In he was given a partner, Jack Buck , who would become another Cardinals broadcasting legend. Together they made history. When he was not calling baseball games, Caray also announced for the St. During his twenty-five years with the Cardinals, Caray was twice named the Missouri Sportscaster of the Year , by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. After he was fired by the Cardinals in , Caray left St.
Louis and worked for the Oakland Athletics. A year later, in , he moved to Chicago and began announcing for the Chicago White Sox. In he transferred to the Chicago Cubs. It was with the Cubs that he enjoyed his greatest popularity. On July 23, , Caray received the Ford C. He was also inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in Carey was given his own star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame in He was married three times and had five children.
His longest marriage was to Dolores Goldman, whom he married on May 19, Harry Caray passed away on February 18, , in Rancho Mirage, California, at the age of eighty-three. Caray will forever be remembered for his love of baseball, as well as for his passion, intensity, and the way he never stopped being a fan of the sport. He passed on his love of baseball to his family. His son, Skip Caray, became an announcer for the Atlanta Braves. In fact, Harry, Skip, and Chip once broadcast together in the same booth, during a game between the Cubs and the Braves.
As St. The following is a selected list of books, articles, and manuscripts about Harry Caray in the research centers of The State Historical Society of Missouri. The Society is not responsible for the content of the following websites:.
Skip to content. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Caray made his debut in with the Cardinals, but was fired in amid rumors of a personal relationship with the daughter-in-law of August Busch, Jr. Caray was well known to his Cardinal radio audience for drinking and advertising a competing brand of beer before the Busch family acquisition of the team.
Caray attributed his firing to a business-related grudge. After a season with the Athletics, Caray broadcast for the White Sox from to , and then for the Cubs from to He was extremely popular among the citizens of St.
Louis and later, of Chicago, and was known as much for his public carousing and jovial spirit as for his sportscasting; it was not for nothing that he was proclaimed "The Mayor of Rush Street" during his Chicago years, referencing Chicago's famous bar-hopping neighborhood. In the years before his death, his skills as a broadcaster gradually declined due to illness and the effects of age, a remarkable recovery from a stroke notwithstanding.
This led some people to say that he should retire, and in fact he was retained well beyond the normal mandatory retirement age of WGN-TV announcers. But his popularity was such that the normal rules were suspended. His tendency to mispronounce players' names often humorously, such as trying to say a complicated name backwards , was widely parodied.
Louis Hawks basketball in the s and '60s. His style became fodder for pop culture parody as well, including a memorable Saturday Night Live recurring sketch featuring Caray played by Will Ferrell as a host of a space and astronomy TV talk show, in which his questions to scientists and professors included whether or not they would eat the moon if it were made of ribs. The sketch continued after Caray's death. In , the cartoon Codename: Kids Next Door had two announcers reporting a baseball game.
One was a parody of Caray, the other, Howard Cosell. In Chicago, with the eccentric and knowledgeable ex-outfielder Jimmy Piersall on the South Side, and the brilliant ex-pitcher Steve Stone on the North Side, the over-the-top and extroverted Caray found sidekicks who could stand up to his style, and the partnerships thrived. He was well known for his frequent exclamation of "Holy Cow! It could be Jones thought Harry had a great voice but needed some experience. By the spring of , Harry was working on WCLS covering sporting events like high-school and junior-college basketball games, summer softball-league games and bowling-league events.
He also provided play by play of Western Michigan University basketball and football. Caray later claimed that it was during the broadcast of this semipro tournament that he first uttered two phrases he would employ throughout his career.
Rejected for military service because of bad eyesight, Caray moved back to St. Louis, where he was working at radio station KXOK by early Working first as a staff announcer, Caray soon had a minute nightly sports show. Unlike other radio sports show hosts of the day, he not only provided sports news, he also editorialized and criticized.
His controversial approach won a lot of attention in a year when both St. Louis teams met in the World Series. In the fall of that year, Caray was hired to do play-by-play of the minor-league St. Griesedieck Brothers were planning on sponsoring broadcasts of Cardinals and Browns home games in and were looking for a famous sportscaster to handle the play-by-play duties. Caray went directly to brewery president Edward J. Griesedieck to lobby for the job. Griesedieck initially turned him down, explaining that he preferred to hire an announcer in the style of veteran St.
Louis broadcaster France Laux. Laux, Griesedieck explained, described the action in a way that allowed a person to listen and yet read the newspaper undisturbed. At this, Caray exploded. Starting in the spring of , Harry was teamed with former catcher and manager Gabby Street to broadcast the home games of the Cardinals and the Browns over WIL. In St. Louis at the time, there were no exclusive broadcast rights. Several local St. Louis radio stations aired the baseball games in direct competition with one another through the s and into the mids.
Caray and Street were competing with such established St. Between the enthusiasm of Caray and the analysis and expertise of Street, the duo built a following in the St. Louis area. As the Cardinals won the National League pennant in , Caray and Street gained increasing recognition and popularity from St.
Louis fans. By Caray had survived changes in Cardinals ownership August A. Busch, Jr. Caray and Street worked together until the former catcher died in Louis included Joe Garagiola and Jack Buck. It has to be spontaneous. I guess some of the ballplayers were perturbed, but he was a fan. He wanted the ballplayers to do well.
Harry shared a booth with Russ Hodges separated by a curtain for a special broadcast back to St. Caray was one of many announcers at the microphone as Bobby Thomson hit his famous home run to win the pennant for the Giants. Another exciting moment came in May as Harry broadcast the play-by-play when Stan Musial got his 3,th hit.
Roger Craig just hit the left-center field fence! The Cardinals are going to win this pennant! His enthusiastic call turned out to be prophetic as the Cardinals who were never in first place until the final week of that season would clinch their first pennant in 18 years. When not broadcasting, Caray enjoyed partying and mingling with fans at local taverns.
In Dorothy Caray, his wife of 12 years, divorced him. Their year-old son, Skip, remembered being devastated as he learned of the divorce when he saw it headlined on the front page of a newspaper as he walked to school. After the divorce Skip, his brother, Christopher, and his sister Patricia would see even less of their father as he kept up the grueling travel schedule of a professional sportscaster.
The car knocked me 35 feet in the air. I suffered two broken legs, a broken shoulder and a broken nose. They said I would be in the hospital for seven months. I never missed a game. Caray recovered and returned for his 25th season with the Cardinals in It turned out to be his last in St.
Louis as he was fired at the end of the season. Caray himself would never deny the rumors, commenting that it was good for his ego for people to believe such a thing to be true. In he was hired to broadcast the games of the Oakland Athletics. The White Sox under owner John Allyn were experiencing difficult financial times. More than , fans came to see the White Sox play that year. Beginning in , Caray added television to his duties, providing play-by-play on WSNS-TV for the first and last three innings and switching to radio play-by-play for the middle three.
By the mids, all of the White Sox home games and most of the road games were televised and Harry was becoming one of the most popular figures in Chicago. Caray loved Chicago and as he had in other cities, he tried to provide fun for the fans. He would occasionally take a cooler of beer to the outfield bleachers at White Sox Park passing bottles of beer to the fans and broadcast the game from there.
He continued to mingle with the fans in area taverns celebrating into the early-morning hours after the games.
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