Our baseball story starts with Wrigley Field’s outfield wall

In March 1922, my father arrived in Chicago from Sweden, a month shy of his 20th birthday. He initially stayed with his faster (aunt), and in a letter to his parents he wrote that he was told that he could find every kind of work. All he had to do was choose.

Without a secondary education or English, his choices were limited to manual labor, and he chose bricklaying — Swedes largely controlled bricklaying on the north side of Chicago at that time.

And one of the first jobs he worked on was Cubs Park, which would be rechristened Wrigley Field in 1927. As a boy, I asked him what an apprentice bricklayer did. “Well, one of the first things I did was shovel crushed stone out of a railroad car,” he said. At 3 a.m. In January. He was paid 23.5 cents an hour.

He was curious about the game they played at the park. He became a fan. He told me he would go to a game with his friends, and they would wear their short-sleeved white shirts to show off their tans and muscles for the ladies. Some things don’t change.

He once caught a foul ball hit by Hall of Fame catcher Gabby Hartnett and in those days, one could wait after the games by a stairwell that led to the clubhouse. When Hartnett emerged, Dad got him to sign the ball and they shook hands. Hartnett caught in the age before hinged mitts, so his right hand was exposed and battered. Dad said all his fingers seemed to be pointing in different directions.

Nearly 40 years later, in the summer of 1970, I covered a charity golf outing and Hartnett was there, being driven around in a cart. I told him my father had seen him play and had told me what a great player he was, and we shook hands. Damned if his fingers didn’t seem to be pointing in different directions.

I was born on the fringes of Wrigleyville at Ashland and Irving Park, and I still have a visual memory of my father taking me the first time to Wrigley. It was against the Phillies. I must have been about five. He was so proud to show me the wall where he had laid bricks.

Four decades later I took my own son there. I have the photo of him in his Cubs shirt and hat and with his hand on that wall. Like millions of families our allegiance to the Cubs has spanned generations.

And now it is spring and 162 games — perhaps more — lie before us with faces new and old but with the same hope that attends every new season. I go to Wrigley often and always stop to touch the paving stone dedicated to my father that lies just beyond the left-field stands — “Thor Peterson helped build the wall in 1923.”

Thanks, Dad…the gift of baseball has made my life immeasurably richer — as it has for so very many who all embrace this season of hope and new beginnings.