MEDFORD - His illustrations of America's famous old ballparks hangin the Baseball Hall of Fame, but the playing fields closest to GeneMack's heart were in his hometown of Medford.
Now a restored gymnasium named for the late Boston Globe sportscartoonist is giving hundreds of Medford youngsters a place to beatthe streets, while recalling Mack's legacy in the golden era ofBoston journalism.
Within two weeks of its ribbon-cutting Feb. 26, the Gene MackClubhouse, operated in Medford Square by the Boys and Girls Clubs ofMiddlesex County, had enrolled more than 750 children.
'I can't tell you how wonderful it is,' said Mack's daughter, RuthMurphy of Stoneham, who said that the night of the rededication shewas walking on air.
The old Medford High School gym on Forest Street was originallynamed for Mack after the popular cartoonist's death in 1953 at age62. More than 800 people attended the dedication ceremonycommemorating the artist who had been dubbed 'Medford's Number OneFan.'
After Medford High moved to new quarters on Winthrop Street in1970, however, the Gene Mack Gym and the Chevalier Auditoriumupstairs fell into disuse. The old gym in the basement was in woefulshape in the mid-1990s when the nonprofit Friends of ChevalierAuditorium and Gene Mack Gymnasium launched a restoration campaign.
The City of Medford contributed about $750,000 toward the gym'srenovation project, while the Friends raised $55,000. The Boys andGirls Clubs of Middlesex County were brought in to operate the youthcenter.
When the renovation was finished this year, the long-neglectedMack Gym shone anew, with a teen center, an arts-and-crafts area,study and game rooms, and a polished basketball floor with GeneMack's name stenciled at center court.
'It's a dream come true, something the community has talked aboutand wanted for many years,' said May Marquebreuck of Medford, thevice president and newsletter editor of the Friends of ChevalierAuditorium and Gene Mack Gymnasium.
Those who recall the state of the gym prior to its restorationwould appreciate its transformation.
'When you have something that had fallen into disarray, and it'sreborn, it has to be a wonderful feeling,' said Marquebreuck.
The renewal also has introduced a new generation to the artist forwhom it is named, who likewise had faded from civic memory.
Eugene McGillicuddy, who would become known to sports fans acrossthe country by the pen name Gene Mack, was a 1908 graduate of MedfordHigh who got his start engraving pots and pans for $3 a week. Hebegan his 35-year Globe career doing illustrations for thenewspaper's advertising department.
Mack is most widely remembered today for his 1940s series of MajorLeague ballpark illustrations that were printed in the Globe and TheSporting News, and now reside in the collection of the Baseball Hallof Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
He also is recalled for creating a feature that still runs in theGlobe sports pages, a cartoon of a bus carrying the undefeated high-school football teams that wends its way, losing cargo by the week,through the fall season toward the Thanksgiving Day finale.
When Mack penned the feature, each town or school had its ownlittle character, such as Lattimore Latin, Medwick Medford, SammySalem, or Sylvester Southie.
'Every Monday the teams that got licked got pitched off the bus,'said former Globe sportswriter Clif Keane of Winchester. 'It was themost fun he had.'
In the pretelevision days when Boston had eight daily newspapersand nearly as many full-time sports cartoonists, Mack was among thebest known in the field, and would be given nearly a full page in themorning Globe for his drawings.
'It was an era when newspapers dominated the media, and cartoonswere where people got the game story,' said Brian Codagnone, theassociate curator of the Sports Museum of New England. 'Gene Mack andthe others told a story with pictures.'
Mack's whimsically detailed drawings gave Globe readers a dailyreason to turn to the sports section for his take on the latest featsof the Red Sox or the Braves or the local college or high-schoolteams.
Little cartoon characters peopled the edges of his portraits todescribe colorful plays or dispense comic asides, and in his famedillustrations of the 14 Major League ballparks of the 1940s, to tellthe distinctive history of each park.
His drawing of the old Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, for example,shows the spot in the outfield where in 1909 a lightning flash madepossible a spectacular barehanded catch by Red Murray of the Giants.
