My old friend and co-worker for 38 years, Leonard Blakely, and I spent a fine afternoon at AutoZone Park recently, watching the Memphis Redbirds defeat the Omaha Royals, 8-7, and enjoying our retirement. We talked non-stop the whole game and I thought I’d attempt to relate some of the war stories Leonard shared regarding minor league sports broadcasts he worked on over the years on WREC.
Dick Palmer was the voice of the Memphis Blues of the Class AA Texas League from 1968-1975, the Memphis Pros/Tams of the American Basketball Association from 1970-1974, and the Memphis Southmen/Grizzlies of the World Football League in 1974-1975, all on WREC. Later, Tom Stocker was our voice of the Memphis Chicks of the Class AA Southern League from 1978-1997 and the Class AAA of the Pacific League Memphis Redbirds from 1998-2004. There were other voices doing broadcasts during these years, but Dick and Tom were the mainstays on WREC during our various sports broadcast contracts with all these teams save the Redbirds. BTW, Dick is preparing for his 27th year doing MTSU Blue Raider Men's Basketball out of Murfreesboro and Tom has left radio to run the Tally Ho Supper Club in Harward, Wisconsin, with his wife.
Sorry for so much digression, but you can’t tell the players without a program now, can you? During many of these years Leonard worked nights on WREC as announcer, talk show host and board operator for games, among many other duties. Sports broadcasts on local radio stations through the ‘60s and ‘70s were a lot like they were the previous 25-30 years…one guy in the control room hoping against hope that the equipment would work and another guy at the end of that little bright wire who worked as play-by-play broadcaster, engineer, equipment manager, statistics guru, and certified loser in endless penny-a-point gin rummy games on the team bus.
Back in the control room, Leonard, and hundreds of guys across the nation like him over those years, would wait nervously for a phone call from the play-by-play guy about a half hour before broadcast time. They would check out the line from the park/stadium to the control room. This line was a one-line handset installed by the phone company or sometimes just a pair of wires. Usually, each home team would maintain a phone line for the opposing team’s broadcast booth, a reciprocal agreement that simplified the job of insuring a phone’s availability at all game sites. For basketball games, this was different because the play-by-play often originated courtside and the phone line would not be permanently in place in a multi-use venue.
Dick or Tom would be doing a game on WREC and the game broadcast would suddenly drop out. Now they had no way of knowing they weren’t on the air because they only had the one phone…and thought they were broadcasting on it! Remember, this was before cell phones! Leonard would immediately start trying to get word to Dick or Tom that we had lost the signal. Over time, Leonard amassed many phone numbers for broadcast cities. Sometimes he could get somebody in the front office of the home team or someone in the venue’s office, but often they were out were watching the game! This called for inspiration on Leonard’s part. He would go to his backup list of phone numbers. Several times he actually managed to talk a police desk sergeant into calling a cop at the facility and getting him to relay the message to our guy.
Once, when everything else failed, he even sent a telegram! The telegram operator couldn’t figure out his message, “We’ve lost the game!” She thought it made no sense to send this message to the place where the game was being played! After multiple explanations from Leonard, she agreed to send a runner and he actually found Dick Palmer. Now imagine you’re on the air, broadcasting play-by-play for all you’re worth, checking names and numbers of players on your crib sheets, telling anecdotes from your stats sheets and keeping those 5x7 format cards in order so you call for a commercial break with the sponsor’s name at the right place! Here comes this guy in a Western Union cap with a yellow telegram in his hand and somebody from the front door accompanying him. He wants you to shut up and sign for the telegram and you think everybody around you has gone nuts! Or a cop walks up to you and, with a quizzical look on his face, says, “You’re dead.” It’s a miracle there weren’t more heart attacks during game broadcasts over the years.
Tom Stocker was doing a baseball game from a pitiful excuse of an away team broadcast booth once when he spotted a cop coming up the steps toward the press box. The guy had a determined look on his face and all Tom could think of was the two car notes he was behind on back in Memphis! He thought the guy was a process server!! Imagine the cop, beating on the door and Tom’s hunkered down under his table, trying to call a game he can’t see over a phone line that isn’t working!
Another time the operator happened to listen in on the line after noticing it had been open for over an hour. All she could hear was a baseball game somewhere in the background. She figured someone had put the phone near a radio and wandered away. You got it; she pulled the plug. That was one of the hardest games Leonard ever tried to get reestablished. He was married at the time and his wife worked for the phone company. He had coerced some official phone numbers from her so he could get help during crises. That’s how he was able to get this game back on. He later met the operator and she was mortified by her error. What I want to know? Why was she listening in on the phone line anyway?
