Managing Editor
Some of my most vivid memories are not things I experienced in person, but from listening to the radio.
Whether it was from an AM radio in my father’s 1962 Chevrolet Impala or through the earphone of a transistor radio late at night, the radio airwaves helped create endearing moments frozen in time deep inside my consciousness.
It was a warm Friday evening on Sept. 11, 1964, and although I had to look up the exact date, I do remember everything from that occasion as if it were yesterday. After taking our family out to eat after getting off work, my father wanted to take a long drive along Lake Ontario to Sodus Point for ice cream.
My mother didn’t drive, so she sat in the front passenger seat while my brother and I were in the back seat. My father turned on the car radio and I instantly recognized the voice of Mel Allen, who was the announcer for New York Yankees baseball games. The Yankees were playing the Minnesota Twins and were trailing in the game, 5-3, when New York manager Yogi Berra selected a 23-year-old rookie named Roger Repoz who was making his major league debut to pinch hit for relief pitcher Rollie Sheldon in the bottom of the seventh inning.
Twins’ relief pitcher Jim Perry got Repoz to ground out to end the inning but for some reason, that moment has rolled around in my brain ever since. We arrived at Sodus Point and had our ice cream and by the time we drove home, the game had ended and instead of baseball, my father tuned his car radio to his favorite country music station. When the opening lines of “Wolverton Mountain” began and my father started to sing along, I closed my eyes and wondered how great it must have felt for Roger Repoz to play in a game with Yankees’ immortals like Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.
I asked my father if he thought Roger Repoz was going to be the next great Yankees outfielder. He said only time would tell. Being a baseball card collector, I followed the career of Roger Repoz for the next nine seasons in the major leagues. He hit 12 home runs for the Yankees the next season but could not break through to become a full-time ballplayer for New York. By 1966, he was traded to the Kansas City Athletics, who in turn traded him to the California Angels the following year. By 1972, Repoz was released by the Angels and spent another five seasons playing in Japan before retiring.
But listening intently to his first at bat with Mel Allen describing each pitch, my father behind the wheel and feeling the warm lakeside breeze on my face as we drove that night is a memory I will never forget as long as I live.
Another radio memory for me growing up was tuning in late at night on my transistor radio while I was supposed to be sleeping and hearing the laugh of WBZ radio personality Larry Glick. Boston was 392 miles from Rochester, New York where we lived, but the 50,000-watt channel reached my radio crystal clear there in 1968.
I enjoyed listening to Glick, who referred to himself as “The Commander” and his unique sarcastic comedy, it was something I had never heard broadcast on the radio previously. He had a revolving door of humorous callers who entertained me to no end. One evening in May 1969 and I do not remember the exact date, Glick’s guest was a man who claimed he had seen a UFO near the airport in Beverly, Massachusetts. It opened the floodgates for at least eight different callers to Glick’s broadcast who said they had witnessed that same UFO.
Each caller described in detail the bright green appearance of the UFO and another suggested that because the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile was supposed to be in Boston the next day, it was hovering nearby to collect hot dogs to bring back to outer space.
With that call, Glick instructed his late-night newsman Art Gardner to call the Beverly Police Department and see what possible information they had about sightings of this UFO. The interview with the police was hilarious and years later, I still remember it like it happened an hour ago.
I’m not sure why these two broadcasts remain lodged somewhere in my psyche, but they are and there’s little I can do to escape replaying them every so often before I drift off to sleep. And there are quite a few more including listening to a basketball game on my 13th birthday in 1966 in which John Havlicek of Boston scored 32 points as the Celtics lost by three to the Detroit Pistons or hearing “Those Were the Days” by English singer Mary Hopkin on the radio for the first time in 1968.
Listening to the radio is still one of my favorite activities and probably will be for the rest of my life and it continues to generate lasting memories for me. <
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