For one season, in 1948, my dad was a batboy for the Chicago White Sox. He was 14. He had entered an essay contest sponsored by the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. “I was just a crazy baseball fan,” he told me. Professional basketball and football weren’t nearly what they would become. Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams were back for their third season since serving in the military during the war. Jackie Robinson had just broken the color barrier the year before with the Brooklyn Dodgers. “We all dreamed of the day when we each could become a professional baseball player ourselves,” Dad said. He found out he was a finalist for batboy when a telegram arrived from the general manager of the team.

Once he was hired, he was dispatched to the Wilson Sporting Goods Company to be measured for a uniform and to pick out a glove for himself. The day before, he’d been a Cubs fan, like all kids who grew up on the north side of Chicago, but had no trouble switching loyalties. “It was baseball and it was Chicago,” he told me. “From that day forward I became a rabid White Sox fan.”

He was small for his age, maybe 5-foot-3, and skinny. The players took to calling him “Kid” or “Red” because of his hair. Before every game he would show up at the park three hours early, hauling out equipment and chopping ice for the water cooler. On occasion, the players would invite him to take part in batting practice. The pitchers would sometimes fool with him, whipping a real fast one over the plate. When he was lucky enough to hit a ball solidly, there was lots of cheering.

In the dugout, Luke Appling, who became a Hall of Famer, always had a mouth full of tobacco. He got a big kick out of spitting on Dad’s shoe. “I was happy to have him do it,” Dad told me.

During the game, Dad knelt on the field 20 feet from home plate and all the heroes who stepped up to it: Williams, DiMaggio, Lou Boudreau. It was important that he not call attention to himself, but once when he didn’t hustle enough to grab a bat, he heard from Yogi Berra, who had just come up to the majors. “Hey kid,” he said, “next time, be sure you get that bat out of there a bit more quickly.”