Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I won’t hear my old neighbor’s voice anymore. Vin Scully retires.

It was 40-something years ago. I was a kid playing in the back yard in southern California. I played to the music of Vin Scully describing Dodger baseball games.

I never saw our neighbor—Mr. Garcia. He had erected some sort of bamboo curtain along the fence so that we couldn’t see him as he toiled on this and that in his backyard. I always heard him. He had his AM radio blasting the Dodgers games six months a year. His radio was too loud as you could hear it several backyards away. No one complained about the noise because it wasn’t noise. It was Vin Scully.

Vin Scully was the sound of baseball. This was the 1970s, and America’s youth—all of it— played baseball. Vin Scully floated through the neighborhood.

As a kid, I thought all baseball announcers sounded like Vin Scully. It was one of the terrible disappointments of the transition from youth to adult that I learned how Vin Scully was the exception to the rule. How did the rest of America grow up without his voice?

Our neighbor, Mr. Garcia, treated the neighborhood to Vin Scully. Our neighbors shared the sound of a distant neighbor chatting at a baseball game. Vin Scully was our neighborhood even though he was a Chavez Ravine some hundred miles away.

Vin Scully retired. The world will be a little less neighborly.