The Sons of Chester

In the mid-1990s, a band of baseball loving boys from the small town of Chester, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River, pursue their dreams of state and national championships. Their fathers, guards in the local penitentiary that houses some of the worst criminals in US history, are their coaches. One dream comes true—the other doesn’t.

This is the story of the dreams and of the town that made them possible.

Filled with unforgettable anecdotes from perhaps the last (nearly) innocent age in America, The Sons of Chester recalls a childhood that in some sense is the twentieth century’s version of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.