Goodbye Old Friend: A Son's Farewell to Comiskey Park

Abstract

Comiskey Park, the home of the Chicago White Sox, closed its gates for the last time on September 30, 1990, after a glorious eighty-year reign as “the world's greatest baseball palace.” I attended that event as both a social scientist engaged in an ethnographic project and a son seeking to reconnect with the memories of and feelings for his father. In the recording and analysis of the language of those in attendance that day, the scientist within me began to recognize and understand a physical “reality” of memories and the symbolic importance of “bridges” to the past. In the writing, the ethnographer soon came to appreciate and more fully explore the reflexive properties and possibilities of ethnographic research. As a son, I confronted, in part through my research activities, a variety of emotions regarding my father, his death, and my previously unaddressed grief. The son and the social scientist each began to realize the role old Comiskey Park had played in my relationship with my father. This article, a brief but emotionally faithful piece of self-reflection, is written more by the son than the researcher. It is my farewell to my father.