The detached voice in her headset dictates her next move. “Charge, Nancy,” says the manager of scoreboard operations and production for the White Sox, and Nancy Faust dutifully responds.
She finally got up the guts not long ago to ask if she could improvise a little and play any version of “Charge” she wanted, and was grateful when her request was approved.
As she awaits her next cue, the U.S. Cellular Field disc jockey filling the time with a little Metallica, Faust greets one of an endless stream of well-wishers filing by her 7-by-12-foot booth on the 100-level concourse behind home plate.
They used to wave to her through a window until a food stand was set up in front of it, at which point she asked if she could please keep her door open so that fans could poke their heads in. Still, signs directing fans to locations of interest inside the park ignore her booth, and it wasn’t until Bob Wood, the author of “Dodger Dogs to Fenway Franks,” wrote a letter to White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf that she got her name on the door.
To say that playing the organ at White Sox games is Nancy Faust’s life would sell short a life that has produced a great marriage, a terrific son, countless friends, a donkey and several chickens on five acres in unincorporated Lake County.
But after 35 summers, she is, without question, the very pulse of the ballpark, both the senior employee of the club and the one closest in touch with fans.
She jokes that she’s like the neighborhood hairdresser, but sit with her for nine innings and it is clear how much further it goes than that. And yet one former Sox executive told her not long ago that the people who tell her they love her are not unlike those who shake the president’s hand. “You don’t have any idea how many fans are sitting in the stands saying `Nancy stinks,'” he said.
The dying breed
Approximately one-third of major-league ballparks still employ organists in one form or another. But they are a dying breed, replaced each year by another DJ blasting canned rock; squeezed out by M&M races, text message quizzes and all other forms of Jumbotron techno-blather designed, it seems, to entertain bored teenagers and make fans forget where they are.
Faust and her ilk are generally regarded as dinosaurs, the teams that still use them either phasing them out like the White Sox; treating them as part of the background–as Gary Pressy is in a tiny enclosed booth atop Wrigley Field; or featuring them as an example of how retro-hip they are.
Brooks Boyer, the new vice president of marketing and broadcasting for the White Sox, said his goal is to have “the greatest show in baseball.” To that end, he has toured many of the major-league parks, and though he concedes “Nancy has been around and does have a following,” he also says, “As we grow and get to where we’ll be the greatest show in baseball, we’ll figure out where we’ll go down the road.”
Boyer points out that the Dodgers just got rid of their organist and that a lot of parks are taking their organ players into the studio and using canned organ music.
“Retro is cool right now,” he said, “but we have to cater to tens of thousands of fans, and when you make these types of decisions, you’re not going to make 100 percent of them happy all the time.”
On this day in early September, the Sox would love tens of thousands of fans. Instead it’s a Thursday day game, and despite the blue skies and 80-degree temperatures, an announced crowd of 17,579 is significantly enhanced by advance sales.
Nevertheless, the air still crackles around Faust, now 57 but every bit as blond and youthful in her white cotton capris and tennies as she was as a 22-year-old shyly waving at the camera following Harry Caray’s introduction.
The fan club
They don’t introduce her anymore, and they definitely don’t show her on TV, but that doesn’t diminish the fans who file by. There’s Janice, who first brought baked goods for everyone sitting around the old organ down the third-base line at old Comiskey Park, and who now vacations with Faust. And there’s Bee and Dick, whom she has known for so long they may as well be relatives, and Ralph Stuba, the data base administrator from DePaul who brings a baseball card of Faust on all his vacations, snapping pictures of Nancy in front of the Eiffel Tower and Nancy on the Blarney Stone, which he sends to her.
But there are also countless others who bring babies and cameras and stories of how Faust is a part of their fondest memories. To a bystander, they all seem to be friends. But questions of “Do you know him? Do you know her?” are most often answered with a sweet smile and a shrug that says without speaking, “No, but they know me.”
She is at once their neighbor, counselor, pastor, daughter, sister, mother. There’s the older man who comes by to tell Faust that he recently lost his wife and is now fighting cancer himself; another who tells her he’s miserable in his job and sees baseball and her music as his outlet; and still another who tells her how impressed everyone sitting around him was that he figured out why she played the theme to “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” last season when the Yankees’ Jason Giambi came to bat.
