Feeling Lost and Found at the Same Time

Fifteen years ago, I wrote one of my favorite-ever stories—my love letter to the greatest announcer of them all, the poet laureate of baseball, Vin Scully. You know I wrote it a long time ago (2010) because in the opening paragraph, I talk about the Dodgers being out of the pennant race. That hasn’t happened in a very, very long time.

This morning, while thinking about Los Angeles and all my friends there, while looking for ways to help, while feeling paralyzed because the devastation is so overwhelming that nothing seems enough, I came across this story again.

And I realized that it’s more than a love letter to Vin.

It’s also a love letter to the City of Angels.

Let’s do all we can to help.

In time, the blue goes cloudy white, then gray, then slowly fades to black; you can almost hear a director shouting: “We’re losing our light.” It is the end of summer in the City of Angels. You know this because the Dodgers are out of the pennant race. Traffic stops and starts on The 101, violently at times, car horns and squealed tires and middle fingers. The names on the exit signs along the side of the highway are startlingly familiar, even for a stranger. Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood Boulevard. Vine Street. The Hollywood Bowl. Los Angeles might be the only city in the world where you can be lost and also know exactly where you are. Lost and found at the same time. Another car horn. Another tire squeal. Another middle finger.

The voice begins. The voice is talking about Charles Fuqua Manuel, Charlie for short. Yes, the voice says, Charlie comes from out of the hills of West Virginia. His father was a preacher. He was third-born in a family of 11… and not only that, he was born in the car on the way to his grandmother’s house.

“Charlie’s a wonderful story,” Vin Scully tells Los Angeles as traffic stalls on The 101, and the summer sky turns to fog. “He’s the sort of story that Mark Twain might have written.”

Vin was 30 years old, and he had clear ideas about what it took to call a baseball game. He had learned the craft from the man who invented baseball broadcasting, Red Barber himself. He knew that a hometown baseball announcer needed to know the hometown thoroughly, completely, like no one else. So, he kept looking around Los Angeles for a place. A center. A home. A heart. Back in New York, there was always a place.

Vin Scully heard life in New York City rhythms then—all he knew was New York. He grew up in Washington Heights. He went to school at Fordham. He had called baseball in Brooklyn. In New York there’s always a place, it doesn’t matter if it’s Brooklyn or the Bronx, Harlem or Greenwich Village, Manhattan or Queens. There’s a place you go, where people gather, where decisions are made, where the energy pulses, where everything starts.

“In New York, for me, it was Toots Shor’s,” Scully says. That was the restaurant on 51st Street between 5th and 6th, but closer to 6th. Toot’s Shor was where everything happened, where the city vibrated, where Vin might see Joe DiMaggio sitting with Marilyn Monroe or might catch Frank Sinatra regaling a crowd with some boxing talk. He might catch a glimpse of Ernest Hemingway or see Jackie Gleason in full spirit or glimpse Judy Garland sitting in a corner. There, he heard what was happening in his town—not the news but what actually mattered, what people were talking about and thinking about.

How could he call a baseball game without knowing what people were talking and thinking about?

So when Vin first came to Los Angeles with the Dodgers, he looked around town for that place. And… he couldn’t find it. Oh, there were famous places, of course, more than you could count. The Brown Derby. Musso and Frank. Formosa. Grauman’s Chinese Theater. And there were famous people everywhere. But it wasn’t the same. Los Angeles wasn’t the same. Los Angeles wasn’t built around a place. Los Angeles was its own thing.

If New York was an eight-block walk from wherever you happened to be standing, Los Angeles was a ribbon of highways. If New York’s jokes were about tourists looking up at skyscrapers and hotel rooms so small that when you put in your key, you broke a window, well, Los Angeles’ jokes were about smog and Humphrey Bogart. It seemed to Vin Scully, at least at first, that New York was an open city, emotions always right on the surface. And Los Angeles was tougher to figure.

“I really had trouble with that for a while,” he says as he sits in the Dodgers press dining room, and he is about to say more, but he is interrupted by people wanting to say hello. Here’s one of the Dodgers chefs (“You look beautiful, my dear.”) There’s Tommy Lasorda (“Vinny, my boy!”). Here’s a young woman bringing him coffee (“You are an angel”). He picks up his thought:

“Like I was saying, I really had trouble with that for a while. I didn’t quite know what the city was about. It took me a while to figure it out.”

“What did you finally figure out?”

