As Time Goes By

As Time Goes By

Somebody told me that next week is the Fourth of July and I immediately corrected him because that can’t be possible it’s too early for the Fourth of July, right? IT IS THE FOURTH OF JULY NEXT WEEK!!!!! Holy smokes! Things are going wayyyy to fast for me—I mean wasn’t last week Memorial day? What do you mean it was a month ago?

It just seems to me that now in the middle years of one’s life expectancy that life is going by wayyy to fast, I keep looking for pause button to slow things down. A lot of people I’ve spoken with lately seem to feel the same way and at the same time memories of our days gone by seem to become more important.

For example, watching this guy Severino pitch for the Yankees takes me back to a fall classic when I stayed home to watch Bob Gibson strike out everybody as the St Louis Cardinals beat the Detroit Tigers in a World Series weekday afternoon game. Like Gibby, Sevvy has a nasty combination of overpowering fastball and lethal slider. There is a similarity in mound presence also although Sevvy seems a little smaller both men exhibit confidence in their demeanor and it is comical watching hitters try to hit his pitches.

Music, good music is another staple of life here in America. I was privileged to attend a Boz Scaggs concert recently that entertained all classes, sizes, cultures and sizes of people and we enjoyed the rock, r and b, and blues offerings as diverse as his audience

In days gone by one of our best friends as youths was radio---that’s right beit the pocket sized am radio or the big stereo systems, remember quad radio….radio was a companion to just about everyone. Sadly this week we lost one of the voices of my youth and without question one of the best DJs ever Dan Ingram one of the good guys of WABC-77. No doubt he was a major influence on me and a part of my shows every time I sat behind a microphone. Others that influenced me with the microphone were Cousin Brucie, Marv Albert, Frankie Crocker, Bob Wilson, Vaughn Harper, Ken Webb; I could go on and on. One voice that I heard often in my high school and college days was that of John Sterling, at that time a sports talk host on ABC 77 and the radio voice of the New York Lowlifes aka Islanders. I even got to interview him when he broadcasts NJ Nets games. John along with Bill Mazer were the best sports talk show hosts I ever heard, sad to say Mr. Sterling now serves to butcher Yankee radiocasts so much that it’s impossible to listen to the game or know what the score is. Baseball games on radio today are a lost listen, the words of Vin Scully, Joe Garagiola, the Scooter and the like painted marvelous pictures of what was going on in the fields of dreams. Most broadcasts today are filled with commercial spots and sponsorships so much so, it’s hard to hear a game. What makes John and his partner Suzyn Waldman so painful is that with all of the business distractions the one thing they don’t tell you is that you want to know—WHAT IS THE SCORE OF THE GAME? It’s bad enough that everything has a commercial attached to it but why all the other nonsense the score is the main reason people listen. When I broadcast games I used a time to remind me to tell my audience what the score was it is not that hard to do……like so many things it seems yesterday was better