Hall of Famer Red Barber Dies : Baseball: Broadcasting great was 84. He brought a country touch to the booth and was Scully’s mentor in Brooklyn.

Red Barber, one of the most influential figures in early major league baseball broadcasting and the voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers in their heyday, died Thursday in a Tallahassee, Fla., hospital of pneumonia and age-related kidney complications.

He was 84.

Earlier this month, Barber underwent surgery for an intestinal blockage at Tallahassee Regional Memorial Medical Center and had been in critical condition since.

Barber’s broadcasts of Dodger games from 1939-1953 served as a yardstick for the emerging electronic broadcast sports field. The Mississippi-born, red-haired son of a locomotive engineer captivated listeners with his Southern-fried expressions and smooth delivery.

The “Ol’ Redhead,” as Barber called himself, broadcast big league games for 33 years, beginning with the Cincinnati Reds in 1934. He also did New York Yankee games from 1954 until 1966, but was best known for his 15 years as the voice of the beloved Brooklyn Dodgers.

Barber was unequaled in his day, spinning yarns and describing baseball action in homespun phrases that enthralled listeners in the working-class borough of Brooklyn.

Some of Barber’s non-uniformed characters also became familiar parts of the Dodger act--Hilda Chester, the fan with the frying pan, and Gladys Gooding, the organist.

Vin Scully, whose broadcasting career began in 1950 when Barber brought him into the Dodger radio booth, found Barber as much a father figure as a mentor.

“He was a great influence, very much a paternal figure,” Scully said. “Perhaps I was the son he never had. Like any good father, he was kind, warm, generous and also caring. Any good things that came my way go back to the day I began working with Red Barber.”

Scully added: “At Red’s peak, he was the finest announcer I ever heard. He had a tremendous gift of expression.

“Red’s on-air persona was the country boy, and in New York, this was tremendous. No one in New York had heard anything like that before. He was also the most literate sports announcer I have ever met, but he didn’t want to project what he knew because it would change his image.”

Barber turned the word rhubarb into a synonym for an argument. Barber in the broadcast booth, or a team with a big lead, was “sittin’ in the catbird seat.”

A hitter on a hot streak or a rallying team was “tearin’ up the pea patch” and if he said “the bases are FOB,” Dodger fans knew immediately that they were “full of Brooklyns.” A bouncing ball to the mound elicited a “Come back, little Sheeba,” and a big play rated an “Oh, Doctor!” Other familiar Barberisms were largely self-explanatory, such as “high on the hog” and “sittin’ in tall cotton.”

Since 1981, Barber was a regular on the Morning Edition show on National Public Radio. Until he became ill, he did his portion of the show from his home in Tallahassee, where he lived with his wife, Lylah, whom he married in 1931.

Barber detested getting up early for work one morning a week, but he eventually devised a schedule to prepare himself for the broadcast. He would prepare tea, feed his cat, look over his camellias and set the table for breakfast before sitting down to his desk for the show.

The non-public Barber loved Winston Churchill’s histories, recited passages from Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet,” wrote seven books, acquired a Matisse tapestry and quoted liberally from the Bible.

Barber’s career was an audio loop of highlights--the first radio broadcast of a night game in 1935, the first television broadcast of a major league game in 1939, Jackie Robinson’s first game in 1947, Dodger Cookie Lavagetto’s ninth-inning double that broke up Yankee pitcher Bill Bevens’ no-hitter in Game 4 of the 1947 World Series, Yankee Don Larsen’s perfect game against the Dodgers in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, Roger Maris’ 61st home run in 1961.

After sharing in some of baseball’s brightest moments, Barber and Mel Allen, another Yankee voice, were the first broadcasters inducted into the Hall of Fame.

“I wasn’t a Dodger fan, I wasn’t a Yankee fan,” Barber once said. “I wasn’t a fan of anyone. I described that game in the best way I knew how without partiality. I think the listeners appreciated that.”

Walter Lanier Barber, son of a locomotive engineer and a schoolteacher, was born Feb. 17, 1908, in Columbus, Miss. He was said to have inherited an ear for English from his mother, his storytelling ability from his father.

