David R. Busse
Well-known member
He died in Atlanta a few days ago, the voice of the Atlanta Braves. He was in his late 60s and had a bad liver. A friend of Skip's told me, politely, the veteran announcer had lived a "full life..." and it took it's toll.
He was the radio voice of the old St. Louis Hawks when I was a kid; also did radio color on University of Missouri football broadcasts in the 1960s with his famous Dad doing play-by-play...and if you wanted to hear something really entertaining, you should have heard Harry Caray doing college football.
I never met Skip. We shared the same hometown (Webster Groves, Mo.) and the same college alma-mater, and we had mutual friends in Atlanta and elsewhere. I was a huge fan of his work.
I was a news writer intern at St. Louis' KMOX radio in 1977. Skip had left that station ten years earlier when the Hawks moved to Atlanta, but the engineers at the radio station talked about Skip as if he'd just left a week ago. The stories were, um, numerous. Here's one of the cleaner ones that I can pass along...
The GM at KMOX was, for many years, a legendary fellow named Robert F. Hyland, who worked 18-hour days and ruled the station with an iron fist. He hired everyone, from janitors to talk show hosts to newsroom interns. He was also a devout Catholic, who distributed his Cardinal baseball tickets for each game to St. Louis area nuns and attended Mass every morning.
I once asked a couple of veterans if they had ever seen Hyland really pissed off. They both laughed and said "...once..." and the telling of a great Skip Caray story ensued.
Joseph Elmer Cardinal Ritter (July 20, 1892—June 10, 1967), was an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Saint Louis from 1946 until his death, according to Wikipedia. When he died, KMOX, the "Voice of St. Louis" carried the funeral services live for the heavily-Catholic St. Louis audience.
Some time earlier, KMOX engineers had rewired the building so the station's air signal was carried wall-to-wall, in Muzak-style ceiling speakers. Caray discovered, with the assistance of an engineer, that some simple patching allowed material to cut in to the building sound system, without so much as a click or other hint that the material was closed-circuit. It all sounded like the 50,000-watt KMOX powerhouse signal, uninterrupted.
So, KMOX was heralding the live midday coverage of Cardinal Ritter's funeral.
And Caray was sitting in a back-studio announce booth, finger on a cart machine.
The on-air announcer (probably the late Bob Hardy), in solumn tone, gave a "KMOX-St. Louis..." legal ID moments before the funeral coverage started...
Then Caray pushed a button, and up (on the office intercom) came the St. Louis Cardinal baseball music which, at that time, was a version of the Busch-Bavarian beer jungle.
Caray opened the microphone and announced, with the same inflection and excitement as he did for the open of his Dad's Cardinal baseball broadcast, "...The St. Louis cardinal is off the air..."
Then the organ music from the service...as if it were all being broadcast this way.
I'm told that all typing in the newsroom stopped. "Oh sh--..." was heard in other corners of the building, and it was obvious that Caray's knowledge of overriding the office intercom was not known to anyone else. Within seconds, everyone heard Hyland's door slam, and he was described as looking like a Mafia hit-man. "Where's Caray...." is all he was heard to say, and his tone of voice was said to be "enraged."
I don't know what was said after that, but I am told that the explanation of it all being a "little office joke" didn't sell well with the boss.
Caray must have known he was headed for Atlanta, because the engineers who told me the story a decade later said Skip Caray hadn't been seen in the building since that day.
Can you imagine how a prank like that, today, would get a person tarred-and-feathered for life?
He was the radio voice of the old St. Louis Hawks when I was a kid; also did radio color on University of Missouri football broadcasts in the 1960s with his famous Dad doing play-by-play...and if you wanted to hear something really entertaining, you should have heard Harry Caray doing college football.
I never met Skip. We shared the same hometown (Webster Groves, Mo.) and the same college alma-mater, and we had mutual friends in Atlanta and elsewhere. I was a huge fan of his work.
I was a news writer intern at St. Louis' KMOX radio in 1977. Skip had left that station ten years earlier when the Hawks moved to Atlanta, but the engineers at the radio station talked about Skip as if he'd just left a week ago. The stories were, um, numerous. Here's one of the cleaner ones that I can pass along...
The GM at KMOX was, for many years, a legendary fellow named Robert F. Hyland, who worked 18-hour days and ruled the station with an iron fist. He hired everyone, from janitors to talk show hosts to newsroom interns. He was also a devout Catholic, who distributed his Cardinal baseball tickets for each game to St. Louis area nuns and attended Mass every morning.
I once asked a couple of veterans if they had ever seen Hyland really pissed off. They both laughed and said "...once..." and the telling of a great Skip Caray story ensued.
Joseph Elmer Cardinal Ritter (July 20, 1892—June 10, 1967), was an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Saint Louis from 1946 until his death, according to Wikipedia. When he died, KMOX, the "Voice of St. Louis" carried the funeral services live for the heavily-Catholic St. Louis audience.
Some time earlier, KMOX engineers had rewired the building so the station's air signal was carried wall-to-wall, in Muzak-style ceiling speakers. Caray discovered, with the assistance of an engineer, that some simple patching allowed material to cut in to the building sound system, without so much as a click or other hint that the material was closed-circuit. It all sounded like the 50,000-watt KMOX powerhouse signal, uninterrupted.
So, KMOX was heralding the live midday coverage of Cardinal Ritter's funeral.
And Caray was sitting in a back-studio announce booth, finger on a cart machine.
The on-air announcer (probably the late Bob Hardy), in solumn tone, gave a "KMOX-St. Louis..." legal ID moments before the funeral coverage started...
Then Caray pushed a button, and up (on the office intercom) came the St. Louis Cardinal baseball music which, at that time, was a version of the Busch-Bavarian beer jungle.
Caray opened the microphone and announced, with the same inflection and excitement as he did for the open of his Dad's Cardinal baseball broadcast, "...The St. Louis cardinal is off the air..."
Then the organ music from the service...as if it were all being broadcast this way.
I'm told that all typing in the newsroom stopped. "Oh sh--..." was heard in other corners of the building, and it was obvious that Caray's knowledge of overriding the office intercom was not known to anyone else. Within seconds, everyone heard Hyland's door slam, and he was described as looking like a Mafia hit-man. "Where's Caray...." is all he was heard to say, and his tone of voice was said to be "enraged."
I don't know what was said after that, but I am told that the explanation of it all being a "little office joke" didn't sell well with the boss.
Caray must have known he was headed for Atlanta, because the engineers who told me the story a decade later said Skip Caray hadn't been seen in the building since that day.
Can you imagine how a prank like that, today, would get a person tarred-and-feathered for life?
