The sun is withering on this afternoon, searing and suffocating and capable of sucking all the juice from an orange. But up there, now descending the steps of Wrigley Field, yes, it’s Harry!
He is not exactly bounding. You just do not do that at his age (75, at least). Yet he appears, jaunty, that is the word, decked out here in an open-necked shirt and bright blue shorts and tennis shoes as white as an unblemished canvas.
Thirteen months earlier, on just this type of day, he was sucker-punched by the weather. He was with the Cubs in Miami then, and as he emerged from the air-conditioned comfort of their locker room, he was blasted by the heat, he got light-headed and reached out for a railing and collapsed headfirst onto some concrete steps, cutting up his face and bruising it and his knees. He never would lose consciousness–old barroom mavens don’t do that–but then he was looking up at former Cubs manager Tom Trebelhorn and wondering, “Treb. What happened?”
“Mike Tyson knocked you out in the first round,” Trebelhorn answered.
“I,” Harry Caray says now, “always thought that was a classic line.”
But after that experience, he is asked, does it scare you to come out in weather like this?
“Hey,” he says. “If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. You know, here I am, a guy that was raised in smoked-filled saloons, never had a cigarette in my mouth, not even marijuana, I don’t know why. Every day somebody dies, they talk about how he smoked cigarettes. But if it gives you enjoyment or escape from your problems, what’s so bad about it?
“What’s the difference if you die one year too soon, or one year too late? You die, and we all know eventually we’re going to die.”
Even legends are mortal. Harry Caray, truly a legend, knows this well. Through endless summers, through 50 seasons as one of baseball’s very best announcers, he appeared indomitable, imperishable, impervious to the limitations that so bedeviled lesser men. But here, in his 51st season, he finally is showing that he knows.
This is not to say he is thinking of retirement, or even that he grabs off any less of life than he did in his past. He no longer drinks, that is true. He is taking medicine now to control an arrhythmic heartbeat, and it is not compatible with alcohol. But ask him about returning next season, about coming back for a remarkable 52nd season behind the microphone, and his voice is strong when he replies, “I hope so. God willing.”
And ask him about his lifestyle now, about adjustments he has made to advancing age, and he answers first with bedroom ribaldry and hearty laughter. Then, more seriously, he says, “I dress the same. I think the same. The young people love me the same. . . . I still go out. I still go to nightclubs. Just because I don’t drink doesn’t affect my good times.”
He is, of course, still inimitable at work, a wet towel draped over his neck on days like this, ever regaling, ever chortling, ever describing, ever singing, ever gracing and blessing a game so lucky to have him. So much about him, then, still screams out Harry, yet in there now as well is also that recognition of mortality.
He talks of it more now than in the past, those close to him say this, and that is one clear sign of that recognition. His more temperate lifestyle and the absence of alcohol from his diet, those are other signs, as is his schedule, which finds him announcing all home games but only selected ones on the road.
“I sense a change in him from a year ago,” says Thom Brennaman, who splits television and radio duty with Caray. “I think he realized for the first time he had to change his lifestyle, or he wouldn’t be around a long while.
“I think he recognized how blessed and fortunate he and each one of us is every day. Some would say he always lived his life that way, but I sense a little different type of outlook this year. He’s been remarkable. He’s been in an unbelievable mood all year. Everybody has bad days, and he’s had some in the past. But this year, every day he’s in a wonderful, jovial, almost affectionate mood to the people he works with.”
There are all those signs of recognition then, and–finally and most significantly–there are also his frequent traipses into the past, nostalgic journeys that themselves attest to a knowledge that much time has gone by. He never knew his mother or father–both died before he was old enough to remember them–and this is a fact often raised now, often sprinkled through a conversation with him.
He openly describes this fact as “the one thing that really gnaws at me.”
He tacitly refers to this while musing, “Just think how happy kids and young people today should be when they realize the importance of their mother and father. Not only to their present lives, when they’re young, but all through their living days. And the longer time goes by, the more you appreciate, nobody’s immortal.”
He, most poignantly, reveals this fact’s hold on him while discussing last Christmas, which he celebrated by throwing a two-day party in St. Louis for his wife Dutchie and his five children and her five children and their countless grandchildren.
“The saddest time of the year for me, all through the years until last year, was Christmas,” he says.
“My wife, born and raised in St. Louis like me, would go home. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to come to Chicago. I have a world of great friends in both places, but it was a time, I just didn’t want to see anybody. I would sit in my living room in Palm Springs, my TV on, crying and crying and crying. Everybody would tell me, `Harry, you’ve got to get over that.’ Suddenly, last year . . . one of these days–and time’s getting shorter, so I better do it quickly–I want to get my whole family together and make it a Christmas they’ll never forget.”
Some have theorized the reason Caray so covets the affection he gets from the fans is because he didn’t know his mom and dad.
“It could be. It could be,” he says. “But I can’t tell you that for certain. I’ve never thought about it that way. But, conversely, maybe that’s the reason I love people. That I mix with people. That I introduce myself if they don’t know me. That I make up idle chatter in a bar. Because I may have missed . . .”
