CLASS AND BLAST FROM THE PAST: JIM THOME'S PEORIA ROOTS
(This story originally ran in the Chicago Sun-Times on April 19, 2006, during Jim Thome's first of four seasons with the White Sox. In a career of meeting amazing people, it was one of the most thoroughly enjoyable features the writer ever had the privilege to do. Thanks to people like Stu Courtney, Joel Boyd, Dan Mann, Larry Hamel and Elliott Harris for helping to make it happen. The Thomes deserve all the good that has come their way. On the winter day last January when Jim's selection to the Hall was announced, his father Chuck - now 82 - said: "I'm just as proud of the way he treated people as the way he played baseball.")
ORIGINAL HEADLINE: He's on solid ground: Jim Thome's baseball roots are firmly entwined in the diamonds of Central Illinois. The White Sox slugger has a long family history of hot stick and steady eyes
- Author/Byline: Jim O'Donnell
PEORIA -- A tree grows in Peoria.
It is a family tree. It is a baseball tree.
The roots of the tree extend back almost eight decades around the diamonds of this bat-and-brawl river town. And those fine lines now reach all the way to the White Sox and U.S. Cellular Field, where Jim Thome is the most prominent living legacy to his family's noteworthy basepath branches.
''I don't think there has ever been any question that the Thomes are the first family of baseball in Peoria,'' said Bruce Saurs, a prominent local businessman and a guiding spirit of the Greater Peoria Sports Hall of Fame. '`But they had that status even before Jim.''
Added Dewey Kalmer, the head baseball coach at Bradley since 1978: ''The Thomes are a remarkably athletic family with an incredible baseball pedigree. And they have never forgotten how to be nice. That's why so many of us down here have felt everything, the good and the bad, with Jim at every step throughout his professional career.''
Pre-Jim, the baseball prowess of the Thome family was so prominent that four members of the clan were inducted en masse into the Greater Peoria Sports Hall of Fame in 1982, the second year of its existence. From the family-table perspective of the Sox slugger, that quartet was grandfather Chuck Thome Sr., father Chuck Jr., uncle Art and aunt Carolyn, a prodigious softball player with the Caterpillar Lettes in the days of the grand women's industrial leagues.
''A legendary group down here,'' said Phil Luciano, a columnist for the Peoria Journal Star. ''To this day, many people track Jim Thome regardless of who he's playing for, which is saying something in a town that remains almost evenly split between Cubs and Cardinals fans. In our paper, we run a daily box on his accomplishments.''
''When Jim signed with the Sox, I became the eighth White Sox fan in Peoria,'' joked Chuck Thome Jr., the slugger's father. ``But now I have the feeling that number is growing.''
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With son's hot stick and steady eye currently blazing down the Sox starway from ``The Cell'' to Lake Peoria, Chuck Thome is probably right. Especially because hot stick and steady eyes long have been among the calling cards of his baseball brood.
''Actually, since we were from the south valley, we were called 'stick people' -- and not always in a nice way,'' Thome recalled. ''It had to do with the fact that we were from out in the sticks, out toward Limestone Township. But we always got a kick out of it and still joke about being 'stick people.'''
The stick people inhabited a south valley that grew in step with early 20th-century industry in Peoria. While the more gilded castes lived up on Moss Avenue and High Street, blue-collar workers squeezed their pay envelopes from Caterpillar and Hiram Walker and breweries such as Pabst and Gipps to purchase homes and start families in the south valley. In time, a further line of demarcation ''down the hill'' would evolve, with African Americans living east of Laramie Avenue and whites commanding the area west of Laramie, away from downtown. Hence, the ``stick people.''
One of the burlier sticks was a Hiram Walker worker named Chuck Thome Sr. He was 5-8, almost as wide as he was tall, with notably quick hands and equally quick feet. Away from the distillery and demands of raising a family of seven in the Depression, baseball was his game.
''He had a powerful body along the lines of Hack Wilson, but he was also fast,'' Chuck Thome Jr. said. ''He played for a while with the Peoria team in the old Three-I League, including a bit with Phil Cavarretta [in 1934]. But then he threw his back out, and that was the end of any professional baseball dream. His friends always kidded him that if he had stayed with Cavarretta [and ascended to the Cubs], people never would have heard of Stan Hack.''
