A man was shot to death Wednesday in Austin on the West Side.

Someone fired shots at the 26-year-old about 5:53 p.m. in the 4800 block of West Harrison Street, Chicago police said.

He was struck in the abdomen and knee, police said. Winesses drove him to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

He hasn’t been identified.

Witnesses who dropped off the man wouldn’t cooperate and with officers, according to police.

Area Four detectives are investigating.

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A man shot at July Fourth partygoers in Austin, killing one woman and wounding two others because he was angry that he was asked to stop shooting his gun in the air as children played outside, Cook County prosecutors said Wednesday.

After hearing the allegations, Judge Susana Ortiz compared Sunday night’s crime to the infamous 30-second 1881 “gunfight at the O.K. Corral” and ordered alleged gunman Calvin Gonnigan held without bail on murder and attempted murder charges.

Gonnigan shot 45-year-old Janina Ford in the face, killing her as she tried to help another victim and attempted to talk to Gonnigan Sunday night, Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy said.

Gonnigan fired at a group of people celebrating Independence Day because someone in that small crowd had asked him to stop firing his gun in the air from a nearby porch as children milled about, Murphy said.

Chicago police

Gonnigan, 34, initially threatened the partygoers, but went inside a nearby apartment building, Murphy said.

He then came outside and approached the group in the alley. Gonnigan allegedly pointed his gun at one person before aiming at and shooting a 32-year-old man.

When other partygoers sought cover, Gonnigan allegedly fired additional shots, grazing the abdomen of a 50-year-old man.

A 49-year-old man who has a permit to carry a concealed weapon returned fire, striking Gonnigan in both arms and hip, Murphy and Chicago police said. After he was hit, Gonnigan ran back inside the apartment building he went into moments before, Murphy said.

As Ford and others tried to help the 32-year-old victim, Gonnigan allegedly came back outside. That’s when Ford attempted to talk to him and was gunned down, Murphy said.

Gonnigan then allegedly stood over the 32-year-old victim and repeatedly shot him as he lay on the ground. That victim suffered 10 gunshot wounds and remained hospitalized in critical condition at Stroger Hospital Wednesday, Murphy said.

Gonnigan also shot the 50-year-old victim two more times before returning to the nearby apartment building, Murphy said.

When officers arrived, Gonnigan was identified as the gunman by several witnesses, including the man who shot Gonnigan, Murphy said. That man turned his gun in to police and has cooperated with the investigation.

Gonnigan tested positive for gunshot residue when he was taken into custody at the scene, Murphy said. His mother allowed officers to search her apartment where a box for a Springfield 9-mm handgun and ammunition was found. However, no firearm was recovered, Murphy said.

Gonnigan has previous convictions, including an unlawful use of a weapon by a felon conviction for which he received a 10-year prison sentence, Murphy said. He also has a prior aggravated robbery conviction, Murphy said.

Gonnigan had recently been living with his cousin in west suburban Brookfield and was employed by Frito-Lay as a package handler, where he worked 60 to 80 hours a week, an assistant public defender said.

“I think the situation is one in which there may be another side to the sequence of events that night,” the defense attorney added.

Ortiz noted that Gonnigan walked away from the camera during his live-streamed hearing before it concluded Wednesday.

Gonnigan is expected back in court July 26.

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SURFSIDE, Fla. — Emergency workers gave up Wednesday on any hope of finding survivors in a collapsed Florida condo building, telling sobbing families that there was “no chance of life” in the rubble as crews shifted their efforts to recovering more remains.

The announcement followed increasingly somber reports from emergency officials, who said they sought to prepare families for the worst.

“At this point, we have truly exhausted every option available to us in the search-and-rescue mission,” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a news conference.

Eight more bodies were recovered from the site, bringing the death toll to 54, the mayor said. Thirty-three of the dead have been identified, and 86 people are still unaccounted for.

Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah told families at a private briefing that crews would stop using rescue dogs and listening devices but would continue to search for remains.

“Our sole responsibility at this point is to bring closure,” he said, as relatives cried in the background.

For two weeks, rescue crews have looked for spaces in the rubble large enough to harbor survivors. But they now say the likelihood of finding anyone alive is almost nil.

“We noticed the stress, the force of the pressure of the walls and the floors just pretty much again sustained no chance of life,” Jadallah said.

Hope of finding survivors was briefly rekindled after workers demolished the remainder of the building, allowing rescuers access to new areas of debris.

