Primetime Pards: Tom Villante '49

good evening everyone and welcome to the 10th edition of prime time fards where we feature former lafayette students who have gone on to excel in their chosen fields our guest tonight is a graduate of the class of 1949 tom velante i'm gary lobach and very happy to have you with us this evening for optimal viewing of tonight's show changing the speaker view right now is strongly recommended to ensure the best possible experience for everyone the microphones of all attendees will be muted and during the audience q a portion of the show please utilize the q a feature which can be found by opening participants it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you tom velante an electrical engineering major tom came to lafayette in 1945 for the better part of the 20th century tom was a staple within america's pastime the game of baseball some of the stars that he called friends were joe dimaggio yogi berra jackie robinson and as you will experience tonight tom has an incredible wealth of baseball stories that start in the locker room and for some reason end up in a fancy hotel room with jimmy stewart during his time on college hill tom wrote about sports for the lafayette student newspaper which had just restarted publication after pausing for the war after leaving college hill tom landed a job in bbdo's public relations department by the time he'd left lafayette he'd begun doing sports publicity work he produced games in brooklyn for the dodgers from 1952 to 1957. when the dodgers moved to los angeles in 58 he moved out to the west coast with the team he's the only one who worked with both long-time dodger commentator vin scully who retired in 2016 and the legendary play-by-play man walter red barber who called dodgers games from 1939 to 1953. with the greatest of pleasures i introduced to you tom velante and tom welcome aboard tonight to prime time pirates it's great to have you with us it's great to see you looking so young thank you very much for the blackbeard alumni who went to school with me they probably knew me as connie valenti ceo at m.i.e my name is carmelo my school early days and nickname was coming c-o-m-m-i-e and then when i joined bb deal on the pr department the director said we can't call you comic because of the comment we changed it with tommy and it's been tom ever since i i know that you grew up in jackson heights right tell us a little bit about your childhood well uh we had great we played all kinds of sports and we had some great guys had terrific names like squeakpito fuzzy baron harry the hall it was great we had a wonderful time i know you uh you also grew up in the same neighborhood with uh with don rickles right he was one of your buddies donald rickles used to hang out at the lower white castle i always remember he had always had white book skin shoes on and he was a very pleasant guy very pleasant did you ever have a clue that he would go on to do the kind of comedy that he ended up doing and doing better than anyone else well he was always witty he was always sarcastic but i never figured he would go into the business and be as successful as he was you know i often tell people that a lot of times life is because you're in the right place at the right time right and i don't think anybody exemplifies that story more than you do in the way in which you became associated with the new york yankees totally kind of out of accident and that your best buddy couldn't make the game so go ahead and tell us that story well when it happened and i went to stylist high school in manhattan and there was a friend of mine called chester palmieri who was the new genki ball boy so uh the beginning of the world series in 1943 with the cardboard at the stadium i went to school and i saw chester paul mary in the hallway i said chester why aren't you at the game he said i have leisures to take can i go in your place i said sure so i had been there a few times with them helping out so i got to the employee entrance went right through no one stopped me i got to the clubhouse yankee clubhouse and fred paul logan who's with the yankee clubhouse since the highlander days where i told him that uh chester would not be there until he sent me into the listening club of the cardinal cup house i put me in a cardboard uniform i knew something was wrong i was gonna be the yankee ball boy i should have a yankee room i hid in the bathroom so no one would see it so i worked the 1943 world series as the cardinal batboy so like a couple of days after the series ended i decided i'd go to the stadium to see if i get some kind of a job so i went into the stadium logan the clubhouse guy so he got channeled with the floor and he said just a minute but then the creative club i had to come out with this man who smoked a little cigar and he looked familiar it was very imagine yankee he asked me questions about school and he said to me how would you like to be the home team that board next year's i'd love it he said write a letter that uploaded which i did on saint patrick's day 1945 i got this letter telling me i'd be the yankee packboard and