The Barbers moved to Sanford, Fla., when Walter was 10 and it was there that he began the journey toward his colorful career. As a high school student, he picked celery, drove a truck, worked as a roustabout and laborer on road construction, loaded swamp muck into trucks and carried hot pitch up a ladder for a roofer.

At 21, Barber decided to enroll at the University of Florida, so he hitchhiked to Gainesville with $100 and a new pair of shoes. He worked part-time as a waiter, wood splitter, attendant at a tennis court and janitor at the University Club.

University radio station WRUF was frantic one day when a professor failed to show up to read his paper, “Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstetrics.” Since Barber was available, and capable of speech, he was quickly pressed into duty behind the microphone.

That changed his life forever. Barber resisted at first--he said later that his dream was to become a college professor--but the general manager of the college station wanted more of Barber and was persistent. Finally, Barber said, he asked for the outlandish sum of $50 a month, figuring there would be no way the station would pay Red such an amount.

“When he got back to me and told me $50 was fine, I was stuck,” Barber often recalled. “I went to work the next morning.”

He became the chief announcer at WRUF, for which he broadcast sports and served as master of ceremonies for a hillbilly band.

He spent summer vacations traveling to Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati and Louisville, trying to find radio jobs. One found him in 1934, three years after he married Lylah Scarborough, a 22-year-old nurse from Jacksonville, Fla.

In Cincinnati, Powell Crosley Jr., had just bought the Reds and wanted to put the games on the two radio stations he also owned, WSAI and WOAI. And he needed an announcer. He hired Barber.

There was only one small problem. Barber’s first major league broadcast was also his first major league game. It turned out to be no problem at all. Barber made that and subsequent broadcasts as smooth as a spoonful of sugar drifting through a glass of iced tea.

He drew pictures with his words, describing Cincinnati Hall of Famer Ernie Lombardi: “The next batter is Old Schnozz, Ernie Lombardi, a big, towering right-handed hitter. . . . He takes his stance with his back foot close to the catcher. . . . he is the only fellow in the big leagues who uses the interlocking finger grip.”

Barber’s association with the Dodgers began in 1939, after five years at Cincinnati. He was lured to Brooklyn as the voice of the Dodgers after club owner Larry MacPhail sold the broadcast rights for $1,000 a game.

Barber quickly became an Ebbets Field institution. Instead of forcing enthusiasm, Barber made his mark with colorful reporting delivered in conversational tones.

He also brought an impeccable sense of style to his baseball broadcasts. He was an innovator when he used such techniques as raising or lowering his voice or speaking faster when there was a close play, or pausing just before a fly ball was caught.

Television critic Norman Chad said no one called baseball better than Barber.

“Barber’s voice was the sound of summer for a generation of baseball fans,” Chad said. “To hear Barber was forever to feel the breeze of late August and to smell the fresh-cut infield grass of Ebbets Field.”

Barber helped ease the way for Robinson, who broke baseball’s color line in 1947. Decades later, Barber wrote a book about that season, “1947--When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball.”

“I had the microphone at Brooklyn when Robinson came,” Barber said. “It was the hottest microphone any announcer had to face.”

Branch Rickey, who brought Robinson into the all-white sport of baseball, counseled the young player about handling the prejudice certain to come his way. Barber himself wasn’t too sure how he would handle it and almost quit.

“You have to understand,” Barber told Newsday in an interview in 1988, “when you’re born in Columbus, Miss., in 1908 and you move to Sanford, in central Florida, which may have been even more redneck than Mississippi, well, everything was segregated, everything.”

Lylah Barber urged her husband to reconsider quitting and Barber soon became ashamed of what he had felt.

“I just announced the game with Robinson in it and I’m proud of that,” he told Newsday. “I think that was the most effective way because it allowed Robinson without any emotional tinge to earn his way, which he did quickly. . . . Just broadcast him as any other player and I didn’t have to say he was Negro or black. Everyone knew it. So I didn’t have to waste any time on that. He was Jackie Robinson and he either didn’t get a hit or he did. But, boy, he was a very exciting ballplayer.”

Barber’s reaction to the Robinson situation was typical of his even-handed, non-emotional approach.

