GRIEF AND GROWTH

Following the end of his successful playing career, Lou Boudreau went on to not very successful stints managing the Boston Red Sox and Kansas City Athletics. After the sad A’s canned him, Boudreau signed on December 12, 1957 with WGN radio, where he joined Jack Quinlan in the booth, replacing Milo Hamilton and Gene Elston.

This was a new beginning for the Cubs in many ways. WGN had regained the team’s radio rights after the ’57 campaign, signing a five-year deal, and were glad to bring the then-30-year-old Quinlan over from WIND. Boudreau’s selection as color man was a surprise—he was the first former player in the radio booth since megaphone-voiced Lou Fonseca in the 1940s—but he went on to a long career with WGN and became as beloved in Chicago as he had been in Cleveland.

Never a natural announcer, Boudreau was rarely asked to do play-by-play, instead using his experience and storehouse of knowledge to add color and analysis to Quinlan’s mellifluous broadcast.

This being the Cubs, however, nothing was that easy. When aging Charley Grimm proved unsuitable as manager of the team just 17 games into the 1960 campaign, Cubs “management” (sic) arranged to trade announcer for skipper, moving Grimm to the booth to team with Quinlan, then sending Boudreau to the field as manager!

So Boudreau served out the remainder of 1960 as manager, doing no better in that role than he had with the A’s or Red Sox. For 1961, the Cubs began their ridiculous five-year “College of Coaches” experiment; future Hall of Famer Boudreau retook his place at the microphone and the banjo-playing Grimm toddled off to retirement.

Quinlan and Boudreau teamed together through 1964. During this time, Quinlan assumed the mantle as WGN radio’s top sports voice, covering Big Ten football as well as the Chicago Bears, who won the 1963 NFL title. He also handled, with Chuck Thompson, national radio coverage of the 1960 World Series. (Boudreau, a three-sport star in high school, later covered NBA basketball and NHL hockey for WGN. The station kept its employees mighty busy back then.)

But tragedy broke up the Quinlan-Boudreau “dream team,” still felt by many to be among the best ever to cover games in Chicago. On March 19, 1965, returning from a spring-training golf date, Quinlan’s car skidded on highway outside of Phoenix. When he rammed a parked truck, the 37-year-old Quinlan was killed instantly, leaving a wife and four children.

Less than a week later, WGN promoted Vince Lloyd to the #1 radio job. He would remain radio partner with Boudreau through 1981, entertaining and educating millions of fans. Lloyd Pettit became Brickhouse’s full-time television partner, a post he would hold through 1970.

Vince Lloyd Skaff, born in 1917, dropped his last name when he began his broadcasting career in 1940. He worked his way through Peoria—like Elson, Brickhouse, and Quinlan—and joined WGN’s television and radio sports staff in 1949. He worked his way up slowly, and was ready for the opportunity to be a #1 sports voice. The excitable Lloyd had a signature call for a great Cubs play: “Holy Mackerel!”

In his first regular season Cubs game as #1 radio announcer, he and Boudreau described a barely believable 10-10 Cubs/Cardinals tie at Wrigley Field that was halted after nine innings by darkness.

After a poor 1965 season, and a last-place finish in 1966, Lloyd, Boudreau, Brickhouse, and Pettit suddenly found themselves, in 1967, broadcasting a surprising Cubs team that vaulted into third place under the management of Leo Durocher.

With a core of Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, and Ron Santo joined by recent acquisitions Randy Hundley, Fergie Jenkins, Bill Hands, and farm products Ken Holtzman, Glenn Beckert, and Don Kessinger, the Cubs remained competitive through the early 1970s—though they never won.

Through those exciting years, Lloyd, Boudreau, Brickhouse, and Pettit (replaced by Jim West in 1971) ascended to new heights as Chicago’s voices of summer, especially after the White Sox went into the tank in 1968. Even when the Pale Hose became competitive again for a few seasons in the 1970s—announcer Harry Caray helping to pull the Sox from the mire—the Cubs had regained their place, on WGN radio and TV, at the top of the city’s sporting scene.

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