With football games every week and now basketball ready to start, baseball can be overlooked at this time of the year. But starting this week the World Series will begin.
When I was young the World Series was what made the headlines. Big games that every sports fan talked about.
I loved every minute of it. The games between the Brooklyn Dodgers with Pee Wee Reese (from Louisville) against the Yankees made for real excitement. Then there was Bobby Thompson winning the Series for the Giants with his famous home run with a Corbin relative, Russ Hodges, announcing the game and some of the greatest players, of which we all knew, to ever play the game. We knew every player’s name and batting average, and it all added up to pure joy.
Games were played mostly on weekday afternoons, and I would skip school and listen to Mel Allen on the radio. I remember the big grin on the face of choir director John Griffey when I told him, “I won’t be back to school this afternoon, I’m gonna listen to the World Series.”
The whole nation would be caught up in the action year after year before professional football got its start.
I had sketches of the major league ballparks, and my imagination made them bigger than they actually were.
I was overjoyed when Kathleen Parkey brought me an actual major league ball that she caught at a Phillies game. It was a treasure until I wore it out practicing throwing it at a circle I drew on the foundation of our house. After that, I kept the ball together with tape. My dream was to be a major league ballplayer.
On another sports note, I want to mention who may be the first sideline reporter ever when I was broadcasting UK football games. Ron Stewart, the chief engineer for the University of Kentucky radio station WBKY came up with the idea of having a reporter on the field with a remote microphone. At that time, we had never heard of this. He built it, and our reporter carried it on a shoulder harness with a large antenna. We used color cards to tell him when he could talk, that yellow is for standby, green is for talk and red means to stop.
This may have been the start of what I detest most now… silly interviews with coaches and players on the field that add nothing to the games. By the way, Ron Stewart designed the plans for the beginning of the Kentucky Educational Television Network (KET). He was a very smart man.
If you are old enough, I think you’ll agree with me about the old time World Series broadcasts, which were the best. They eventually moved to television. The Super Bowl may be hyped more, but it never has produced the real pleasure like listening to the baseball contests of the World Series in the 1950s. We lived in the best of times.
