They both excelled in widely different formats and subjects, but like a description of the old Penn Station that Thomas Wolfe wrote in "You Can't Go Home Again," "the station was murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time," their voices held the sound of time. Vin's the stories of baseball; David's American history.
I wasn't a Dodger fan growing up in Queens in the 1950s. It was the Yankees for me. As such, I didn't grow up with Vin's voice on the radio. I was of course familiar with his calls later in his life when he did national broadcasts on TV.
I remember a few stories he told. One had to do with his keeping a sand dial in front of him to remind him to give the score before the sand ran out. Once he gave the score, he flipped the sand dial over and waited through another cycle. The listener was always informed, not through graphics, but through voice.
Another story had to do when the Dodgers finally beat the Yankees in the 1955 World Series, the only World Series they won while in Brooklyn before they abandoned a city's fans. There are those who will tell you that the demolition of Penn Station in the middle '60s was an urban sin. Some of those same people will tell you the Giants and Dodgers leaving for the West Coast after the 1957 season was another example of Original Sin.
Vin described the intensity of baseball fandom in that golden era of three baseball teams in New York City; The Yankees, the Giants and the Dodgers. No other city in the country boasted three major league teams. No other city was big enough to hold all those grudges.
Vin described the drive back from Yankee Stadium after Dem Bums beat the Yankees in the seventh game. There were no celebrations of fans along the route out of the Bronx or Manhattan as he headed toward the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel that connects lower Manhattan with Brooklyn.
Once the car emerged from the tunnel in Brooklyn, Vin described a scene of "Bedlam." Horns were honking, people were dancing in the streets, paper was flying everywhere; joy was in the air. There were no celebratory fans along the route in The Bronx or Manhattan for the Dodgers. Those boroughs were as quiet as a bank on Sunday. Such was the localization of baseball fandom in the New York '50s.
Until the obituary for Vin Scully I didn't realize his New York roots: Fordham Prep, Fordham University, schools in The Bronx. But Vin grew up rooting for the New York Giants because he felt sorry for them. Those who grew up in Manhattan, like my father, rooted for the Giants since they played at the Polo Grounds on 155th Street, pretty much across the Harlem River from the Bronx and Yankee Stadium.
I didn't remember that it was Vin Scully's voice I was listening to as he New York Mets came from behind against the Boston Red Sox in Game 6 in the 1986 World Series in the 10th inning with two outs to force a Game 7, and eventually extend The Curse of the Bambino over an entire New England region.
Mookie Wilson is famously at bat. He skips rope to avoid a wild pitch which allows Kevin Mitchell to score form third. Ray Knight goes from first to second. Game tied. Mookie still at bat. Count is 2-2.
Mookie's been fouling them off, but finally connects with a ball that goes fair, a cue shot along the first base line. The Sox first baseman Bill Buchner crows hops over to field the ball, only to watch it go between his legs and dribble into right field.
Ray Knight rounds second, third and scores. If Bobby Thomson's homer against the Dodgers was "The Shot Heard Round the World" then this was the dribbler that was heard around the world.
BEDLAM. 55,078 at Shea are going NUTS. The Mets have tied the Series. My phone rings. It's my father, calling from Crystal City, Virginia where he lives, one eye nearly closed because of the encroaching cancer, but still able to see.
We've long ago become Met fans as soon as a National League team moved back to New York. Shea Stadium was less than two miles from the house in Flushing.
Scully just lets the TV audience see and watch the crowd. He takes his time. This is what it must have looked like in 1955 when his car came out of the Battery Tunnel in Brooklyn after the Dodgers won the series.
Scully lets it sink in. It takes a while, but he returns to the microphone and tells us; "If a picture is worth a thousand words, you have just seen about a million," I never get tired of reliving that moment.
David McCullough was born in Pittsburgh. For anyone bad at geography that's in Western Pennsylvania. He was born in 1933 into a Scots/Irish household with multiple generations at the dinner table. It can be no surprise then that he took an interest in the famous Johnston Flood of 1889, in a city 56 miles east of Pittsburgh. Surely someone at his dinner table knew the news first hand; 2209 people died when the South Fork Dam burst.
As a youngster, he read about the dam bursting, but personally found the stories lacking in the ability to hold the reader. They didn't make such a cataclysmic event personal enough.
He entered Yale in 1951 that then boasted an English faculty that counted John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren and John O'Hara as members. His major was English literature, and he graduated in 1955. Imagine having those people on campus with office hours.
McCullough recalls lunchtime conversations with Thornton Wilder that helped him shape his first published work, "The Johnston Flood" published to positive reviews in 1968. He quits the day job at Sports Illustrated. His career has started.
His biographies on John Adams and Harry Truman won Pulitzers. I have to admit I once tried to read "1776" but got bogged down in the minutia and quit soon after starting. I guess I'm not good at reading biographies or history. I never finished the book, but always enjoyed the sound of his voice when he narrated documentaries on PBS. The HBO series on John Adams was great. The Brooklyn Bridge story as well.
In his later years, McCullough had the gravitas of Walter Cronkite. You know if he said it, it was true.
The photo of McCullough above was in 2001, the year his biography of John Adams came out. I find it more than interesting that the photo was taken in the main reading room of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue in New York.
The reading is room immense. I took a tour there once and the guide told us the ceiling is the size of a football field. That's about an acre.
If you look up at it long enough, you realize it holds the sounds of time. Just like the voices of Vin Scully and David McCullough.
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