|
OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
 |
|
RED BARBER |
 The Late Red Barber |
Edwards, Barber Provided Some Wonderful Moments
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
The recent re-assignment of Bob Edwards as host of National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” show led to a rumpus with loyal Edwards fans. Edwards now has left NPR and the controversy got me to thinking about Edwards and a neat, little book he wrote about his radio friendship with Red Barber, the legendary baseball broadcaster.
Several years after Barber retired from active baseball broadcasting, he came on NPR for a chat with Edwards every Friday morning. They talked about baseball and sports and literature and life-and camellias. The sense of those mellow conversations is captured by Edwards with warmth and affection in “Fridays with Red: a Radio Friendship,” a book written in 1993, a year after Barber’s death.
Barber started his career as a baseball broadcaster with the Cincinnati Reds in 1934, moved to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1939 and then worked for the New York Yankees from 1954 to 1966. He is remembered essentially as a force in Brooklyn even though he worked for the Yankees almost as many years.
Edwards, a Kentuckian, quotes a passage from a novel called “Brooklyn Boy” by Alan Lelchuk in which the central character, Aaron Schlossberg, knows that “Red Barber was as important to both kids and grown-ups as, say, General Eisenhower or President Roosevelt….
“He was the Voice
of the Bums, and the voice--maybe conscience--of the borough.
It was a measure of Brooklyn’s hospitality and worldliness
that Aaron and his friends had adopted this Mississippi-born,
Southern-accented gentleman to speak for them, sing to them.
When Red was on the air, telling us about Pistol Pete [Reiser]
crashing into the wall yet again or about Fireman [Hugh] Casey
coming in from the bullpen to put out another fire, you could
hear his special phrases everywhere you went, on the beaches
or front stoops, in drugstores or candy stores, in parlors or
barber shops, at lunch wagons or pool halls, from car radios,
portables, or consoles. He was soft-spoken, scrupulous, knowledgeable,
rhythmic, humorous, down-home, eloquent. Always eloquent. His
voice filled the streets, shops, seasides of the borough, surrounded
and suffused us with its sweetness and moral light; a very different
voice from that older Brooklyn singer, Walt Whitman.”
The book is an unabashed love letter to Barber, yet Edwards acknowledges
that some of the NPR people who worked with Barber “got
to know what he called the ‘flinty’ side of his personality.”
I came around the beat when Barber was still in Brooklyn and
found him not particularly approachable off the air. He could
be quite preachy at times so I can understand the comment of
Tom Gallery, a rival broadcast sports director, who said, “I
hate that Psalm-singing sanctimonious son of a bitch.”
Even a New York Giants fan like me loved Barber for his literacy, his language. As Edwards notes, “Some of Red’s expressions have become clichés now--‘high on the hog,’ ‘walkin’ in tall cotton,’ ‘liftin’ the ox-cart out of the ditch,’ ‘hollerin’ down the rain barrel.’ His word, “rhubarb” for an argument became the name of a novel by H. Allen Smith after he asked Barber for permission to use the word.
Barber popularized the phrase “sittin’ in the catbird seat,” which he had heard from a poker player describing his situation sitting with a good hand and watching Red raise the pot for him. James Thurber adopted Barber’s most famous phrase for his short story, “The Catbird Seat.” It rankled Barber that Thurber never talked to him or asked for permission to use the phrase. Years later, Barber’s daughter, Sarah, a college literature teacher, heard some of her students ask if her father had stolen the phrase from Thurber.
Barber prided himself on
not being a rooter. Yet, the flinty side of him showed when he
criticized what has come to be the celebrated call by Russ Hodges
of Bobby Thomson’s home run that won the playoff for the
Giants over the Dodgers in the 1951 playoff. Whereas Hodges went
crazy saying the fans were “going crazy,” Barber was
low key. He said:
“…Swung on and belted deep out to left field. It is--a
home run! And the New York Giants win the National League pennant
and the Polo Grounds goes wild.” He was silent for the next
59 seconds while the crowd roared. He then mentioned that a couple
of hundred Americans had lost their lives in Korea that week,
and said, “The Dodgers will get over this, and so will their
fans.”
He had shown a bit more exuberance in a much-played description of a Dodger heroic. On a great World Series catch by Dodger left fielder Al Gionfriddo off Joe DiMaggio, here’s his call:
“…Swung on. Belted. It’s a long one! Deep into left-center. Back goes Gionfriddo, back, back, back, back, back, back. He makes a one-handed catch against the bullpen. Oh, doctor!”
Barber was devoted to his wife, Lylah. They were married for more than 61 years. Yet, Edwards writes, “In some ways it was a mixed marriage. She showed up for his sermons [as a lay minister] but did not share his religious fervor. He supported [Barry] Goldwater, while she was an arch-liberal who felt Red’s trip to Vietnam was giving support to the war.”
Edwards closes his paean to the man he came to love, saying, “Red Barber’s ashes are part of the Florida soil. His body couldn’t last, but there’s not another thing about him that has to die He gave me lessons that are easy to relate here on these pages, and others I’ll recall when I need them. …[I] am not Red’s broadcasting heir. But like everyone who ever heard him, I am his beneficiary.”
Had he lived Red Barber might have been one of those protesting the departure of Bob Edwards from “Morning Edition.”
©2004 by Stan Isaacs.
The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel.
The photo of Red Barber is
courtesy of the Baseball Hall of Fame website.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Stan Isaacs. To send an
email, click here: talkback@thecolumnists.com
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |