Growing Up With the Red Sox and Curt Gowdy.
If, like me, you grew up in Connecticut back in the 40’s or 50’s — anywhere north of New Haven, that is — chances were about 50 to 1 that you were a Red Sox fan.
I saw my first Red Sox game in Fenway Park on May 25, 1946, and have been hooked on the Sox ever since. Boston was about 100 miles north of where we lived and we usually managed one trip a year to see one or two games. The rest of the time, we caught the games on the radio … every game, day or night, with play-by-play provided by the incomparable Curt Gowdy who, apart from my father, was probably the most important man in my life back then.
I used to steal the cardboards out of my dad’s white shirts after they came back from the laundry and use them to make my own scorecards, drawing the lines with a ruler to form the boxes, making sure I left room for possible substitutions and extra innings.
I used the white side of the cardboard for the Sox and the reverse side, which was darker in color, for the opposition. Unless, of course, the Sox were playing the Yankees. I refused to keep score for the Yankees’ half of the games.
I still try to visit Fenway Park every year to see a few games. And I enjoy watching most of the rest on my new high-definition, wide-screen, state-of-the-art television set. But nothing can compare with those long ago nights, lying in the darkness of my bedroom, listening to Curt Gowdy’s description of those games. A TV set with a picture that clear has yet to be invented.
It’s hard to imagine he could have improved on his lifetime batting average of .344, but he hit about 35 home runs a year, so a good guess for a projected homer total would probably be somewhere around 680.
You mentioned Hank Greenwald … he started his career here in Hawaii, doing play-by-play for the Hawaii Islanders in the PCL. At the time, I was doing the PA announcing in the ballpark. Hank was a very funny guy. On a couple of occasions, he would read scores from the big league games and conclude with something like, “… and here’s a partial score from Cleveland … SIX.” Not everyone got it, but the rest of us in the press box thought he was hilarious.
Jim
The boys of summer come and go. The voices of summer stay with you for a lifetime.
That’s not original with me, of course, but quoted in the 2005 book by Curt Smith (former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush)Voices of Summer: Ranking Baseball’s 101 All-Time Best Announcers (and, not surprisingly, 15 of the top 16 came from radio).
I always thought radio’s theatre of the mind, and a good announcer’s ability to paint word pictures, lent itself especially conducive to the pace of baseball (Maybe that’s why we remember so clearly the Curt Gowdy’s, Mel Allen’s, Dizzy Dean’s,
Buddy Blattner’s and Al Helfer’s of the 40’s and 50’s. when they were on radio.)
I’ll bet you’d enjoy that book.
I always thought baseball announcers, as a group, had to be better than football or basketball announcers. In the book Hank Greenwald reminds us that, often, there’s not a whole lot going on on the baseball field — football and basketball carry the announcer along, but the announcer carries baseball.
On a Red Sox note, have you ever seen a best-guess speculation by a baseball statistician on how many home runs Teddy Ballgame might have hit if his career had not been interrupted by service in two wars?