#ticket stubs

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.