Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

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It’s the Duke of Windsor’s wedding day. $1300 worth of flowers have arrived at their French château to “festoon the nuptials,” while back home in Baltimore, we’re told, Mrs. Simpson’s house is being reopened as a shrine and museum. EDWARD BOSSES WALLY AROUND AND SHE LIKES IT. She’s in fluted blue today with a bonnet of feathers and tulle. Elsewhere, another Soviet marshal is being shot, a young American is being guillotined in Fascist Germany for plotting against anti-Semites, a supposed has-been named Bill Dietrich pitched a no-hitter for the White Sox, and up in Wisconsin some guy dynamited his whole family just “because they wouldn’t help around the farm.” And here in Chicago Gloomy Gus is dead. I walk home from the county hospital, through the cool rain, up Ogden, thinking: Only for the egoist and the dogmatist (and maybe they’re one and the same, although I’m thinking of two different friends of mine) is there one “history” only. The rest of us live with the suspicion that there are as many histories as there are people and maybe a few more — out here in the flood, after all (I chuck the day-old Trib in a bin as I pass), what arrangements can we not imagine? Of course, we share some of the same information, call it that — Gus, for example, is dead in all our histories — but it’s never enough to call “History.” What do we have? Births, debts, deaths, and the weather.

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