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Instead, Thome Sr. channeled his baseline fervor into the enduring outlet for adult amateur baseball players in Peoria: the Sunday Morning League.
The league was founded in 1916 and continues to this day, now billing itself as ''the oldest amateur baseball association in America.'' In the 1930s, it was a compact group of eight teams sponsored by local businesses and featuring the best of the locals who had somehow missed getting on the then-sprawling pro baseball carousel. Each team played 21 games, all on Sunday mornings, between late May and early September.
''Back then, the Sunday Morning League was huge,'' Saurs said. ''My father, Eddie, was commissioner of it for years. They would draw crowds of four or five thousand people for games at Bradley Park and at Glen Oak Park. Some games were even carried on local radio. And the greatest slugger of them all was Chuck Thome Sr.''
Thome Sr. remains the Sunday Morning League's all-time leading home-run hitter. In a career that stretched from 1923 to 1959 -- he pinch-hit into his early 50s -- the rye foreman hit 49 homers. He is also third on the league's career stolen-base chart with 117. And he also managed the Hiram Walker team for years, winning a league championship in 1961.
''We all used to go down to watch Chuck Thome hit the ball,'' said Joe Stowell, the longtime Bradley basketball seer. ''Then, around 1940, his son Art turned into quite a hitter at Manual [High School] in the days when my brother Jim used to play against him for Central. And not far behind him was Chuck Jr.''
Art had the father's eye but more of a knack for contact and spraying hits. He led the Sunday Morning League in batting four times, peaking with a .471 average in 1952. And he frequently drew the attention of major-league scouts.
But according to Chuck Thome Jr.: ''They would always sign someone else. I can remember taking the old [Peoria] Rocket up to the LaSalle Street station with my parents and Art, and he would take batting practice with other prospects before games at Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park. And it would always seem like he was about to be signed.''
Instead, Art followed his father to the hoists at Hiram Walker and also opened a bar on Laramie Avenue called Art's Hideaway (now Earp's Hideaway). Chuck Jr. veered from the call of the vats and began as a United Auto Worker at Caterpillar. He married a valley girl named Joyce Gilmore, and in the mid-1950s, the stork began arriving with Randy, Chuck III and Lori.
''A little later, I started playing fast-pitch softball at nights and on weekends up in the Quad Cities with a team called Harrelson Motors,'' Chuck Jr. said. ''That was back in the days before I-74, so it meant a lot of driving back and forth after work on some back roads, but I loved it. Finally, in 1967, we won the world fast-pitch championship, which was a very big deal in those circles.''
Two years later, in 1969, Chuck Jr. would bid adieu to major fast-pitch by batting .462 as an outfielder for Bon-Air of Moline and being named first-team All-World. Three reasons helped prompt his decision to return his focus to the Illinois River Valley: One, he was being promoted to foreman at Caterpillar, and two and three, Joyce presented him on Aug. 27, 1970, with twins Jennifer and Jim.
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''I am living the dream that every father who has ever watched his son play in a Little League baseball game has had at one point or another,'' Chuck Thome Jr. says today.
Thome's dream teased before his third son. Both Randy and Chuck III were all-state baseball players at Limestone High School in Bartonville (a town adjacent to Peoria's south valley). Jim had quick hands and outstanding athletic ability but was perceived as somewhat undersized (6-1, 175 as a high school senior) and got lost in the diamondeering shuffle as his class graduated in 1988.
''Limestone had a very good team Jim's senior season,'' Bradley's Kalmer said. ''They had four Division I prospects and a few seasons before had produced Mike Dunne, who had a great rookie season pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1987.
``But [Jim] opted out of college and instead, in my opinion, tried to fast-track his professional career by going to Illinois Central [a junior college on the northeast side of Peoria]. Had he taken a scholarship to a four-year college, he would have been ineligible to sign with a major-league team until the end of his junior year or until he turned 21, whichever came first.''
Instead, Jim Thome produced an MVP season with the Bartonville American Legion team in the summer of 1988 and an All-America junior-college season in 1989 for the start-up program at Illinois Central. A scout for the Cleveland Indians inadvertently saw him play a juco game, and the Tribe picked him in the 13th round of the amateur draft in June 1989. Still, the path from Peoria to major-league points north had a long way to go.
