#old ticket stub

As another baseball season begins I bring you this old Chicago Cubs ticket stub. Oddly, there is no date anywhere on it, so dating it becomes a bit of a challenge. One hint is the zip code on back. The US Postal Service started to use the five digit code in 1963. A quick read on the internet shows that the USPS made a serious push starting in the late 1960s to get people to use the new five digit system. Thus the absolute earliest it would be seen on a ticket would be the 1964 season.

Another clue is the price of a $1.50. If you’ve been to a game in the last decade or so you know that price has to be from a good while back. Along with the fact that this is a “Child’s Ticket.” I don’t know when that ended, but nowadays if the kid is old enough to take up a seat they are full price. I managed to find this story a guy wrote about his first Cubs game in the summer of 1963. He mentions that a grandstand ticket was $1.50 and a kid’s seat was ¢.60. So we now know that this ticket has a to be at least few seasons after ‘63.

By the late 1960s both of my parents were adults and married. Soon after I came along. So, there is a very good chance that this stub is from the 1970s and the child it was for was me. Who knows, maybe this was the ticket to my very first ball game. 

A ticket stub to Michael Todd’s Hall of Music, which sadly has no date. Thus I can only guess as to which Michael Todd theater incarnation this was from. One was during the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair. At that time he created a production called the “Flame Dance” where burners would singe off the dancer’s costume thus giving the perception that at the end she was nude. Post WWII Todd owned the Michael Todd Theatre (now the Harris and Selwyn Theaters in the Loop) which showed movies but on occasion would host a dance and music review. He also owned the Michael Todd’s Theatre Cafe in the Lake View neighborhood of Chicago. So, any one of those could be the source of this stub. 

While his name is largely forgotten today, he was once very well known. Besides producing many theatre shows both in Chicago and in NYC, he was also in the movie business. He helped usher in widescreen and is best remembered for producing Around the World in 80 Days which won the Oscar for Best Picture. He is also known for marrying Elizabeth Taylor, and being the only husband she didn’t divorce. The reason for that lack of divorce might very well be the fact that in 1958 he died in a plane crash in New Mexico. The story goes that before takeoff he had tried to convince a few friends to join him on the flight, one of which was Kirk Douglas, so that he could have someone to play gin rummy. He was reported to have said "Ah, c'mon, It’s a good, safe plane. I wouldn’t let it crash. I’m taking along a picture of Elizabeth, and I wouldn’t let anything happen to her.“