There is Lee Cordes, 67, who said he has been driving up to Sox games from Gibson City, Ill., for more than 20 years and that every one of his large collection of baseball caps has a Nancy Faust signature. And then there is Bobby Camp, 35, of Lemont, who bounced in joyfully to announce that after attending more than 100 games in his life, he has just caught his first foul ball and would like nothing more than to have Nancy autograph it.
“I love her,” Camp said. “I’m a heavy-metal guy, but when I come to the ballpark I don’t want Metallica in my ear, I want to hear Nancy’s organ.”
His buddies agreed. “I once paid an usher to let me stand next to her,” said Scott Green, 35, of Oak Brook.
Memory lane
You half-expect the walls inside her booth to look like a “Lettuce Entertain You” restaurant–Nancy and the mayor, Nancy and the Blues Brothers, Nancy and Harry. Instead, there are photos of the donkey she took home when the first prize for one of Bill Veeck’s promotions went unclaimed, and others of kids whose parents and grandparents send them to her like she’s a favorite aunt.
The daughter of well-known local musician Jackie Faust, Faust has never read sheet music– everything she plays is by ear–and she has never had an agent–“I can’t afford one,” she laughs–which may explain the long run of one-year contracts and the car with 90,000 miles on it. But then driving through two hours of rush-hour traffic per day doesn’t help either.
She wrings her hands nervously when the subject of business comes up, extolling instead the joy this job has brought to her, including those nights when she had to keep her hands warm in between tunes by shoving them inside oven mitts.
“My whole life is identified by this place and the friendships I’ve made here,” she says. “And what a great life it has been.”
Faust is far from a fossil. She says she enjoys the newer songs the most, and with the sequencer that she schleps with her to the park each day and the hours she spends during each road trip working on new arrangements, she makes OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” sound like the real thing.
But her legacy will always be taking name association to a different dimension. Long before Chris Berman became a millionaire with his nickname schtick, Nancy was playing “Will You Marry Me, Bill?” when Bill Melton came to the plate.
When her playing of Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)” song in the late 1970s prompted ballparks all over America to start playing it and Mercury Records to re-release the song, she was given an honorary gold record. “I’m 46 and I remember that, and I can remember her playing `Jesus Christ Superstar’ for Dick Allen,” said Pressy, in his 17th season at Wrigley Field. “She was a big influence on me. She has more talent in her little finger than most guys have in their whole bodies.”
These days, Faust is pretty much limited to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and the visiting team’s at-bats after management gave Sox players their choice of DJ-generated introductions. And so, without so much as glancing at a lineup card before the first Oakland Athletic is introduced, she launches into “Say, say, say,” for Mark Kotsay and “I’m on Fire,” for Eric Byrnes. Marco Scutaro gets “Who are you?” and ball four is greeted by “Walk Like a Man,” one of her few old standbys.
She is instructed to play the theme for “The Exorcist,” when Damian Miller comes up, the guys in the booth evidently unaware that Damien was the main character in “The Omen.”
Natural instincts
After 35 years, which have included stints with the Bulls, Blackhawks, Sting, DePaul and Hustle, she says she is no baseball savant. But she does have a little bit of instinct for her job, like when to play “Charge” and when not to. But then, that is no longer her call.
Still, a palpable calm comes over the park as she begins to play, a feeling that there is nowhere else you could be at this moment but at a ballgame. Suddenly, you can talk to your neighbor again and almost without knowing it, you are humming along to the strains of “Lake Shore Drive.”
“I’m not condemning hard rock, but when you walk into a ballpark, it’s supposed to be like a cathedral,” Pressy said. “Now, it’s boom, boom, boom.”
Faust has only good things to say about the voice in her ear and her immediate supervisor, scoreboard manager Jeff Szynal. But a higher power like Boyer will ultimately decide on her future. A rare two-year contract procured through her first minor display of stubbornness expires after next season.
After 35 summers, life inside and outside the park blurs for Faust, who has only missed five games, that for the birth of her son Eric, now 21, who took his first steps in center field during an employee picnic. Happily married for 24 years to Joe Jenkins, deputy assessor for Fremont Township, she will go on without her organ. But you suspect it will never quite be the same for those who have become accustomed to listening to her.
“I must have something to offer,” she says with her shy smile. “And I’m pretty sure it goes deeper than music.”
