Morning Report: One call Kalas had to miss

There probably are a million Phillies fans who will tell you they remember exactly where they were when Harry Kalas screamed, "The Phillies have won the 1980 World Series championship."

Harry, after all, was the voice of nearly every good memory the post-war baby boomers had of the Phillies.

He called the division championships in the 1970s, the division clincher in 1980 and the sensational five-game playoff with the Houston Astros.

He had opened the Vet in 1971 and he closed it in 2003, a ceremony that did not allow a dry eye in the packed house.

When my daughter asked me why everybody was crying, I thought for a second and said, "We're all crying for our lost youth."

Harry Kalas united parents who remembered 1980 with children still unborn for that championship when he called the World Series victory last October.

Walter Cronkite was the voice of my teenage years.

But Harry Kalas was the voice of my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.

Strangely, though, Harry didn't call the greatest moment in Phillies history - the club's first world championship in 1980.

When a dog-tired Tug McGraw managed to sneak a "scroogie" past a free-swinging Willie Wilson, Kalas was in the Phillies' clubhouse, waiting to do postgame interviews.

"I just wanted to call that play," Kalas told the Daily News. "I just really wanted to call that play."

But in 1980, major networks owned exclusive rights to World Series broadcasts.

Radio listeners got the Hall of Fame voice of Dodgers announcer Vin Scully on CBS radio.

But viewers of NBC-TV were subjected to Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek and their blatant rooting for the America League champion Kansas City Royals.

Kalas and fellow Phillies broadcast immortal Rich Ashburn were exiled to an auxiliary press box down the right-field line.

Neither broadcast a live pitch of the Series.

"It's depressing, frustrating and disappointing that after working the Phillies through the entire season and playoffs, we can't work the Series," Kalas told the Daily News. "It's like being in reach of the plum and not being able to grab it. But that's the nature of the beast, I guess."

But something good came of that absence. Due, at least in part, to the firestorm of criticism that erupted from the Philadelphia region, the rule was changed a few years later.

So all of us could hear Harry's incredible baritone last October.

It's impossible to imagine any broadcaster of Kalas' renown being a better person. Almost alone in a profession that grows swelled heads the way South Jersey grows tomatoes, Harry Kalas never talked down to the ink-stained wretches of the print media.

He never failed to offer a kind word and was unfailingly upbeat and courteous to one and all.

It has been more than a decade since Ashburn passed away, also on a road trip, and many Phillies fans still haven't gotten over that death.

How they - and the franchise - will weather this loss is impossible to forecast.