The kicker, though, was Tom Stocker at Engel Stadium in Chattanooga for a baseball game with the Lookouts and our Chicks, probably about 1980. Tom had set up in the broadcast booth above the field behind home plate per usual. He even remembered to hang the crowd noise mike out the window so he could run his two-mixer Shure amplifier and get appropriate crowd noise to punctuate his play-by-play. In some locales back in those days, you would really have to crank up the crown noise mike to make those two or three hundred fans sound like several thousand.
From the start of the broadcast, Tom had a nasty buzzing noise coming over his mixer through his cans (headphones). Leonard was already trying to get word to Tom and, over the course of the next hour and a half, several people came to Tom’s booth with the information that he had a buzz on his broadcast, something Tom was well aware of but could not figure out.
The home team broadcaster even sent his engineer over to check Tom’s equipment while he manfully called the game. The engineer finally thought to check the crowd mike and when he pulled it into the booth, the buzz went away! The crowd mike was bad!! Luckily Tom had a spare mike and the engineer snapped it on the cannon plug and lowered it back out the window. The buzz was back!! Now really confused, he leaned out the window and looked down to where the mike was swinging idly…right over the biggest wasp nest he had ever seen!!! The thing was alive with wasps and they weren’t happy about this contraption about to invade their home.
One final story…and this one took place in the control room of WREC down in the basement of the Peabody Hotel in the early ‘70s. Leonard was working a University of Tennessee football game one Saturday afternoon and training a new guy at the same time. UT games came over a network hookup and usually went faultlessly, but experience is a good teacher. Leonard pulled a record and placed it on one of the turntables. He cued up one of the instrumental cuts on the album so he’d have something to put on the air in case the signal from the game dropped – standard procedure. The new guy, one Harry Edwards by name as I recall, asked Leonard what he was doing. “Oh, this is in case we lose the game,” Leonard said. Harry looked closely where the tone arm was on the record and asked, “Well, which song do we play if we win?” My hand to God!!! Incidentally, Harry later became vice-president of a large broadcast group on the West Coast…go figure!
Faulty equipment, poor phone lines, Western Union telegram delivery boys, wandering cops, nosy operators, possible process servers and, finally, wasps…all a part of the history of minor league sports broadcasting as done on WREC over the years. Leonard Blakely and Dick Palmer and Tom Stocker did it all in those years and we’re the richer for the memories. Thanks, guys!
Dick Palmer was the voice of the Memphis Blues of the Class AA Texas League from 1968-1975, the Memphis Pros/Tams of the American Basketball Association from 1970-1974, and the Memphis Southmen/Grizzlies of the World Football League in 1974-1975, all on WREC. Later, Tom Stocker was our voice of the Memphis Chicks of the Class AA Southern League from 1978-1997 and the Class AAA of the Pacific League Memphis Redbirds from 1998-2004. There were other voices doing broadcasts during these years, but Dick and Tom were the mainstays on WREC during our various sports broadcast contracts with all these teams save the Redbirds. BTW, Dick is preparing for his 27th year doing MTSU Blue Raider Men's Basketball out of Murfreesboro and Tom has left radio to run the Tally Ho Supper Club in Harward, Wisconsin, with his wife.
Sorry for so much digression, but you can’t tell the players without a program now, can you? During many of these years Leonard worked nights on WREC as announcer, talk show host and board operator for games, among many other duties. Sports broadcasts on local radio stations through the ‘60s and ‘70s were a lot like they were the previous 25-30 years…one guy in the control room hoping against hope that the equipment would work and another guy at the end of that little bright wire who worked as play-by-play broadcaster, engineer, equipment manager, statistics guru, and certified loser in endless penny-a-point gin rummy games on the team bus.
Back in the control room, Leonard, and hundreds of guys across the nation like him over those years, would wait nervously for a phone call from the play-by-play guy about a half hour before broadcast time. They would check out the line from the park/stadium to the control room. This line was a one-line handset installed by the phone company or sometimes just a pair of wires. Usually, each home team would maintain a phone line for the opposing team’s broadcast booth, a reciprocal agreement that simplified the job of insuring a phone’s availability at all game sites. For basketball games, this was different because the play-by-play often originated courtside and the phone line would not be permanently in place in a multi-use venue.