to show off the polar ground for a uh charity game so i cut to the pool around they told me to bring my spikes and glove so i get to the clubhouse visiting clubhouse carrying my spike with yellow shoelaces well the lone four player saw those yellow shoelaces but one of the great tools of my life it's going on my locker looking up and see my name spelled correctly right next to frankie corsetti was he was one of my hero so that was great so uh after a while he asked me uh he asked me to throw a phone that's right with him and he says what position do you apply said shortstop well okay so that's a boss well the short composition in masonry baseball is like a an outfield position to sailor so he moved me over to second base and it was it was pretty good so he had georgetown and cosetti schooled me and i ended up taking seth winfrey so after a while boo boo dro who's a 26 year old shortstop and manager cleveland is all beyond one she was sitting there and he said to me are you ready for college i said i will be soon he said i'll get you a four-year scholarship of high school university of auburn but it's wonderful the next day joe mccarthy called me at his office they said i hear you've been talking a little bit drunk he said what did he offer you i told him he said he could count your calls and we'll send you wow so it turned out i had relevance and charlie gilbert had just admired by as the new manager at lafayette and he was a great shortstop for them to st wisconsin and that's how i began my career that's amazing it's amazing so lou budreau i think he wanted you to go to northwestern university right yeah university of illinois yeah you're right right anyway uh it was fun so i remember in 1946 i was in the 1812 i'd work out with the yankees and i'm talking to joe dimaggio and there's this wait a minute i'm going to stop you so people real i want people to to really kind of soak this in you've already mentioned the cardinals with stan usual so you spent time with stan musial right and now and now you're telling us about about talking to another baseball great uh this had to be an unbelievable experience for you as a young man it really was but while i was talking to dimaggio i heard these guys laughing around this locker i said you know what's going on with it well there's kimmy just brought up in september his name is yogi berra and he has a funny way of talking they're asking to talk about movies and he's very very funny i remember that 40 years later i started showing you you'll be at the movies [Music] can we can we go back a little bit to uh to the lafayette years i know we're going to talk about yogi at the movies a little bit later on can you can you talk about uh your lafayette experience because obviously uh you weren't going to be involved in sports with your major as an electrical engineer um so talk a little bit about that experience and then we'll get to some of the things that really made you rather famous on campus well what happened was i ended up playing baseball second base uh for lafayette and i played uh boston basketball first two years basketball was brilliant i loved basketball and uh so i had a lot of fun and that's when all those years and i had a lot of fun and i created this fictional character called yahtzee soon which is really stay loose still backwards i turned him into a campus celebrity it will be a lot of fun can you tell us a little bit about some of the stories that uh you wrote under the pseudonym of yahtzee soul well i had them doing all kinds of things and uh all kinds of aurora things and uh i ended up brushing one of the lathiest skinny tall kid he was yahtzee sue with the mask he actually had a play an intro there the crowds were just i mean he was so popular on campus it was a lot of fun did everybody know it was you oh yeah sure anyway uh the story i wrote the stories from the latvia paper and i use those articles ended up getting me a job at dvd you know in the publicity department so it turned out great i i love the i love the story about where you your tv broke and with your electrical engineering background the guy wanted to charge you an astronomical amount of money to fix the tv how did you handle that was i was home with my mother and uh something's wrong with tv said so she called her even fair guy so i'm sitting there watching him my mom always wanted me to banana well the guy charged 35 dollars just for the visit so i sat down and i wrote the 10 most common problems the tv sets just replacing twos and i called the tv cure i made so much money from it i ended up buying a boat it was fun how did you get how did you get that published or how did you get that out there obviously i self-published it of course you did and i ended up i wanted to deal with the wr tv tv station where they would run ads and we would split the money so it worked out great oh my goodness unbelievable and you actually had pro baseball aspirations right oh really oh yes oh yes and what had happened was uh the first big training i went to uh there was this kid casey steinke loved him and it was billy martin and frankie who said he told me we're