In the summer of 1974 or ’75–no one’s quite sure of the exact year–Jon Seidman organized a softball game at Bent Park, in the northwest corner of Evanston. He’d come home from college for the summer and was looking for something to do on a Saturday afternoon. He called friends and friends of friends, and soon had enough guys to play.
Paul Thompson, another mainstay, says, “I came to Chicago from Oklahoma in about 1970 or 1971, and not long after that I met Jon. I was working at the warehouse at the old Northwestern University Press. Jon’s mom was an editor there, and she got him a job for the summer. He told me about the game. We just started playing, and we never stopped.”
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If the group had a leader, it was Seidman. He was scrappy, quick, and coordinated. He played second or short, scooping up most grounders that came his way. At the plate he crouched low, slashing shots along the foul lines. “Jon always kept us loose,” says Ruschman. “He was such a wise guy with his dry, sarcastic sense of humor. If you missed really bad he’d say something like, ‘Nice swing–you must have practiced it.’ He policed the games. He settled the disputes. A couple of the guys have been known to have tempers. All right, Thompson and I have had our share of arguments. But Jon was always the one who stepped in and said, ‘Hey, take it easy,’ or, ‘Let it go.’”
Seidman played into August of this year, then had to stop. He made one last appearance in early September. “He was pretty sick then, very thin, and he only came to watch,” says Ruschman. “He brought his dog, and he sat on the sidelines in this big foldout chair, and he threw out those classic-Jon derogatory comments about how we were playing. Saying something like, ‘It’s amazing that I’d be associated with people with so little talent.’ Everybody was laughing, but it was hard not to cry.”
On November 2, three days after Seidman’s funeral, they returned to the park to play football. It was a crisp autumn day, and they met on the soccer field in their ratty sweats and tattered T-shirts.