As he is about to answer, a flurry of people wander in to offer hugs. They apologize profusely for interrupting, but they cannot help it, they cannot let an opportunity like this go by. Vin Scully! He has been a Los Angeles icon now for more than 50 years. So many of the great baseball voices are gone. Ernie Harwell over in Detroit—Vin’s buddy for almost 60 years—died a few months ago. There are not many of the great baseball voices left, not from the old days. Philadelphia’s Harry Kalas died a year ago. Jack Buck’s gone, Mel Allen’s gone, Harry Caray, Bob Murphy, Joe Nuxhall, Herb Carneal, Jack Brickhouse, Herb Score, all gone.

Vin Scully has been calling baseball games in Los Angeles for more than 50 years now. And he keeps going.

“I’m sorry,” Vin says as the last of the well-wishers walks off. “What were we talking about again?”

It can be a dizzying experience, walking up and down these streets, staring at the ground, regarding all these folks who were once famous, once legendary, once accomplished and realizing that you haven’t heard of most of them.

I listen to Vin Scully as I look down at the stars. I write down some names. Charles Vidor was a Hungarian director who directed more than a dozen pictures, including “The Joker Is Wild” with Vin’s old pal Sinatra. England’s Flora Finch played in hundreds of silent films. Laraine Day starred in many movies and was a regular panelist on the television show “What’s My Line?”, but when listening to Vin I think about how she was once married to the Hall of Fame baseball manager and lovable (enough) rogue Leo Durocher. Robert Guillaume is a stage actor best known for his work on television and as the butler in “Benson.”

People all around me wander aimlessly and also look down at the Hollywood Stars; their faces brighten when they recognize a name. A couple has a photo taken by Michael Jackson’s star. Parents point out Shrek’s star to their children. I notice that the Vaudeville couple (and real-life couple) George Burns and Gracie Allen, who began making America laugh during the Depression and kept going, like Vin, have their plaques next to each other, as it should be…

Burns: “Say good night, Gracie.”Allen: “Good night, Gracie.”

More plaques. There’s the bandleader who gave Sinatra his big break, Tommy Dorsey, and there’s Hollywood tough man George Peppard, and there’s a Hollywood star for The Monkees.

And there is a son pulling his father’s hand so he can point out Vin Scully’s Hollywood Star.

It is a mark of the man’s grace that he is the one apologizing repeatedly and not the reporter who asks him precisely the same questions people have been asking for a half-century.

“I know you’ve probably heard about the radio,” he says. I nod. I ask if he will tell it again.

“When I was a little boy in New York, we had this radio that stood on four legs,” he says. “It was huge, or at least it seemed that way to me at the time. We lived in a little fifth-floor walk-up apartment then, and the radio was just about the biggest thing in there. I remember—I couldn’t have been older than 4 or 5—I used to crawl under that radio with my pillow. There was no baseball on the radio then, but there were football games, and I remember I used to love listening even then to the crowd.”

I wait for the punchline. The finish. Vin, I think, knows that I’m waiting for it.

“That sound of the crowd would just engulf me,” he says, and then (I’m mouthing the words with him now), “it was like water out of a shower head.”

Like water out of a shower head. No announcer in the history of sports has used crowd noise more musically than Scully. When Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run, Scully called the shot, and then he took off his headset, walked to the back of the room, and let people listen to the crowd cheer. Like water out of a shower head. 

“What could I have said that would have told the story any better?” he asks.

What indeed?

“You know what?” Vin asks. “I still love listening to the sound of a crowd cheering. Don’t you? Don’t you just love that sound?”

You would think, based on his connection to sports and the sound of the crowd, that Vin Scully was destined to live this sports broadcasting life. But there was no such thing as a sports broadcasting life then. Vin Scully turned 2 just as Wall Street crashed in 1929. The Depression began. There was no television. There was almost no sport on the radio. Scully does remember writing an essay in school about how he wanted to be a sports announcer, but it was fantastical stuff then in the 1930s, like writing about how he wanted to be a superhero or wanted to travel in space.

Still, he never stopped thinking about it, never stopped working toward this inconceivable dream. He lost his New York accent. He practiced his cadences. When he graduated from Fordham, he sent out more than a hundred letters to radio stations and was not surprised to hear that there were no jobs. His break came at Fenway Park, though it hardly felt like a break at the time. Red Barber was sports director at CBS Radio, and he was desperate for someone, anyone, to cover the Boston University-Maryland game (he had moved Ernie Harwell to the Notre Dame-North Carolina game). Scully had introduced himself to Barber a few months before, and Vin’s fiery red hair left enough of an impression that Barber called up someone he knew at Fordham and said, “Who is the red-haired kid who wants to be a sports announcer?”

