Take Me out to the Suburbs: Baseball, White Flight, and Radio Advertisement in Chicago (Or Thereabouts)

Illustration: George William Myers

[I]

I have just heard the worst radio commercial of all time. It aired on WSCR Chicago ("670 The Score"), radio home of my beloved White Sox. During a commercial break in an afternoon call-in show, a discount auto parts store exhorts men of the Chicago area to reclaim their garages for "man stuff"---viz., discount auto parts. At the end of the ad, apparently to get us psyched up to purge the garage of heathen wife-and-kids stuff, comes the line that elevates the spot to greatness:

"Put the man back in Manifest Destiny!"

I shit you not. Whatever could possess someone to pen this line, I have no idea. But assuming it wasn’t the work of some unhinged liberal arts major with a tremendously clueless copy editor, whoever wrote this must have assumed two things about the target audience. First, to get the connection to garage-conquest, they have to have some inkling of what Manifest Destiny is. Second, if it’s actually going to make them want to shop there, they also have lack the obvious cringe-inducing associations. Apparently the intersection between these groups is a little larger than I thought.

I’ve long suspected that I was somewhere outside of the typical target demographic for Sox radio broadcasts. I don’t listen to games on the radio because I spend a lot of time in the car, or because I have a nefarious wife and child who monopolize the TV when they’re not filling my garage up with their junk. I don’t own a TV, (or a car, for that matter) and even if I did, the fact remains that our television announcers are atrocious. (Ken “The Hawk” Harrelson sounds like Foghorn Leghorn with a Carl Yastrzemski fetish and all evidence suggests that his sidekick, Darrin “DJ” Jackson, keeps a gravity bong stashed behind the press box. For some reason, they are loved by White Sox fans everywhere.[1] This only reinforces my suspicion that I’m an outlier in that particular data set.) Given this, I frequently find myself wondering during the commercial breaks: just who are these radio listeners?

What follows isn’t some facile analysis of everything wrongheaded in the Manifest Destiny ad. What concerns me here is the weird glimpse that radio spots offer into the collective id of their target audience, at least as conceived by the people buying and selling airtime. The ads that first inspired the question came from the Miller Brewing Company. There were three spots in particular that caught my attention, one for Miller Genuine Draft and two for a foul concoction called "Miller Chill", which according to the literature is a "light lager brewed with a hint of lime and salt." (This is Miller's attempt at a michelada, which I understand is a legitimate Mexican preparation.)

Consider the following:

(a) The narrator, a white guy if ever there was one, (WGIETWO hereafter) details the “four step filtration process” used to make Miller Genuine Draft. This four step process, we are told, is the epitome of luxury beercraft. To underscore the point, they put an effect on his voice to muffle it, and progressively take the effect off as he describes the first three filtration steps; that is, his voice starts out scratchy and distant sounding, and by the third step it's a normal voice. As he details the fourth and final step however, the narration is taken over by Barry White: a deep bass voice, clearly belonging to a Black Male. The thing is, it's obviously the same guy. The "black dude impression," which the script must have called for, is terrible---embarrassing, really---and completely transparent.

(b) This is an ad for Miller Chill. It features a slam poem (shudder) read again by a WGIETWO. He isn't doing a black dude impression as in (a), but his diction and articulation are completely affected to include "typically" (read: what a lot of white people imagine to be) black English and articulation. His slam poem, delivered in deadly earnest (yet somehow completely farcical) hip-hop fashion, details a scene in which his friends are having a house party, drinking Millers, etc., and ends horrifically with the line "together we hang... together we chill."

(c) Another Miller Chill ad. This time, it's a WGIETWO, with preposterous Mexican accent, exhorting you to have your "zenzes awakened az only Mee-ler Cheel can," and so forth. Again, simply embarrassing.

