Longtime Chicago White Sox fan Fredonia Bey had never been to the team’s stadium to watch them play before.
“I’ve only watched them on television, heard about them on the radio or talked about them in conversations,” Bey, 100, said.
That changed Wednesday, however, when she was finally able to get the in-person baseball game experience and see the White Sox play against the Minnesota Twins.
“It’s a real treat,” Bey said.
Bey and three other women, who live in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, were able to see Wednesday’s game, thanks to the White Sox communications team and community activist Andrew Holmes, who is also the executive director of Club 100, an organization that celebrates people living in the Chicagoland area who are 100 and older.
Club 100 members Callie Lott, 102, Clara Washington, 102, and Juanita Mitchell, 110, arrived at Guaranteed Rate Field in custom White Sox t-shirts that displayed the team’s logo and had their names and ages embroidered on them. The women also received free Sox hats from the team.
Holmes said he started Club 100 almost nine years ago because he found that some people in assisted living facilities had family members who did not visit them often, or they had no living relatives. So he started the club as a way to get them out of their residences to enjoy outings and even throw birthday parties for them.
This was not the first time Holmes brought Club 100 members to a Sox game. In 2019, Holmes was able to take longtime fan CP Crawford to his first Sox game shortly after his 112th birthday. Crawford died later that year.
“Since then, Andrew reached out and told us that he had a group of wonderful women he wanted to bring to a game, so we were happy to treat them to a little White Sox baseball game,” Sheena Quinn, a Sox spokesperson said.
Mary Muse, who attended the game with her mother, Juanita Mitchell, said her mother was no stranger to the Sox’s home field, as Mitchell and her late husband were longtime Sox fans.
After more than 30 years, she’s taking in a Sox game in person, Muse said. “This is her first time in quite awhile being at the stadium since my father passed,” she said.
Lott and Washington, who also have attended past White Sox games, said they both were excited to be out at the ballgame.