When Red Barber called Scully’s house, Vin wasn’t home, but his mother answered and took the message. “You got a call,” she told her son excitedly, “from Red Skelton!”

Scully went to the Boston University-Maryland game. There was a mixup, and he ended up broadcasting the game from the roof of Fenway Park out in the freezing cold. He did not complain on the air or off. (“I was so green, I thought that was just how they did things,” he says). Instead, he did his live reports on time, and Barber was pleased enough. It was only the next day, when Barber got a call from Boston University apologizing for sticking their announcer out in the cold, that Barber realized the kid was something special.

“I think he was impressed that I didn’t complain,” Vin Scully says.

But, sure enough, there’s Santa Monica Boulevard—where the sun comes up and over in that Sheryl Crow song. There’s Wilshire Boulevard, which leads right to the Miracle Mile. Not only do you know Rodeo Drive, you know how to pronounce it—“Row-DAY-oh,” like a song, and not “ROW-dee-oh” like a cowboy contest.

There’s MacArthur Park, where someone left the cake out in the rain, and Mulholland Drive, like the David Lynch movie, and Sunset Boulevard. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” A bit closer, toward West Hollywood, is Melrose. We all know Beverly Hills. We even know the zip code.

“Rod Barajas grew up in Ontario and he went to high school in Santa Fe Springs,” Vin Scully is saying. “And so this is a dream come true for him. He came over from the Mets last week, but this will be his first at-bat at Dodger Stadium in a Dodgers uniform.”

Yes, everything, all around, is famous, or at least feels famous. When you drive in Los Angeles, you feel you’re on television. Music plays in the background. Here are the most-filmed palm trees in the world. These trees, these streets, these buildings, these hotels, these parks, these statues, they are all stars themselves.

“What a special moment for Rod Barajas,” Vin Scully says.

Scully loved O’Malley and felt deeply indebted to him. There was a lot of local pressure on O’Malley to hire a West Coast announcer to call the Dodgers. O’Malley said he would not even consider it. Vin Scully would be his announcer.

But O’Malley did wonder if Scully might adjust his style a little bit, maybe punch his up his love for the hometown team. It made a lot of sense back in New York to keep the boosterism to a minimum because there were three teams in New York, and you didn’t want to alienate any of the listeners. But now the Dodgers were Los Angeles’s team. This was a whole new market. O’Malley thought it wouldn’t do any harm if Scully spent just a little more radio time cheering for the Boys in Blue.

Scully considered it. He had no ethical issues with rooting for the Dodgers, who paid his salary. But he had learned his craft from Red Barber, and Red had given him one clear rule about broadcasting baseball games.

“He was hard on me at times,” Scully says. “But he did it out of love. He really was like an older brother to me or a second father.… And he said to me, and I’ll always remember it, he said: ‘You bring something to the broadcast that nobody else can bring.’ I thought, ‘Really? I bring something nobody else does? What?’ And he said, ‘You bring yourself.’”

Vin Scully knew himself, and he told Walter O’Malley that he would prefer to keep calling games without openly cheering. O’Malley trusted Vin enough to let him call the games as he wanted. And it turned out to be a brilliant business decision, as well as a brilliant artistic decision. See, people in Los Angeles had already heard their share of minor league announcers, screamers who cheered for the boys and complained about the umpiring and overlooked blunders. They’d had enough of that.

When the Dodgers arrived, finally, Los Angeles was MAJOR LEAGUE. When Scully arrived, and he didn’t do any of that minor league stuff, and he told stories about players and managers on both teams, and he expressed delight at a great play no matter which team made it… well, that felt MAJOR LEAGUE.

They loved him from the start. Scully instantly connected in a way that no radio announcer had ever connected with any city, not even Red Barber. Los Angeles was perfect for baseball on the radio. It was so spread out, so many neighborhoods, so many cars stuck in traffic, no place to go, nothing to do but listen to the ballgame.

Old Memorial Coliseum, where the Dodgers played their first four years, was vast and rife with bad angles for baseball watching, so people grew accustomed to bringing their transistor radios to games. When things on the field quieted, you could hear Vin Scully’s voice echoing and repeating throughout Memorial Coliseum, a radio wall of mirrors.

