“All they really need is for a grown-up to show interest in them, Ms. Sharaski.” She flashed a bright meaningless smile at me. “No one expects them to win games.”
“Warshawski. And the girls expect to win games—they’re not playing to show what good sports they are. Which they’re not. Three or four of them could be top-notch players with the right coaching—they deserve more than the short time and mediocre skills I can give them. What is the school doing to find someone?”
“Praying for a miracle with Mary Ann McFarlane’s health,” she said. “I know you went to school down here, but back then the school could rent an instrument for any child who wanted to play one. We haven’t offered music in this school for eighteen years, except for the Band Club, which one of the reading teachers runs. We can’t afford an art program, so we tell kids to go to a free downtown program—two hours and two buses away. We don’t have an official basketball team—we have a basketball club. We can’t afford a coach—we need a volunteer, and we don’t have a teacher who has the time, let alone the skills, to take it on. I suppose if we could find a corporate sponsor we could hire an after-school coach.”
“Who’s down here who could put that kind of money into the basketball program?”
“Some small companies in the neighborhood, places like Fly the Flag, sometimes put up money for uniforms or instruments in the band. But the economy’s so bad right now that they aren’t doing anything for us this year.”
“Who’s big down here now that the mills are closed? I know there’s the Ford Assembly Plant.”
She shook her head. “That’s all the way down on 130th, and we’re too far away and too small for them, even though some of the parents work down there.”
Her phone rang at that point. Someone from the city health department was coming by tomorrow to look for rodent droppings—what should they do about the kitchen? A teacher stopped by to complain about the shortage of social studies texts, and another wanted eight students moved out of his room to a different section.
By the time Ms. Gault got back to me, she couldn’t remember whether I was Sharaski or Varnishky, let alone whether the school would help find a coach. I ground my teeth, but when I got back to my own office that afternoon I did a search on companies within a two-mile radius of the school. I’d found three that were big enough to afford serious community service; the first two hadn’t even let me make an appointment.
By-Smart had both the discount megastore at Ninety-fifth and Commercial, and their Midwest distribution center at 103rd and Crandon. The store told me they didn’t make any community service decisions, that I needed to see Patrick Grobian, the Chicagoland south district manager, whose office was in the warehouse. A kid in Grobian’s office who answered the phone said they’d never done anything like this before, but I could come in and explain what I wanted. Which is why I was hiking through mountains of things on my way to Grobian’s office.
For some reason, when I was growing up in South Chicago I’d never heard of the By-Smart company. Of course, thirty years ago they had only begun the most phenomenal part of their staggering growth. According to my research, their sales last year had been $183 billion, a number I could hardly comprehend: that many zeroes made my head swim.
I guess when I was a kid, their warehouse had already been here at 103rd and Crandon, but nobody I knew worked here—my dad was a cop, and my uncles worked at the grain elevators or steel mills. Looking around me now, it was hard to believe I hadn’t known about this place.
Of course, you’d have to be a Trappist monk not to know about the company today—their TV commercials are ubiquitous, showing their happy, nurturing sales staff in their red “Be Smart, By-Smart” smocks. All over America, they’ve become the only retail outlet for a lot of small towns.
Old Mr. Bysen had grown up on the South Side, over in Pullman; I knew that from Mary Ann’s telling me he’d gone to Bertha Palmer High. His standard bio didn’t talk about that, instead dwelling on his heroics as a World War II gunner. When he got back from the war, he’d taken over his father’s little convenience store at Ninety-fifth and Exchange. From that tiny seed had sprouted a worldwide empire of discount superstores—to use the overheated imagery of one business writer. Of the sixteen girls I was coaching at Bertha Palmer, four had mothers who worked at the superstore, and now I knew April Czernin’s father drove for them, too.