The Candle is Flickering Low

The Candle is Flickering Low

When I think of my childhood summers in Baltimore in the 1940s I remember three things: the oppressive heat, lightning bugs, and the Baltimore Orioles. It seemed like we had all three every night.

After supper, everyone went outside. No one had air conditioning. The grownups dragged folding chairs to the sidewalk or—if they had them—to their front porches, and sat and talked, hoping for an occasional breeze as the evening moved from twilight to darkness. I played games in the street with my friends, usually stickball, until it was too dark to see well.

We had a simple method of defining when it was too dark: when the lightning bugs came out. That usually ended stickball, and set off the next game: capturing the lightning bugs and placing them in jars. When we had enough, or just enough collecting, we screwed the tops onto our jars. The tops had a bunch of holes punched in them, too small for the bugs to get out, but large enough that they could breath. Later, when we had to go inside, we would each put our jar in the refrigerator. In the morning we would take the streetcar over to Johns Hopkins University, to the Biology Lab, where we would be paid a penny a bug for that night’s catch.

We were paid—in cash, of course—by the secretary of the Biology Department who told us that the bugs were part of a research program being carried out by a Dr. McElroy. We never saw him—it didn’t matter—we were interested in the pennies. I did meet him forty years later, when I joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, and he was the Chancellor. I introduced myself to him and told him that this was the second time that he was my “boss.” In response to his quizzical look, I explained that I was one of hundreds of kids in Baltimore who had supplied him with lightning bugs.

Lightning bugs are a pretty dim memory now. It’s not just the memory that’s going—the bugs themselves have all but disappeared. The recollection of another flicker remains though—a candle, and an imaginary one at that. The flame flutters and that visual image creates sounds—names—that dance across my memory.

Howitzer Howie Moss

Fireman Johnnie Podgajny

Sherm Lollar

They were the Baltimore Orioles of 1944. They were the best team in the International League—the gateway to the Major Leagues for most players at that time.

But I’m off the track. It’s the candle. Its creator was the radio announcer for the Orioles: Bill Dyer. In the forties, Dyer managed the Baltimore Bullets professional basketball team. At the same time, he was doing Orioles games on WITH Radio. In the summer, when the Orioles had a game at night, every radio in the neighborhood was on. And on the usually hot and humid nights, the grownups were in their chairs on the sidewalks, or on their porches. The radios were in windows facing the outside, and the men listened to the game. CBS Newsman Charles Osgood says that as a nine year old, he would walk through his Baltimore neighborhood and all the houses had their windows open, the Orioles game was on, and you could walk from place to place and not miss the game.

We didn’t walk. We sat on the steps, cheering the team to victory.

It did not matter to us that the Orioles were not a major league team. They were “our” team—“dem Birds.” And we got to see players a year or two before they “went up” to the Majors. I can still remember the names of the other teams in the International league at that time: the Newark Bears, the Jersey City Giants, the Syracuse Chiefs, the Rochester Redwings and the Buffalo Bisons. And since it was called the International League, there were the two Canadian teams: the Montreal Royals and the Toronto Mapleleafs.

Some nights, the game progressed very slowly. So much so, that when our bedtime came around, the game was only in the seventh or eighth inning. That did not prevent me from hearing the rest of the game, however, because I had a radio at the side of my bed. It was an old Philco model, with a wooden cabinet about two feet tall, and shaped like a bullet. 

I would get in bed, turn out the lights, turn on the radio and listen to Bill Dyer “call” the game. My radio was old, and the reception of the radio signal was not very strong. To compensate for that, the radio had an antenna—a long copper wire that snaked out from the back of the cabinet. Normally, you would attach the free end of the antenna to a nail banged into the wall somewhere near the ceiling of the room. Mom didn’t allow nail banging in my room. But Dad had taught me that I could transform myself into a human antenna. All I had to do was wrap the uninsulated end of the wire around one finger, and I became the radio antenna. I imagined the radio waves channeling through my body. They tingled—or at least I thought I felt something.

Regardless of what I felt, I heard Bill Dyer “calling” the game. He was a master at baseball radio, and especially when the game was not played in Baltimore, but in one of the other International League cities. Years later I learned that when the team played out of town he was not at the field with them. He was in Baltimore, in the WITH radio studio, at the receiving end of a teletype machine. Someone paid by WITH was at the game, say in Buffalo, and he would type the results of each “at bat” as the progressed. For example, he might type: Lollar at bat. Called strike one. Ball one, LOW. Ball two, INSIDE. Swinging strike two. Fly out to deep left field.

These words were transmitted over a telephone connection, and they then appeared in Baltimore, at the WITH studio, typed in a line on a long, continuous ribbon of narrow paper tape that issued from a kind of a typewriter (the receiving end of the teletype machine). With that tape in hand, Dyer would report the action. But his genius lay in how he embellished the bare facts.

What we heard was:

“Lollar steps up to the plate. He knocks the dirt out of his cleats. Here’s the first pitch.” (Dyer’s voice would rise in excitement.) “It’s called a strike! Lollar didn’t like that call very much.” There would be a short pause. “The pitcher takes the signal. Here’s the windup. The pitch. Ball one.”

Dyer had a selection of recorded crowd noises. When appropriate you would hear fans cheering or booing. You could hear someone selling hot dogs in the aisles. And finally, at least for Sherm Lollar that inning:

“The count is two and two. Here’s the pitch. Lollar hits one to deep left field. It may be out of here. Vitelli is racing to the wall. He leaps. He’s got it. Lollar kicks the dirt in disgust. This inning is over for the Birds.”

Baseball radio announcers were known by their voices, but they also had distinctive phrases that they would use for certain actions of the game. For example, if the batter hit a long drive toward the bleachers, one announcer might say “That one’s headed for the pastures!” while another would shout “It’s going, going, GONE! A home run!”

When the Orioles played “at home,” in Baltimore, then Bill Dyer was at the game in the “announcers booth.” This was no more than a crude wooden shack behind home plate, at the top of the stands. There was no window—just a wooden board that was hinged at the top, swung up by a rope, to make an opening through which Dyer watched and called the game.

If the Orioles were behind in the late innings, and would get a man or two on base, the crowd would hope for a few runs to move them ahead. Dyer had a small red wooden chair in the booth. He would lean out through the opening holding the chair in one hand, shake it in the air, and arouse the fans to chant for a rally. The “little red chair” was Dyer’s trademark as an announcer.

For the “away” games, since he was in the WITH studio, he did not have his red chair with him. There was no need for it, since he had no live audience on hand. For those games, Dyer had another method for fomenting a “come from behind” victory for the Orioles. He would announce that it was time for some runs, that the Birds needed a rally, and tell the listeners that he was walking in a circle around his red chair. Of course we could “see” this as we listened to his running commentary on the game. We thought the chair was magic, because every time Dyer performed this ritual of the chair, the Orioles would score several runs and move ahead in the game. It never failed!

Years later, as an adult, I learned that Dyer simply looked at the teletyped summary of the game coming off of the machine, peeked ahead at the section of the game that had already occurred but that he had not yet announced, saw that there was going to be a rally, and then “predicted” it—we thought he made it happen—for his excited radio fans.

And what if the Orioles were not able to come from behind and win the game? Then Dyer primed us for the loss. In dramatic, somber, tones he prepared us for the end of the game and its sad outcome.

“It doesn’t look good for the Birds tonight, folks. The candle is flickering low.”

To a young boy alone in bed in the dark, the room lit only by the dull orange glow from the station dial on the front of the radio, the image of the failing, flickering candle was very strong.

“The candle is flickering low.”

And when it was extinguished for the night, when the game had ended with disappointment, I unwrapped the copper wire from my “antenna finger,” turned off the radio, and went to sleep.