Judith R. Hiltner - Red Barber: The Life and Legacy of a Broadcasting Legend

Red Barber is one of the greatest and most influential baseball broadcasters ever to occupy the catbird seat, as the Ol Redhead called it. From Jackie Robinsons debut to Bobby Thomsons Shot Heard Round the World. From Brooklyns beloved Bums to the Mantle/Maris Yankees, to mentoring a young Vin Scully, Barbers life and career are an important part of baseball history and the history of the craft he mastered. This complete and carefully researched biography is both merited and most welcome.

Bob Costas, twenty-nine-time Emmy Awardwinning broadcaster and 2018 Ford C. Frick Award honoree

Red Barber was the lilting voice of the Reds, the Dodgers, the Yankees, and National Public Radio. But more than that, he was the conscience of baseball, a man who believed in the power of broadcast for the good of the game and its listeners. Red was perched in the catbird seat while big-league baseball grew in ways he could barely have imagined; he grew with it, as an announcer and as an American. With Red Barber: The Life and Legacy of a Broadcasting Legend, the authors have given this complicated, important figure the biography he deserves.

John Thorn, official historian, Major League Baseball

At last a full biography of a legendary sports broadcasting pioneer. Red Barber balanced responsible reporting with charming entertainment. Judith Hiltner and James Walker explain how the Old Redhead retained his personal integrity in a field where baseball, broadcasting, and sponsors want total control.

Bob Edwards, author of Fridays with Red: A Radio Friendship

Red Barbers voice was my lullaby. He sang me to sleep from the catbird seat, his honeyed literacy suffusing my dreams and forming the bedrock of my writing life in baseball. When I stupidly sent him my raunchy, fictional love letter to the game, hoping he would embrace it, it showed just how little I knew about this complex and courtly gentleman, the seminal voice of baseball broadcasting. Now, thanks to Judith Hiltner and James Walker, Walter Lanier Red Barber has belatedly received the serious and definitive biography he deserves.

Jane Leavy, author of The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created

Judith R. Hiltner and James R. Walker

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

2022 by Judith R. Hiltner and James R. Walker

Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image courtesy Everett Collection.

Author photos courtesy of the authors.

All rights reserved

The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-grant institution with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hiltner, Judith R., author. | Walker, James Robert, author.

Title: Red Barber: the life and legacy of a broadcasting legend / Judith R. Hiltner and James R. Walker.

Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021045242

ISBN 9781496222855 (hardback)

ISBN 9781496231857 (epub)

ISBN 9781496231864 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : Barber, Red, 19081992. | SportscastersUnited StatesBiography. | BISAC : SPORTS & RECREATION / Baseball / History | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts

Classification: LCC GV 742.42. B 34 H 55 2022 | DDC 796.092 [B]dc23/eng/20211020

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045242

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

We are most profoundly grateful to Carl Van Ness and Michele Wilbanks of the Special and Area Studies Collections at the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Van Ness and Wilbanks responded to our every request (and there were many) and helped us navigate the enormous collection of documents, photographs, and memorabilia in the Walter Lanier Red Barber Papers and Book Collection. They allowed us to use their facilities to photograph or scan over ten thousand letters, article clippings, and scrapbook pages, enabling us to examine and absorb the bulk of their Barber holdings in our home offices in Chicago. In addition, we were able to listen to over forty hours of audio recordings and view several thousand slides in their collection. They arranged to digitalize more than twenty audio recordings and several of Barbers home movies and made them available online. These digital offerings included the original recordings of Red sharing his recollections, the oral text from which Robert Creamer crafted Barbers memoir, Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat. Complete and convenient access to this collection, curated by the George A. Smathers Libraries for the last four decades, provided many of our most valuable sources and much of the primary content of our book.

We offer our deepest thanks to the many folks who granted us interviews for this biography and provided valuable insights into Red, Lylah, and Sarah Barber. Reds niece, E. V. E. Joy, provided generous access to family photos, letters, and documents and shared detailed and delightful memories of Red, his father William Barber, his brother Billy, and his sister Effie Virginia. She even gave us a fabulous roof over our heads when we visited her in Florida. Much of what we learned about Sarah Barber derives from stimulating interviews with Ellie Edelstein, Margie Edwards, Liz Bremner, Leslie Rich, and Judy Gomez, who knew Reds daughter during her years as an educator in New York and/or after her retirement to Santa Fe. Their memories, reflections, and candor were invaluable since, sadly, Sarah passed away in 2005. Glenn Lautzenhiser, who organized a spectacular 2008 celebration of Reds one hundredth birthday in Columbus, Mississippi, provided a wealth of information and insight into Reds hometown and its many famous citizens. With true hospitality he arranged for us to meet, during the weekend before Christmas 2019, with experts on Columbus and their towns celebrated broadcaster: Dixie Butler, Nancy Carpenter, Birney Imes, Jerry Jones, Derek Rogers, Harry Sanders, Slim Smith, Mona Vance-Ali, Rufus Ward, and Chuck Yarborough. Glenn also gave us access to his personal files and a video of the Red Barber celebration. Mona Vance-Ali, archivist at Mississippis Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System, provided access to files on Red Barber and directed us to documents that provided crucial insights into the Columbus that Red knew as a young boy.

Others with rich insights into Red Barbers career also took time to talk with us. Marty Appel told us about Reds impact on Phil Rizzuto during his Yankees years and directed us to the amazing Tom Villante, who worked closely with Red during the early 1950s in Brooklyn. Toms spicy memories of Red are sprinkled throughout our biography. George Vecsey and Steve Jacobson provided both critical insights into Reds later days with the Yankees and much encouragement for our project, while Walker Lundy told us about Reds work as a columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat. Bob Edwards, who wrote his own excellent Barber bookFridays with Redwas incredibly generous with his insights into his radio friend for more than a decade. Bob read an earlier and much rougher draft of our biography, and his many comments helped us sand off some rough edges. It was his call for a fuller biography of Red Barber that inspired our effort. Steve Gietschier, an expert reader of our earlier draft, helped us focus our text more sharply, showing us where we could effectively contract our first effort. He also found several errors and offered corrections. Readers will never know how much they benefitted from his pointed suggestions, but Steves efforts have enriched their experience. Our third reader was our friend Stuart Shea. Stu magnanimously shared his polished skills as editor and his encyclopedic baseball knowledge to improve our text. We also thank Vin Scully for his welcomed support of our project, his many valuable letters to Red, and comments about his mentors influence on his own amazing career.