Thank You Vin Scully For Making The World A Better Place

Before the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, my dad and I would root for the Hollywood Stars, a Pittsburgh farm team, at Gilmore Field in Los Angeles, near the Pan Pacific and Farmers Market.  My dad was a very amateur artist and this picture of Gilmore Field was a birthday present the year the Dodgers moved to LA.

From then on it was the Coliseum to watch the Dodgers, and later Dodger Stadium*.  But most times it was Vin Scully over the radio.  I knew I enjoyed listening to him call the game.  He knew all the players' stats, stories of their personal lives, their training, and lots of other baseball trivia,  that he would weave together to make listening to a baseball game on the radio exciting.  And there was that voice.  He was like a family friend.   Many nights I had my radio under the cover to hear the end of the game when it was supposed to be off. And if you went to the game you would hear his voice echoing from transistor radios all around you.  

What I didn't know at the time was how special he was.  That came over the years as I grew up and moved off.  I'd come back and Vin Scully was still doing Dodger play-by-play.  And he was at it, it seemed, forever.  A part of my history kept alive by that voice calling plays.  Even my grandson has heard Vin Scully calling Dodger games live.

So thanks Vin Scully.  You enriched my life and millions of others for so many, many years.  

My main Scully years were all radio and I tried to find some audio to post here, but here's a complication of Scully calling different games on television.  Best I can do for now.  

*The story of Dodger Stadium is not one to be proud of.  It involved the displacement of an important community of Mexican-Americans near downtown LA.