They Made Good Call This Time

Mr. Harry Caray of Palm Springs, Chicago, St. Louis and the world will not be embarrassed, I hope, when he hears about my telling you how worried I had been about him.

I’m just wild about Harry, see, so when he suffered that massive or mild (depending on whom you believe) stroke of his a couple of years ago, it left me, in fact, doubly worried. Worried that Harry might never come back to the baseball broadcast booth. And worried that Harry might never come back--period.

Harry came back, all right. Came back strong. Came back loud and . . . well, considering Harry’s voice, not clear, exactly. But loud and proud, anyway. And, best of all, now hear this: Harry Caray has just been elected--at long last, way overdue--to baseball’s Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y.

All I can say is: about time. About time they came to their senses and enshrined the man with the golden gums. To leave Harry out of the Hall of Ball would be to leave Trigger out of Roy Rogers’ museum. He belongs. He belongs in that wing with the other melodious voices of the game: Mel Allen and Bob Elson and Vin Scully and Ernie Harwell and the rest. Harry’s a tuba to Vinnie’s flute, a washboard to Ernie’s harmonica, but every band needs different noises.

Besides getting in, the important thing is that Harry Caray got in now, not a minute too soon. Sometimes an award loses meaning if you have to wait too long. Paul Newman had to wait forever for his Oscar, Red Smith forever for his Pulitzer. Nobody wants to become an afterthought. Nobody wants to know what everybody else thought of him after he has gone.

Harry was deadly serious when he told his son and fellow baseball broadcaster, Skip, some time ago: “If I get elected after I’m dead, don’t accept it.” He meant every word.

For years and years and years, Harry Caray has been calling the balls and strikes from above for teams in St. Louis and Chicago. I can testify to times when he was twice as popular as the ballclubs he was covering, just as I can testify to times when he was absolutely hated by the ballplayers he was covering.

Once the WGN superstation started blasting his descriptions of Cub games all over creation, there became a much greater recognition and appreciation of Harry Caray’s very scary larynx. Oh, the appeal and charm of Mr. C was lost on some who couldn’t take that Wallace Beery (well, beery, anyway) voice of his, or those constant mentions of which merchants or restaurateurs happened to be in attendance. Mostly, though, Harry’s voice was returned to those of us who had missed it, and introduced to others who had never experienced it.

Harry Caray has been around the circuit a few times. He has been hired and fired, run out of town and practically run for mayor. He taught Jack Buck everything he knew, then sat back and saw Buck inducted into the Hall of Fame ahead of him. He resented untrained ex-ballplayers who bounded from the field to the booth, and yet his two best-known sidekicks have been Jimmy Piersall and Steve Stone, ex-players both.

With the poor and unknown and the rich and famous he is comfortable, during hot-stove winters in the Springs or during sunny summers in the Windy City. Late last season, Ronald Reagan unexpectedly wandered into the Wrigley Field booth and did a couple of innings at Harry’s side. They were both older than the ivy, but so what? So they’re both missing some of their factory-original parts, so what? At Wrigley, we have been taught never to expect perfection. Just sit back and enjoy whatever comes.

Kings and presidents have been entertained by Harry Caray. Once, Harry was calling a Cardinal exhibition game at Memphis, when a phone call came.

“Hello, Harry? This is Elvis.”

“Elvis who?” Harry asked. Harry might have been one of a dozen people alive who would have asked that.

“Elvis Presley,” said Elvis.

He invited Harry over to shoot the breeze. Said he’d been listening to St. Louis games off and on for years. So, they got together, Mr. Great Voice and Mr. Grate Voice. I would rather have a tape recording of this conversation than any other, except maybe Moses and that bush.

Harry Caray has brought a lot of joy to a lot of people, and will continue to do so, through his own throat and through his descendants. Skip Caray still calls the Atlanta Braves’ games, and younger son Chip is a sportscaster in North Carolina. Harry has been thinking about family ties lately, maybe more than ever before since recovering from that stroke.

Having heard the news of his Hall of Fame election just before receiving a similar honor from the Italian-American Hall of Fame at Atlantic City, Harry said: “Italian families are so close, it got me to thinking of my own parents. Because I’ve been an orphan since I was 9. I hope whoever they were, that they would have been proud of this poor kid of theirs from the wrong side of the tracks in St. Louis, who has come a long way just to buy the house a drink.”

Harry did buy the house a drink Monday, at his restaurant in Chicago. He lays off the booze himself these days, no longer the bon vivant with the whiskey-a-go-go life style who was known as the Mayor of Rush Street throughout his adopted town. That stroke caught Harry Caray off stride, and, as Skip has said, “They called his stroke a very mild one, but if they had seen him in the hospital . . . “

That’s when I got worried. That stroke threatened to leave Harry with a speech impediment, if it didn’t kill him first. All those weeks when celebrities from Bill Murray to George Will were pinch-hitting for Harry, I feared we would never hear his terrible, beautiful voice again. I should have known better. You can’t keep a great man down. “I’m glad there isn’t a Hall of Infamy,” Harry said, when the big news came the other day. “I might have made it in that one before the real one.”

Anything you say, Harry. Anything you say.