Saying Farewell to Harry Caray

At 10 o’clock Friday morning, people filled the sidewalks around Wrigley Field for the Chicago Cubs’ home opener. Hundreds formed a line for standing room tickets, others waited for the gates to open. They had come early, despite wind and cold, to start celebrating a baseball life. This was the first time in 17 years that Harry Caray was missing from a Cubs’ Opening Day in the little green ballpark known as the “Friendly Confines,” and the first time since Franklin Roosevelt was president that Caray would not broadcast an opening day game somewhere.

Caray died Feb. 18 after falling into a coma when his heart changed rhythm, blocking oxygen to his brain, during a Valentine’s Day dinner with his wife. He was 83. Renowned as the “voice” of the St. Louis Cardinals from 1945 until 1969, Caray gained even greater fame as the Cubs broadcaster who led the Wrigley fans in singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch. While he mangled players’ names and often lost track of the game’s action in his later years, Caray was loved. “He had great energy and a great passion for the game,” said Cubs Manager Jim Riggleman. “He made it fun.”

Jim Murphy mourned the passing of his friend--but not without the kind of story that made people laugh or shake their heads and say, that’s Harry. Murphy, the proprietor of Murphy’s Bleachers, the tavern across the street from Wrigley’s bleachers, was in Atlanta when Caray told him to meet him at a bar at 11 p.m. after a Cubs-Braves game. “It got to be 12, 1 and then 2, and they closed up. No Harry. I went back to the hotel and at 3 o’clock the phone rang and it was Harry. ‘Where are you?’ He had gotten them to reopen the bar, and he got me out of bed to go back and join him.”

“I’ll never get tired of hearing Harry Caray stories,” Chip Caray, 33, Harry’s grandson and broadcast successor, said as he sat in the Cubs’ dugout before ascending to Harry’s seat in the overhang behind home plate. “I just hope most of them aren’t true.”

Harry’s seat, now Chip’s, is the best in one of the last diamond palaces, a bucolic square in a hard-working, friendly, passionate, sentimental city. Cubs fans take defeat with a practiced let’s-get-’em-tomorrow resilience: The club is below .500 for the century.

“Harry used to say, ‘When things go bad, we have to be good,’ ” said Steve Stone, analyst alongside Harry and now Chip. “Unfortunately, that’s been a lot of the time.”

The crowd looking to Harry in the booth or listening to him at home trusted him; he was their announcer, not the owners’, so he could be critical. Curtis Marquardt, of Elgin, Ill., recalled Friday at Hi-Tops Cafe when Caray teamed with Jimmy Piersall doing Chicago White Sox games. “Together they were good,” he said. “They wouldn’t tell me crap.”

When former White Sox shortstop Bee Bee Richard committed two errors in a game, Caray rasped disdainfully: “Richard just picked up a hot-dog wrapper at shortstop. It’s the first thing he’s picked up all night.”

“Bill Melton at the plate. He’s 0 for April. . . .”

Years before, in St. Louis: “The Cardinals have the tying run on second. Two out. Boyer the hitter. We’ll be back in one minute with the wrapup.”

Honesty and earnestness--and just being Harry--served him in recent years when he would call former second baseman Ryne Sandberg “Ryneberg.” Caray remained, in shifting from an off-the-subject soliloquy or garbled aside back to the play-by-play, the master of the segue.

His buddy in the booth, Stone, made it possible. A former starting pitcher who one season won 25 games, Stone will be better remembered as Harry’s set-up man. After Harry had lost the subject and gone off talking--sometimes about grapes, watermelons or prunes--Stone would have to bring the viewers, and Harry, up to date: “Well, Harry, Hernandez is in to pinch-run and Sosa is behind in the count, 0 and 1.” Harry would pick right up as if he knew everything all along: “Cubs need speed on the bases here in the eighth inning, and Sammy’s due for a hit.”

“Most people knew what Harry was talking about,” Stone said Friday, “because on television, when you’re dealing with pictures and if you’re isolated on (Montreal shortstop) Mark Grudzielanek and he’s calling him Grazelniak and Gratso-whateverhisnameis, the fan at home knows it’s Grudzielanek. Most of the time everybody knew what Harry was trying to say.” Caray settled on calling him Mark G.

“He called Hector Villanueva seven different names the first inning that he played here. He called him Venezuela, Valenzuela, Villanahuaga, Villanova, Villaneva. . . . Finally, he spelled it out phonetically in his scorebook and looked at it for about a minute and decided to call him Hector.”

Caray once forgot who Stone was. “Harry opened up one year’s broadcast with, ‘This is Harry Caray with Ben Stein.’ Then he said, ‘Harry Caray with Dave Stone.’ And then he turned to me and said, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘It’s Steve Stone.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ ”

The whole midsection of the nation, and parts beyond, grew up or grew old listening to Caray bringing his hometown Cardinals over KMOX radio, a 50,000-watt boomer. But, fired by August Busch, he wandered to Oakland for a year before bouncing back to the Midwest in 1971, to do White Sox games. He rose far above what that occasion presented him, a desultory White Sox team and low wattage. He began singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch of home games.

In 1982, when he was 67 years old, Harry finally made it to the destination that seemed preordained. He was perfectly matched with the Cubs and Wrigley. His voice carried across the whole country on the cable superstation WGN-TV. So a vast national television audience saw that over the years, the lenses of his glasses not only got thicker, they grew larger, until he looked like an owl perched up in the booth.

So it was that a caricature of Caray emphasizing his smile and his glasses was settled on by the Cubs to help fans remember him. The caricature was everywhere Friday: on banners and pins and, after a moment of silence before the game, it was unveiled on a plaque above the broadcast booth. The crowd looked up and chanted “Har-ry, Har-ry.” The caricature is being worn this season on the right sleeve of every Cubs player.

“You see his smiling face,” said a fan, Lorrie Wiltgen, of Chicago. “It’s nothing sad. It’s not a black armband.”

“Holy Cow!” he’d shout. And, as he would have said Friday after the Cubs beat Montreal, 6-2, “Cubs win, Cubs win, Cubs win.” And, “It might be ... it could be ... it IS--a home run!”

Dutchie, Harry’s third wife, led the crowd of 39,102 Friday in “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Every game this season will have “guest conductors,” including Ernie Banks and Stan Musial. Dutchie waved the microphone out of the booth, as Harry used to, balloons floated upward and “We Miss You, Harry” came up in lights on the scoreboard. The organist played “Amazing Grace” as Chip and Dutchie embraced and the crowd chanted, “Har-ry, Har-ry.”

When Harry signed off after the final home game last season, it was happily, because the Cubs had won--although they lost 94 in his farewell season:

“Well, Harry Caray speaking from Wrigley Field. God willing, hope to see ya next year.

“Next year maybe will be the next year we all have been waiting for forever.

“So long, everybody.”