Wanda Hickey's Night Of Golden Memories

Let's start by carving this into stone...

Should the Bears make good on their threat to move to Hammond, Indiana--as I still don't believe they will. As I still believe they want to stay in Illinois, but having painted themselves into a corner by encouraging those dumbass Hoosiers to throw them money to move to Hammond, they're basically pleading, in so many words—please, Illinois, please, save us from Hoosier Hell...

But should they move, I will never--repeat--never again call them the Chicago Bears. Got that?

No, from then on out they will be the Hammond Bears. As far as I'm concerned.

Now that I got that settled, let me give you a reason why I think the Bears moving to Hammond is so preposterous.

It has to do with stories written by one of my favorite satirists--the great Jean Shepherd.

Unfortunately, Shepherd--who died in 1999--is sorta lost to time. If you know of him, you probably know his voice. He's the narrator of The Christmas Story--the best Christmas movie. Ever!

Which is based on a book he wrote called In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. Which is one of the best book titles--ever!

Jean Shepherd was a big deal to nerdy little ol' me, growing up in the `70s. He did it all. Wrote stories. And plays. And radio scripts. And he was a late night DJ, who flawlessly spun yarns. 

And 17-year-old me thought Jean Shepherd was one of the world's funniest and wittiest and coolest cats--ever! 

The great Jean Shepherd…

Most of his stories are about growing up in northwest Indiana, just outside of Chicago, in a town he called Hohman.

Usually, those stories were published in Playboy. And then gathered in collections, like In God We Trust. At one time or another I read them all. And then I read them again. 

It's sort of like reading the early columns of Mike Royko (key word, being "early"-- as in before Royko went to the Tribune).

Like Royko, Shepherd did not sentimentalize the neighborhood he grew up. No, he basically made fun of it. As there is so much to make fun of.

For instance, here's how Shepherd describes Hammond (I mean, Hohman) in The Grandstand Passion Play, the lead story in the Wanda Hickey's collection...

"Ours was not a genteel neighborhood, by any stretch of the imagination. Nestled picturesquely between the looming steel mills and the verminously aromatic oil refineries and encircled by a colorful conglomerate of city dumps and fetid rivers, our northern Indiana town was and is the very essence of the Midwestern industrial heartland of the nation. There was a standard barber-shop bit of humor that said it with surprsing poeticism: If Chicago (only a stone's throw away across the polluted lake waters) was Carl Sandbug's `City of the Broad Shoulders.' then Homan had to be that city's broad rear end."

Hear that, Bears. You’re heading right up Indiana’s derrierre. Wait Shepherd’s not done...

"According to legend, it bore the name of a hapless early settler who had arrived on the scene when the land was just prairie and Indian trail. Surveying the sparking blue waters of Lake Michigan, he decided that Chicago, then a tiny trading post where land was free for the asking, had no future. Struggling through the quagmires farther south, for some demented reasons now lost to history, he set up camp and invested heavily in the land that was destined to become one of the ugliest pieces of real estate this side of the graders of the moon. Indeed, it bore some resemblance to the moon, in that the natives were alternately seared by stifling heat in the summer and reduced to clanking hulks when the fierce gales blew off the lake. Our founding fathers set the pattern of futility for all future generations."

What a wonderful passage, and what a lousy town for the Bears to move to. But if move there they must, they will be the Hammond Bears.

Or, at best, the Homan Bears. In honor of the great Jean Shepherd.