Harry Caray (born
Harry Christopher Carabina, (March 1, 1914 –
February 18, 1998) was an American
baseball broadcaster on radio
and television. He covered four
Major League Baseball teams,
beginning with a long tenure calling the games of the
St. Louis Cardinals, then the
Oakland Athletics (for one year) and the
Chicago White Sox (for eleven
years), before ending his career as the announcer for the
Chicago Cubs.
Career
St. Louis Cardinals
Caray caught his break when he landed the job with the Cardinals in
1945 and, according to several histories of the franchise, proved
as expert at selling the sponsor's beer as he'd been in selling the
Cardinals on
KMOX. Caray was also seen as
influential enough that he could affect team personnel moves;
Cardinals historian
Peter Golenbock
(in
The Spirit of St. Louis: A History of the St. Louis
Cardinals and Browns) has suggested Caray may have had a
partial hand in the maneuvering that led to the exit of general
manager
Bing Devine, the man who had
assembled the team that won the
1964
World Series, and of field manager
Johnny Keane, whose rumored successor,
Leo Durocher (the succession didn't pan out),
was believed to have been supported by Caray for the job. Caray,
however, stated in his autobiography that he liked Johnny Keane as
a manager, and didn't want to be involved in Keane's dismissal. As
the Cardinals' announcer, Caray broadcast three
World Series (1964,
1967, and
1968) on
NBC.
After the 1969 season, Caray was unexpectedly fired as the
Cardinals' lead broadcaster (
Jack Buck
subsequently replaced him). Golenbock and other Cardinal historians
have suggested the cause was a purported affair Caray had with the
daughter-in-law of Cardinals owner
August A. Busch, Jr. (who also owned Anheuser-Busch
brewery, the club's broadcast sponsor); Caray first
called it a business grudge while never necessarily denying or
affirming the rumors. He was with the St. Louis Cardinals
for 25 years, his longest tenure with any sports team.
Oakland Athletics
He spent
one season broadcasting
for the Athletics before, as he often told interviewers, he tired
of owner
Charles O. Finley's interference and accepted a job
with the
Chicago White Sox.
(Apparently the feeling was mutual; Finley later said "that shit
[Caray] pulled in St. Louis didn't go over here.")
However, there were some reports that Caray and Finley did, in
fact, work well with each other, and that Caray's strained
relationship with the A's came from longtime A's announcer
Monte Moore, because Caray was loose and
free-wheeling, while Moore was more conservative.
Chicago White Sox
Caray quickly became popular with the South Side faithful and
enjoyed a reputation for joviality and public carousing (sometimes
doing home game broadcasts bare-topped from the bleachers). He
wasn't always popular with players, however; Caray had an
equivalent reputation of being excessively critical of home team
blunders and for continuing criticism of certain players after even
one on-field mistake. During his tenure with the White Sox, Caray
was teamed with many color analysts who didn't work out well,
including
Bob Waller,
Bill Mercer and ex-Major League catcher
J. C. Martin, among others. But in 1976, during a
game against the
Texas
Rangers, Caray had former outfielder
Jimmy Piersall (who was working for the
Rangers at the time) as a guest in the White Sox booth that night.
The tandem proved to work so well, that Piersall was hired to be
Harry's partner in the White Sox radio and TV booth beginning in
1977. Piersall and Caray became very popular, and are and still
fondly remembered by White Sox fans to this day.
Among many of Caray's experiences during this time with the White
Sox include
Disco Demolition
Night.
On July 12, 1979, what began as an effort to
sell seats at a White Sox/Detroit Tigers double-header turned into
tens of thousands of eager fans storming the outfield at Comiskey Park
in between the games of the double-header.
Caray tried to calm the crowd by leading the park in the singing of
“Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” but order could not be restored.
Eventually the White Sox were forced to forfeit the second game of
the double-header.
Chicago Cubs
Caray increased his renown after joining the North Side Cubs
following the 1981 season.
In contrast to the "SportsVision" concept,
the Cubs' own television outlet, WGN
, had become
among the first of the cable
television superstations, offering
their programming to providers across the United States for free,
and Caray became as famous nationwide as he'd long been on the
South Side and, previously, in St. Louis. In fact, Caray had
already been affiliated with WGN for some years by then, as WGN
actually produced the White Sox for broadcast on competitor
WSNS
, and Caray was a frequent sportscaster on the
station's newscasts. Caray succeeded longtime Cubs
broadcaster
Jack Brickhouse, himself
a beloved announcer and Chicago media fixture.