He stops here, pauses here for a heartbeat, and then Harry Caray says, “Can you imagine? The thing that makes the Cubs is day baseball. Can you imagine kids out in the bleachers with their grandads? Then they get home and, oh, talking to their parents about something their parents know. `Oh, dad. The play Mark Grace made. You should have seen. Wow.’
“It’s a definite link for a family, and that’s something I missed, of course.”
Generations of fans
They just will not let him go. Harry Caray is in the right seat of this cart, which will ferry him from Wrigley’s bowels to his booth in the press box, and in the left is his driver, who here is pleading, “Please, folks. We’ve got to get him into air conditioning.” Still, they just will not let him go.
Boys and girls, older men and older women and all ages in between, they keep appearing, approaching, beseeching, seeking a piece of this legend and a bit of that warm glow that flows always from him to them. He is, to them, very much a touchstone, a singular performer who has entertained generations in their families, and here their emotions are palpable, their feelings are as warm as the day itself.
Those occasional errors he now makes, those names he butchers and those descriptions that might come slowly, they mean nothing to them, nor should they.
“They ought to have something else to worry about,” Brennaman will say of those who do care about that. “You’re talking about a guy who’s a legend. If he makes a mistake, who cares? Who cares?”
“Who cares?” echoes Steve Stone, Caray’s partner for 13 years. “You’re watching the last vestiges of baseball history. There’s never been another Harry. If he gets a name wrong, if he gets a score wrong, who cares? He’s part of baseball history.”
“Harry,” Brennaman will later say, “ought to be able to stay behind the microphone as long as he wants. I hope he’s here another 15 years. Now some people would say that’s ridiculous . But I’d never, never count Harry Caray out of anything.”
“People have been saying it’s his last year for a long time,” Stone says. ” Harry loves the game of baseball. That’s why, 51 years later, he’s still in the booth. He moves people, and when the game’s on the line, he doesn’t make mistakes. He’s still dramatic. It’s like he’s transported back 30 years and Stan Musial is out there playing for the Cardinals.”
“Harry’s future is whatever he wants it to be,” says Tribune Television Vice President Dennis FitzSimons. “We hope he is back with us next year. We’re real pleased with the job Harry’s doing, and we hope he feels up to it and is back.”
“As long as I feel good, I’ll be back,” Caray will say.
His journey is over now, he finally has reached the air conditioning, and here he is sipping from a glass of water and taking time to autograph pictures, and talking, talking pleasantly and openly and in high spirits.
“This,” he is saying here, “is a story of failure. I started in as a No. 1 baseball announcer with a major-league team in 1945. I’ve been a No. 1 announcer ever since, that’s 51 years, and I’ve never got a promotion. I’m in the same rut I was in 51 years ago. Not many people can say that.”
How do you feel when they use the word legend to describe you, he is asked.
“I don’t like that,” Harry Caray says. “To me, legends are people who’re dead. Who wants to be reminded of death? I’m reminded well enough of it every day I wake up.”
A cherished treasure
Past civilizations, Stone is saying, civilizations with perspectives far deeper than ours, treated their old people differently. We, in this modern age, have a tendency to push them aside, to shuttle them off stage, to screech always for young blood and the newest Kid of the Moment.
But the ancient Greeks, the various dynasties that ruled China, the many great tribes of the American Indian nation, they treated their elders with deference, they turned to their elders for advice, they regarded their elders as wise men to be heeded. “They,” says Stone, “cherished their older people.”
That is what Harry Caray is now, a wise old hand to be cherished, a historical monument in a game that trumpets and treasures its past.
He is a link that holds a half-dozen decades together, a bridge that spans more than half a century, and within him now are the lore, the stories, the memories that make up the tapestry that is baseball. He is a pioneer, an original not to be duplicated, his sport’s greatest salesman, an irrepressible figure who reaches out and embraces all around him, and is embraced in return.
Even now he is proving that, proving by the very way he is forestalling its arrival and just carrying on. Still, someday, somewhere, that end will come, and so here, finally, he is asked the inevitable. How, Harry Caray is asked, does he want to be remembered?
“The funny thing,” he says, “I’ve never thought about that. I know every day you wake up is one day less you have to live. But I really don’t want. . .”
He hesitates now, fiddles with his water cup, then goes on. “I’ve threatened to be cremated, and have my ashes strewn over Comiskey Park and over Wrigley Field, and I really should hold a couple ashes back for St. Louis. I’ve also mentioned this to my wife. I want her to take some of the money I’ve accumulated and just throw a party where people drink and eat and lift a drink up to me either upstairs or downstairs”–now, here, a laugh, one of his familiar, rumbling laughs–“and I give you two guesses to where it’ll be.”
Really? That’s what you want people to do when you die?
“I really do. I really do,” says Harry Caray, still laughing, still irrepressible, still indomitable.
