The Voice of the Turtle, and of My Life
By Michael Green
“Lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” If those words look familiar, they are from Song of Solomon. They also are how Ernie Harwell began the first Detroit Tigers spring training broadcast for four decades. They meant spring had arrived, and so had baseball.
Besides quoting The Bible, Harwell broadcast major league baseball brilliantly for 55 seasons. He also had the distinction of being the only broadcaster ever traded for a player; in 1948, the Brooklyn Dodgers needed an announcer, and Harwell’s team needed a catcher.
In 1950, Harwell left for another club. The Dodgers’ chief broadcaster, Red Barber, wanted to hire someone who, like a younger player, would just be starting out. Fans could watch him develop, and Barber would be the one developing him. He chose a 22-year-old Fordham graduate, Vin Scully, who started out on a one-month option. Scully retired in 2016 after 67 years with the team, a legend not just for his tenure, but for his verbal poetry.
Image caption: Walter “Red” Barber hired Vin Scully and invited him to join the Dodgers in 1950. Scully said Barber was his mentor, and he uses the advice he received to this day.
(Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Dodgers)
Indeed, he was almost too good. In 1965, Dodger left-hander Sandy Koufax pitched a perfect game. Scully’s call of the ninth inning has appeared in an omnibus of baseball literature. The editor reported the transcript prompted the only critical mail he ever received, from readers saying he must have edited Scully, because no broadcaster could ad-lib that brilliantly. The editor hadn’t, and Scully could.
In 1973, an eight-year-old in Las Vegas heard Scully’s voice come out of a transistor radio for the first time and decided to become a baseball broadcaster. He wrote to Scully, who replied that he should make sure to get a college degree, and for a broadcaster, the best possible degree was …English.
The eight-year-old eventually heard his own grown-up voice and became a history professor who blogs occasionally for Nevada Humanities. But what Scully wrote nearly half a century ago still resonates. The humanities, whether English or history or one of the cultural arts, aren’t just for writers and teachers and thinkers. Beyond how important they are for living a well-rounded life, they are valuable for anyone whose job requires them to think and communicate.
And that is what I do. And that is what Scully did beautifully for two-thirds of a century, having learned from Barber. Scully described Barber as the most important man in his life besides his father, and Barber called Scully the son he never had. But Barber, who broadcast major league baseball for 33 years and later was a beloved commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition, also said hiring Scully may have appealed to him for other reasons. Before he entered broadcasting, Barber had wanted to be…an English professor.
Double Down Blogger image credit: Casey Jade Photography.
Michael Green is an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He is the author of several books about the Civil War era, including the forthcoming Lincoln and Native Americans, and numerous books about Nevada, including Nevada: A History of the Silver State, published in 2015. He is executive director of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and executive director of Preserve Nevada, our state's oldest statewide historic preservation organization. He was president of the Nevada Center for Civic Engagement, which puts on the "We the People" high school civics events and other programs, and serves on the boards of The Mob Museum and the UNLV College of Liberal Arts. He writes Nevada Yesterdays, a program supported by Nevada Humanities, for KNPR.
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