going to have a tough time because cage he loves his kid so then i realized i should start looking elsewhere and that's what we're getting a job do you think without billy martin showing up you might you might have had an opportunity well i had a good shot at it uh-huh a good shot at it if mccarthy had still being manager i would have a very good shot but when casey came in he had brilliant west coast and a little yeah i can understand uh losing your best buddy uh may have cost you a second based job bbd bbdo um some people think that that that mad men the uh the show a very popular show was was based on that advertising agency is there any truth to that a lot of truth so in fact all all the clients that i use in the show will be your client epo stands for back bond personal go ahead i spent the first two years in the publicity department then uh in 1952 shea fever and lucky strike ended up as the co-sponsors of the brooklyn dodgers radio tv and they wanted a producer so they looked through their [Music] files so he was this kid used to be yankee blackboard so they made me the producer i knew nothing about television i became the producer of brooklyn telecast from 1952 to 57 when they went to l.a and it was terrific can you even believe that that happened i mean like you said you had no experience i would sit there and say listen red barber was a master he was a match and uh he video book that he knew that one of the major complaints listens they didn't get the score long enough so red bought a three-minute head timer when he would give the score the situation every three minutes then when television came along he knew he wasn't the leader anymore tv director was so what he was brilliant he had a wooden replica made of the four pawn midfield and he had a with switches and it had a replica directive so red one of the shot like uh the elizabeth dugout he turned the switch and the directed blue red one that shot it was terrific in scholarly first year 1850 i'm in 2052 fred would constantly uh talk to scully scully what another thing you don't ever talk over the problem quad knowledge is our continuity don't ever talk over it you listen to scully and this thing you would say it's a home run back off but the cry boy died down didn't even give you fred was terrific he was he was a brilliant was a master uh interesting story though as to why he uh he quit the dodgers tell that story well what happened was in 1952 he and his family went to portugal and he came back and he bought a beret and he wore this beret and he wouldn't take it off and he went through an online camera commercial well the two sponsors shaffer beer and lucky strike thought it was very effeminate they just wanted to take it all walt o'malley foreign so i took my job was to talk to red said red you gotta take off to the right he wouldn't take it off all during that season of 53 he would not pick them at all so he knew that the sponsors were not going to renew him but until the end of the season he reached out to the yankees and they hired her he didn't melt out so that's why i left the yankee coach unbelievable that he would be willing to give up that job but he ended up on his feet pretty well yes no way you know you were also a pioneer i mean this is something that's so obvious today but back then unheard of you you started to make sure the broadcasts were in spanish that's right exactly there was such a huge puerto rican population in new york that we ended up having buccaneers very famous medical so what we did was uh we would advertise in the spanish newspapers watch in english and listen in spanish it watched it for the wr tv telecast and the spanish audio terrific it very well got shaped into the normal position and now today everything i mean you can even read it in spanish as the game is being done uh so you're way ahead of your time that's true for sure uh also tell us a little bit about the doing away games which was also unheard of and and after i heard your explanation it made so much sense that the away games were going to be done as opposed to just doing the home games wonderful o'reilly always wanted to do road games not home games and it made sense the problem was it was so expensive so um 18 t controlled over the line so i sat with them of course some of my electrical background they came in to talk about the class of people and they said well what do you do from here to here to here so what happens when we leave the giants come in the same thing i said why he said it's the usage you got to have a common usage so we ended up when i ended up starting a company called sports network who became the buyer of att so that there was one buyer so all risking down tremendously so everyone was able to afford board games [Music] uh tom i'm going to ask you just if your phone is near your computer i'm going to ask you to move it just a little bit because we're getting a little bit of static and we certainly want to hear every word that you say i'm going to let's do a little stream of consciousness i'll give you a name you talk all about that person uh everybody knows joe dimaggio what was he