Red Barber may have made a name for himself in New York, as the longtime play-by-play broadcaster for the Brooklyn Dodgers and later the New York Yankees. But he traces his origins back to his birthplace of Columbus, and on Saturday he will be posthumously inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame.
Born in 1908, Walter Lanier Barber spent the first 10 years of his life in Columbus before his family moved to Sanford, Florida. While attending the University of Florida, his broadcasting talent was discovered by Cincinnati Reds general manager Larry MacPhail, and by the age of 26, Barber became the Reds’ radio play-by-play voice — without ever having previously attended a Major League Baseball game.
“He fell into this broadcasting thing, which was not anything anybody planned to do, but he was very good at it,” Barber’s niece, Eve Joy, said. “He had a good way with words and he was a hard worker. He worked really hard to get where he did, to get those jobs and hang onto them. I don’t think he got paid very much at all when he first started being a broadcaster.”
MacPhail later became president of the Dodgers, and in 1938 he brought Barber over to Brooklyn after five years in Cincinnati. It was there where Barber truly became beloved and developed many of his signature catchphrases, such as “sittin’ in the catbird seat” for when a player or team was playing well and “bases full of Brooklyns” for when the Dodgers had the bases loaded.
When Jackie Robinson was set to make his debut with the Dodgers to break baseball’s color barrier in 1947, Barber — having grown up in the segregated South — was initially opposed and threatened to quit, but changed his mind after seeing Robinson play and deal with racist abuse from fans and opposing players and managers.
“I was proud to learn later that he had supported Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier,” said Wynne Beers, Barber’s great-grandnephew. “It was nice to see that as something that he had supported, even though he had initial misgivings.”
Brooklyn won five National League pennants during Barber’s 15 years as the voice of the Dodgers, but lost the World Series each time to the crosstown Yankees. In 1954, Barber joined the Yankees’ broadcast booth, remaining there for 13 years and calling four World Series championships.
After being dismissed by the Yankees, Barber retired from broadcasting and turned to writing, publishing his autobiography, “Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat,” in 1968 and four more books in the years that followed. Joy, a writer herself, bonded with her uncle over their shared passion, and Barber encouraged Joy to pursue that interest.
“I really knew him more after he retired to Tallahassee, because I was in Florida then,” Joy said. “I wrote something and he called to say he liked it. He was not my mentor. We weren’t the same age or in the same place. As we got older, though, he did encourage my writing some.”
Barber’s Christian faith was also important to him. His book “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” published in 1971, details his journey into faith, and during his broadcasting career he persuaded managers to allow players to participate in services on Sunday mornings at the ballpark before games.
From 1981 until his death at age 84 in October 1992, Barber would speak every Friday on National Public Radio with Bob Edwards about sports and whatever else was on his mind. Those chats were memorialized in Edwards’ book “Fridays with Red: A Radio Friendship,” published in 1993.
“I think I would more enjoy having a conversation with him today than I did when I was younger,” said Steve Joy, Eve’s son. “The conversations we did have quite often centered around issues of faith and things like that, because that was a very important thing to him, and it is to me too. Our whole family when I was young was Episcopalian, but he had a heart for every Christian denomination and wanted to make sure everybody had an opportunity.”
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