In all three of these ads, you get some white guy either copping a secondhand (if not outright imagined) black dialect as in (b), or going all-out minstrel-show as in (a) and (c). Why? ¿Por qué, Señor Meeler Cheel? Miller obviously has enough money to hire real, live voice talent of color. It's hard to escape the conclusion that this is a deliberate production choice, and that the desired effect is simply of a white guy making an ass of himself. The accents are stereotypical in the extreme, and executed with alarming ineptitude. Nobody who has ever actually heard a Spanish accent could possibly be taken in by this ruse. It sounds like some drunk buddy (the kind of guy for whom the term "buddy" was invented) of the ex-fratboy that lives downstairs from you, carrying on until all hours of the night, likely consuming Miller products. And this, of course, is the point. He is the target demographic. It is a message from one white guy, designed to conjure an image of black or Mexican people in another white guy. It's fairly easy to imagine the genocidal implications of Manifest Destiny lost on a generation of discount auto parts buyers, but the appeal to vocal stereotypes functions on a much lower level, and the intent is basically undeniable: White Guy 1 to White Guy 2... Do you copy?

[II]

The White Sox play on the South Side of Chicago. With certain exceptions, (notably, Irish populations in Bridgeport and Beverly; the strange black/white integration of Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago and the author; Chinatown; and large Latino populations in Pilsen and on the Southwest side) the South Side is now largely black and working class. There are remnants of the black middle class which flourished in the first part of the twentieth century, e.g., in the South Shore neighborhood, but economic depression was (both obviously and tragically) a consequence of white flight. The story of shifting class and ethnic composition on the South Side is a familiar one in Midwestern cities. The divisions between neighborhoods have been strict and predominantly ethnic. There was, and in certain enclaves still is, a strong showing of European immigrants alongside the perennially African American neighborhoods, which have been present at least since Reconstruction. For various reasons, too numerous and subtle to investigate here, the South Side was hit hard by the white flight pandemic of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Middle class whites moved to the suburbs in droves, this despite the fact that the city on the whole escaped the worst of the economic fate that befell many nearby cities such as Detroit. (The reasons for this are, again, too numerous and subtle to pursue here; one likely explanation is that Chicago was already economically diversified and established in numerous markets other than the steel and auto industries that collapsed in nearby inner cities.) South Side white families that previously laid claim to much of the area west and south of the White Sox’ longtime home, Comiskey Park, were now finding themselves outside of the city limits, pushing the frontiers of the Chicago metropolitan area.[2]

Anecdotally, my family on my father’s side is largely Scot-Irish. My grandmother grew up in the heart of the South Side, near 70^th Street and Damen Avenue. This neighborhood, Englewood, is now almost entirely black, and one of the city’s most economically depressed. For all of my grandmother’s virtues, when she talks about what happened in her old neighborhood, the racial undertones are hard to miss. She remembers a neighborhood of single family houses, castles to their owners, hard working immigrants with bustling (and enormous) Catholic families. Englewood these days---plagued by drugs, gang violence, unemployment and high school dropouts---is considered by many to be emblematic for much of the South Side. It is a common attitude among white people of my grandmother’s generation that these are quintessentially black problems, created by dysfunctional stewardship of the streets: once “the neighborhood changed,” as they typically bowdlerize for us politically correct youths, things really went to hell in a handbasket.