really like joe dimaggio you know i've been to a lot of clubhouses but in the yankee clubhouse joe was no question he was a star all by himself he'd hold up his hand before next you know the clubhouse guy had a cup of coffee in there billy martin wanted to lock him next to joe d because he wanted he was like jody's bobo and uh he claimed he told me joe gave him a 56 game hit that so i asked you all but nice and i gave it to luke costello for matt evan costello we believe he had this bat joe was a terrific guy he was uh he he really was a star he was a you know certain charisma battle that was just terrific great way that i never saw him die for a while he he's obviously there were no nobody better than joe dimaggio and then i have one jody's story uh he ended up playing golf because my guest was just the country who had to win that border to my house in westchester and we had lunch and afterwards over a drive home and my little seven-year-old son wanted to join us so i asked joey that's all right the jones in the passenger seat the right side my son's in the back i remember jill at that time was probably the most recognizable face in america so joe's kind of napping off my little sunglasses and question joel you have a job just well i really don't have a job people pay me to play golf and make appearances he said are you married well i was and it was maryland said that's my mom's name and he started asking questions about mallory got to the hotel in new york he's very boring [Laughter] well one guy i would assume was not very boring uh was was jackie robinson jackie was too jackie in those days the black ball players were not allowed in the same hotel especially in st louis and after a while they agreed to enter the hotel but they couldn't eat in the dining room to jackie shaker's room and i go up there with him a lot and we used to plot funny contests until he turned over glass he was terrific he was he jackie had such a sense about what he did was he ended up becoming a nelson rockefeller republican and i asked his wife rachel i said how come jackie did that i mean he didn't want the democrats to take the blacks from uh for a habit and he wanted him to compete so he built up his constituency and he was a friend for life right yeah i used to play golf with a lot of the games that this field began at three o'clock would be done by four or five like it was a golf course on the way and it's jackie's not on the play well he never played before because it was very awkward jackson was awkward so he ended up barely making 100 and he ended up breaking 200 breaking 90. he would make you shooting in the 70s that's how terrific i had to sleep by hand coordination as natural and athlete as there was and how about i know you played golf up until a couple years ago are you still hitting the ball that's right yeah uh yo yo i bought yoga to play one of the practice league and yogi's like 20 yards away from the from a buttonhole once you get close to this place i'm never that close so we were watching nick falgo play a practice round on our 18th call i know he let's watch him so i'll go push the ball down and start i said yogi you can bet your life this ball is going to break right to the left you'll get it why are you telling me that i thought left-handed do you think he just had a a crazy mind and knew all the things that he said that became so famous that he knew they were just juxtapositioned or no he didn't tell jokes he just in responsive thing for example when he did the pilot for you at the movies it was a fatal attraction he kept calling glenn close when cold i was i was off camera he was sitting on a school and i said yogi did you say no i didn't get scared only got scared at the scary part yeah the last 15 minutes was so scary i couldn't watch it you can't hold blood he was terrific well you you turned movie reviews by yogi berra into what you alluded to earlier yogi at the movies yeah uh how popular was that was that a weekly thing or anything when it was it stro's beer use it as part of their it would buy a minute spot 30 seconds of it with the yogi show the other 30 second for the commercial so they ran that campaign all over america during 1980 and 88-89 was very popular one of uh when i first talked to yogi about it and i went to his house and his wife almost there said yogi you still love moving i love movies if i like them so he was hesitant about doing and carl embarrassed of course you're gonna do it he said i need a new kitchen so you know he was great so we he was a he was the final jeopardy answer on jeopardy last night yogi berra was i don't know whether you saw it or not they asked who said uh that record will stand until it's broken that was that was his quote you know one of your buddy uh one of your buddies that i think was a sponsor of yogi at the movies jim finn and i think is with us tonight uh so he's watching you and i'm sure enjoying your stories that's great that's great all right how about tommy lasorda what what was tommy lasordo what sort of thing noticing him up in 55 dodges and uh so we became friends immediately and he did some terrific