Dubuquers: In Loyalty, Steadfast
May 31, 2007A recent email from Joe Schallan, a Dubuquer living in Phoenix, on Dubuque and the Cubs:
Dubuque, Iowa, has been a hotbed of Cubs fanaticism for a very long time. I know my mom went from Dubuque to Wrigley Field in 1938 to see a game. Does the fascination with the Chicago Cubs go back even further? I suspect so, though the Dubuquers who would know have probably passed on to the Great Ballpark Above.
There is a certain social convention associated with the Cubs: In the summer, when you arrive at a relative’s house, the Cubs game will be on WGN, even if no one is currently in the living room actually watching it. (But someone may be *listening* from the kitchen.)
In any case, you knock and go in by the kitchen door (never the front), step in, and before you say anything else, ask “How are the Cubs doin’?”
To inquire after anyone’s health or how the kids are doing before asking about the Cubs would be a breach of Dubuque social etiquette.
When I go back there in the summer or fall (usually once every year), I see homes with flagpoles flying Cubs banners. In the summer of 2005 I saw a home on a hillside where the owner had taken the slope in front of his house and made a flowerbed in the form of the Cubs logo, with geraniums for the red and some other flower for the blue.
I was there in October 2003 about a week after the Steve Bartman fiasco, and the place was in mourning. The rural districts surrounding Dubuque in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin are Cubs hotbeds, too, and on that trip I saw the following in Lancaster, Wisc., just north of Dubuque:
http://members.cox.net/jbsphx/cubshope.html
But I grew up a Dodgers fan. Why?
My cousin Harold Stecklein, whose Conoco station at 32nd and Central some oldtimers may remember, acquired a taste for the Brooklyn Dodgers while he was in the service in WWII, and stayed true to the Blue even after he came home to Dubuque. When I was seven I thought it was so cool that Harold went against the prevailing grain that I, too, adopted the Dodgers. Harold and I were probably the only Dodgers fans in northeast Iowa.
My family moved out to Arizona and the Dodgers left Ebbets Field for sun-splashed Los Angeles, but I kept up my emotional attachment to the Dodgers, with the glorious Koufax years coinciding with my teenage years in Phoenix.
Meanwhile, in Dubuque, the faithful stayed with their Cubs through miserable season after miserable season, seasons made crueler by the events of 1969, 1984, and 2003.
There is an ancient German motto — In Treue Fest — which in fact was used in coats-of-arms and official seals by various German states. In the First World War, Bavarian soldiers of the German Army marched off to the trenches with it emblazoned on their belt buckles. It means “In loyalty, steadfast” and is quite close in spirit to the U.S. Marine motto, “Semper Fidelis” — “always faithful.”
“In Treue Fest” is what being a Dubuquer is all about — steadfast in loyalty, be it to the Cubs, the family, or the Church. In a culture in which everything that seems to be solid melts into thin air (to paraphrase Karl Marx, who was at least astute on this point), many in Dubuque, even in this late age, remain steadfast in loyalty. It is a defining characteristic.
Cheers,
Joe S.