The timing was fortuitous especially when the Cubs ended up winning
the
National League East
division title in 1984 and radio station WGN's nationwide audience.
Millions came to love the microphone-swinging Caray, continuing his
White Sox practice of leading the home crowd in singing "
Take Me Out To The Ball Game"
during the seventh inning stretch, mimicking his mannerisms, his
gravelly voice, his habit of mispronouncing or slurring some
players' names (which some of the players themselves mimicked in
turn), and even his trademark barrel-shaped wide-rimmed
glasses.
Caray's national popularity never really flagged after that,
although time eventually took a toll on him. Nicknamed "The Mayor
of
Rush Street", a reference
to Chicago's famous tavern-dominated neighborhood and Caray's
well-known taste for
Budweiser, illness and age began
to drain some of Caray's skills, even in spite of a remarkable
recovery from a 1987 stroke. There were occasional calls for him to
retire, but he was kept aboard past WGN's normal mandatory
retirement age, an indication of just how popular he really
was.
The seventh-inning stretch
His famous
seventh-inning
stretch singing of "
Take Me Out to the Ball Game"
began during his tenure with the White Sox.
Habitually singing the
song in the broadcast booth when played by long-time Comiskey Park organist Nancy Faust,
Caray was doing it one afternoon when WMAQ
radio
producer/broadcaster Jay Scott decided to open the booth mikes on
him without his realizing it. (Scott had suggested the idea
in a memo some years before, but Caray had rejected the idea. He
accepted it once it caught on with the home fans.) For the rest of
his career, Caray enthusiastically led the song's singing during
the seventh-inning stretch, using a hand-held microphone and
holding it out outside the booth window. And, he inserted the home
team's name for "the home team" in the song's lyric, a ritual still
practiced by many baseball fans around the country.
Many of these performances began with Caray speaking directly to
the baseball fans in attendance either about the state of the day's
game, or the Chicago weather, while the park organ held the opening
chord of the song. Then with his trademark opening, "All right!
Lemme hear ya! Ah-One! Ah-Two! Ah-Three!" Harry would launch into
his distinctive, down-tempo version of "Take Me Out to the
Ballgame". For the lyrics "One, Two, Three, strikes you're out...."
Harry would usually hold the microphone out to the crowd to
punctuate the climactic end of the song. And if the visitors were
ahead in that game, Harry would typically make a plea to the home
team's offense: "Let's get some runs!"
The seventh-inning stretch routine became Caray's best-remembered
trademark; after his death, the Cubs began a practice of inviting
guest celebrities, local and national, to lead the singing
Caray-style. The use of "guest conductors" continues to this
day.
During the
2009 NHL Winter Classic at
Wrigley
Field
, as the Chicago
Blackhawks hosted the Detroit Red
Wings on New Year's Day 2009, former Blackhawks players
Bobby Hull, Stan
Mikita, and Denis Savard and former
Cubs players Ryne Sandberg and
Ferguson Jenkins sang a
hockey-themed version of the seventh-inning stretch; "Take Me Out
to the Hockey Game" used lines such as "Root, root, root for the
Blackhawks" and "One, two, three pucks, you're out".
Personality and style
Caray had a number of broadcasting partners and colleagues through
the years, some of whom made known their dislike of the man. He had
a particularly frosty relationship with
Milo Hamilton, his first partner with the
Cubs, who felt Caray had pushed him out in St. Louis in the
mid-1950s. Hamilton was fired by WGN in 1984; he claimed that
station officials told him that the main reason was that Caray
didn't like him.
Caray's longtime St. Louis partner,
Jack
Buck, was guarded in his comments about Caray in his own
autobiography, while acknowledging that he sometimes felt held back
by Caray. However, Caray also didn't lack for broadcast companions
who played well with and off him. With the White Sox, his
longest-lasting partner was
Jimmy
Piersall; with the Cubs, he was teamed for 14 years with former
pitcher
Steve Stone.
Caray was known for his unabashed
homerism.