things for example he was very federal with ronald reagan so when ronald reagan was in some airlines on the west coast they had a huge honorary uniform in washington loaded with dignitaries their two speeches features was morally thatcher and probably slaughter a wall of thatcher spoken call me since he tried she's got a five-minute standing ovation now it's his turn okay daughter gets up and says you know i knew i'd have to give the speech in my life i worked on it for months in fact he said i worked on it the three o'clock this morning finally got a just right came into the lobby i lost my speech i fell on the floor and margaret thatcher found it i guess his wife got upset at one point because she thought he loved baseball more than he loved her yeah they had a great response yeah what happened when he came later at two o'clock in the morning and she says tommy you always come in late you always do something with baseball i said i think you love baseball more than me but i love you more than football basketball so what made you leave that to go to the commissioner's office what was the impetus that uh that caused you to make that move well uh the commission's office was something that was just you know the head of tv and balcony and it was a preschool job but i got to do uh baseball fever there so it really became a very institutional thing i had a lot of fun doing it and then when i left there after five years i went on my own company i don't think we should skip over what you just said because most people probably don't realize but the major league baseball slogan baseball fever catch it that's your slogan right yes it is yes it is you created that yeah i created the spots too it was a lot of fun it caught on it really caught on and the goal your marketing goal uh obviously was to increase attendance and if i read correctly attendance went from 1.2 to 1.7 million people right when you came out with that slogan i know in advertising the number one thing you do for a product to find out who the best prospect is the one part people who consume the majority of the product so i knew in baseball i knew exactly what the best prospect was there's a guy sitting at home watching television i listen to radio that's why the whole campaign was designed to get them off that couch and come out with a ball fall that's why baseball even has it all the spots we ran for actual footage shots and it kind of became very popular obviously and it still hangs around today yeah after all these years you also i believe uh helped create the major league baseball logo right that's right i uh believe it or not the american league and the local and the national logo there was no mentioning level so like i decided when i joined the commission's office the first thing we needed so i got a homeless firm good designers they came up with the logo the major look that you see today yeah i think and you said that everybody thought it was based on harm in calibre not true uh everybody thought it was based on harman killebrew and that was not true all right caliber clan was but it was not true he claimed it but it's not true i think the greatest part of the logo is the fact that uh it looks like it could be a right-handed or a left-handed batter absolutely that's one of the challenges could be a right-hander left-handed better and you found that artist right oh yeah oh yeah it was terrific his name was jerry dior dior oh my goodness so now you have this persona i don't know whether it's called whether you write a blog what do you call it is it a blog is it a what the story i use yeah i i i i had my my best friend in advertising was a guy called alcohol he was a tv artist and he was also a very famous cartoonist that cartoons running in esquire and playboy and he was very very but i remember he had a neighbor who was a terrific fan and so the uh the daily moves in a series they would present a subject and invite people to write in pro and con subject this week was pigeon pigeons in new york love of a hater well did you a pigeon no hater from a promise excuse me pigeon bubba from the frog wrote this terrific thing he was invited on the show and alfonso's neighbor for the patient movement he was divided on the show it's going to be a live debate on a sunday afternoon that sunday morning almost his neighbor got nervous and asked our boss to go in this place so how about sweating this place and he said the first five minutes pizza hater from a cross vision lover vision hater from the problem he took a lousy bird carry disease and stuff now pigeon brother from queens our parts gets up towards the moment says i agree with the previous speaker not much of a debate [Laughter] so i so why have you kept him as part of your uh writings because he was such a funny guy he did a lot of funny things and we went to lunch two or three times a week for 60 years and we had a lot of experiences so he got parkinson's disease and i was in the hospital i'd visit him and he met me he was okay but he had a tough time talking so one day i was talking to him when i get ready to leave and i get to the door and i try to go back