His rendition of Fenway Park shows where a hill called Duffy'sCliff once rose to the wall in left, presenting a unique hazard tooutfielders, and the location in the bleachers where Ted Williams'slongest home run smashed a fan's straw hat.
Fans of Boston's National League team could easily recognize right-fielder Tommy Holmes in the cartoon ballplayer shouting, 'I got it! Igot it!' by the 'Jury Box' bleachers in a Mack drawing of the oldBraves Field.
'You would always know a Gene Mack cartoon,' said veteran sportscartoonist Phil Bissell of Sandwich who succeeded Mack at the Globe.'Everyone wanted to grab a paper to see what he had done.'
Many at the time considered Mack second only to the great WillardMullin of the New York World-Telegram in the ranks of sportscartoonists, said Globe colleague Keane, whose own career at thepaper spanned from 1929 to 1976.
'He did a perfect picture of a guy making a catch,' said Keane.'You didn't have to read about how [a player] caught the ball. GeneMack would show you.'
Mack took a workmanlike approach to the job of filling fivecolumns' worth of space in the daily paper, colleagues and familysaid.
Bissell described Mack and Bob Coyne, of the old Record, perchedin the back row of the press box at the ballpark, filling theirsketchbooks, then departing in the late innings of an afternoon gamefor their newsrooms on Washington Street's Newspaper Row.
'[Mack] would do the completed drawing in a couple of hours and behome for dinner,' said Keane, who recalled the cartoonist as adeparture from the raffish, ink-stained stereotype of the newsman inthe 'Front Page' era of journalism.
'He should have been a priest,' said Keane. 'I never heard himcuss anybody. I never saw the man angry in his life. He'd just sitthere and draw and laugh.'
His daughter, Ruth, recalled, as a schoolgirl, asking her fatherif he were famous. 'I'm an artist - that's it,' was his reply.
Mack took great interest in school sports. 'He used to go to the[Boston] Garden on Saturday afternoon for high school hockey games -Arlington, Medford, Stoneham, teams like that - and he'd sit theredrawing cartoons all afternoon,' said Keane.
And he remained loyal to Medford High with the annual Thanksgivinggame vs. Malden, a boisterous tradition in the McGillicuddyhousehold, according to his daughter.
He would have been proud to have a youth gym named for him, Murphysaid. She recalled how her father's 'eyes got all watery' when the1942 state championship Medford High football team presented him witha football-shaped charm.
At the newly renovated Gene Mack Clubhouse one recent Fridayafternoon, children in the after-school program buzzed aroundathletic director Marco Abreu of Somerville as he gave a tour of thefacility, where a membership for September through June costs $15.
'With these kids, you can't help but have fun,' said the 21-year-old Abreu, dressed in a purple staff T-shirt, baggy shorts, and anupside-down visor cocked sideways on his head.
The veteran of the local pickup-basketball circuit credited asimilar Boys and Girls Club in his hometown Union Square neighborhoodfor keeping him off the streets.
'I'm hearing from these kids that some got into trouble becausethey had no place to go,' Abreu said. 'Some come up and thank me, asif I opened the place, so grateful are they to have a place to come.'
On Father's Day, the only one of Gene Mack's five children stillliving reflected on her father's legacy as she showed visitors to herStoneham home some of her most treasured family keepsakes.
There were the annual Christmas cards her father had drawn in the1940s, each decorated with caricatures of the family as well asballplayers and the odd bat-toting Indian chief exhorting, 'Come on,you Braves!'
There were the illustrations of baseball immortals like Babe Ruth,pictured on his return to Boston in 1935, and Philadelphia Athleticsmanager Connie Mack, born Cornelius McGillicuddy, a cousin.
There was the weathered news photo of A's manager Mack, herfather, and her late brother, Gene Jr., as a boy, posed at theballpark under the heading 'Three Real Mackmen Get Together.'
And there were photographs taken at long-ago Red Sox springtraining camps, of her sister, Miriam, with Joe Cronin, of hersister, Grace, with Jimmie Foxx.
'I miss them,' Ruth Murphy mused.
But a spirit that had been lost has been recaptured at the youthcenter that bears Gene Mack's name, Marquebreuck said.
'A place that was dark and had fallen into disrepair,' she said,'has life in it again.'
