RED BARBER: The Old Redhead

If you listen to Red Barber call a game you'd notice that our own Ted Leitner resembles him in style of broadcasting. Intertwined with the play-by-play are interesting stories from the redhead's life experience.

Another similarity between Ted and Red is the fact that Red loved his long-term team, the Brooklyn Dodgers just like Ted loves our San Diego Padres.

WRUF was his first sports assignment: Florida's opening football game in 1930. He called his debut “undoubtedly the worst broadcast ever perpetrated on an innocent and unsuspecting radio audience.” He was so bad that he was pulled off the air and other announcers tried their hands at the next two games. During those weeks, Barber began attending football practice and picking the brains of an assistant coach. He learned how to prepare for a broadcast. He talked his boss into giving him another chance, and the sportscaster's career began.

Barber encountered the other passion of his life in Gainesville: Lylah Murray Scarborough, a nurse who treated him when he was taken into the infirmary one night after an accident. They were married in 1931. On September 17, 1937, Red and Lylah's daughter, Sarah, was born. Sarah, their only child, later became a professor of English.

Ambitious for a better job, Red took time off from WRUF and rode buses to Atlanta, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Chicago for auditions, but stations were not hiring during the Depression. In 1934 the Cincinnati Reds' new general manager, Larry MacPhail, persuaded owner Powel Crosley Jr. to put the team's games on the air. An executive at WLW, a station owned by Crosley, remembered the young man from Florida, and hired him as the club's first play-by-play announcer at $25 a week, less than he was paid in Gainesville.

On Opening Day he broadcast the first major-league game he had ever seen. “That was the most joyous day of my life, next to my wedding day,” he remembered.

In 1935 Red called the first of thirteen World Series, over the Mutual network. What he remembered most vividly was the pregame briefing by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Judge Landis summoned the announcers from all the networks (there were no exclusive rights deals then) and in his customary Sermon-on-the-Mount style, lectured them, “Don't editorialize. Report.” Landis's admonition was prompted by Ted Husing's 1934 Series broadcasts, when Husing criticized the umpires. Husing was banned from the Series forever after.

Many of Barber's successors in the booth have called him the first reporter to broadcast baseball. “I've heard tapes of Red Barber in the 1930s and '40s,” Bob Costas told the Los Angeles Times, “where he tells you there's a line single to left-center and he tells you how many times it bounced before the center fielder picked it up. You needed that then. Today, even the very good announcers will very rarely describe a guy's stance or the peculiarities of a guy's windup, because they've been subconsciously influenced by television even though they're on the radio.”

Allan Barra, in the online magazine Salon, described listening to tapes of Barber's broadcasts: “There were no complex statistics, no hype, and, of course, no visuals. Just poetry. When the wind was blowing the flag. A description of how the fielders were set. An anecdote or two about each player. With nothing to work with but words, Barber painted a picture of the game that kick-started my own imagination in a way that technology never could.”

Barber's best-known innovation for broadcasters was a simple device to remind him to repeat the score frequently for listeners who had just tuned in: He kept a three-minute egg timer, an hourglass, on his desk in the booth. Every time the sand ran down, he repeated the score and flipped his timer over. Dozens if not hundreds of later announcers adopted this prop.

An important part of the early play-by-play man's job was the re-creation of out-of-town games. Broadcasters didn't begin traveling with teams until after World War II. The announcer in a studio hundreds of miles from the ballpark used Western Union's telegraphic pitch-by-pitch accounts to simulate a live broadcast.

Most broadcasters tried to make the re-creation seem as realistic as possible: using sound effects of recorded crowd noise, cranking up the volume for an exciting play; two pieces of wood banged together to simulate the crack of the bat; recorded organ music. “My reaction was just the opposite. I wanted the audience to know at all times that I was doing a re-creation,” Barber said in a 1985 appearance on KCMO radio in Kansas City, Missouri. He used no sound effects and placed his microphone close to the telegraph key, so listeners heard the beeps of Morse code.