Ernie Harwell, another Hall-of-Fame broadcaster who once filled in for Barber when he was ill, said that Barber was the forerunner.

“A lot of the announcers in those days were just guys who worked around the radio station,” Harwell said. “Red took it out of that syndrome. He was one of the first reporters that baseball ever had (who would) report the game rather than look at it as a fan.”

Scully said that much of what he learned from Barber, he carries with him to this day.

“Red’s basic method of operation was all based on accuracy and hard work,” Scully said. “That’s not necessarily his legacy, but it’s part of the overall picture. All I do know is that I literally and figuratively sat at his feet for four years and he gave to me a strong work ethic.

“He surprised me once when I came to ask advice. He said, ‘The one thing you bring to the booth that no one else can bring is yourself. Don’t listen to other announcers, you might subconsciously alter your style. You don’t want to do that to yourself. You want to be you.’

“I have followed that to conclusion. That was the best single piece of advice I have received to this day. I am what I am and that’s all.”

In the fall of 1953, after 15 years, Barber fled the Ebbets Field catbird seat in a salary dispute with Gillette, which was the sponsor of the World Series. Gillette refused to deliver a pay raise that Barber believed he was due for the Series. When Dodger owner Walter O’Malley would not stand up for him, he decided he could no longer stay in Brooklyn.

He moved over to the Bronx and a job with the Yankees beginning in 1954. Paired with Allen, the established Yankee voice, Barber accepted a secondary role. There was immediate speculation that Allen and Barber could not coexist, but their union was generally harmonious. Barber and Allen worked together until Allen was fired by Yankee owner Dan Topping in 1964. And although Barber might not have seen it coming, his own time in tall cotton was growing short.

Over breakfast at the Plaza Hotel on the morning of Sept. 25, 1966, new Yankee President Mike Burke fired Barber. It happened so quickly, Barber said, that he hadn’t had time to finish his coffee.

Barber always believed that his commitment to objectivity hastened his dismissal. On a broadcast of a home game four days earlier, when the last-place Yankees drew a crowd of 413, Barber had alluded to Yankee Stadium as a ghost town.

At 58, after 33 years of broadcasting baseball, Barber would never call another ball or strike, but he quickly decided that Burke actually had done him a favor.

“I’m sure (Burke) didn’t have it in mind, but he gave me back my life, gave me back my independence,” Barber said. “For 30 years, I had been a servant of everybody, you name it. Anybody could call me into a meeting whenever they wanted. I loved my work, but I didn’t belong to myself.

“When it happened, I said ‘Dad-gum, I’ve had enough.’ It made me a better husband, a better human being.”

He moved to Key Biscayne, Fla., where he wrote a weekly column for the Miami Herald and did a local radio sports broadcast, then to Tallahassee in 1972. On Barber’s 80th birthday in 1988, he was honored in a ceremony in Tallahassee as the state of Florida declared “Red Barber Day.” A birthday party was held in the state capitol, where a message to Barber by Howard Cosell was read.

“You are the man who has always told it like it is,” Cosell wrote. “A beacon light who never resorted to becoming a public relations arm for any team, any league, any organization.”

Barber lived in a yellow ranch-style house on a quiet, tree-lined street about 10 minutes from the capitol in Tallahassee. On his bookshelf, baseball record books shared space with other works, such as the Bible, “Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible” and “The Prayer Book.” Barber was a lay reader in the Episcopal church for nearly 20 years and sometimes delivered sermons.

One sermon was delivered not in church, but at Cooperstown, N.Y., at the Hall of Fame. He called God the “Good Manager,” and said, “The Good Manager well knows His best hitters will go out about seven times for the three times that they will hit safely, and that even if He should win the pennant, His team at best is going to lose about one third of its games.”

Barber seldom followed baseball in his later years. By his own admission, the game changed almost to the point where he could no longer identify with it.

“It’s a different world,” he said in an interview, 22 years after the Yankees fired him.

And besides, Barber told the Chicago Tribune in an interview in early 1988, he had other things to do.

“I was the eyes of the game for millions of people that couldn’t see for themselves,” Barber said. “I was a servant of my microphone, but now I’m free. My life is my own and it’s precious.”