Scully had fun with it sometimes. One game, he noticed that it was umpire Frank Secory’s birthday and, on a whim, he decided to ask the fans at the game to shout “Happy Birthday, Frank,” on his count. Only later did he realize that this could have backfired and nobody would have shouted and he would have felt like a fool. But, of course, that’s not what happened. Instead, the “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FRANK!” was so loud it jarred even Vin Scully, and he found himself once again marveling at the good fortune of his life.

“I managed a game once, did you know that?” It was a Sunday day game, the last of the 1965 season. The Dodgers had clinched the pennant on Saturday, and there was the expected revelry on Saturday night. So, yeah, things were moving a bit slowly on Sunday. Dodgers manager Walter Alston used a makeshift lineup and even pinch-hit Tommy Davis, who had not played for four months because of a fractured ankle. Davis hobbled his way out on an infield grounder.

Alston was in a grand mood. At some point between innings he called up to the booth and told Scully, “OK, I know you’ve always wanted to be a manager…. (“I never wanted to be a manager,” Scully says in parentheses)… Well, OK. You’re the manager. You decide what to do. But you have to say it fast.”

Scully couldn’t pass up a chance like that. He told his radio audience that he was now the manager. Here’s how he remembers it, Ron Fairly came to the plate—Fairly was Scully’s mother’s favorite player (“He was left-handed and had red hair and that was enough for my mother,” he said). He got on base. Fairly, like the rest of the Dodgers, was probably not in the greatest condition for the game. “I hate to do this to Ron Fairly,” Scully remembered saying, “but this seems like a good time to steal a base.”

He asked the fans at the stadium to look at Fairly’s face when he saw the steal sign. Fairly was obviously stunned. He ran on the pitch, and the ball was fouled off. He went back to first base.

“Oh boy,” Scully said, “Now, I really hate do to this. But I was always told if it was right the first time then you should stick with it. Sorry, Ron, but the steal sign is back on.”

Fairly could not believe what he was seeing. The fans were thrilled beyond words. This time, in Vin’s memory, Fairly took off for second, the catcher could not handle the pitch, and Fairly was safe. Scully, realizing that it could not get any more perfect than that, then said: “OK, Walter, I got you this far, you’re on your own.”

It’s such a wonderful story that I hated to go back to review the box score. Alas, Fairly didn’t steal a base in that game. But newspaper reports from that day do confirm that Alston had turned over manager duties to Scully up in the radio booth. Maybe Scully is confusing Fairly with Willie Crawford, a 19-year-old rookie who did walk and steal a base. Or maybe Fairly did try to steal the base and maybe the batter hit the ball—Fairly WAS doubled off in that game on a line drive hit by Sweet Lou Johnson.

Not that any of that matters. All that matters is all that ever matters when Vin Scully calls a baseball game—it’s the joy. That’s what it’s all about for Vin Scully. That’s what it has always been all about.

“The goose bumps,” he says. “They always come back.”

His first wife, Joan, died of an accidental overdose in 1972. His oldest son, Michael, died at 33 in a helicopter crash. He has found his faith tested again and again. He has had many doubts in many lonely hotel rooms.

But those happy things—they have been there for him, too. So many moments. So many legendary calls. His final-inning call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game was poetry. (“On the scoreboard in rightfield, it is 9:46 p.m. in the City of Angels, Los Angeles, California.”)

His simple words, “It gets through Buckner,” would send half of New York into hysterics and all of New England into months of mourning.

His call of Kirk Gibson’s home run in the 1988 World Series for the Dodgers—“She is… gone”—is perfect Scully, the way he used his voice, the way he used the crowd, the way he called a home run “she.” And then he followed it up with the classic: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”

“That line,” he says, “was a gift from God. I can’t explain it any other way.”

The calls will remain with us forever, but Scully’s true brilliance does not come from those legendary calls… they build from summer nights just like tonight, when, under a dimming sky, he kindly calls another baseball game. It is 9:46 p.m. in the City of Angels, Los Angeles, California, and traffic is stuck, and tourists mill around, and deals are being made, and deals are falling apart, and people are sleeping, and people are suffering, and actors are waiting tables, and, yes, after all this time, Vin Scully did find the essence, the center, the heart of the city, even if he would never say it. The heart of Los Angeles is his voice.