Some of those voids did exist, mostly in the basement and the parking garage, but no survivors emerged. Instead, teams recovered more than a dozen additional victims. Because the building fell in the early morning hours, many were found dead in their beds. The death toll stood Wednesday at 46, with 94 people unaccounted for.

No one has been pulled out alive since the first hours after the 12-story Champlain Towers South building fell on June 24.

Twice during the search operation, rescuers had to suspend the mission because of the instability of the remaining part of the condominium building and the preparation for demolition.

After initially hoping for miraculous rescues, families have slowly braced themselves for the news that their relatives did not survive.

“For some, what they’re telling us, it’s almost a sense of relief when they already know (that someone has died) and they can just start to put an end to that chapter and start to move on,” said Miami-Dade firefighter and paramedic Maggie Castro, who has updated families daily.

Authorities are launching a grand jury investigation into the collapse and at least six lawsuits have been filed by Champlain Towers families.

Naum Lusky, president of the Champlain Towers North condo association, said engineers hired by the city arrived Tuesday to conduct three days of tests at the building, which has a similar design and was built at about the same time as Champlain Towers South.

“They are checking from one end of the building to the other and everything is fine,” Lusky told The Associated Press.

Since the south building collapsed, he has insisted his tower is safe because his association kept up the maintenance and did not allow problems to fester.

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If the great surrealist painter Salvador Dali and iconic LSD proponent Timothy Leary designed an after-hours club during the height of a pandemic in Cabaret-era Berlin, it would definitely look something like Eschaton.

(Virtually) wander the seductively murky, always tantalizing rooms of Eschaton‘s gloriously bizarre, hour-long livestream and you’ll find dancing magicians, burlesque strippers, sultry chanteuses, giant rats, drag royalty, profane puppeteers, and Chicago’s Tony Grayson, coughing up cockroaches and trying to clean up a murder scene in the north side attic of an underground comedy venue.

Grayson’s your host, a poet/performance artist who sometimes wears a massive papier-mache mask and sometimes speaks in extreme close-up, their face peering out from inside a mini set they created: a parlor-like room just big enough to accommodate an adult-sized human head.

“My brain at the beginning was like, OK, we’re doing this stream show in place of the in-person show. But as we went on, it became obvious: This wasn’t a replacement. This was the show–in a new medium. With elements you can only create with digital, interactive film,” Grayson says.

Its title comes from the Greek for (roughly) the end of history, or the last event in some higher power’s divine plan. Eschaton didn’t start out as a virtual show, with audiences meandering via mouse clicks through the tantalizing shenanigans of a labyrinthine club where a weird new adventure lies within each of a dozen or so Zoom rooms.

Creators Brittany Blum and Tessa Shea Whitehead originally planned an immersive, site-specific interactive production along the lines of Sleep No More, where ticketholders wander through different rooms as a multilayered, never-the-same-twice story unfolds.

“We started out the pandemic thinking that we needed to find an alternative, some way of doing an immersive show without the being-there-in-person physical immersion,” Grayson says. “But as we worked, we started to realize that what we were creating wasn’t a substitute for anything–virtual Eschaton became its own thing,” they say.

Indeed, Eschaton is very much its singular own thing. Audience members are free to loiter in the various Eschaton rooms as the spirit moves them, piecing together the many narratives woven into the production’s uncompromising, celebratory freakiness.

Throughout, Grayson plays Niko, a genial if comically insecure host-with-the-most, gifted at using their considerable offbeat charms to draw out even those who habitually take a hard pass when it’s time for “audience interaction.”

“As an audience member, I’m somebody who finds it nerve-wracking when someone in the show calls on you. So it’s important to me that our audience knows they are in good hands. You can’t be just like ‘Where are you from? OK, cool,’ and then it’s like all the air gets sucked out of the room because nobody knows what to say next.

“With Eschaton, I work to make sure there’s never that hesitancy when I’m doing crowd work. If an audience member doesn’t know what to say, that’s OK, because my job is to navigate that with the classic rule of improv–make your scene partner look as good as possible,” they say.

Grayson has had some mondo-bizarro scene partners wandering the halls of Eschaton, where audiences are asked to keep their cameras on throughout the 60-minute show.

“The craziest thing I ever saw was this guy Kevin, who had magnets implanted into his fingers,” Grayson says. “Sometimes that happens–I’ll be chatting with people throughout the show and suddenly I’ll stumble onto something incredibly odd and I’ll be like, ‘What even was that?’

