 |
||||||
 |
||||||
Fields of Honor
Before World War II Bill Gleason wanted to be a sportswriter. After the war he wanted to be a sportswriter. The war failed to lift Gleason's horizons, but it did give him some perspective. "From time to time," he says, "I've listened to guys say, `Holy Christ, you writers don't know anything about pressure.' And I'm thinking, `You asshole! Pressure is knowing any second of any hour of any day you can get your fool head blown off. That's pressure.'" Gleason is reminiscing at my invitation because he just called it quits after 40 years as a Chicago sports columnist, the last 15 of them at the Daily Southtown. For 12 years he was also a TV celebrity, one of the garrulous sages of The Sportswriters. Asked to remember the war, he doesn't brood. Instead, he digs up his Silver Star citation. "Private William Gleason and three comrades were in an open field pinned down by machine-gun and mortar fire," he reads. "In an attempt to dash for a house, two of the men were immediately hit by enemy fire, one seriously. Private Gleason remained in the field, while the other injured man crawled to a position where he could call for an aid man. Meanwhile, Private Gleason crawled through 50 yards of murderous machine-gun fire to the more seriously wounded man to administer first aid. The fire was directed so low that the soldier was unable to rise from the prone position to apply the first aid pack. When the aid man arrived, Gleason carried the Browning automatic rifle of the wounded man and his own rifle to the house and helped cover the advance of the platoon." This account seems to amuse him. "See, we were a new division," he says, "and they were always looking for new decorations early to send to the papers. So I got into the Economist and the Chicago Sun. An interesting and very bitter sidelight to this -- when I went over to help the other runner, the guy who got hit in the buttocks, I went into his ammunition belt and I got his sulfa packet, and the damn thing was empty." Sulfa was the penicillin of the day. "And I cursed the people back in the States, the profiteers. So I used my sulfa pack to pour into his wound, and on the way to the house I said, `You asshole! What if you get hit?'" It was November 16, 1944, Gleason's 22nd birthday and first day of combat. "I was lying there under a sapling with little buds on it, and this German I could not see was sniping off the buds. And I thought, `This is going on everywhere! On this day people are shooting at each other all over Europe and in the South Pacific.' I thought, `Holy Christ!'" He lay there expecting never to see 23. Not that war troubled him. "It's so damn exhilarating," he says. "There really is nothing like it. I didn't realize it at first, but as we went along it came to me that I was a war lover. You hear so much about fear, but a lot of these guys -- and I was one of them -- had no fear at all." Before the war he'd been a copyboy at the old Chicago Sun and done some freelance writing on the side for the Southtown Economist (today the Daily Southtown), and when the war took away the Economist's sports department, the paper's editor hired Gleason to run it. After the war, Gleason tried and failed to launch a weekly sports newspaper, went back to the Economist, moved to the Chicago American as a picture-caption writer, shifted to sports, and began writing a column in 1961. He wrote that column at the American, at the Sun-Times, and finally at the Southtown. I've never understood how writers can devote their adult lives to the games of youth, so I ask Gleason if his life knew those wrenching passages when sports seem paltry by comparison. "Everything after the big war is anticlimax," he says. Aside from that, he thinks being a kid from the south side who grows up to cover the hometown teams is to be as lucky as anyone on earth. "Anybody can be a street reporter," he says. "Anybody can write op-ed editorials or columns. But to become a sports columnist is almost beyond the comprehension of most people. My next campaign is to talk Ebert into becoming a sports columnist. He'd be a marvelous sports columnist." Now Gleason is writing a memoir. He won't tell me the title, because titles get stolen, but here's how the book begins: "It's about my father and me and our great cockroach hunts." The Gleasons lived in a six-flat at 71st and Eggleston. Gleason's father was a blacksmith. "He'd come home from his VFW meeting, and we'd get down on the floor in the kitchen and kill cockroaches. The reason we didn't use powder, as other people did, is that we had a dog. It was a wonderful thing, being together with my father, kneeling side by side. He'd say, `Get that one, Bill. She's pregnant.' My job was the light switch -- turning the light switch on and off. When the lights were off, that's when they were scurrying. And when the lights were on, we could go to battle. "My mother and two sisters up at the front of the apartment would pay no attention to this, but she would say, `They aren't our cockroaches. They come from upstairs.' Or `They come from downstairs.' Downstairs was the basement. The other thing was `They came from the grocery store in the boxes.'
|
