Hlas: Cubs’ title more than a victory to many

The Chicago Cubs' World Series win Wednesday night was more than a championship around Eastern Iowa.

The victory was also a celebration of family ties. It was all sorts of people suddenly tasting forbidden fruit, and remembering those who never got to have a bite.

Thursday afternoon, a headstone in Czech National Cemetery for a husband and wife who had died within the last three years had a Cubs banner beside it, and a tethered Cubs balloon bobbing above it.

The online obituary for the husband featured the phrase 'lifelong Cubs fan.”

Lifelong Cubs fan. So many are in our midst. So many hollered and hugged and wept with joy late Wednesday night and well into Thursday morning.

A white flag with the blue ‘W' noting a Cubs win flew from the porch of the southwest Cedar Rapids home of Katie Klinkkammer Thursday.

Wednesday night, she said she was in Walford watching the Cubs' 10-inning, Series-clinching win over the Cleveland Indians, 'screaming at the TV. I couldn't watch any more. But I had to.”

Her house had belonged to her grandparents, Carol and Larry Franck. They died in 2008 and 2011, respectively.

The flag, Katie said, was flown 'in tribute to them. We'd come over here on Sundays and watch Cubs games. It was a family tradition.”

Larry Franck's online obituary states he was 'an avid Cubs fan.”

Not far from Katie's house, Alex Andersen was wearing a Cubs shirt and hosing down the sidewalk in front of Ernie's Tavern, the Czech Village bar he owns.

It was just him and solitude in the bar early Thursday afternoon, a far cry from the night before when he and about 20 customers were on a nearly 4-hour-long roller coaster ride that ended with the first Cubs world-championship of their lives.

'It was loud in here,” Andersen said. 'I think we played ‘Go, Cubs, Go” about 50 times.”

Four decades ago, the bar's original owner would keep one eye on Cubs games via KCRG-TV on Sunday afternoons when the tavern was closed and he was inside it filling coolers and doing paperwork.

Ernie Hlas didn't live to see the Cubs in a World Series, but he did take two sons and a nephew to Chicago in August 1969. There, they saw Ken Holtzman throw a no-hitter for the first-place Cubs against Atlanta. First-place didn't last that summer, but his loyalty to the team did for another 36 years.

The Cubs, said Ernie's obituary in The Gazette, were among 'some of his favorite things.”

Darel Sterner of West Liberty died early Thursday morning, about four hours after the Cubs recorded the last out in Cleveland.

He was 85, had leukemia, and had a difficult 2016 after suffering a small stroke last Christmas Eve.

But he had a good life. He was a husband and a barber in West Liberty for 62 years after he came home from serving as an engineer with the U.S. Army at a base in Germany during the Korean War.

Jacob Lane wrote this in the West Liberty Index newspaper earlier this year: 'From the 1950s to 1995 Sterner operated a business out of the corner shop at Third and Spencer Street, a daily gathering spot for farmers, firemen and tall tales.”

On Darel's last night on earth, his baseball team reached the mountaintop.

'We kept telling him the score last night,” said Darel's son, Durk Sterner of Lone Tree.

'We whispered in his ear ‘We won it! We won it!' ”

In Darel's online obituary, it says 'He was a LONG TIME Chicago Cubs fan and lived long enough to hear the Cubs had won the World Series!”

No, that wasn't just a baseball game to a lot of people Wednesday night.

Comments: (319) 368-8840; mike.hlas@thegazette.com