The old Comiskey Park stood at the corner of 35^th and Shields for 80 years from 1910 until it was demolished in 1990, watching over all of the upheaval the century had to offer. The new Comiskey Park---now known with a wince as “U.S. Cellular Field,” or just “The Cell”---was built just across 35^th Street. The park sits on one of the city’s major ethnic fault lines. To the west is Bridgeport, still a heavily Irish neighborhood, and to the east is Bronzeville, a historically black neighborhood. The monstrous Dan Ryan Expressway, fourteen lanes of sheer chaos, divides the two. (For obvious reasons, The Ryan has been referred to as the Iron Curtain of the South Side.) Both neighborhoods are rife with history. Bridgeport was home to Chicago’s Irish political machine, including the Daleys, who were and are all fearsome White Sox fans. The elder Daley, Richard J., famously set off the city’s air raid sirens when the Sox won the 1959 American League pennant, sending Chicagoans across the city (many of whom were Cubs fans, I note with satisfaction) scurrying into homemade shelters to escape the Soviets. Bronzeville, referred to as Chicago’s Black Metropolis,[3] was home to everyone from Muddy Waters to Gwendolyn Brooks and was one of the most significant bastions of black culture in the country, rivaled only by the likes of Harlem during its eponymous Renaissance. The White Sox sat in the middle. In the second half of the twentieth century, both neighborhoods suffered, but Bronzeville more severely: two of the most notorious housing projects in the country, the Robert Taylor Homes (1962) and Stateway Gardens, (1958) were constructed just east of The Ryan. From the upper deck of the ballpark, you could see the high rises above the scoreboard, stretching more than two miles south along the expressway. The projects, demolished over a ten year period ending in 2007, combined poverty and population density on a monstrous scale, and solidified the downturn of the areas just east of the ballpark.

[III]

As middle-class whites moved out of the South Side, they of course spread the Sox gospel to the burgeoning suburbs, but they hardly carted out the city’s love of baseball when they loaded their station wagons. On the contrary, Chicago---and the South Side particularly---had long been a mecca for black baseball. The Sox themselves were a draw: “[b]lack fans used to adore the White Sox. Comiskey was right in the colored neighborhood,” noted Ted “Double-Duty” Radcliffe, a former Negro League star, in 1991.[4] The Negro Leagues boasted a strong presence on the South Side with the Chicago American Giants, and the East-West championship games drawing more than 50,000 fans to Comiskey.[5] Even if interest in baseball has declined among black sports fans nationally over the last thirty years, as is frequently claimed, the South Side represents a natural intersection between black culture and the game of baseball; one would think it to be bulwark for black interest in the game.

So for all of this, we ask the question: given that the White Sox are proudly the baseball team of the South Side, why is their model radio listener so… white? We might try to connect it to the aforementioned declining popularity of baseball in African American communities. According to ESPN, as of 2008 only 8.2 percent of Major Leaguers are (non-Latino) black players, with the number dropping to 3% for pitchers.[6] But our model radio listener isn’t just non-black; he’s emphatically white. Lest we forget, Latino stereotypes are hardly spared in the aforementioned ads. Furthermore, Latino White Sox fans are numerous, and more or less ignored completely in the radio market. Despite the facts that the Sox have natural appeal in the Latino community---e.g., native Venezuelan Ozzie Guillen has international name recognition as the first Latin-American born manager to win a World Series title---and that Chicago boasts a massive Latino population, a grand total of 35 games out of 162 received Spanish-language broadcasts in 2008.

The Sox have been in Chicago for 108 years. Some of my earliest (and happiest) memories are of driving up to the ballpark with my father to catch the Sox. My dad’s family has White Sox fans going back four generations. To appeal to White Sox devotion is to appeal to deep images of family and tradition which are, to say the least, resistant to revision. For example: in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many Sox fans are still convinced that the 2005 championship team won because they played “small ball”: an offensive paradigm in which a team “manufactures” runs through stolen bases, sacrifice hits and general cunning rather than sheer power hitting. You can tell these people anything you want---that the ’05 Sox hit 200 home runs, good for 4^th in the American League, or that our leadoff hitter failed to score 100 runs or draw 50 walks. It simply does not matter. They are convinced that the ’05 Sox were a small ball team. And they will get really irritated with you for suggesting otherwise. (Of course, the White Sox their parents and grandparents watched growing up actually were small ball teams.) Romantic---and inaccurate---pictures of the Sox and their fans extend well beyond the field. Particularly, it’s a commonplace that the Sox are Chicago’s “blue-collar” team. (Contrast the Cubs, who are thought to play for effete, margarita-swilling yuppies.) As USA Today sportswriter Christine Brennan wrote breathlessly after heroics from Paul Konerko and Scott Podsednik in Game 2 of the 2005 World Series, “If it wasn't a Konerko, it was going to be a Podsednik. A ballplayer with a blue-collar name was destined to send delirious, drenched South Siders celebrating into the glistening streets of working-class Bridgeport on Sunday night.”[7]