“We had one regular couple for a while who brought this creepy doll they’d make talk. Loved it,” they say.

Along with Blum and Whitehead, Grayson was joined in devising the piece with ensemble members in London, Berlin, New York City, and Tennessee. Audience members have visited Eschaton from as far away as Tokyo.

As the pandemic raged, Grayson found solace in dancing with total strangers miles away.

“I do a bit where I ask someone to dance. I can’t really explain it–but dancing with people virtually? It makes you feel better. It makes you create a community in a pretty amazing way,” they say.

Niko–who Grayson conjures as equal parts raging insecurity and over-the-top showboat–lives in the attic of Chicago’s illustrious DIY performance venue The Shithole, where Grayson lives on the first floor. On show dates, Grayson trudges up to the attic with their kit of lights and audio equipment. In non-pandemic times, rowdy, sweaty crowds pack the place for late-night offerings of performance art and stand-up. For now, the attic is solely Niko’s turf.

“Going back up there for Eschaton, it was like walking into a ghost town,” Grayson says of the attic space. “But the energy of the people that had been there, you could feel them. The old beer cans. The sweat. All this amazing energy, palpable.”

Finding that energy was crucial to Grayson’s artistic survival over the long lockdown. After Eschaton‘s first show, they packed up their laptop, cameras, and sound system and descended from the attic back to the living quarters.

“My roommate hugged me and asked how it went,” Grayson recalls. “And all I could think was that it felt like art really mattered. I go through these phases–especially in the pandemic–where I’m always asking myself: ‘What are we even doing? Who is this even for?’ But I exited the attic that night knowing how much art means to people. And always will mean to people.”

Grayson also found themself connecting with the ensemble, even though they never met in person.

“We do these aftershow hangs, and there was one when we all realized we were using the same Neutrogena wipes to clean off our makeup. It was such an unexpected, weirdly specific connection. We all felt, all of a sudden, like we were about to go out after the show,” they say.

Grayson’s optimistic live Shithole shows will return. But for now, they invite all and sundry to Eschaton. It’s worth the trip. v

Next dates for Eschaton are TBA. See info.eschaton.club for updated info.

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The smell of summertime grilling filled the air of the Pullman City Market on Wednesday. Food trucks lined the street and dance hall music blared from a stage. This was 2021’s Taste of Chicago To-Go.

In lieu of the annual Grant Park food festival, the city — still recovering from the pandemic — found a new way to host the iconic summer event: neighborhood pop-ups.

The food truck event Wednesday at 111th and South Cottage Grove Avenue was the first of five days of Taste of Chicago pop-up events this week.

While the city couldn’t plan for 1.5 million people to safely gather as usual, Neal Heitz, director of event production for the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, said the department could pull off pop-up events “on a dime.”

“Going to neighborhoods was an opportunity to engage the Invest South/West that is a real priority for this administration and spread the Taste throughout the whole city,” Heitz said, referring to Mayor Lightfoot’s community development initiative.

The Pullman City Market sported 10 food trucks Wednesday. The last Taste of Chicago in Grant Park in 2019 had 82 food vendors for attendees to choose from.

But for some vendors and foodies, the smaller event offered a connection to neighborhoods the large event often misses.

Rebecca Vanderkloot operates Doom Street Eats, a food truck out of the Pilsen/Little Village area. She said the truck has been at Taste of Chicago for five years but this year’s neighborhood pop-up version is a great way to help communities.

Cheyanne M. Daniels/Sun-Times

“Some of the pop-ups are in the places that don’t always get attention,” she said, adding that the pop-ups give people who normally can’t make it to the downtown event a chance to attend.

Elizabeth Nix said she thought the address was a mistake at first but was glad the city offered something good for the community to look forward to.

“There’s been so much violence it’s nice to have something positive in our community,” Nix said.

While the city tried to host a spinoff Taste of Chicago last year, it had to work around pandemic safety measures that some vendors said weren’t the best.

“Last year, they had us drop food off in different communities,” Caribbean-Asian fusion Whadda Jerk food truck owner Thomas Brewer said. “This … gets people outside and gives some kind of normalcy.”

New small-business owner Ebony Blue also got a chance to show the South Side what she has to offer: coffee.

Southside Grinds, a mobile coffee bar started in 2019, made its first appearance at the Taste of Chicago, handing out ice-cold drinks and peach cobbler to sweaty attendees.

