LETTERS FROM HOME: WHERE WRIGLEY AND WRIGHT ARE STILL KINGS

July 6, 1995

Dear Pat,

What's the story from Newport News? Have you seen the Orioles play this year? I'd love to go to Camden Yard. Built by people who love the game.

Like the rest of America, I'm short on enthusiasm for baseball right now. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street," greed is good and ugly.

I don't think baseball players and owners are really different from you and me, though. We look at Bill Gates, the $12.9 billion Microsoft man, and marvel not at his creations but at his accumulations.

We think we'd be happier never to have to worry about bills while watching people who make millions on the national stage living unhappily ever after trying to make more.

We're like lab mice in a cocaine experiment: The more we get, the more we want. But there'll never be enough to fill the hole inside.

DC and I just returned from Chicago, where I watched the St. Louis Cardinals play the Chicago Cubs in one of baseball's holy places, Wrigley Field. The ivy on the outfield wall is real and so are the guys in the outfield operating the scoreboard.

Lights were installed a few years back in a concession to modernity and money-making. There's no place to park during night games, since all the residents are home then, so a spot within walking distance sells for as much as $15. If you can find one.

DC got frustrated looking, so she kicked me out of the car in front of the "Welcome to Wrigley Field" sign and spent the evening roaming Lincoln Park. It's more historic than holy, the place where the Yippies initially camped out in 1968 before the riots during the Democratic National Convention.

I took heart hearing 40,000 people sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Baseball will survive because fans love it too much to let the owners and players kill it.

DC and I also toured the home Frank Lloyd Wright and family lived in in Oak Park, a suburb south of the city. Because of his influence on architecture, it has become a mecca for international tourists and seekers. Brochures offer information in French, Spanish, German and Japanese.

The tour guide asked our little group why we were there, whether we were architecture students or had some other interest.

One man finally said, "We heard he was God."

I like his style -- Eastern influences, harmonizing form and function, lots of fireplaces. He idealized the organic and functional, yet did so by creating the illusion that his houses were emerging from the ground or even floating on it.

Except for the art works, Wright created almost everything in the house himself. He even designed his wife's clothes, which ought to make a lot of wives grateful they aren't married to a Frank Lloyd Wright.

We did some hanging out with my 5-year-old cousin, Brandon, the born hockey player. Never met a person or a wall he didn't want to run into. We played miniature golf. He was winning after two holes but suddenly discovered the greater joy of rolling himself down the hills instead of a ball.

Children are like aliens who've landed on Earth and don't know what they're supposed to do. God bless 'em.

We returned to Cape Girardeau in time for the Fourth of July. I had to work, so DC brought fireworks at dusk and we set them off in the parking lot. Like aliens who don't know what they're supposed to do.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.