During a broadcast last season, Ron Santo told the story about how he used to avoid post-game traffic on Addison or Irving Park Road by heading west through the North and Northwest Sides on Berteau Avenue, two blocks north of Irving. Berteau is one of those Chicago streets, like Grace, Wellington and Wrightwood, that run between the main thoroughfares and look residential but are busier than the more narrow residential streets. We often drive Berteau to bypass the always congested intersection of Damen, Irving and Lincoln. Ron continued that the kids in the neighborhoods along Berteau would wait at the stop signs and traffic signals to wave and cheer and chat and ask for autographs, to the point that he felt that they got to know each other pretty well.

I started a new job the Monday after Ron died. During typical small talk conversations with my new fellow employees, Santo came up often. One colleague told me how, as a kid, after Cub home games she would wait at a Berteau corner for him to drive by. She said he never failed to stop and say hello, and always had time to talk and sign autographs for those kids who hadn't gotten his signature yet. She said losing Ron Santo felt like losing a lifelong neighborhood pal. I told her about Santo's own Berteau story. She hadn't heard him tell it, but confirmed that the sight of Santo driving through the neighborhood was part of the fabric of her childhood.

I loved this story because to me it symbolized the status of the Cubs as a neighborhood team, and Santo as a regular guy who felt that the fans were part of his Cub family.

So, I nominate Berteau to be renamed Ron Santo Avenue. It's kind of a modest street that runs through typical North Side neighborhoods, so to rename it after a modest man who was a great Cub player, a great Cub broadcast personality and a true humanitarian who loved the Cubs, the city and the fans would be a suitably modest, but heartfelt, memorial. I would hope it could be a genuine name-changing, and not just one of those "honorary" brown street signs mounted under the green street name signs.

We had a family get-together to enjoy so we couldn't go to Saturday's game against the Phillies, but we listened on WGN as we drove to a suburb so far out of town that vast plains of corn, soy beans and wild grass dominated the landscape.  We followed the pitchers' duel for inning after inning, although after Thursday and Friday it sounded suspiciously like back-to-normal as the Cubs seemed unable to support Randy Wells with any run production ... until a squeeze play brought Castro in to score the lead run in the bottom of the 7th. All the Cubs needed was for Marshall and Marmol to do their jobs as they did on Friday and it would be three in a row.

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On May 15, 1960, the Cubs played a traditional Sunday doubleheader against the St. Louis Cardinals. I was nine years old and my brother Steve was seven. We had moved into our new house in suburban Oak Park less than a year before. I say "suburban" but we lived only four blocks south of the city limits at North Avenue, and six blocks west of Austin Boulevard, Chicago’s western boundary with Oak Park. Our neighbors two doors to the north invited us to the games. Their son, two years older than I, and daughter, a year or two younger than Steve, would be with us.

My first doubleheader. I was in heaven.

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