Harry Kalas, Jack Buck, Your Local Newspaper And The Death Of Institutions

By Will Leitch, 12:30 PM on Tue Apr 14 2009, 25,090 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

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This is a new weekly column from Leitch. It has words, and pictures. It's called Ten Humans Of The Week. It might or might not work. But here it is.

Back in June 2002, I knew something had happened to Jack Buck when I woke up to his voice on my clock radio. Jack had been suffering from Parkinson's for a while, and he'd looked particularly frail the last time I'd seen him, during his 9/11 poem just days after the attacks.

New York radio was playing his call of Ozzie Smith's home run in the 1985 NLCS -- the "Go Crazy, Folks!" home run off Tom Niedenfuer -- and I knew that had to mean he was gone. In my remembrance of him later that day, I noted that I'd probably heard Jack Buck's voice more than any other human's voice on earth. I suspect that's still true, seven years later. It'll probably still be true 30 years from now.

I thought about that when Harry Kalas died yesterday, when Daulerio went through what I did seven years ago. (His remembrance was particularly well done.) It was sad, of course, to lose someone you've been attached to for so long, but with distance and time, you realize that you've lost something different than just a person: You've lost an attachment to something that will never, ever be mended, or even replicated.

There aren't many broadcasters like Buck and Kalas left. Vin Scully seems to be it, yes? Marty Brennaman, maybe? Ernie Harwell, if he were still doing games? They are relics of a more permanent era, when people really did have one job for 50 years and couldn't be happier about it. (And back when people listened to the radio, the one station they could get, only if they happened to be on a hill.) That doesn't happen anymore, in any field. The people who have been doing this for so long, whether they're a broadcaster, or a newsman, or just the guy who does your taxes, are the last of their breed. We are a transient society, constantly moving, looking for the next thing, never sitting still for too long. There isn't much constancy. This makes for a more vibrant, exciting life. (Theoretically, anyway.) But it also casts darkness on all our institutions: When nothing lasts for too long, those things have lost value. We appreciate them more ... but we find ourselves mourning them less when they're gone. There's always something else.

That's what we lost when Jack Buck, and Harry Kalas, and Phil Rizzuto, and Harry Caray, left us. That what we lose when newspapers close. There's always a new thing. Harry Kalas was one of the last of his breed. Not just because he was a beloved broadcaster. But because he cared enough to stick around so long. People don't do that anymore. For better or worse.