While advertisers played up his habit of openly rooting for the
Cubs from the booth (for example, one
Budweiser ad described him as "Cub Fan, Bud Man"
in a
Blues Brothers-style parody of
"Soul Man"), he had been even less restrained about rooting for the
Cardinals when he broadcast for them. He said later that his firing
from the Cardinals changed his outlook and made him realize that
his passion was for the game itself, and the fans, more than
anything else. He was also well-known for his frequent exclamation
of
"Holy Cow!" As he noted in interviews and in his
autobiography
Holy Cow!!, he trained himself to use this
expression, to avoid any chance of using profanity on the air.
Caray also avoided any risk of mis-calling a home run, using what
became a trademark home run call:
It might be . .
. it could be . . . it IS! A home
run! Holy cow! In Holy Cow!, Caray said he first
used the "It might be..." part of that expression on the air while
covering a college baseball tournament in Kalamazoo,
Michigan
, in the early 1940s. He also said that was
probably the first time he said "Holy cow!" on the air.
In 1987, the Cubs had
Ryne Sandberg,
Jim Sundberg, and
Scott Sanderson on the roster. Caray had
suffered a stroke in February and often confused these names and it
was not uncommon for him to refer to "Jim Sandberg", "Ryne
Sanderson", or "Scott Sundberg". He also once pronounced pitcher
Jason Isringhausen as
"Jason....Ice-ring-hoisen." Caray was intrigued by unusual names,
and one of his frequent on-air bits was to try to pronounce a
multi-syllabic name
backwards. This bit became more
challenging for him in the 1987 season but he kept on trying, even
poking fun at himself. Two player names he took delight in
pronouncing backwards were Toby Harrah and James 'Truck'
Hannah.
Caray had
a reputation for mastering all aspects of broadcasting - writing
his own copy, conducting news interviews, writing and presenting
editorials, covering other sports such as University of
Missouri
football, and
hosting a sports talk program.
He was considered a fan's broadcaster above all, along the lines of
such announcers as
New York/San
Francisco Giants legend
Russ Hodges
or
Pittsburgh Pirates legend
Bob Prince, and that didn't always earn
him respect to equal his popularity. However, Caray never pretended
to be the kind of objective announcer that such broadcasters as
Red Barber and
Vin
Scully prided themselves on being regardless of their team
attachments.
Non-baseball work
Though best known and honored for baseball work, Caray had also
called
Missouri Tigers
football, St. Louis University
Billiken
basketball,
Boston Celtics and
St. Louis Hawks basketball in the 1950s and
'60s. Nationally, he broadcast eight
Cotton Bowl Classic games (1958-64,
1966) on network radio.
Death
Caray
maintained a winter home in Palm Springs, California
, along with his primary residence in
Chicago. As discussed in Steve Stone's 1999 book, Where's
Harry?, Caray was at a Rancho Mirage
restaurant on February 14, 1998, celebrating
Valentine's Day with his wife
Dutchie, when he collapsed, and in the process allegedly hitting
his head on the side of a restaurant table, and was rushed to
nearby Eisenhower Medical Center
. He never regained consciousness, dying of
cardiac arrest with resulting
brain damage four days later. Caray's
funeral took place in downtown Chicago's Holy Name Cathedral on
February 27, two days before he would have turned 84. Many
celebrities and athletes were in attendance, including
Sammy Sosa and former
Chicago Bears head coach
Mike Ditka.
Legacy
At his funeral, the organ played "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."
Harry
Caray's body is interred in All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines,
Illinois
.
Following his death, during the entire 1998 season the Cubs wore a
patch on the sleeves of their uniforms depicting a
caricature of Caray. Cubs slugger
Sammy Sosa dedicated each of his 66 home runs
that season to Caray.
Caray had five children, three with his first wife, Dorothy, and
two with his second wife, Marian. He married his third wife Delores
"Dutchie" (Goldmann) on May 19, 1975. His son
Skip Caray followed him into the booth as a
baseball broadcaster with the Atlanta Braves until his death on
August 3, 2008, and his son Chris had a long career with Maritz
Travel before passing away at an early age from brain cancer. His
daughter, Patricia, worked for Coca-Cola in Atlanta before retiring
to Bradenton, FL where she currently resides.
Caray's two daughters with wife Marian both opted for careers in
the healthcare field.
Michele lives in St. Louis, MO
and works as a registered nurse with OptumHealth
Behavioral Solutions, a division of UnitedHealth Group.
