Vin Scully

I grew up with Vin Scully. When the Dodgers played their first game in Los Angeles in 1958 I was four years old. The Dodgers signed on with the fifty thousand watt clear channel station KFI 640 to broadcast their games on the radio. So even though we were in Hemet, ninety miles east of Los Angeles, the games came in loud and clear. I learned about baseball from my dad and from Vin Scully. (Vin and my dad were close to the same age. Vin was just a year older, minus a week.)

We spent three years in Barstow in the San Bernardino County high desert from 1960 to 1963, my first through fourth grade years. We relied on cable for our television (when cable carried only broadcast stations for the benefit of people in remote areas), and we couldn’t get all the television stations that we got over the air in Hemet. But the KFI radio signal was strong and we had no worries about missing out on Vin calling Dodger games.

After our return to Hemet Dodger baseball was a regular part of our lives in the spring and summer. There were a few games on television but we mostly relied on the radio to hear Vin and his broadcast partner Jerry Doggett give us the play-by-play. We had a table-top radio in the kitchen, on top of the refrigerator, but this was when transistor radios were first coming into vogue and my dad would go about his tasks on a Saturday with one in his shirt pocket listening to the games.

Sandy Koufax threw his perfect game on September 9, 1965. The whole family was in the living room and the television was off. As it became clear what was happening, we hung on to Vin’s every word and were right there until the final out.

When I was growing up our family attended one game at Dodger Stadium. I was as interested in looking at the broadcast booth trying to catch a glimpse of Vin as I was in watching the game on the field.

I left California in 1977 and spent 1978 to 1985 in Central Oklahoma. I have never been a big football fan, but in those days Vin broadcast professional football for NBC. I would watch a football game just to hear Vin’s voice.

In the Bay Area, where I moved in 1985 and where Terry joined me in 1993, I became something of a San Francisco Giants fan. Terry and I rented a house in Mountain View before we bought our home in Gilroy. There was a lot of foliage in the yard and I found doing yard work a pleasant chore when I could listen to Hank Greenwald call a Giants game. But on our visits to Southern California (where we both had family) we tuned in to Vin when we could. On one trip we were staying at the Town Place Suites (as it was then called) in Anaheim. We had our In-n-Out burgers, a bottle of wine, a hot tub, and Vin announcing a Dodger game on television. We both decided that life didn’t get much better than that.

Giants fandom was a short-lived. When Terry and I moved to Hemet in 2015 we rediscovered the Dodger blue in our veins. For our television, telephone, and internet we selected (what was then) Verizon, even though the Dodger games were only on (what was then) Time-Warner Cable, just because TWC had such a bad reputation. Vin had by that time gone mostly to television, and he was only doing home games. But the first three innings of the games he did were always a simulcast, so we got to hear him regularly on the radio.

Vin’s final season before retirement was 2016. By this time Spectrum had bought Time Warner Cable and allowed KTLA Channel 5 to carry his last few games. So we got to see his final home game at Dodger stadium and the last broadcast of his career in San Francisco.

It was quite the ride, Vin, and we love you for it.

Rest in peace and rise in glory.

photo credit: Floatjon. cropped. Creative Commons License 3.0.