Dick or Tom would be doing a game on WREC and the game broadcast would suddenly drop out. Now they had no way of knowing they weren’t on the air because they only had the one phone…and thought they were broadcasting on it! Remember, this was before cell phones! Leonard would immediately start trying to get word to Dick or Tom that we had lost the signal. Over time, Leonard amassed many phone numbers for broadcast cities. Sometimes he could get somebody in the front office of the home team or someone in the venue’s office, but often they were out were watching the game! This called for inspiration on Leonard’s part. He would go to his backup list of phone numbers. Several times he actually managed to talk a police desk sergeant into calling a cop at the facility and getting him to relay the message to our guy.
Once, when everything else failed, he even sent a telegram! The telegram operator couldn’t figure out his message, “We’ve lost the game!” She thought it made no sense to send this message to the place where the game was being played! After multiple explanations from Leonard, she agreed to send a runner and he actually found Dick Palmer. Now imagine you’re on the air, broadcasting play-by-play for all you’re worth, checking names and numbers of players on your crib sheets, telling anecdotes from your stats sheets and keeping those 5x7 format cards in order so you call for a commercial break with the sponsor’s name at the right place! Here comes this guy in a Western Union cap with a yellow telegram in his hand and somebody from the front door accompanying him. He wants you to shut up and sign for the telegram and you think everybody around you has gone nuts! Or a cop walks up to you and, with a quizzical look on his face, says, “You’re dead.” It’s a miracle there weren’t more heart attacks during game broadcasts over the years.
Tom Stocker was doing a baseball game from a pitiful excuse of an away team broadcast booth once when he spotted a cop coming up the steps toward the press box. The guy had a determined look on his face and all Tom could think of was the two car notes he was behind on back in Memphis! He thought the guy was a process server!! Imagine the cop, beating on the door and Tom’s hunkered down under his table, trying to call a game he can’t see over a phone line that isn’t working!
Another time the operator happened to listen in on the line after noticing it had been open for over an hour. All she could hear was a baseball game somewhere in the background. She figured someone had put the phone near a radio and wandered away. You got it; she pulled the plug. That was one of the hardest games Leonard ever tried to get reestablished. He was married at the time and his wife worked for the phone company. He had coerced some official phone numbers from her so he could get help during crises. That’s how he was able to get this game back on. He later met the operator and she was mortified by her error. What I want to know? Why was she listening in on the phone line anyway?
The kicker, though, was Tom Stocker at Engel Stadium in Chattanooga for a baseball game with the Lookouts and our Chicks, probably about 1980. Tom had set up in the broadcast booth above the field behind home plate per usual. He even remembered to hang the crowd noise mike out the window so he could run his two-mixer Shure amplifier and get appropriate crowd noise to punctuate his play-by-play. In some locales back in those days, you would really have to crank up the crown noise mike to make those two or three hundred fans sound like several thousand.
From the start of the broadcast, Tom had a nasty buzzing noise coming over his mixer through his cans (headphones). Leonard was already trying to get word to Tom and, over the course of the next hour and a half, several people came to Tom’s booth with the information that he had a buzz on his broadcast, something Tom was well aware of but could not figure out.
The home team broadcaster even sent his engineer over to check Tom’s equipment while he manfully called the game. The engineer finally thought to check the crowd mike and when he pulled it into the booth, the buzz went away! The crowd mike was bad!! Luckily Tom had a spare mike and the engineer snapped it on the cannon plug and lowered it back out the window. The buzz was back!! Now really confused, he leaned out the window and looked down to where the mike was swinging idly…right over the biggest wasp nest he had ever seen!!! The thing was alive with wasps and they weren’t happy about this contraption about to invade their home.
One final story…and this one took place in the control room of WREC down in the basement of the Peabody Hotel in the early ‘70s. Leonard was working a University of Tennessee football game one Saturday afternoon and training a new guy at the same time. UT games came over a network hookup and usually went faultlessly, but experience is a good teacher. Leonard pulled a record and placed it on one of the turntables. He cued up one of the instrumental cuts on the album so he’d have something to put on the air in case the signal from the game dropped – standard procedure. The new guy, one Harry Edwards by name as I recall, asked Leonard what he was doing. “Oh, this is in case we lose the game,” Leonard said. Harry looked closely where the tone arm was on the record and asked, “Well, which song do we play if we win?” My hand to God!!! Incidentally, Harry later became vice-president of a large broadcast group on the West Coast…go figure!
Faulty equipment, poor phone lines, Western Union telegram delivery boys, wandering cops, nosy operators, possible process servers and, finally, wasps…all a part of the history of minor league sports broadcasting as done on WREC over the years. Leonard Blakely and Dick Palmer and Tom Stocker did it all in those years and we’re the richer for the memories. Thanks, guys!