Old orange radio evokes memories of Buck, Caray calling St. Louis Cardinals games
On my maternal side, I come from family that does not like throwing things away.
We are not hoarders, or junk collectors, but we are orderly, sentimental collectors of our past. We hold onto things, mostly for sentimental reasons, and because someone said it might be worth big money someday.
That’s my excuse for having boxes of plates, silverware, books, and nic nacs from my parents, grandparents and children’s early years in storage.
I save it because I think my children may want it someday. I also have this inner feeling that someday, Antiques Roadshow may show up at my door and trade me baskets of $100 bills for those boxes of old, weird plates and glasses wrapped in yellowed newspaper and boxed up.
I had been told some of my keepsakes may be valuable, maybe even antique. I had some pieces checked out by experts. The expert looked at me and said, “Made locally. Worth a couple of bucks, maybe.”
I was better off not knowing the truth. But just one guy’s opinion, I reasoned. I re-wrapped and put it back in storage. But then something comes up and justifies why I have held onto to something all these years.
I grew up listening to Cardinals baseball on the radio. Jack Buck. Harry Caray. Mike Shannon. A few other announcers that are easily forgotten. There were only a few Cardinal games on TV. All I knew about players was what was printed on the backs of their baseball cards, or what Jack Buck told me on the radio. There was a certain mystery about the players. They were all great guys, as far as I knew, and I liked it that way.
I listened to a lot of those games with my Grandpa Tockstein in the front yard of his home on Lakewood Place in Centreville. We’d listen to the start of Cardinal night games on the radio in his front yard as steady traffic passed on its way to nearby Cahokia Downs Race Track.
Gramps died in 1975 while I was in high school. We divided up his belongings. I grabbed a few things including a couple of his old ballcaps and little orange radio. That radio was his constant companion.
Trying to track down elusive radio
Over the decades, the orange radio has been shifted from box to box, from closet to closet, to attic to garage, from house to house. It remained intact. A relic from a special man in a special time in my childhood.
This past spring, when the coronavirus hit, I was having a phone conversation with my older brother, Bill, who was in Florida. We were talking about missing baseball. He brought up Gramps’ old radio. It surprised me. After all these years, I figured I was the only family sap who remembered it. We shared the same memories of it.
I said, “I think I have that orange radio somewhere. If I can find it, you can have it. I will send it to you.”
That started the search frenzy. Over the years, I have seen the old radio but could not remember where. I searched everywhere. Boxes. Drawers. Closets. The storage unit. Nowhere. Maybe I had thrown it away. Maybe it got lost. I gave up. I was down about it. But I still had a little hope it would show up someday.
Radio is found
One evening, my wife Colleen came in from the garage and asked me to go look in a box on the garage floor that had been on a shelf. There was the old orange radio, along with a few other keepsakes. You know the stuff. Somebody may want it someday, too.
The radio looked as I remembered it. Old. Orange. Not working. But one look at it and I could hear the memories of Buck and Caray telling a story of Gibson and Drysdale battling on another sweltering, steamy Sunday afternoon here at Busch Stadium.
The next day, I wrapped, boxed and shipped the orange radio to my brother. We talked on the phone when it arrived the next day. On the phone, he changed out the batteries which were at least 45 years old. The radio did not work. My brother’s plan is to find a handy guy near his home in Boston to repair it, if possible. I should have told him whether it works or not, just look at it long enough and you’ll hear Harry Caray and Jack Buck.
“I’d like to listen to another ballgame on it,” he said.
I am glad he has it now. It’s a good thing I saved it.
