A Sad Tuesday

Yesterday on my way to work I turned on the car radio and heard some disturbing news. One of my favorite all time baseball broadcasters, Harry Kalas, collapsed in the radio booth before the Phillies game against the Washington Nationals. He died a short time later.

Harry Kalas is a nationally famous sports broadcaster and voice over personality. For nearly 40 years he broadcast the Phillies games and since the late 70's has narrated thousands of NFL films. He's probably the reason I'm such a baseball fan today.

I wasn't much of a baseball fan before I was 11 years old. But in the summer of 1971 we were living in a new neighborhood. I started listening to the Phillies games on the radio out on the front porch of the house next door with the man who lived there. The excitement and action of the Phillies games drew me in like a moth to a flame. I quickly became a Phillies fan and listened to the games all the time. Soon I was hooked on baseball due in part to the vivid pictures painted vocally with the voice of Harry Kalas.

When I got to high school my love for baseball conflicted greatly with my lack of ability to play the game with any success. I decided to look ahead to the next best thing. I decided I wanted to become a baseball sportscaster. As part of a school project I wrote a letter to 3 play-by-play broadcasters for the 3 area teams Yankees, Mets and Phillies. Harry Kalas was the only one who wrote back to me. I don't have the letter any more but I remember some of what he wrote. He told me that sports broadcasting was a tough job to get into (this was still before sportscasting jobs became the inherit occupation of former athletes like they are today) but if I was serious I should think about going to Temple University to get a communications degree. I ended up not pursuing that career path but I never forgot the kindess Harry Kalas had shown a high school kid who wrote him a letter.

A couple of decades later I had moved on to being a fan of the Yankees but both my mom and dad had become big Phillies fans. They watched or listened to a game whenever they could. Harry Kalas was their guy. My mom LOVED him. A couple of years before she died I got my mom a stuffed Harry Kalas doll they had given away at a Phillies game one time. I got it off of Ebay. It was a plush likeness of the broadcaster with a voice chip in it so that when you squeezed his hand you heard the real Harry's voice. Kalas' infamous "That Ball's Outta Here" home run call along with several of his other popular phrases were part of the souvenir's novelty and charm. I still have the doll but the voice chip no longer works.

Now Harry's voice is silent for real. Gone much too soon at the age of 73. I'll tell you he was one of the good guys. If I had to make a list of top 10 people that I've never met but have had an influence on my life along with Jim Henson, Paul Winchell, Casey Kasem, and Soupy Sales, Harry Kalas would be on it. I will miss him and will never forget him.

Another less tragic but still sad thing happened on Tuesday as well. About noon while relaxing around the house I went back to my son James' bedroom and discovered his new pet iguana, Gizmo, dead in his cage. That's right after less than 3 weeks as part of our family, we have another dead reptile. I don't know how or why he died but I found out something I didn't know at the time I wrote my March 26th post. James got him from a local pet store at a discount because the woman there felt like something might be wrong with the reptile and he wouldn't live very long. The reptile wasn't very lively or energetic during his whole time here. He slept all the time and hardly ate anything. So it's wasn't really much of a surprise to James that he died. It was to me though. I had such an awful attitude toward the animal I feel a bit guilty now that he's gone.

(Please realize that I've place my tongue firmly in my cheek before I wrote this next paragraph. wink, wink nudge nudge)

I don't know what it is about James' bedroom and small pets. With in the last 3 1/2 years the room has been home to a blue tongued skink, a bearded dragon, an iguana, and 2 hamsters and none of them have made it out alive. The only exception to my theory that James' bedroom is a "cavern of death" for animals is our cat, Lil Bit. She's nearly 13 years old and she sleeps in the room all the time. Maybe cats are immune to the room's mystic forces. I can't be sure. But I know one thing. If Paula ever gets made enough at me to lock me out of our bedroom and James is away for the night I'm sleeping on the couch.