Tank McNamara by Bill Hinds for October 22, 2017

Some of us old-timers have a saying: “If life were easy it wouldn’t be any fun.”

Whatever happened to the days when you had to cut work or school to see a ballgame? Whole generations have grown up without knowing the joy of it…

It was nostalgia. The lightning bugs gave it away. However, if the truth is told the “simpler times” didn’t seem all that simple at the time.

I remember everyone listening to the Tigers World Series games in ‘68 at school on transistor radios. Games during the mid day!

Back when I was in parochial school, I remember the principal, Fr. Blanchfield, bringing a small black & white portable t.v. into our classroom so we could watch one of the games between the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1955 World Series !

Radio gave us “Red” Barber, Jack Brickhouse, Jack Buck, Mel Allen, Vin Scully, Ernie Harwell, and the like. Voices that were portrait painters. You really didn’t need visual medium to know what was happening.

I remember being over 300 miles away from KFI and being able to listen clearly to Vin Scully bring us a game on a clear summer night. Get off my lawn.

Back in the early 50s, my dad listened to radio broadcasts of out-of-town Albuquerque Dukes (West Texas-New Mexico league) night-time baseball games. The announcer sounded like he was right there. (He was actually sitting at the local radio station, embellishing the incoming teletype!)

DGMiller, that’s how Ronnie Reagan started his career.

Pat Hughes of the Cubs paints a picture every game for me. He is probably the one who brought me into sports, one call at a time.