The line for the small Black-owned business never let up. The bar even had to stop serving its iced drinks for a short period after running out of ice.

“It’s really exciting to know that our mission and our vision and our hope for the South Side comes across to people,” Blue said.

Cheyanne M. Daniels/Sun-Times

But Wednesday wasn’t just for food trucks. The Get Growing Foundation’s Plant Truck Chicago made an appearance, too, selling cacti and moss-ball Kokedama plants.

Still, for some, Taste of Chicago To-Go couldn’t beat the bigger, grander Grant Park event seen in years past.

Bryant Hobbs, 53, said he understood the city had to make a difficult decision but the event in Grant Park is “one of the events of the summer.”

But Heitz said there is no telling what next year’s event could see.

“In a perfect world, there [would] be an ability to do all these things and the downtown event,” Heitz said.

Right now, he said, the city hopes the pop-ups will help restaurants regain some of revenue lost to the pandemic.

Cheyanne M. Daniels is a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South and West sides.

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A man shot at July Fourth partygoers, killing one woman and wounding two others in Austin because he was angry that he was asked to stop shooting his gun in the air as children played outside, Cook County prosecutors said Wednesday.

After hearing the allegations, Judge Susana Ortiz compared Sunday night’s crime to the infamous 30-second 1881 “gunfight at the O.K. Corral” and ordered alleged gunman Calvin Gonnigan held without bail on murder and attempted murder charges.

Gonnigan shot 45-year-old Janina Ford in the face, killing her as she tried to help another victim and attempted to talk to Gonnigan Sunday night, Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy said.

Gonnigan fired at a group of people celebrating Independence Day because someone in that small crowd had asked him to stop firing his gun in the air from a nearby porch as children milled about, Murphy said.

Chicago police

Gonnigan, 34, initially threatened the partygoers, but went inside a nearby apartment building, Murphy said.

He then came outside and approached the group in the alley. Gonnigan allegedly pointed his gun at one person before aiming at and shooting a 32-year-old man.

When other partygoers sought cover, Gonnigan allegedly fired additional shots, grazing the abdomen of a 50-year-old man.

A 49-year-old man who has a permit to carry a concealed weapon returned fire, striking Gonnigan in both arms and hip, Murphy and Chicago police said. After he was hit, Gonnigan ran back inside the apartment building he went into moments before, Murphy said.

As Ford and others tried to help the 32-year-old victim, Gonnigan allegedly came back outside. That’s when Ford attempted to talk to him and was gunned down, Murphy said.

Gonnigan then allegedly stood over the 32-year-old victim and repeatedly shot him as he lay on the ground. That victim suffered 10 gunshot wounds and remained hospitalized in critical condition at Stroger Hospital Wednesday, Murphy said.

Gonnigan also shot the 50-year-old victim two more times before returning to the nearby apartment building, Murphy said.

When officers arrived, Gonnigan was identified as the gunman by several witnesses, including the man who shot Gonnigan, Murphy said. That man turned his gun in to police and has cooperated with the investigation.

Gonnigan tested positive for gunshot residue when he was taken into custody at the scene, Murphy said. His mother allowed officers to search her apartment where a box for a Springfield 9-mm handgun and ammunition was found. However, no firearm was recovered, Murphy said.

Gonnigan has previous convictions, including an unlawful use of a weapon by a felon conviction for which he received a 10-year prison sentence, Murphy said. He also has a prior aggravated robbery conviction, Murphy said.

Gonnigan had recently been living with his cousin in west suburban Brookfield and was employed by Frito-Lay as a package handler, where he worked 60 to 80 hours a week, an assistant public defender said.

“I think the situation is one in which there may be another side to the sequence of events that night,” the defense attorney added.

Ortiz noted that Gonnigan walked away from the camera during his live-streamed hearing before it concluded Wednesday.

Gonnigan is expected back in court July 26.

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While most guest soloists who perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra travel hundreds of miles from far-flung cities around the world, Jorge Federico Osorio will only need to take a 10-minute automobile ride.

The 70-year-old pianist, who lives in Highland Park about five miles from the 36-acre Ravinia Festival grounds, will join the orchestra there for the July 9 opening of its 15-concert residency. In all, he has performed more than 10 times at the summer musical extravaganza since 1998.

“It’s like my local festival, and it’s been wonderful,” he said.

Osorio might not possess the flashiness or fame of some of his keyboard counterparts, but the Mexican-born pianist is highly esteemed within the classical world for his thoughtful, honest and refined style of pianism.

