Constable: Attention, please! Push on to honor old Cubs' voice

Denied the chance to celebrate any World Series championships in the past 107 years, Cubs fans sometimes go looking for something from the good old days to cheer about. Rich Bysina of West Chicago thinks he's found a good cause.

“I came up with this idea to remember the Cubs' famous field announcer Pat Pieper, who was the field announcer for the team for 59 years,” Bysina says, noting Pieper's career handling public address chores started in 1916 with the Cubs' first game in what is now Wrigley Field. “This is the 100th anniversary of Pat Pieper first doing this job.”

You don't have to be a historian to be familiar with Pieper, Bysina notes.

“Every Cubs fan over the age of 50 would remember Pieper's voice,” says the 75-year-old Bysina. “The thing that was most memorable to me as a kid was the voice of Pat Pieper. I can still remember that voice of his ringing out just before the Cubs took the field in the afternoon.”

Pieper didn't miss a game in the 50 years after 1924, but became ill and missed the last couple of games of the 1974 season. He died a month later at age 88.

That sort of commitment deserves recognition, Bysina says. A former advertising man, Bysina used his calligraphy skills to hand-address packets with his pitch to honor Pieper, and mailed them to local media and Cubs brass, including Tom Ricketts, whose family owns the Cubs. Bysina also started a petition drive.

“What better way to honor and celebrate the 100th anniversary of Pat Pieper all of next year than to have any number of randomly selected Cubs fans replicate that same announcement over the P.A. system throughout 2016,” Bysina says.

On Thursday, April 20, 1916, the Chicago Cubs played the team's first game at Weeghman Park, which today is known as Wrigley Field. Under Manager Joe Tinker, the Cubs, coming home from a 2-4 road trip to Cincy and St. Louis, beat the Reds 7-6 in 11 innings.

Before that game, Pat Pieper, who had worked for the Cubs since 1904 as a vendor, walked onto the field. With the help of another fellow to hold up a megaphone that was taller than Pieper, the German immigrant made this simple announcement: “Attention! Attention, please! Have your pencils and score cards ready, and I will give you the correct lineups for today's game.”

Pieper continued to make that same announcement for almost every game through the decades, introducing a bevy of Hall-of-Famers, starting with Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown and ending with Billy Williams. Pieper also insisted that Babe Ruth did call his famous home run in the 1932 World Series. That was the same year Pieper traded in his 14-pound megaphone to take advantage of the new electronic public address system.

Ground zero for the petition drive is The Barber Shoppe, 0S120 Church St., in Winfield, where owner Kathy Agresti continues to gather supporters.

“She got 200 signatures, even White Sox fans,” Bysina says. “I guess women have a certain way of persuading people, especially when you are about to get a haircut from one.”

Agresti says many of her customers knew about Pieper, even if she wasn't familiar with him.

“My favorite thing about baseball was senior skip day (in high school) when we would go to a baseball game,” Agresti says.

Bysina says he's hoping his cousin from his old Chicago neighborhood, Mike Krzyzewski, the head basketball coach of Duke University and a Cubs fan, might join his crusade.

Finding a cause to promote comes naturally to Bysina, who sips a sherry as he recalls his advertising career that spanned the “Mad Men” era. Starting as a copywriter for the Montgomery Ward catalog, Bysina moved to the prestigious Compton Advertising firm in Chicago, before working with the Winfield Chamber of Commerce (now the Western DuPage Chamber of Commerce). He still promotes the Winfield Farmers Market.

“I can't watch a baseball game without marking score,” notes Bysina, who even kept a neat, frame-worthy score card for every Cubs game of last year's playoffs.

“That was going to be my Christmas present to my son, Jay,” says Bysina, noting that the New York Mets crushed that dream by sweeping the Cubs out of the playoffs.

Bysina adds that one of his greatest radio spots in the summer of 1969 played off the Cubs waiting 25 years to go back to the World Series. It was doing gangbusters until it was abruptly dropped from the airwaves after the Mets passed the Cubs in the standings.

He's hoping his Cubs, who did induct Pieper into the Cubs Walk of Fame in 1996, will see fit to honor the 100th anniversary of Pieper's first season.

“After all,” Bysina says, “100 years doesn't come around very often.”