A dying Cub fan’s last bequest

By Margie Schaps and Jack Doppelt          January 31, 2024                                                                                                     

We may be daft, but our bats aren’t in the belfry. 

We met by the shores of old Lake Michigan, where the hawk wind blows so cold, as folksinger Steve Goodman sang. Our first date, our first kiss, was attending an outdoor Steve Goodman concert in Milwaukee in July 1983. 

When Jack had been in college, friends visited, toting his first record player as a birthday gift. Hitchhiking from Champaign to Grinnell College, friends got a ride. The driver asked where they were headed. “Grinnell, Iowa.” Me too, the driver said, “I have a gig there tonight” and drove on at 95 mph. Goodman asked during his performance who’s the fella with a birthday today, and Jack got to request a song. 

Thirteen years later, the year after our first date, in Sept. 1984, Goodman died of leukemia. He was 36. Jack’s job as morning news radio producer allowed him to line up top and bottom of the hour headlines. After Goodman died the night before, Jack pulled out his cache of Goodman’s tunes and plucked some choice musical ditties to spruce up the headline, an unusual embellishment for radio news. After a couple of hours, the morning anchor, apparently thrown by the memorial pageantry, bellowed into the internal mike, “Who the hell is Steve Goodman?” 

A few months ago, at the opening of The Fat Shallot, in our Evanston neighborhood, the owner’s mom asked if we’d heard of Steve Goodman. Came to the right place. She told us she had Steve Goodman’s piano. Do we want it? No charge. We just had to move it out of her garage. It had been there for years and was out of tune. Goodman had given her the piano when he was moving to California to stoke his career. Her dad was his hematalogist, addressing Goodman's leukemia. She had the piano hoisted into her third-floor apartment at 1225 W. Chase in Rogers Park. What? That’s where we lived, on the first floor. She’d long since moved, as have we. 

We now live in a 110-year-old stucco house that has endured basement flooding, mice, squirrels, and a recent 25-page animal control report that pinpointed more than 20 vulnerable openings in our home’s exteriors. Estimate to repair: $8,516. Yikes! 

It took weeks to work out moving arrangements for the upright Thompson piano. We let the arctic chill in early January pass. On Fri., Jan. 19, the movers drove up. They removed an out of tune piano in the living room and replaced it with Goodman’s out of tune piano. It was our first introduction. Yes, it resembled the piano on the album cover of Goodman’s Somebody Else's Troubles. 

Beneath the piano’s dust and web-ridden exterior was a stunning interior view of the hammers and tuning pins above the keyboard.

In every crevice lurked wads of dust, webs, droppings, whatever a loose imagination might conjure from years in a garage. Gloves on, I vacuumed everything the nozzle approached. I emptied the garbage bags. I scoured. It looked less like a prop from the Munsters. A few days later, our housekeeper took over and applied skill to elbow grease. Better yet. 

Our welcome party got waylaid. We woke up Monday morning to an unexpected, and deeply unwelcome visitor, resting in our bathtub on the second floor. A quick, nervous glance convinced us the clump was a bat, not of the Louisville Slugger variety. We consulted a YouTube video, reconnoitered with our neighbor, a naturalist, and devised a plan. Thick gloves on hands and a plastic garbage can in hand, we swooped in, so to speak. We covered it, had it, and brought over some heavy books to weigh down the bat-enriched container. We also covered it with a heavy blanket. We called the animal critter folks, who briefed us on the regs on protected species (read: bats). They aren’t to be killed. The animal critter folks came out, took away the container and retreated to their facilities to test the bat for rabies. Though humans aren’t protected species, we aren’t left unprotected. Per doctor’s orders, and armed with two truths - rabies bites are 100% preventable and 100% fatal - we headed to the closest ER for rabies shots. A battery of five vaccine doses over a two-week period; three initially. 

Returning home spooked and vaccine achy, we cancelled our evening plans and tried to sleep. It was challenging enough until Margie woke at 2 am to go to the bathroom. There on the shower curtain was another clump. Another bat, this one in an inconvenient place to capture. The curtain dangled loosely from a rod. How to capture it? We called the animal critter folks. They would come out in the middle of the night for $550. Worth it, but the guy lived more than an hour away. Were we willing to leave the bat as is, and go back to sleep as the guy drove over? Leave it? No. Sleep? Not likely. Having watched a YouTube video, we felt equipped to capture it ourselves...sorta. We poised ourselves.

Gloves in place, container in hand, we pinned both the clump and the shower curtain to the mosaic tiles. 

The captured package was high up the wall. We could hold it in place against the tiles, but after a while, our arms would tire.

Shower curtain and
rubber gloves

In confining the bat, we’d caught its wing under the edge of the container. If it had been sleeping, as bats do plenty, it wasn’t now as it tried to wriggle out of the container. As it wriggled, flailed and strained to fly, it hissed, squealed and bared its teeth. Scary enough. Our mission was to scoonch the container down, holding it tautly to the tiles until it was tub high so we could hold it longer. Scarier. 

We went at it, as the bat leeched blood down the tiles. Too reminiscent of Hitchcock’s shower scene at the Bates Motel in Psycho for our tastes. 

Janet Leigh

We got it down. Next maneuver. Place the top of the plastic container level with, but behind, the container. Push the container onto the container top, hold it taut, turn it over and tightly secure the container. Did it. Missed a chance to go viral on YouTube. Now, we could wait till morning for the critter control folks to fetch the bat from our renamed batroom on the second floor. We had become suitably spooked about staying in our bat-infested house. The rabies results came back. Negative on both bats. Still, we checked on accommodations with friends. We stuck it out and tried to return to normal, notwithstanding sleep deprivation. 

