Cub need to win. For Steve's sake
Where you can STILL find Steve Goodman....I still miss him.
Steve Goodman rests in little pieces at Wrigley Field.
Near the end of my column last week about the resurgent popularity of the song, “Go Cubs Go,” I mentioned that some of the ashes of its singer and composer, Steve Goodman, are scattered at Wrigley Field.
This means that when fans sing along with the recording of Goodman now played after every home victory, they also, in effect, serenade whatever microscopic portion of him is still mixed into the left-field warning track.
The scattering ceremony was unofficial. After Goodman died in 1984, his cremated remains ended up in the possession of his long-time friend and business partner Al Bunetta.
Bunetta and others felt that they ought to be sprinkled at Wrigley, given not just that Goodman was a devoted Cub fan, but also that in his other famous baseball song, “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request,” written while he was battling the leukemia that claimed his life at age 36, the singer asks that his “ashes blow in a beautiful snow….over the left-field wall…to my final resting place out on Waveland Avenue.”
Bunetta said team officials refused this request, so the remains sat in a box in his office for more than three years. That’s when Goodman’s younger brother, photographer David Goodman, got the job done the Chicago way:
He found a guy - local singer songwriter Harry Waller --- who knew some guys who knew a guy who knew a guy in stadium security who’d let them slip into the Friendly Confines with a portion of Goodman’s remains just before Opening Day of 1988.
The plan was to scatter them by home plate, according to an account confirmed by David Goodman that appears in author Clay Eals’ "Facing the Music" ($29.95, ECW Press), a Steve Goodman biography published earlier this year. But the tiny bone fragments - they’re not really ashes - looked too rough to leave where players would be sliding.
So they went into the bleachers: “We stood along the wall, sang the song and let his ashes flow in a beautiful snow,” David Goodman wrote later. “One problem, the wind was blowing in that day and instead of coming to rest on Waveland Avenue, Stevie landed jus’ a little short, (on the) warning track under the 368 sign.”
Goodman’s widow and his daughters later were similarly surreptitious in scattering the rest of his remains by home plate at Doubleday Field at National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
The bone fragments posed no health hazard. Cremated remains, having been heated to close to 2000 degrees, are sterile, said Jerry Sullivan, president of the Cremation Association of Illinois. Sullivan said it’s legal to scatter them anywhere as long as you have the consent of the property owner, and that in his 35 years in the business he’d never heard of anyone being prosecuted for unsanctioned scattering.