In the Catbird Seat One More Time

By Leonard Shapiro
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, February 13, 2008 1:44 PM

It began last September when local businessman and amateur baseball historian Glenn Lautzenhiser ran into his friend Birney Imes, the executive editor and publisher of the Commercial Dispatch (Columbus, Miss.), at a local restaurant.

"I told him I was going to be giving a speech a few days later on the subject of 'I'm a suck-egg mule,' and wondered if he knew what I was going to be talking about," Lautzenhiser said the other day. "I gave him a hint, that it had to do with a famous native of Columbus, and he still didn't have any idea."

When Lautzenhiser explained that he'd be speaking about an expression often used on the air by the late Hall of Fame baseball broadcaster Red Barber, born in Columbus in 1908, Imes was intrigued enough to show up to hear his presentation at the Possum Town Toastmasters Club. He took notes, then wrote a column about Barber in the Sunday paper.

In the age of the World Wide Web, it did not take long for Imes' story to reach the computer screen of broadcaster Bob Edwards, the long-time host of Morning Edition on National Public Radio until he left in 2004 to originate his own signature show on XM Radio.

For a dozen years, Barber had called in to Morning Edition virtually every week from his home in Tallahassee, Fla., to chat with Edwards about any and all topics, from baseball to The Gulf War to the state of the roses in his garden.

They became great friends and their conversations were fabulous must-listen radio. Only Barber's death in 1992 ended the charming weekly feature that introduced Barber to a whole new generation of listeners. Most never had the privilege or pure pleasure of hearing him do the play-by-play for three different major league teams, including memorable stints with the old Brooklyn Dodgers from 1939-1953 and his last gig, sharing the N.Y. Yankees booth with another southern gentleman, the late, great Alabama baritone, Mel Allen, from 1957-1966.

After reading Imes's piece, Edwards e-mailed the editor immediately and wondered if he knew that the 100th anniversary of Barber's birth in Columbus was just around the corner. He also told Imes he'd be more than willing to come to town and give a speech of his own about his old friend and radio colleague to celebrate Ol' Redhead's birthday.

Imes quickly called Lautzenhiser and it did not take long for the two of them to jump on Edwards' offer and then expand on it, forming a committee to plan a proper celebration of Barber's life.

This weekend, Columbus will, indeed, honor its native son with several events around the Mississippi town where Barber's mother worked as a schoolteacher and his father was a railroad engineer. The family moved away to Sanford, Fla., when Red was 10, but he always considered himself a native Mississippian, and never lost that languorous, syrupy drawl that certified him as a true son of the south.

They'll kick it all off with a traditional crawfish boil at an antebellum mansion outside of town on Friday night. On Saturday, a stone memorial marker will be unveiled on a street not far from Barber's boyhood home by incomparable New York publicist Joe Goldstein, a born and bred Brooklyn Dodgers fan who knew and listened to Barber for years and has helped spread the word nationwide about this weekend's festivities.

On Saturday night, 300 guests will attend a dinner at the Mississippi University for Women, where Barber's mother graduated in 1899. Those guests and hundreds more will then move over to the larger Nissan Auditorium to hear Edwards and several other speakers reflect on Barber's rich and remarkable life, along with a number of video tributes sent in from former Dodgers Duke Snider and Tommy Lasorda and broadcasters Jerry Coleman and Ernie Harwell, among others.

Even ESPN's Chris Berman, who shamelessly adapted Harwell's famous "back, back, back" call as his very own early on in his ESPN career, has sent along a tape to help honor Barber's memory, a very classy move.

Barber's own "back, back back" call that day 60 years ago was used to describe a shot hit by Yankees Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio against the Dodgers in the 1947 World Series. "Here's the pitch," Barber began. "Swung on, belted, it's a long one. Back goes (Al) Gionfriddo, back, back, back, back, back, back. He makes a one-handed catch against the bullpen. Oh Doctor!!!!"

For the uninitiated, Barber was a pioneering broadcaster who began his career while a student at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He was majoring in education and working as a part-time janitor at the student radio station when he got his first on-air break. He was asked to substitute for a forgetful agriculture professor who had failed to show up to read his scholarly paper entitled "Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstetrics."

Barber quickly fell in love with the relatively new medium of radio. In 1934, the Cincinnati Reds, impressed with his work broadcasting University of Florida baseball games, hired him away from the school station, where he was working full-time after dropping out of school.

In fact, the first major league game Barber ever broadcast also was the first one he'd ever seen. Four years later, he joined the Dodgers, hired by former Reds executive Larry MacPhail, who had originally signed him in Cincinnati before moving north to Brooklyn as club president and general manager. It made perfect sense to bring his best announcer along with him, and Barber soon became a beloved Brooklyn broadcaster.

