next year?’ ” Lin says. “There used to be, but not anymore. The world could end tomorrow. It’s also the refrain we’ve heard our whole lives from people who’ve bossed us around, to people who have advised us, to members of our immediate families, including brothers, sisters and wives.

“Waiting is a tribute to a culture that always feels we can put off celebration until another day.”

If Waiting is the perfect gateway to Cubbie Blues, Lin’s introduction to Eddie Vedder’s All The Way is the ideal exit. Lin uses Vedder’s drinking song to create his own lyrical ode to the passion and pity that is the Cubs fans' lot, and in so doing puts All The Way in an appealing context. If it weren’t impossible, we might have sung a frolicking, drunken rendition of that song to close the book, but Lin’s take on it is the next best thing.

“You always get the feeling, and I hate having the feeling,” Lin starts, “but you do look around sometimes and say, ‘These people don’t know what kind of suffering they’re in for.’ When they say this is going to be the year, you just smile and nod. There’s a time in every Cubs fans’ life when he looks at his children and in the back of his mind says, ‘Maybe in your lifetime.’ ”

Lin, despite knowing better, keeps at it. He’ll be at Yak-zie’s again on April 13, and he’ll return to his regular Wrigley Field seat often this summer. He held onto the season ticket even after he took a job in Minneapolis in 1991—a job that turned out to be a one-year hiatus from WXRT and the Cubs.

“I just went up there to see what a World Series looked like,” Lin says of the season the Minnesota Twins beat the Atlanta Braves to capture the title. He went to all the playoff and World Series games that year, and then, the following year, was back in the right-center field bleachers, “like a swallow to Capistrano.”

Benjamin Keehn recently sent him his documentation as a member of the Cleo James Fan Club, along with the player’s baseball card in a plastic sleeve. “My family vacationed with [the Keenes],” Lin says. “They were born in India, but lived in Oak Park [before they moved to New York]. We would play baseball all day, every day. I’d be the Cubs and he’d be the Yankees, or I’d be the Yankees and he’d be the Cubs. It was a stickball game that went on for years—just the Cubs and the Yankees.”

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Want more Lin?

• Read "Five Minutes With Lin Brehmer"
• Visit WXRT.com