Put me down for a save. Just Joshing

The retrospective on Rochester Red Wing broadcasters by my good friend, Jim Mandelaro, earlier this week in the Democrat and Chronicle brought back some fond memories, particularly of a young Josh Lewin, the current play-by-play man for both the Texas Rangers and San Diego Chargers.

I vividly remember giving him rides home from old Silver Stadium to Brighton after filing my stories for the newspaper in the mid-1980s. Josh was a young teenager at the time. He usually had his tape recorder with him, and he would tell me how he had practiced broadcasting that night's Wings game from the stands.

Back then, he had an audience of one.

Now, he has an audience in the hundreds of thousands. I’m not surprised he made it to the big-time, given his talent and work ethic.

I had nothing to do with the advancement of his broadcasting career, but I like to joke that I once saved his life.

The press box at old Silver was on the roof overlooking home plate and foul balls into the cramped room were a fairly common occurrence. One night, Josh was working as an intern, passing out press releases when a foul ball came zooming our way. Fortunately, I was paying attention to the game (yeah, I know, one of the few times) and I screamed for him to duck. The speeding spheroid barely missed his head and wound up splintering the wood panel façade in front of the second row of seats.

I joked to official scorer Len Lustik that I wanted credit for a save in that night’s boxscore.

This ink-stained wretch also had an opportunity to do color one fall with Josh on University of Rochester football broadcasts. Somehow Josh's career survived the ordeal of having to carry me. Seriously, though, it was a lot of fun working with him. Good kid. Great to see his hard work rewarded.

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Probably won’t happen, but given the Bills offensive woes (three points in 15 possessions this preseason), I’d like to see the first-string out there long enough to at least produce a touchdown tonight against the Detroit Lions.

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Bills fans disappointed in Trent Edwards’ indecisiveness have begun calling him: Hesi-Trent.

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I thought the beleaguered and often gruff Charlie Weis had a good comeback when asked about that South Bend billboard reading: “BEST WISHES TO CHARLIE WEIS IN THE FIFTH YEAR OS HIS COLLEGE COACHING INTERNSHIP.

“Every thing was great until the last word,’’ the Notre Dame football coach quipped when asked about the advertisement.

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It’s impressive that the Bronx Bombers could have eight guys in their lineup finish with 20 or more home runs, but it’s still going to come down to pitching, defense and clutch hitting come October. That said, I think this team has the makeup to go the distance.

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I’d like to know who came up with these new Joba Rules for Joba Chamberlain. The guy is 23 years old and a horse at 6-foot-2, 220 pounds, but the Yankees brass still wants to baby him by limiting him to just three innings for the remainder of his regular-season starts. Jeez! Give me a break.

And that's the way it was

I remember the announcement as if it were 46 seconds, not 46 years, ago. I was 8 at the time, a second-grader at Bell Road Elementary School in Rome, N.Y., and our principal, Mr. Clough, came on the public address system to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot and that the buses would be arriving early to take us home.

I recall fighting back tears as I gathered up my stuff and headed to the bus circle.

I arrived home to find my parents glued to the old, black-and-white television set in our living room. My mom hugged me tightly, and asked if I was OK. I sat down next to her and began watching the tube in hopes of making sense of the chaos.

Over the next several, surreal days, we and millions of other Americans were gracefully and gently guided through this tragedy by an avuncular, bespectacled man visiting all of our living rooms simultaneously.

His name was Walter Cronkite.

"Uncle Walt'' would become the trusted voice of my generation over the next 20 years, leading us through the triumphs and tragedies of a tumultuous time in American history.

He was the soothing, authoritative narrator we turned to during the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations; the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, Watergate, the moon landings, the Beatles music invasion and so much more.

In this age of seemingly infinite information sources, it's difficult to put Cronkite's reach and impact into context. Back in the day, you didn't have the Internet and YouTube and a jillion television options. We essentially had three tv choices - CBS, NBC and ABC - and the majority of us put the dial on CBS because Uncle Walt was a man we believed in most.

One story sure to be repeated often in these days following the anchorman's death Friday night at age 92 underscores his enormous influence on American society in the late 1960s. Cronkite went to Vietnam to do a series about the war. His indepth reporting convinced him that the battle had reached a stalemate and that negotiations for a settlement should begin as soon as possible, lest thousands more pointlessly lose their lives. With the encouragement of his boss (I don't believe that media honchos would have the guts to to this today), Cronkite ended his series of reports on the war with a commentary suggesting peace talks should begin immediately.

A deflated President Lyndon B. Johnson flipped off the set after watching the commentary and resignedly told press secretary Bill Moyers: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America.''

Cronkite was a journalistic giant, an American icon who revolutionized news coverage.

It will be interesting to see in the coming days how his passing is treated.

The celebrity-obsessed media of today clearly won't go ga-ga the way it did in it's over-the-top coverage of the recent death of entertainer Michael Jackson. It may not even cover it as extensively as it did the passing of journalist Tim Russert a year ago.

And, knowing Cronkite, that's probably the way he would want it. A consummate journalist, he was interested in covering the story, not being the story.