and i hugged him first time ever died and i said to my wife i want to do stories people who knew almost loved him i'm gonna do some stories on how far to keep his name and his memory alive so i started in 2010 with b and alpha we've been doing two or three a week and it's his cartoons are great we get some very funny stories that's an amazing number of writings that you do um so that explains your friendship without funds i know there's a couple other people outside of baseball that you've had some really good relationships with talk about your relationship with rocky graziano the box rocky lived in the same neighborhood i did and i'd see him all the time we go to the bakery and we got talked i remember when rocky marciano was killed in a plane club i have to bump the grand rocky graziano i said too bad about rocky marciano he was always freeloading showing them right by hitching the rider so one day it fell on i saw this little cut from the newspaper the old numbers on it was in terms of his divorce so i said to him you got to kind of take deposit box so we finally we went and made funny [Music] that his daughter went to clean the apartment took the waste paper basket into everything his visa cards is passport that says his worst nightmare oh my gosh it's funny but it's not funny one other story about alpha my brother and i are rushed from at least 58 street cool mama so one day and jackie kennedy came in with this older fella so he sat down and all the way out i said alcohol don't do anything don't cause any problem her brother upset walk by the table bye watch out he looks at jackie kennedy he nods his head she looks back at him and she knocks back your life experiences are amazing you know there are a couple of people i don't i don't know who they are the kiwano brothers who are they clubhouse men they'll be okay they'll be kiwana but the dodger clubhouse but yoshiwana was with the chicago coast for years and years when the ridley family sold the club to the trivia cup there was a clause in the contract they could not fire he had a place and a sailor had on backwards that ended up in the hall of faith they were a very funny guy yeah they were a great great company great company yeah no question about it uh all right you uh you alluded to or i alluded to um the being in a hotel room with jimmy stewart i don't know this story at all so you're gonna have to fill us all in he had a uh whose anniversary dinner centennial dinner in washington dc and uh what i wanted to do was we wanted to do a wreck it out and it was a terrific but i i in my head her genie stewart as the narrator i accept it immediately i'm not even sure what you paid them by doing this ceremony we had invited the hall of fame players they use the audio from jimmy stewart which was terrific very very moving moments oh my goodness that's a that is a great story i i don't know it seems like anybody that met you like you yeah i had a lot of fun yeah i'm sure you did i never did when lasorda was in town he'd always go to the carnegie telecontestant and would sit there next thing knows all the comments would come in i had a young man and they'd come in and actually know the table was jammed so all the way out i said that was sort of i said who picked up the tab he stopped and said look the two things we never talk about and his religion and who could accept the dead as long as you didn't have to and i guess he didn't have to it's fine i do want to remind anybody now that if you have a question for tom it's a good time to get it in here because i now want to talk to you about and you know at your stage in life i am always amazed at all the things that you continue to accomplish and now i hear you're actually writing a book that's right i'll tell you the next name of the book what is the name i'm gonna give you the name what happened was we're good historians were flying in the dodger plane they're playing crashes and they're out and identifying a bird bodies here's pvlings and gil hodges and jackie roberts and there's this guy unidentified friend so that's the name of my book unidentified friend what what keeps you going tom i mean you're not a young man what keeps you going i enjoy first of all i enjoy doing the columns for me and alcohol stories it's terrific i've been doing it for 11 years now so they're a lot of fun and i get a lot of playback from it we started out with maybe 50 or 60 on our email list we're now up to the thousands thousands so it's a lot of fun a lot of satisfaction so what's what's a typical day now i know you're you're obviously busy writing you're you probably are in front of your computer a lot um you live at the westchester country club i have one of the rooms is my office it's a lot of fun here uh ralph brinker used to live in this building and so everybody has a lot of fun i remember uh jim kyle the old pitcher was waiting down the lobby waiting for ralph to go to breakfast so i popped into him he told me he broke paw or infamous i guess for uh one bad i did give ralph a line that he used all the time the line was i lost a game but i want a friend he and he bobby thompson