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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Covering sports wasn�t my thing Once World War II ended, I didn�t arrive back in this country until six months after V-J Day because our division had been sent to take the formal surrender of the Japanese in North China, a ceremony with a cast of thousands. It was an interesting six months, but arriving late for the job market in Los Angeles, where my parents had resettled, meant most of the radio jobs in the glamorous world around Hollywood were filled. It was time to leave the big city. Finally I answered an ad in a broadcasting magazine for a job as program director at a station that was due to go on the air momentarily in St. Joseph, Mo. My new boss was Paul Roscoe, a sportscaster who had established a pre-war reputation as the best play-by-play man in Kansas City. He was approached near the end of the war by three business tycoons who wanted to build a new radio station for him in St. Joseph, as a frequency was available. Roscoe looked more like a bookie than a broadcaster. He was about 5-feet-8 inches tall, some 50 years of age, weighed more than 200 pounds, and had a bristly mustache and a bald spot on the back of his head. Roscoe always wore colorful suspenders in which he would hook his thumbs and occasionally snap them. "Kid," he said to me on that first day, "In addition to all your other duties, I�m gonna draft you as my color man. Think you can handle it?" (A color man is the second man in the booth, a second banana, who keeps things going. ) I told Roscoe I had a lot to learn about sports, but I looked forward to the experience. His glasses slid down his nose. "Give it a try," he said. So while we waited for the FCC license to arrive, Roscoe coached me on how to be a color man. Baseball was big in St. Joseph. Its team in 1946 was a class A minor league outfit that was hoping to set a new attendance record of a quarter of a million tickets that summer. When the license arrived and the station began broadcasting, our summer days were filled with baseball and our evenings with postmortems. One of the craziest baseball games that season was one that was tied in the ninth inning at 4-4. The game continued with the score tied until the 24th inning, when somebody made it around the bases on a hit into the outfield. It was the middle of the night, and I think the kids were just too tired to continue. Fall came and it was time for high school football. Roscoe broadcast the games for the "other," or working-class, high school in the city. Near the end of the season, he learned that a high school in Atlanta, Ga., wanted to book a postseason game with a school from Missouri. Roscoe launched a campaign to have "our" school selected by the state athletic association. It was a real campaign, as he used his nightly sports show to whip up interest by having the locals send letters and telegrams to the residences of the five members of the state high school sports authority. Our "full-court press" worked and our team went to Atlanta. I stayed behind to make sure the "feed" worked. Ours was a typical high school team of that era with a 155-pound scat back and a line that averaged 175 pounds. Roscoe said later that when he was handed the Atlanta roster, he knew there was no way to win. Its high school was unofficially the place the district set aside for incorrigibles, and the team looked it, with its 200-pound line and 180-pound backfield. Our team lost by several touchdowns. Then came basketball, a game that was different then from the game as we now know it. One night in Springfield, Mo., the host team decided to freeze the ball when the score was something like 6 to 3. It remained that way for the rest of the game. Stalling has long since been made illegal. That was my first and last season as a color man. I have to admit, my heart wasn�t in it. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Obituaries | Sports | Business | Classifieds | Tempo | Prime Times | So Oregon Sites | Outdoor Journal | Subscribe | Contact | Movies | Advertise | Real Estate Showcase | Archive | Editorials | Letters to the editor | Religion | Wake-up Call | NIE | Cyber Chef | Job Network | So Oregon Weather | WSJ Northwest | Forums | AP Wire | AP Money | F.A.Q. | Awards Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. The Community Newspaper Subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co, Inc Copyright �The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA