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.