became good friends is that right i did not know that bobby thompson with the huge home run yeah didn't he tell you once though he should have thrown at his head didn't he tell you you should have thrown at him no no he he uh he just hit a good pitch i do i want a question from one of our viewers can you tell us about the best game you ever watched in person well there's a games where the maggio had some terrific games and uh i can't eliminate it i remember one game uh as far as announcing lynch you were in boston and uh i just were playing and then we're going to jail in the game i looked and it was a storm coming before regular city you could see two red began they wanted to get to making an official game of course the dodgers were winning and the braves were stalling so red was giving his play by play at the same time he's deciding the storm as it's coming in at any minute it's going to rain and cancel the game but it's very exciting he did a perfect job you saw don larson's perfect game also right yeah i was in the stands i was a spectator that was something i was going to say that had to be i mean i listened to that game on the radio and that's still special for me in dodger town rogers had four instructors that had gill hodges uh clem leblanc carver and duke snyder they were sitting at his table and they were talking and finally they all had ailments and uh bad backs bad legs at one point bob franken got up and slowly started to shift his feet duke snyder says who are you rushing to i have another question from one of our uh viewers where was the baseball field when you played at lafayette excuse me where was the go ahead uh i can't think of the name of the field fisher field was it where fisher stadium is now that was it and uh do you have any lafayette stories about your baseball career uh charlie gilbert was the first most he was very very good tony cartini was a shortstop and i was a second baseman well yeah that was fun tech robins uh from lafayette terrific football player a terrific picture you signed with the yankees it's interesting uh you played for charlie gelbert and years later when i pitched against lafayette charlie gilbert was still the head coach obviously a great career for him you know baseball is is getting i don't want to say a bad rap but a lot of people saying it's too long it's hard to watch it do you have those similar feelings or can you still sit in front of a game uh in front of the tv and watch very bothering of the new stats they're coming up with i mean pos what happened to the old ron's hits and errors and uh they're making it very very confusing and they don't have that there's no reason to do it it's right simple keep it simple do you still enjoy it do you still enjoy watching again very much so very much yeah you know every every time there's a ball game you never know what's going to happen you never know what's going to happen so this is a good time of the year for you watching the playoffs oh yeah very exciting and the giants dodgers tonight should be a special game yeah the uh i always had a lot of fun to dodge they were a crippled organization o'malley's walter and peter o'malley which is great do you think the game's too long or is there anything you would do besides some of these stats that nobody understands the game is the game you know if it's a if it's a good game it could be four hours long you're gonna be interested the problem is when it's a they drag out the game but the pitches take forever to pitch and the batteries get in and out of the so are you a lifetime yankee fan or a lifetime dodgers fan or just a baseball fan i'm not both dodgers and yankees yeah club i joined the sword he was a terrific manager he did a lot of funny things you know it was a yankee dodger world series and uh florida was a fan man in brooklyn uh and uh new york and the yankees from the first two games they now go back to the uh california and the night before there's a dinner so after the dinner american virginia wife and lasagna says where you going i'll drive it that's a walking through dodger stadium i walked down to the mezzanine box i said tommy i want you to imagine tomorrow that's your marriage what happens is that fat number two walks after another balance valenzuela especially the trigger game the question is he gets into a little trouble either take them out or not in this landmark section they're messing with yourself or even been there your fat head you got you this fall or as it turned out and the actual game that situation took place with valenzuela and the sort of left dugout went to the mound and kept him in the game and he ended up feeling great afterwards the new skies and the media basket what possessed you to keep him in the game and the sort of soulmate company said okay i didn't want to hear that mom in the mezzanine section so he got some help managing that night uh we have a question you know there's a number of student athletes who are watching this tonight uh and obviously uh you know learning about all these great stories do you have any advice for young people who are attending a college right now and as