''One juncture I remember well is that at the end of Jim's first spring training with the Indians, in 1990, he still was assigned to no minor-league team,'' Chuck Thome Jr. said. `'Instead, the Indians put him in extended spring training and had Charlie Manuel, then a minor-league instructor, working with him.
``The team had paid much more for some highly touted guy, but Manuel kept telling them about this kid from Illinois who was the first to the ballpark and the last to leave every day. Manuel told management: 'This kid will be a hitter. Whatever you do with the other guy, get Jim someplace where he is going to get to swing the bat. He will be a big-league hitter.'''
Its interest recharged, Indians management assigned Thome to Burlington of the Class A Appalachian League, where he hit .373. Later that season, he moved to Class A Kinston of the stronger Carolina League and batted .308. By the end of the next season (1991), he was with the Indians for their final 27 games. There, on the south shore of Lake Erie, he set the table for home runs and American League pennants to come with a .255 average and his first major-league round-tripper.
''It is all such a dream,'' said Chuck Thome Jr., whose wife succumbed to cancer in January 2005, after his father (1983) and Hall of Fame siblings Art and Carolyn also passed. ''Jim has a little cabin on the lake for me out on his property [a huge hunting estate in west central Illinois, 40 miles from Peoria]. Some days I've been out there after listening to a game on the radio or watching it on the dish and just wondering how it all happens.
``So much of it is about all of the work he's put into it. And so much of it is just about how life can work out. I know after my 39 years at Cat, you never could have predicted that my retirement would be like this.''
Not unless all of the possibilities of that tree that grows in Peoria were considered.
A family tree. A baseball tree. A special tree.
[email protected] (April 2006)
------- (SIDEBARS WITH MAIN PIECE...)
TRACKING THOME THROUGH THE TREES: FROM CAVARRETTA TO 'THE CELL':
--- QUIETING PHIL CAVARRETTA
Phil Cavarretta remains one of the greatest names in the history of major-league baseball in Chicago. The former Cubs player-manager lives quite happily with wife Lorayne in suburban Atlanta. He will turn 90 in July.
When the Cubs signed him off the Lane Tech campus in the spring of 1934, Cavarretta's first posting was with the Peoria Tractors of the old Central League. A muscular local enjoying a cup of coffee with the short-lived franchise was Chuck Thome Sr., the grandfather of current Sox slugger Jim.
''I don't remember Mr. Thome, but I do remember the summer,'' Cavarretta said. ''The weather was awful and the team folded before the end of the summer, so I got sent to Reading [Pa.]. But I wound up working in a men's store in Peoria that winter, and my wife and I got married down there by a Judge Stone in 1937.''
No memories of Thome?
''Not of the grandfather, but I do have one of Jim,'' Cavarretta said. ''A few years back, when he was with the Indians, a friend and I went to a spring-training game. Well, it's a ballgame and the sun is out, so we're giving everybody the old raspberry, Thome included. He comes up, and I'm yelling, 'Hey, this guy can't run. He's too big. Get the piano off his back.' Stuff like that.
''He grounds out, and I don't realize it's his parents sitting in front of me. The mother is glaring a little bit, and a few innings later, he hits a home run. That shut my friend and me up for the day -- at least as far as he was concerned.''
--- VERY LITTLE HOMEY FOR THOME
BARTONVILLE, Ill. -- The town is nestled on the southwestern edge of Peoria. It is technically the home base of Jim Thome. He graduated from Limestone High School here in 1988.
But Bartonville does not abound with the nostalgic trappings of Thome.
Yes, the scoreboard in right field of Griffith Field does acknowledge, '`Donated by Jim Thome ... Cleveland Indians ... Class of 1988.'' He paid a reported $15,000 for that back in 1996.
And, yes, there is a pathway into Alpha Park off of Garfield Avenue, about a half-mile from Limestone, that is designated ''Jim Thome Drive.''
But other than that, not much.
''The man across the street from our house flies a White Sox pennant,'' said Jenny Thome Ellis, Jim's twin sister. ''But he's always done that. And I'm counting down his home runs to No. 500 on a marker board on our refrigerator door. Of course, no one other than family and friends ever sees that.''
''The mayor always told us that the town was going to do something,'' said Chuck Thome Jr., Jim's dad, who now lives in a bordering community farther southwest. ''But they haven't, so what are you going to do?''
