Ray Meyer grew up at Ray’s Bleachers, his dad’s bar at Waveland and Sheffield, running hot dog orders over to Wrigley Field when he was a kid nicknamed “Little Ray.” Later, he served up beers to customers.
“He helped his mom and dad at everything,” said his cousin Larry Meyer.
He also was an original member of the Left Field Bleacher Bums, a group of rowdy fans whose antics got almost as much attention as the Cubs when they were in the sub-basement of the National League in the mid-1960s. Their home away from home was Ray’s Bleachers, now Murphy’s Bleachers.
Wrigleyville was a blue-collar neighborhood then, and young Ray “was the one running hot dogs back and forth from the bar because [Cubs pitcher] Fergie Jenkins would send him an order,” said friend Robert Castillo, who grew up in Wrigleyville and became a veterinarian at North Center Animal Hospital, 1808 W. Addison. “He used to be a bat boy. He did grounds crew work.”
“I met Ray at 9,” said Jenkins. “He just loved sports. As a kid, he grew up like that.”
“The ballplayers would come over to the bar all the time,” said another friend, Randy Anderson.
“My uncle [Ray Sr.] would say, ‘I’ll give you a drink, you sign a baseball,’ ” Larry Meyer said.
Fans at the ballpark “would make liquor runs to Ray’s and you could come back with cocktails,” said another friend, Bob Foley. “In those days you could go in and out.”
Mr. Meyer, who had struggled with pancreatic cancer, was found dead on Jan. 27 in the home he grew up in — and never left — near Winnemac and Ashland. He was 60 years old. He worked more than 30 years as a Skokie postal worker. An only child, he never married or had kids. Cubs fans and players became like family.
“He was a genuine individual,” said Jenkins. “We were personal friends.” During spring training, Mr. Meyer did work for Jenkins’ foundation.
A “big brother type,” he made people laugh and gave them bracingly frank advice, said Castillo’s wife, Angela Castillo, a regional operations manager and veterinary technician at MedVet, 3124 N. Clybourn.
“If I was having a bad day at work and I needed to make a really hard decision and [I’d] go to him,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Aw, just stop it, this is what you gotta do.’ ’’
“When I threw my first New Year’s Eve party he came over and helped me cook my first spiral ham,” she said. “He had a special way that he made it all the time. . . . He had a brown sugar-and-beer trick.”
“He was just a downright cool guy,” Anderson said.
“He stood up in my wedding,” Robert Castillo said. “We’d go to spring training” in Mesa, Arizona, where Mr. Meyer — who had a sweet tooth — enjoyed the giant cookie sundaes at Oregano’s Pizza Bistro.
Mr. Meyer went to Our Lady of Lourdes grade school on Ashland and played hockey in high school while attending Gordon Tech, now DePaul College Prep.
Growing up, a lot of his friends hung around Ray’s Bleachers, where his mother, Marguerite Meyer, served them her delicious hamburgers. “She was like the den mother for everybody, no matter what your age or background,” Foley said.
When the LFBB went on team road trips, there were two or more buses, according to Foley. Marguerite Meyer was on the sedate bus, keeping an eye on “the older people and the kids.” The other buses carried the people “who drank and caroused,” he said.
“She cared about everybody,” Foley said. “She would call bleacher bums in the wintertime and say, ‘I know your mom was sick, just want to see how you are doing.’ ”
After high school, “Ray got into the Post office at 18, 19,” Foley said. When his father sold the bar to the Murphys in 1980, Mr. Meyer and his friends migrated to Bernie’s Tap & Grill, 3664 N. Clark, and the Nil Tap, 5734 N. Elston.
The regulars at Nil’s knew his routine. “Monday was laundry day, so he wasn’t there on Mondays,” Angela Castillo said. Other than that, “He was there pretty much every day until he started to get really sick.”
A celebration of his life is planned later this month.