The image of the tough, blue-collar, European immigrant worker is held in reverence by Sox fans. It’s not surprising, given that this is for many Sox fans the very image of their father or grandfather, toiling away in the stockyards and industrial parks of the South Side. Despite this, radio broadcasts contain almost no ads for businesses actually on the South Side, or just about anywhere else in the city. But every game, just after first pitch, radio commentator Ed Farmer gives a description of both teams’ uniforms, followed by, “when you want to wear what the players wear, go to Triple Threat Sports, in their new, easy to find location on Old Lagrange Road in Mokena…” I was personally stranded outside of the TTS in Mokena once (don’t ask) and let me tell you, it is utterly desolate suburbia. They have no sidewalks, only drainage ditches. The train that stops across Old Lagrange Road takes more than an hour to reach downtown Chicago. No city person in their right mind would consider this an “easy to find location”—unless they left the city over twenty years ago.

A few other omnipresent ads:

• Giardiniera by Marconi Foods, “[a] Family Run Business for over 100 years” according to their website; (giardiniera, n.: a fiendish pickled concoction of hot peppers, carrots, celery, pimento, and other vegetables, used locally as a condiment on just about everything)
• The Gary-Chicago International Airport; (it’s in Indiana)
• Suburban Discount Tire (it’s all in the name);
• At least one spot per game for each of the following organizations: the Concrete Contractors Association, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 134, partnered with the National Electrical Contractors Association; the Fire Sprinkler Fitters’ Union Local 281, and Chicago Area LECET (“Laborers-Employers Cooperation and Education Trust”, whatever that is);
• Menards, a home-improvement store empire stretching from Ohio to the Dakotas, whose theme music consists of hyperkinetic banjos accompanying a chorus of unreasonably happy (and white) people promising “you’ll save big money when you shop Menards”;
• Pace, the Suburban Bus Division of the Regional Transportation Authority (with no Chicago Transit Authority ads to speak of)

…and so on. As a friend of mine put it, as we stood outside of The Cell before this year’s Halfway to Saint Patrick’s Day Game, “we aren’t the team of the South Side. We’re the team of the suburbs.” It’s not just that our hypothetical listener is white. He loves his Italy-by-way-of-Chicago cuisine, blue-collar organized labor, discount doors and windows, nonstop bus rides to the ballpark from other counties, and flying in and out of northwestern Indiana rather than the city. It’s not, however that AM radio is actually targeting a South Side audience, and is just (way) behind the times. It’s that they consciously target the suburban white audience with appeals to the image that these Sox fans hold of themselves and their ancestry. In addition to attitudes on blue-collar labor or grimy small ball, the image frequently involves inherited attitudes on race, preserved in the brine of the white suburbs. The model radio listener is a member of a suburban White Sox diaspora created by white flight (as the suburbs themselves were, for the most part). AM sports radio, with much less money and scrutiny hanging from its shoulders than television, is the ideal environment for these preserved attitudes to survive.

In appealing to a white South Side in-exile, these ads cash in on racial attitudes that are not so much outmoded as they are atavistic: they survive as a time capsule from the old South Side, in which blacks and Latinos are The Other from across the neighborhood divide, and contact with them is preferably mediated by minstrelsy. Is this too harsh a judgment? Come by The Cell sometime when Cleveland is in town and hang out by the bleacher bathrooms, (try not to get punched) or at the 35th Street station on the Ryan after the game (try not to be black). Decide for yourself.