you see how your life went and panned out any advice for any of them all i know is if you're gonna be a ball player no matter what you're gonna do you really have to work at it no kidding you have to work at it and uh do the best you can you never know when you can you can help a close never know that's true in any walk of life right that's right as you reflect back i think maybe as you were getting ready to go to lafayette the last thing you probably thought you would ever be is a publicity guy with an ad agency um not really what happened was i always like to write and uh while i was at lafayette i took a lot of writing as an assistant publicity i kind of enjoyed it and uh when i got out of college is there something special about your lafayette experiences i mean is it did you do you run into some some great professors or great what i did like about laptop and what brought me to it was it was terrific in science and engineering like the local different engineering course i knew i'd have to work at it and uh so i really had to apply myself and that worked very well and helped me open my life you have to apply so i know you get a lot of uh lafayette guys who visit you from time to time uh john lee john leon tells me story after story yeah of people that stopped by to see you charlie berry we did that with amazing [Music] and how about you know another name that just popped into my head uh sandyco facts that's somebody that you probably uh also had some experiences with yeah sandy's a good friend of mine he lives near me in beautiful florida so we go to dinner right but at one point i told my wife look at the dinner i want you to take a picture of me and sandy be sure to get our hands for sending his huge hands he had his picture but said he took my hand next to sandy's had his huge hand sandy's a terrific guy uh you know when he came up when he first came up uh he was a terrible i mean he threw the ball it was high wide but he's too hard and what happened was when the dodgers moved to l.a uh sherry uh norm sherry i've known from the show that norm sherry was a catcher and he went to sandy between sandy so when you go into a wind-up position first your control is terrific and your ball takes off from that moment on sandy gave up the wind-up went to the stretch position and he had five or six years now he might have been the greatest pitcher they've ever lived he was just one thing that's amazed me about him uh he happened to be a member of a club up our way up here uh and he would go and hit buckets of balls constantly in fact the rumor was he never played the course he only practiced i i was amazed by his size he's not a big man at all standing yes he's six more she's not too stupid it didn't appear that he was that big yeah have you did you play some golf with him his first wife was uh the daughter of i can't take the thing anyway cindy is married three times so recently we went to dinner with him i've never seen you so happy and he pointed to his new wife her name is jane clark she's so grateful terrific oh that's that's good for him yeah sandy's lived in the same place in bureau for years now making walks around town people pay attention to it but no one you know bothers them tell us a little bit about your family well i have of course my wife i have two son and a daughter and five grandkids uh my son was a football player tristan uh-huh wow yeah do you get there to see those games uh he's in california so i see him when he comes into town uh that's okay uh how's your health my health is great my health is terrific my wife's had a problem she has parkinson's so the last couple years she's had a tough time when do you think the book will be done uh pretty soon i have a lot of it done well that's that's lot of amazing follow my stories from me and alpha stories a lot of stories uh unidentified friends so there's a lot of good stuff in there a lot of father jackie robertson father gill hodges hill hiding they're all duke schneider tripping guys how would you describe the genre what genre is it what genre what genre is it is it a uh comic or uh oh it's a it's a story about a baseball a baseball player okay yes what they were like but they were somewhat of a terrific guy it's great guys i would be anxious to read it thank you tom we're out of time uh just fabulous talking to you the stories are are great and i look forward to uh getting to the bookstore and buying your book thank you very much and i'll tell everybody i i know that guy and your friends yeah thank you tom thank you bye now that is the 10th edition of primetime parts i will remind you that the 11th edition is coming up on december 9th we will be talking to leslie ann howard class of 76 she is part of the first female class ever to attend lafayette college so that should be a very interesting conversation she has had an amazing amazing career in public service so we will chat with leslie ann howard on december 9th my utmost thanks to tom for taking time to be with us tonight i always thank all of you for spending time with us so for all of us on prime to time parts i'm gary laubach good night everybody