You have to start, of course, with The Voice.
A football coach - I think it was his college coach - once famously said of Walter Payton, “What God had in mind there was a football player.”
When He made Harry Kalas, what God had in mind was a broadcaster. Try to hear him in your head right now. How easy was that?
“The soundtrack of our lives,” is a cloying, maudlin phrase you’ll hear a lot the next day or so that it happens to be, in this case, on the money. For 6-7 months of every year for going on four decades, Harry Kalas hung out with us as we cleaned out the garage or drove the kids to practice or sat on the back porch and stared contentedly at nothing. He was a hit song you never got tired of.
The Voice really was on the soundtrack of many lives and the message on many answering machines (”Marge and Larry are outta here…. leave a message at the beep…) of fans who simply approached Harry with a recorder and asked if he had a minute, and if he’d mind doing something special. He never did.
Which is part of the story of how a guy from Chicago by way of Iowa, Hawaii and Houston became as quintessentially Philly as Ben Franklin and cheese steaks.
This guy, this Voice, is one of the five most important figures in the history of Philadelphia baseball. Seriously…. Mike Schmidt, Connie Mack, Ruly Carpenter, Richie Ashburn and …. who else?
Nobody.
And if you think God doesn’t have a sense of poetic justice, consider that in the last postseason game he worked, the Phillies won the World Series, and in the last game he worked in Philadelphia, he got a World Series ring and threw out the first pitch, and the last time he walked into a ballpark he didn’t walk out.
Hard to believe, Harry.
RIP