We brought in a piano tuner. With a look of woe and wonder, he reinforced how out of tune and action-damaged the piano is. But he knew of Steve Goodman, figured there might be Cubs paraphernalia stuck somewhere in the works and volunteered for the piano rescue team. Before he could tune, there were more remnants crammed into interstices. Gloves re-engaged, we vacuumed more and emptied the garbage bags. 

He had a go at step one in the tuning process. He saw hope. He found some pennies. We unearthed the piano’s serial number: 145291. So far, no Cubs paraphernalia. No scribbled notes or chords to Go Cubs Go, to City of New Orleans, to Lincoln Park Pirates, to Men Who Love Women Who Love Men, or to A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request. 

We’ve had an epiphany. We are now operating on the hypothesis that the bats came in the piano, just the right size to host two bats, making the bats the paraphernalia. They are Goodman’s Dying Cub Fan's Last Bequest.

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Letters from home freshman year

                                                                                                                                           January 6, 2024 

[Listen here to the Lines n' Lyrix version of My Old Man, Steve Goodman's dedication to his dad]

Our basement flooded recently. As I aired it out, I discovered a filled folder of old letters and cards that I’d saved. Among the water-damaged pages were letters from my college days, circa 1970. Still mostly legible 50+ years later, but needing to be scanned if I want to keep them. I do. 

I say “college days” instead of “college years” because I noticed that almost all the letters were from the first half of freshman year. Regular letters from my parents. They lasted the year. My dad did most of the writing. My mom considered herself a “greenhorn” and wasn’t confident writing in English. Crammed into the rest of the folder were a few hundred letters, no exaggeration, from high school chums, many of whom I don’t recall maintaining a friendship with once I went to Grinnell, 300 miles due west of my Chicago home. No wonder I have such a fond and clear memory of Ernie, the campus post office guy. A few of my friends’ communiques made it through break. They vanished before summer. The letters from friends were of all shapes, sizes, colors and designs, period pieces worthy of a retro exhibit. I learned from a quick once over that I was apparently known by a flurry of pet names in high school, like Black Jack, Mad Dog, Dip-Breath, Cracker, Jacob, Podner, Jackie Poo, Zalman King, Dop, and Dobbs.

It will take me awhile to do memory justice to them, so I decided to read my parents’ for now. My dad’s letters were in the same handwriting, mostly on 6”X 8” paper. I got used to deciphering them. The first letter from my parents was dated Labor Day.

It referenced a package I would be getting with 25 bank checks imprinted with my name. I was now a man. We’d invested in a long-distance call (me reversing the charges of 85 cents) before then in which I told them my hay fever was acting up. Iowa alfalfa? Marijuana? The next letter expressed disappointment that I wasn’t coming home for the Jewish high holidays. My parents planned to accept Grinnell’s offer, as one letter put it, to visit on Parents’ Day Oct. 31. I got a parcel with candies from my mom and a reform high holiday prayer book from my dad, with wishes for continued strength in body and spirit. My dad’s notes became peppered with Hebrew words, as he wrote how proud he was to be asked to do an Aliyah Levi at the Torah during high holiday services. I had wished my dad happy birthday and he told me a friend had gotten my mom and him two tickets to “Butterflies Are Free.” My folks didn’t go the theater much. 

One letter provided addresses of our relatives in Israel so I could write them too. Apparently my high school chums who were in college nearer to home would drop in and visit my folks. 

By Oct. 20, our letters expressed mutual feelings of loneliness. I’d apparently written them that food at Grinnell was “not very palatable,” to which my dad responded with a Hebrew phrase that he translated for me: “Such is the way of the student of learning.” They wrote how much they anticipated my return home for Thanksgiving. Seems I didn’t make it home. My dad repeatedly asked in the letters for me to reflect more on my course subjects. In the Thanksgiving letter, he wrote how pleased he was that I was in the company of such learned writers as Thucydides, “the student of cause and effect in history.” My dad was clearly reveling in vicarious education. He was also noting that he liked my writing style; that my heart was in it and that therefore my heart was in writing to them. That made it easier, he wrote, to not be with me for Thanksgiving. He would look forward to my homecoming “in the near future.” I apparently phoned on Thanksgiving. The next letter – on Dec. 5 – mentioned that I was a student of logic. At some point, probably at the time I received the letter, I highlighted in yellow the next phrase: “It therefore follows logically that upon receipt of this letter, you will call us again and tell us, especially, how you are progressing with your finals.” 

They stuck with me after break and wrote in late January that they’d received my grade report. They were “extremely happy therewith,” as my dad put it. They hoped I’d make it home for my birthday in late Feb. I didn’t. The next letter enclosed a birthday check for $18, which spells out Chai (or life) in Hebrew. Next in line for a visit home was Passover, in early April. My favorite holiday. Didn’t make that one either. Seems as I read over the 1st year correspondences with my parents that college was all consuming for me, and that’s how I wanted it. It reminds me that when my parents drove me to campus to begin college, I couldn’t wait for them to drive off so I could set off on this college/Grinnell thing. My folks and I kept up our correspondence through the school year. Last exchange: May 11, ’71, two days after Mother’s Day. My dad thanked me for having one of my high school buddies deliver flowers to my mom. He called Shel (my oldest friend to this day) my “harbinger of surprises.” 

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