A bar less than one mile from Limestone is called Dizzy Dean's. Inside, banners and posters are divided almost equally -- between the Cubs, the St. Louis Cardinals and NASCAR. Not an iota of Thome material.
''A lot of it is the Sox' fault,'' said columnist Phil Luciano of the Peoria Journal Star. ''They cut Peoria out of their winter caravan a few years back, and now they're paying for it, even with the world championship. Maybe Jim's presence will help change all of that.''
--- HUNTING AN EGG ON EARTH
FAIRVIEW, Ill. -- To Jim Thome, heaven is a hunter's breakfast on earth.
That is why he long has designated the Fairview Cafe as his early-morning gateway to bliss. The cozy cafe is less than five miles from Thome's huge private hunting estate -- about 40 miles west of Peoria -- in a town boasting 493 residents.
So it was no surprise to the waitress -- three parts Tammy Wynette, one part Roseanne Arnold -- when a recent visitor requested, ''The hunter's breakfast, please.''
''Oh,'' the waitress replied. ''You want what Jimmy Thome gets, right, hon'?''
''Hon''' rolled the breakfast bones and said, '`Yes.'' The result was a hearty platter of scrambled eggs, some kind of sausage, white toast and marvelously coagulated moist hash browns.
Thome's estate is a properly hidden range featuring a master lodge and guest cabins that is actually closer to a town called Ellisville. His older brother Chuck -- ''The Caveman,'' to Thome homies -- oversees the property. Major-league guests have included Will Clark, Travis Fryman and ex-Cub Mark Clark, now retired after his improbable $20 million career in the bigs as a gentleman outdoorsman near Bath, Ill.
Thome's passion is bowhunting deer. He told reporters that there are about 15 deer heads on the walls of the main lodge at his property. (''My wife won't let me keep them at home,'' he said.) But visitors also report that the slugger's conservation sensibilities include large patches of corn on his land to help preserve the deer population.
To find Fairview, head west out of Peoria on Route 116 until all signs of franchised civilization and radio stations carrying hip-hop have ceased. Then drive another seven miles and turn left. Look for the Fairview water tower.
The Fairview Cafe is open from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m., seven days a week.
--- THROW IN THE BIG GUY, TOO
When the White Sox acquired Jim Thome last winter, they didn't just get a home-state home-run hitter; they also got a dandy addition to the wives' club at home games.
Mrs. Thome is the former Andrea Pacione of North Royalton, Ohio. Among other things, in 1993, the Bowling Green communications graduate was selected as Miss Ohio USA. Seven years earlier, that accolade was won by another young Cleveland suburbanite named Halle Berry.
Later, Pacione worked as a TV reporter in assorted Ohio outposts, including Findlay and Toledo, where she reportedly met Thome while he was playing for Charlotte of the Class AAA International League. They were married in Chicago, at Holy Name Cathedral, in a lavish wedding in November 1998. By then, Thome was playing for the Indians, and Pacione, too, had advanced to bigger shows on Cleveland TV.
Chicago, friends said, was selected to accommodate Thome's relatives from the Peoria area and Pacione's family, split between Cleveland and Detroit. (Her father owns an ornamental iron firm in North Royalton.) Guests included Dwight Gooden, Richie Sexson, Jaret Wright, assorted other major-leaguers and then-Cleveland Cavaliers coach Mike Fratello. The reception was held in the grand ballroom of the Westin Hotel, where 400 guests danced to a 10-piece band.
Daughter Lila Grace was born in December 2002. Her growing presence, coupled with Thome's move to the Sox, prompted the couple to purchase a suite at U.S. Cellular Field this season to accommodate their daughter and the endless stream of visiting family and friends during games.
Said Chuck THome Jr., father of the slugger: ''I'll tell you, it is so refreshing to see that girl[Andrea] with her daughter at games. We used to sit near the wives' section in Cleveland, and this one had a nanny with her twins and that one had two nannies with her kids. It seemed like almost all of 'em had given their kids over to nannies. Andrea is not like that. She is absolutely 24/7 with their child, and I think that's wonderful.''
(FINAL NOTE: Sunday, July 29, 2018, in Cooperstown, NY - 900 miles from Peoria - it all become memoralized as wonderful for an amazing baseball brood from "the sticks.")
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