Daughter
Elizabeth lives in Phoenix,
AZ
and works as a pharmaceutical representative for
Bristol-Myers
Squibb.
Caray's broadcasting legacy was extended to a third generation, as
his grandson
Chip Caray replaced Harry as
the Cubs' play-by-play announcer from 1998 to 2004. He later
returned to work with his father Skip on
Atlanta Braves broadcasts, where he had
worked for awhile in the early 1990s. In what Harry Caray said was
one of his proudest moments, he worked some innings in the same
broadcast booth with his son and grandson, during a Cubs/Braves
game on May 13, 1991. On-air in a professional setting, the younger
men would refer to their seniors by their first names. During 1998,
Chip would refer to the departed Harry in third person as
"Granddad". His half-brother Josh is a broadcaster and producer for
WLAQ radio in Rome, Georgia, calling the Class A Rome Braves
baseball and Rome High School football.
Another of Caray's grandsons,
Eric
Stanger (son of Patricia Caray) is also enjoying a very
successful career in the radio business, as Director of Talk
Programming for ABC Radio Networks, and Director of Affiliate
Relations for the syndicated radio personality
Sean Hannity.
Honors and special events
On
October 23, 1987 Harry Caray's Italian Steakhouse opened in the
Chicago
Varnish Company Building
, a Chicago Landmark
building that is also listed on the National Register of
Historic Places. There are now six restaurants, and an
off-premises catering division which bear the Harry Caray name. The
original restaurant has received numerous awards for its food and
service, and features many items of memorabilia, even a statue of a
"Holey Cow" (complete with holes) wearing the trademark Harry Caray
eyeglasses.
In 1989
the Baseball
Hall of Fame
presented Caray with the Ford C. Frick Award for "major contributions to
baseball." He also has his own star on the
St. Louis Walk of Fame.
On June 24, 1994, the Chicago Cubs had a special day honoring Harry
for 50 years of broadcasting Major League Baseball. Sponsored by
the Cubs and Kemper Insurance, pins were given out to some unknown
number of fans in attendance that day. The pins had a picture of
Harry, with writing saying "HARRY CARAY, 50 YEARS BROADCASTING,
Kemper MUTUAL FUNDS" and "HOLY COW".
Caray's style became fodder for
pop
culture parody as well, including a memorable
Saturday Night Live recurring
sketch featuring Caray (played by
Will
Ferrell) as a host of a space and astronomy TV talk show, in
which his questions to scientists and professors included whether
or not they would eat the moon if it were made of spare ribs and
turning hot dogs into currency (20 hot dogs would equal roughly a
nickel). The sketch continued after Caray's death.
When asked by
Joan Allen (impersonating NASA
flight director Linda
Ham) about his death, Will Ferrell
as Caray replied, "What's your point?" The Bob and Tom Show also had a
Harry Caray parody show called
"After Hours Sports" which
eventually became
"Afterlife Sports" after Caray's death.
On the
Nickelodeon series
Back at the Barnyard,
news reporter Hilly Burford bears a strong resemblance to Caray,
both in appearance and speech. In 2005, the cartoon
Codename: Kids Next Door had
two announcers reporting a baseball game. One was a parody of
Caray, the other,
Howard Cosell.
The most
widely-accepted impersonation of Caray in Chicago was done by Jim
Volkman, heard most often on the Loop and
AM1000
. Also, comedian
Artie
Lange, in his standup, talks about Caray.
Caray can be briefly heard in the
1986
film
Ferris Bueller's Day
Off, as a Cubs game is shown on a TV in a pizza
parlor.
Recent Chicago-area TV and radio ads for
AT&T's Advanced TV have featured comedian
John Caponera impersonating the
post-stroke version of Harry Caray. However, due to a complaint by
Caray's widow, AT&T had withdrawn advertising featuring Harry
Caray.
Ryan Dempster,
Chicago Cubs pitcher, is known for his Harry
Caray impression, most notably, he announced the Cubs' starting
lineup while speaking like the post-stroke version of Caray before
a nationally televised baseball game on Fox Sports.
Atlanta Braves pitcher Will Ohman
performed a Harry Caray impersonation when announcing the starting
lineup for the Atlanta Braves during a
Fox Game of the Week in
2008.
References
- "Holy Cow!" Harry Caray with Bob Verdi, 1989, Villard
Books
- Harry Caray's
- Sports Illustrated
- [1]
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