Among the soloist’s fans is famed conductor James Conlon, who served as the Ravinia Festival’s music director from 2005 through 2015 and led multiple concerts featuring Osorio as soloist with the Chicago Symphony, including a complete set of the five Beethoven piano concertos.

“Of the many artists with whom I worked at Ravinia, he stands out,” Conlon said via email. “In today’s age of inverted values, his deep, un-theatrical musicianship attests to a standard of seriousness that should be the norm but that one does not encounter as often as one wished.”

After a one-year hiatus because of the coronavirus shutdown, the Ravinia Festival is presenting a somewhat abbreviated season of more than 70 concerts, with certain capacity limits and other Coronavirus protocols in place to help ensure audience safety.

The July 9 performance will be just the 13th live, in-person performance by the Chicago Symphony since it returned May 27 to the Orchestra Hall stage after nearly 15 months of, at first, inaction, and later virtual, small-ensemble presentations.

It will be led by Marin Alsop, who makes her debut as chief conductor and curator of the Ravinia Festival — the first such position in the event’s history. In all, she will lead seven of the Chicago Symphony’s concerts this summer, including a July 10 program that focuses on works by women and composers of color.

Brian Rich/Sun-Times

Osorio was supposed to perform Rachmaninoff’s beloved “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” at Ravinia in 2020, but he instead will take on Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, for this make-up appearance. The orchestra’s forces will be reduced to allow for social distancing onstage this summer, and the earlier, classical-era concerto does not require as many musicians.

“I’m delighted,” the pianist said. “I just love this concerto. I think it’s one of the most beautiful and unusual [of Mozart’s 27 piano concertos]. The colors that he gets with two clarinets and the wonderful adagio which is so poignant and expressive — it’s really something else.”

Osorio grew up in Mexico City, where he began his piano studies first with his mother and later at the National Conservatory of Mexico before leaving at age 16 for more advanced training in Paris and then the Moscow Conservatory.

He entered several competitions and won some prizes, but he did not catapult onto the music scene like some winners of high-profile contests such as the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Instead, his career developed more incrementally.

The young pianist did take first place at the little-known Rhode Island International Master Piano Competition in the early 1970s, and one of the prizes was a chance to tour the United States with the Warsaw Philharmonic. Then-music director Witold Rowicki later invited Osorio to play with the orchestra in Poland, and his career began to take off in Europe.

His big break in the United States happened on a lark. He was performing with the San Antonio (Texas) Symphony in the early 1990s when Henry Fogel, then the Chicago Symphony’s president and chief executive officer, happened to be in the audience.

Fogel clearly liked what he heard, and that appreciation led to Osorio’s first recital in Orchestra Hall in February 1996 and, soon afterward, an engagement with the orchestra to perform Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody” with guest conductor Christopher Wilkins.

“It’s a very competitive field,” the pianist said. “You need to be persistent, and I guess you need to be lucky. Like they say, sometimes it’s being in the right place at the right moment. Then, things start developing.”

Both of Osorio’s parents were musicians, and he listened to their recordings of the Chicago Symphony as a child. “I always thought I would love to play with this orchestra,” he said. “Somehow, it just caught my imagination. So, what a thrill it has been for me to fulfill that dream many times over.”

Kyle MacMillan is a local freelance writer.

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A man who was found in the trunk of a burning car Tuesday on the Far South Side died of a gunshot wound to his head, according to an autopsy.

Authorities responded to a vehicle fire about 10:35 p.m. in the 12100 block of South Doty Avenue and extinguished the blaze, Chicago police said.

The severely burned body of Myron Richardson, 19, was found in the trunk of the vehicle, according to police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

An autopsy conducted Wednesday found he died of a gunshot wound to his head and ruled his death a homicide, the medical examiner’s office said.

Area Two detectives were investigating.

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Professional athletes have always had difficulty telling themselves it’s time to retire, but fewer than ever seem to know when enough is enough.

You can blame Tom Brady for that. He won a Super Bowl last season at 43, turns a year older next month and apparently plans on playing and living forever. Suddenly, lots of athletes in their competitive golden years think that if they stop eating tomatoes, as Brady did, they can play at a high level into their 40s. This has to be killing the BLT lobby.

No one knows if Brady has discovered some nutritional secret to being able to play longer than everybody else or if he’d be just as successful on a diet of Big Macs. It doesn’t matter. Everybody thinks it’s the former.