“You did that broadcast from a series of mental pictures,” Barber said. “I made it my business to mentally photograph every player—how he looked, how big he was. . . . I memorized the idiosyncrasies, the habits. . . . I memorized how each pitcher pitched. So as I stood in the studio I saw the game.”

When Larry MacPhail left Cincinnati for Brooklyn in 1939, he took Barber with him to the nation's media capital. Red brought the down-home idiom of his Southern roots to the borough whose residents were ridiculed for speaking of “dem” and “dose.” Many people who lived in Brooklyn in the 1940s have insisted that they could walk down any street in the borough and never miss a pitch, because Barber's voice was wafting out of every window and every passing car.

During World War II, he became a civic institution as chairman of Brooklyn's Red Cross blood drive and host of radio War Bonds sales.

New York offered Barber unmatched opportunities. According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he called the first National Football League championship game to be broadcast nationwide, in 1940, when the Chicago Bears buried the Washington Redskins, 73-0. He regularly broadcast football games of the professional Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, as well as Princeton University. He also hosted entertainment programs with bandleaders Sammy Kaye and Woody Herman and singers Lena Horne and Mario Lanza. For nine years after World War II, he was the director of sports for CBS, where he first heard Fordham University student Vince Scully.

During the war, Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey was signing as many promising young players as his scouts could find, laying the groundwork for a decade of success. He was also laying the groundwork for an even more important move. Months before he signed Jackie Robinson, Rickey confided his plan to Barber. Red said he was the first one outside Rickey's family to hear that Rickey intended to break organized baseball's sixty-year-old color line: “I believe he told me about it so far in advance so that I could have time to wrestle with the problem, live with it, solve it.”

Barber never admitted any racist feelings. In his history of Robinson's rookie year, 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball, he declared, “I was not a racist.” He wrote in his autobiography, “The Negroes who came and went through our lives were always treated with the utmost respect and with a great deal of warmth and a great deal of affection.” At the same time, he acknowledged, “[T]here was a line drawn, and that was that.” Southerners of Barber's generation never encountered a black person in a situation of social or economic equality until they reached middle age. That was that.

After Rickey's revelation, Barber told Lylah, “I'm going to quit.” She suggested they have a martini and sleep on it. His wife's cooler head prevailed, but Barber said, “It really tortured me.” Eventually he concluded, “[A]ll I had to do when he came was treat him as a fellow man, treat him as a ballplayer, broadcast the ball.” In his 1991 interview with Bob Costas, Barber recalled, “I don't think I ever said he was a Negro. I didn't have to. Everybody knew who he was.” He also owned up to his self-interest: “Economics has a way of being the hidden persuader. I valued the job at Brooklyn.”

The rookie Robinson led the Dodgers to the 1947 World Series. That classic included two of Barber's most famous games. In Game Four, Yankees right-hander Bill Bevens took a no-hitter into the ninth inning, while walking ten. Brooklyn pinch-hitter Cookie Lavagetto came to bat with the Dodgers trailing by one run and two runners on base: “Two men out, last of the ninth. The pitch. Swung on. There's a drive hit out toward the right-field corner. Henrich going back. He can't get it. It's off the wall for a base hit. Here comes the tying run— and—here's—the winning run.”

On National Public Radio's “Morning Edition” on April 23, 1982, Barber told host Bob Edwards, “When all of the excitement was over for a little bit, I just sort of caught my breath and without thinking about it, Bob, I said, ‘Well, I'll be a suck-egg mule.’ ”

Edwards asked why he said that. Barber replied, “When you're doing something such as you and I are doing, live radio without any preparation, no script, you are just concentrating on your work and something just comes out. . . . When you realize that things suddenly come out of your subconscious or your unconscious when you're talking to an open microphone, sometimes it frightens you.

Red Barber died at eighty-four on October 22, 1992, at the Tallahassee Memorial Regional Medical Center. The New YorkTimes reported that the cause of death was pneumonia and other complications from surgery. His ashes were buried in his yard, beneath five camellias. In his Morning Edition tribute, Bob Edwards said, “One of the great voices of America will speak to us no more, and the camellias will never smell as sweet.