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Robert Goldsborough: Author

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By Donald G. Evans

Robert Goldsborough remembers as a youth looking west from Wrigley Field’s upper deck and seeing Riverview’s famed parachutes.

“I was ten years old, or just about to turn ten, and at the height of my impressionability as a youngster,” Bob says, “To me, in 1947 Wrigley field was about the most wonderful place in the world, it ran a close race with Riverview.”

Bob spends a lot of time mulling over the past. His literary career has been built on two mystery franchises, both firmly set decades ago. His literary debut, Murder in E-Minor (1986) continued the serial adventures of corpulent detective Nero Wolfe and his sidekick Archie Goodwin. Written for his mother, who had lamented the end of the series after creator Rex Stout’s death, Bob went on to write six more Wolfe novels, the last The Missing Chapter (1994). Those novels, set in the 1970s, hark back to the Golden Age of mysteries.

Snap Malek, Bob’s own creation, first appeared in Three Strikes You’re Dead, and subsequently starred in Shadow of the Bomb, A Death in Pilsen and the soon-to-be-released A President in Peril. Three Strikes is set in 1938, and includes characters such as Dizzy Dean and his contribution to the Cubs’ National League champion team that year. The subsequent books are all set in the forties.

It was only natural, then, that when Bob was asked to contribute to Cubbie Blues, he set to work on an essay set in 1947.

“I like Chicago history and I like Chicago baseball history, that’s a piece I like doing,” says Bob. “In Three Strikes You’re Dead, I had so much fun researching facts I could squirt into book.”

Bob’s essay, “The Guy Who Saw the Triple Play,” is a reminiscence of the second major league baseball game he saw in person. He began with that germ of memory dating back 61 years and used the Naperville Public Library’s microfilm archives of the Chicago Tribune to check his memory and round out details from that game. But first, he went online to locate the specific date in 1947 when the Cubs defeated Cincinnati at home 2-1.

It is the details that excite Bob.

Get Bob started talking about historical events, and he’ll launch into a detailed narrative with the clarity of this morning’s breakfast. Like other great historians, Bob possesses a good memory and enthusiasm for musty, curled artifacts. When he stumbles across a narrative of, say, The Homer in the Gloamin’, his mind sets to work on how he can recycle such an arcane bit into a new, fresh context.

For too many contemporary fans, Cubs history begins and ends around 1969. Younger fans might not know much that preceded the 1984 collapse. And the baby Cubbie fans look to Sosa and Alou for nostalgia. So it was a boon for the anthology to have a writer willing and able to tackle an era ripe in Lovable Losers lore.

“The Cubs were coming off a World Series, and in ’46 and ’47, the nucleus of their last pennant winning team was still there: Pafko, Cavarretta, Nicholson, Lowrey, Hank Borowy. Lennie Merullo and Stan Hack. These were guys that had all played in ’45 and some even played on the ’38 team. It was almost a legacy team. To me, as a grade schooler, there was a romance about that seven-game 1945 World Series, which is when I started to have a sense about the Cubs. That carried over.”

Bob’s fictional library, impressive though it is, cannot compare to his body of work as a journalist. He worked more than 20 years each at the Chicago Tribune and Crain Communications (“if they gave out 20-year watches, I’d have two”), and during that four-decade time he dabbled in some sports writing. He once wrote a piece for the Tribune sports section about a 1950s exhibition doubleheader played between the Chicago White Sox and Cubs—on the eve of Opening Day.

“When I became a Cubs fan was the beginning of a huge slide for the Cubs,” Bob says. “1947 was the first of about 20 losing years in a row. I felt somehow I was to blame for this. About time I began to get all worked up about the Cubs, they began to drop away. It was almost a mystical thing to me.”

The Elmhurst of Bob’s childhood was almost all Cubs fans, except the Catholics, who were White Sox fans. Bob was a Protestant. He now resides in Wheaton, and still follows the Cubs, though not as religiously. (“Anybody can be beaten down.”) In his retirement years, Bob free-lances for Elmhurst College’s alumni magazine.

In addition to Bob’s contribution as a writer, he also volunteered as an editor, and took on jobs that ranged from proofreading to fact checking to spot interviews. He was a general in the small army of editors who helped elevate the anthology to greater heights.

“That does speak to my enthusiasm for the project,” Bob says. “I liked the idea from the getgo. I thought you guys had a good plan here. Oddly enough, I enjoyed that part more than writing my own piece. To me, editing the diversity of stuff you’d collected was an awful lot of fun. A lot of fascinating creativity went into these poems, essays, the fiction. I am, after all, retired.”

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