https://www.latimes.com/podcasts/story/2022-08-04/the-times-podcast-essential

Click the link to the podcast above and listen one more time to his voice.

What more can anyone say but, “It’s TIME for Dodger Baseball!”

My big brother, Joe, took me to my first baseball games at the old Yankee Stadium to see some of the great Yankees like Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin, and Whitey Ford, and he took me to see Game One of the 1977 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Series that made Reggie Jackson into “Mr. October!” I acquired my lifelong love of the Yankees from my brother Joe that lasts to this day . . . unless they are playing against our Arizona Diamondbacks in “The Greatest World Series In The History Of Baseball.”

But it was another brother from another mother, Kent Buttermann, my former boss in the Armadilla Wax Works and lifelong friend, and Vin Scully, the late, great, no greatest announcer of baseball, who taught me the game.

Making sand candles for a living in a warehouse with only “swamp” cooling is a young man’s job, and I was a young man then, working my way through college, falling in love with my beautiful soon to be bride, Karen, and soon after that the mother of our only son, John, and a little while more our only daughter, Julia, who was conceived on a perfect Sunday afternoon while her three year old brother napped and her parents made love in our new two bedroom apartment in Prescott, Arizona, where we had helped Kent and Denise move the Armadilla Wax Works from downtown Tempe, Arizona, to Arizona’s beautiful old territorial capital, Prescott, which is pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable and not on the second like some uneducated out-of-towner would say it.

Vin Scully was always the soothing, mellifluous voice in the background as we all made candles while listening to Dodger baseball on the radio during those long ago days in the springtimes, summers, and falls of our long ago youth.

Rest in peace, Vin Scully. Thank you for always being there. Thank you for my developed love of Dodger Baseball . . . and baseball, itself . . . and just life and the loving of it!