Five years gone

My brother's the one with the story, something about working in a country club pro shop and having Jack Buck come in with Stan Musial. Legends made flesh and needing a belt, but still having time to talk and laugh and play the harmonica with the golf pro who better have been at least a little awestruck. Me, I don't think I ever saw either Buck or Musial in person except from a distance at the ballpark, but I still cried when Jack Buck died five years ago today. Why? For the life of me, I'm not sure I can explain it.

While I do have a thing for voices (I'd appreciate George Clooney even if I were blind), that wasn't really the appeal. Besides, as my daughter would say, that's just creepy. Although he was easily old enough to at least be my father, Buck's voice is what I chose to listen to even when I was 13 years old A self-made baseball fan, I tuned my bedroom clock radio to KMOX and listened to the games all summer long. Jack Buck and Mike Shannon were the sound of summer that year and for the next twenty.

So, the nostalgia is easy. But still, cry for a stranger? Well, the thing about radio, especially baseball radio, especially baseball radio done by old-school types who know what they're doing, is that it gives the impression that you're not strangers after all. You hear their stories, you hear their excitement, you hear their frustration with this stupid team you're both such suckers for following, right there in your car, right there in your kitchen, right there in your bedroom. It's intimate in the best, most non-creepy sense of the word.

Today all the games are on TV, usually narrated by idiots who can't shut up and let you watch the game that you can, after all, see. I'm sure those TV producers would have had a conniption watching the seconds tick by as Buck and Shannon let a minute go by with nothing but crowd noise floating out over the airwaves. But hey, it's baseball. Sometimes, nothing happens. Hearing the nothing is part of the appeal.

It's just harder to hear it these days. I admit my radio habit was broken after Buck was gone and it took a few years for them to find someone who fit. I'll turn the game on, but it's not so automatic any more, and even if it's on, actually hearing it is a crapshoot. The Cardinals moved to a station with a signal that barely carries past the arch, and XM only carries the home broadcast team for home games. It's novel to hear other cities, but it's no way to make me care.

But I did, once upon a time, and so did the thousands of people who filed past a casket placed, altogether fittingly and not at all creepily, at home plate back at the real Busch Stadium. But why? For a man? For the end of an era? for admiration of his skill? his part in our memories, and making them what they were? for having a really cool job, and keeping it, with style, for longer than many of us had been alive? Heck if I know how to parse it all out. But I know what a loss feels like, and that was one.