Over the years, Barber's down-home calls also became baseball classics. Disputes were "rhubarbs." An easy fly ball was "a can of corn." And teams with big leads or on long winning streaks were in "high cotton" or "tearin' up the pea patch." If you were "sittin' in the catbird seat," life also was mighty fine, and if "the bases are FOB," that meant they were simply full of Brooklyns.

Barber was one of the first to learn that Dodgers general manager and team president Branch Rickey (he had replaced MacPhail in 1942) was going to make Jackie Robinson the first African American player in the major leagues. Barber's southern sensibilities at first made him somewhat uneasy over the prospect of calling the games. But when he saw Robinson play and heard the vicious insults he often had to endure in ballparks around the country, Barber quickly embraced the idea of integrating the game and became one of Robinson's most vocal supporters.

A dispute over being paid to do commercials as well as Dodger owner Walter O'Malley's insistence that he become more of a homer eventually led to Barber's decision to leave the Brooklyn booth. He was quickly signed by the Yankees, and stayed in the Bronx until 1966, when his on-air integrity probably cost him his job.

The Yanks had skidded to 10th place that dreary season, and in a game on Sept. 22, 1966, only 413 fans paid to get inside the 65,000-seat "House That Ruth Built". During the telecast, Barber asked that cameras be aimed toward all those empty seats and said on the air, "I don't know what the paid attendance is today, but whatever it is, it's the smallest crowd in the history of Yankee Stadium and this crowd is the story, not the game."

A week later, he was told his contract would not be renewed. Barber retired to his home in Tallahassee, wrote his autobiography, "Rhubarb in The Catbird Seat," and eventually began his weekly appearances with Edwards in 1981. And now, 16 years after his death at age 84, his hometown will honor Walter Lanier Barber this weekend in fabulous fashion.

"People around here are very excited about all of this," said Lautzenhiser, who has studied Barber's life and career extensively over the years. As for Barber's declaration that "I'll be a suck-egg mule," Lautzenhiser said it was another signature expression he used when he simply could not explain what he had just seen.

"There could be nothing more improbable than a mule sucking an egg," Lautzenhiser said. "He was just a very unique announcer. I'm 67, and I never met the man. I just wish I'd had the opportunity. He was so erudite, so distinctive and he worked so hard at his craft. He took nothing for granted, and he definitely was not a homer. We'll never see another like him, I'm afraid."

Even more reason to celebrate Barber's 100th birthday this weekend in Columbus, Miss., where the Ol' Redhead quite appropriately will be front and center in the catbird seat one more time.

E-Mail of the Week

I myself have a background in law, and it was refreshing to read the comments in your article from the prosecutors on the subject of the NFL's investigation into Spygate and the New England Patriots. You reported a facet of this whole issue that has long been ignored in the background noise of people grousing about whether Sen. Arlen Specter has better things to do or whether taping the other team really is a big deal. The facet is this: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's non-investigation of the matter presents a serious lapse of judgement and responsibility on his part as Commissioner.

Think about it. In baseball when a player gets caught with a corked bat, the policy is to confiscate all the game bats and check them out. If a pitcher is suspected of putting foreign substance on the ball, the umpire comes out and gives him an examination. They don't just stand back and make the batter/pitcher promise to turn over any incriminating evidence. It seems more and more that Goodell's "investigation" into the Pats encompassed little more than making the team pinky-swear that their tapes were turned over and then destroyed them.

I believe Goodell miscalculated in thinking that if he brought down a "severe" and "unprecedented" punishment on the Pats and Bill Belichick, the public would be placated and wouldn't mind that a real investigation never took place. If Goodell is seeking to protect the image of the league, then the last thing he needs is a prolonged and detailed investigation into whether a head coach of the NFL's modern dynasty is a serial cheater. The sad thing is that it took a U.S. Senator to remind Goodell of all this.

Goodell dropped the ball big time. He spent so much of his early tenure positioning himself as a disciplinarian who was going to clean up the image of the league, and his crusade was taken up against individual players and their criminal conduct. The reality is that this is a secondary responsibility for Goodell (i.e. disciplining players for their criminal conduct is primarily a job for the courts, not for the employer). Goodell's primary responsibility is to protect the integrity of the game and the league. The possibility of flagrant serial cheating by a coach/franchise is supposed to be right in his wheelhouse, the precise sort of thing a commissioner is supposed to deal with thoroughly and completely. The reality is that an "unprecedented" punishment does not make amends for a shoddy and incomplete investigation.

Pailo Ungolini, Rockville

Leonard Shapiro can be reached at Badgerlen@hotmail.com or Badgerlen@aol.com. Sports Wave