Steve Rushin - Early Life

Early Life

Rushin grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota, the third in a family of five kids. "Beer has long been in my blood, and not just in the literal sense," he wrote. "My ancestors were much practiced at naming bars." In 1946, his father's father, Jack Rushin, opened a saloon on Market Street in San Francisco he called Jack's. But the neon sign Jack Rushin ordered came back misspelled. Faced with a costly correction, he installed it unaltered, which is why San Francisco had—under different ownership—a famous nightclub of the '50s called Fack's. Rushin's maternal ancestry consists of a long line of big-league baseball players, firefighters, and bar owners named Boyle. His grandfather Jimmy Boyle (baseball) played catcher for the New York Giants in 1926 and his great-uncle, Buzz Boyle, was an outfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Their uncle, Jack Boyle, had a long career with the Phillies, then became nearly as renowned as the owner of a bar in downtown Cincinnati. In 1954 Steve's father, Don, was a blocking back for Johnny Majors at the University of Tennessee. And Steve's older brother, Jim, was a forward on the Providence hockey team that reached the Final Four in 1983.

He recalled his businessman father making him look up words in their big red dictionary so he could report on what they meant. His mother, Jane, was a teacher who thought his love of reading and writing meant he should become a lawyer. After her abrupt death on Sept. 5, 1991, of a disease called amyloidosis, Don took up golf at 57. "He and my mother had always played tennis – a couples' game of mixed doubles and tennis bracelets and Love-Love," Steve wrote. "But in mourning, Dad turned Job-like to golf, a game of frustration and golf widows and solitary hours on the range. On his first visit to a driving range, my father struck a steel stall divider with one of his drives, and the ball rocketed back into his privates, beginning a long history of violence and comedy – often combined – in the Rushin golf game." In Bloomington, young Steve watched baseball and football games at Metropolitan Stadium, where he sold hot dogs and soda to Twins and Vikings fans (for one year he also took in hockey in the pine-green polyester worn by vendors at the Met Center, home of the Minnesota North Stars).

"When I was 16, my father, with Wite-Out, rolled forward the odometer on my birth certificate so that I could sell beer at Minnesota Twins games, where the official brand was Schmidt, whose brewery, in St. Paul, bore enormous, electrified letters that lit up at night," he wrote. "On those unfortunate evenings when every second letter failed to illuminate, you could drive by and see, like a beacon on the side of the brewery, a brazenly honest bit of beer advertising: SCHMIDT." He is a graduate of John F. Kennedy Senior High School in Bloomington, and Marquette University in Milwaukee. In college, he once recalled, he "did not bring down the Berlin Wall as my summer job. No, on my summer job, I worked at a Tom Thumb convenience store and wondered what would become of my life, and if that life would involve Slurpees. Standing behind the counter in a red smock, I envied the hot dogs as they rode all day on that little hot dog Ferris wheel."