The arrival of the once- and perhaps still-hated New York Yankees for a long weekend series here in Chicago against a once but no longer formidable White Sox team takes me back to the late 1950s and early ’60’s, when I was a rabid young Sox fan and the games actually meant something to both teams in the heat of a pennant race.

I still vividly recall the many hot, humid, late-summer Friday nights, well before my teen years, driving with my dad from our home in Evanston to the Bridgeport neighborhood just south of old Comiskey Park and leaving the car on a block of wood-frame houses where grownups gathered on porches and kids played in the street.

We acknowledged the locals with smiles and nods, then walked on purposefully to the ballpark — the pungent odor of the nearby Union Stockyards h

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