This brings us to Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta, who is 35 and struggling to do what he used to do so well. I don’t know if he has looked to Brady for inspiration, but Arrieta has been a big fan of cutting-edge diets and exercise programs throughout his career. If he was being reticent during his 2015 Cy Young season, all a reporter had to say was, “Where can a guy get some decent kale juice in this town?” and Arrieta wouldn’t shut up. Brady’s success at an advanced age and his disavowal of some common foods — I’m talking to you, strawberries and eggplants — resonates with a certain kind of athlete.

The problem for Arrieta is that there doesn’t appear to be a secret recipe to stop the steady decline of his career (though maybe going on the 10-day injured list will delay it a bit). Since that magical 2015 season, when he had a 1.77 earned-run average and led the National League in victories, starts, complete games and shutouts, he has gotten worse every year. His ERA is an elevator that only goes up: from 1.77 to 3.10 to 3.53 to 3.96 to 4.64 to 5.08 to this season’s 6.30.

Former Cubs president Theo Epstein saw the decline happening fairly early and was smart enough to make Arrieta a contract offer he could refuse in 2018. Jake went to the Phillies, where the downturn accelerated. With Epstein gone, the Cubs reverted to their age-old habit of nostalgia when they signed Arrieta to a one-year contract before this season.

And it looked good for a while, didn’t it? He was the Jake of old in his first five starts, with an ERA of 2.57. But he went downhill after that. In his last two starts, he hasn’t made it out of the second inning, including an outing Tuesday in which he gave up seven earned runs and was pulled after 55 pitches.

Afterward, Arrieta was stubborn in the face of evidence, and reporters’ questions, that more than suggested he might be on his last legs as a productive pitcher.

“There is still a lot left in the tank,” he said. “No question about that. The stuff plays. The execution is not there. It hasn’t been for a while, but I’ve been in similar situations in my career. I’ve been in worse situations than this.”

Athletes are taught to never quit. It’s an excellent mindset when you’re down 20 points in the fourth quarter of a basketball game. It’s problematic when you’re past your prime and hurting your team. The loss Tuesday was the Cubs’ 11^th in a row. Arrieta clearly isn’t the team’s only problem, but that doesn’t make him any less a problem.

“I have all the tools,” he insisted. “I know what needs to be done.”

It’s not easy giving up the thing you do best, especially at an age considered young by any standard except pro sports. We see it all the time, with athletes trying to hang on because they have no idea what else to do with their lives. There are always a few Olympians who refuse to leave the stage, but at least they can argue they don’t make the ridiculous money that athletes in the major sports do. Arrieta has made more than $100 million in his 12-year career. With a bit of belt-tightening, I think he’ll be OK.

He got knocked out of Tuesday’s game so early he could have watched Game 1 of the NBA Finals. It might have given him ideas. Suns point guard Chris Paul, who is 36, scored 32 points and had nine assists in a victory over the Bucks.

If it inspires Arrieta to play better, great. If it inspires him but he can’t play better, then maybe the facts are exactly what they seem to be: evidence that it’s time.

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Harry Caray – The Early Years

Harry Christopher Caray (né Carabina) was born in St Louis on the 1st of March 1914 as the son of a Romanian mother and Italian father. Harry’s mother passed away when he was 14 and he had little recollection of his father who left to serve in WWI. He attended Webster Groves High School while living with his aunt & uncle who took him in.

A talented baseball player in his youth, Harry possessed sufficient skill to receive an invitation to play for the University of Alabama directly after high school. Unfortunately, financial woes forced him to turn down the offer. At the time WWII affected the lives of people across the world, Harry applied to enlist in the Armed Forces but was ultimately rejected due to poor eyesight. After being denied the possibility of both a baseball and military career he switched to selling gym equipment while looking for alternative avenues to continue pursuing his passion for baseball.

Harry spent several years learning the basics of his future craft at radio stations in Kalamazoo, Michigan as well as Joliet, Illinois. Bob Holt, the station manager at WCLS Joliet suggested Harry should consider changing his surname from Carabina to Caray. Mostly because Holt believed the Carabina family name sounded awkward on the radio.

By the time he retired Harry was one of the great legends of baseball. Over the course of his lifetime, he became ingrained as part of the baseball consciousness throughout America. It is highly doubtful baseball fans will ever have the luck to grow up listening to an expert, accurate game commentary, and often controversial opinions of a living legend of the game. The accomplishment did not come easy for Harry.

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