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End of an Era Stirs Dodger Blues
The phone rang and my wife answered and the voice on he other end of the line was unmistakable even before the caller identified himself.
“Hello, this is . . .”
Vin Scully was returning my call. However, I had not mentioned to my wife that I was trying to set up an interview and since it is not every day that The Voice of the Dodgers phones home, my wife was caught off guard.
“You aren’t Vin Scully,” she said, amused, thinking it was one of my friends pulling a prank.
And she hung up.
The phone rang again, again the golden voice asked for me, and this time my wife realized her embarrassing mistake.
A few days later, I didn’t interview Scully so much as I pulled up a chair in the Dodger Stadium press box and listened, enchanted, to his storytelling. At one point, he mentioned having just read “The Professor and the Madman” about how the Oxford English Dictionary was compiled by two men – one turning out to be an insane murderer. It struck me, as Scully spun the synopsis, that he could read a random page from the dictionary and make it a listening pleasure on the radio.
About a year after formally meeting Scully we crossed paths a second time at a gala dinner – washing hands in the restroom. Remarkably, he remembered my name, but the greater display of his peerless people skills was his insistence I come meet his wife.
I have been reading The Star for the better part of four decades, writing in its pages for more than a quarter century, and in all this time I cannot recall a more terrific on-going feature, “Peanuts” included, than the daily “Visions from Vin” compiled by Jim Carlisle chronicling Scully’s life and career. The sports-section serial came about because, after being the rivet holding the franchise together for the past 67 seasons, Scully is hanging up his mic following the Dodgers’ regular-season finale in two weeks.
While the gems Carlisle has uncovered from various books, magazines and newspaper interviews have been enjoyable, even more so have been the personal encounters with “Vin” shared by local readers. The common denominator of their remembrances is this: the next time Scully is rude to someone will also be the very first time.
Scully’s friendliness is authentic.
“I enjoy people, so I don’t mind autograph requests at all,” Scully told me. “Why not sign? They’re paying me a compliment by asking.”
And what are some of the stranger “compliments”?
“I’ve signed a lot of baseballs, as you can imagine,” he answered. “But also golf balls and even a hockey puck, which is sort of strange. Paper napkins seem popular, even dirty napkins – I think it’s all they have on hand. I don’t expect them to keep it, but I sign anyway because hopefully they will keep the moment.”
As personal tale after tale shared in “Visions from Vin” attest, these moments are indeed kept, safely wrapped in red velvet in each person’s mind.
One more red-velvet moment. Our interview concluded, I asked Scully if he would put me at the plate in Dodger Stadium. Pat Riley once diagramed for me the Lakers’ “Fist Up” play to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and my goodness how I wish I had kept that doodled napkin. Even more, however, I wish I had recorded Scully’s imaginary calling of my Major League at-bat against the great fireball-throwing Bob Gibson.
No matter, for I can hear it in my mind’s ears yet, working the count full before Scully ended my fantasy with a wink, so to speak: mighty Woody struck out. It was perfect.
To borrow from Ernest Thayer’s famous poem, “Casey at the Bat,” come game’s end on Oct. 2, the tale will be this: “Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright; the band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light; and somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout . . .”
. . . but there is no joy in Dodgerville, mighty Vinny has called his final out.
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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.
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