Free The Time of My Life by Bryan Woolley Page A

little color. So I could say, ‘Dimaggio swings and misses! He looks disgusted, fans. Joe didn’t like that call.’
    â€œYeah, I had a few advantages over the live sports-casters. I could take more liberties to make it more exciting. If only twenty-five fans came out to see the Phillies, I could still have thirty thousand roaring.”
    The bat that cracked so smartly was suspended by a string over the Old Scotchman’s microphone. He just tapped it with a pencil when the batter connected. The dog was always ready to run onto the field when ever the teletype broke down. “Sometimes it would be the dog, sometimes it would be a fight in the stands,” he says. “I made up all sorts of things to keep the fans with me while repairs were made.”
    But McLendon was what made it all work. He was an encyclopedia of baseball lore, and his voice made boring contests as suspenseful as Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds.”
    â€œI was something of an actor,” he acknowledges. “But I was an avid student of baseball. I did two hours of homework before every game, and I just loved what I was doing. Every game was an adventure. I couldn’t wait till I got to the ballpark.”
    After spending the seasons of 1947-49 in the Cliff Towers basement, the Old Scotchman actually did journey to the ballpark. In 1950 he saw his third major league game in person, and for three more years he did half of his broadcasts from the scene and the rest by his teletype. Some fifteen hundred games in all, and if there was a difference among them, the live ones were probably less exciting.
    Since those summers the Old Scotchman has built an empire of radio stations, then sold them one by one. He owns one of the largest drive-in theater chains in the country. He’s the third-largest stockholder in Columbia Pictures. In his spare time he lectures on international finance at economics seminars.
    â€œBut maybe I should have remained a sportscaster,” he says. “My devotion to baseball was rhapsodic. Every broadcast filled me with joy—a young man’s springtime joy. I don’t think I cheated the public by adding a little color to it. Do you?”
    Not unless Huckleberry Finn is a fraud, too. And Dubble-Bubble, and watermelon, and circuses.
    May, 1979

The Difficulty of Saying Thanks
    A MONG THE TALENTS of Robert Folsom, mayor of Dallas, eloquence doesn’t rank high. Sometimes he’s only half a cut above Tank McNamara, the fumblemouthed broadcaster of the comic strip, who informs his viewers of the “norts spews.” But the mayor came up with a line the other day that has stuck with me because it is eloquent and true.
    It was during Vietnam Veterans Week, an observance to acknowledge that once upon a time, long ago and far away, yes, there was a war, and, yes, there were Americans in it, and some of them even got hurt. Mayor Folsom was presenting the Presidential Certificate for Outstanding Community Achievement to a group of vets, most of whom had been paralyzed, maimed, or otherwise crippled in the conflict, and he pointed out that the nation has never really expressed its gratitude to the veterans of Vietnam for their sacrifices.
    â€œOur inability to express that thankfulness is difficult to explain,” the mayor said. And that sentence stuck with me and has bothered me ever since.
    American troops returning from World Wars I and II were greeted with ticker-tape parades in the cities and brass bands at small-town railroad stations. A grateful nation was ready to honor them, eager to fold them back into civilian society, open-handed in its generosity. I remember signs in the small businesses of my childhood: “The Proprietor of This Establishment Is a Veteran of World War II.” To be a veteran was an honorable thing, worthy of respect and admiration.
    The Doughboys, after all, had saved the world for democracy and, the country thought, had fought the