CARLI Digitized Book of the Month - October 2016

Here on the north side of Chicago, it's baseball fever right now with the Cubs in the World Series. I got to wondering about what it was like to be a baseball fan back when the Cubs last won the World Series, so I turned to the St. Ignatius Collegian, a quarterly journal put out by St. Ignatius College, an institution that would soon be called Loyola University Chicago. The (at the time all male) students put a lot about their athletics programs into the journal, with especial detail on the football games--not quite play-by-play, but close. 

While there are many mentions of baseball throughout the 1908-1909 volume, J. Francis Quinn, class of 1909, published a slightly alarming poem about being a baseball fan. "The Base Ball Fan" In this poem he muses on the travails of being a baseball superfan, rather than just a fan. Doing violence to the umpire, sitting on top of telegraph poles with lunch, meeting some notorious players of the era, and coming up with excuses for getting to games are some of his topics. While we don't talk about baseball in those exact terms any more, the sentiments still rings true to many this week.

Written by Margaret Heller, Digital Services Librarian, Loyola University Chicago

This volume was contributed by Loyola University Chicago. You can find this volume and others from CARLI participant libraries in the Internet Archive.