Blue White Illustrated

So, in September 1996, I walked into the radio booth at Beaver Stadium and met Fran Fisher. Little did I know that would be the start of a longtime friend- ship that continues to this day. In fact, it was advice from Fran some 25 years later that triggered my return to State Col- lege after living elsewhere for 3½ decades and eventually led to me being hired as the first director of the Penn State All-Sports Museum. But that's another story. I worked in the booth with Bender, Fisher and Bergstein from 1966 through '69. I spotted the home games and an oc- casional away game when I could get there. My full-time job all this time was as a TV news producer, assignment edi- tor and part-time reporter for Channel 11 in Pittsburgh. I left the station at the end of the 1969 regular season for a better TV-radio job in Detroit, where I contin- ued being a spotter for Michigan home games originated by our radio station. From 1970 through '82, I saw only one game at Beaver Stadium, and that was as a fan when Penn State lost to third- ranked Nebraska, 21-7, in 1980. But I was at many bowl games, either cover- ing the game for Football News or as a spectator. After moving back east in 1983, to the Washington, D.C., area, I was simply a fan, and my wife, Carole, and I became season-ticket holders. Since leaving the press box and be- coming a fan, I have always listened to the radio broadcasts of the game while sitting in the stands. That was natural after all the fun I had as a spotter. I'm not alone in this, but it's not for every- one. We listeners are more into the game than all the pomp and circumstances around us. I still stand up and cheer Zombie Nation's "Kernkraft 400" once in a while, but often I have my binocu- lars zeroed in on something on the field or sideline and wish I had a direct line to Steve and Jack in the booth to tell them because they haven't seen it yet. After the publication of my first book, The Penn State Football Encyclopedia, in 1998, I got to know George Paterno because we had the same publisher. To this day, I wish I had been able to spend more time with him before his retire- ment in 2000 and death in 2001. The beat writers loved him, and many of them still reminiscence about after- noons and evenings around a bar at an out-of-town game or listing to him and his brother argue politics at a private media reception. As the years passed, I became friends with Steve Jones and then with Jack Ham, primarily through Dan Radakovich, who was Jack's position coach at Penn State. Dan is the true fa- ther of Linebacker U, and Jack wrote the foreword for the autobiography Dan wrote with my assistance, "Bad Rad: Football Nomad." So I wasn't an outsider when I re- ceived permission to watch Steve and Jack and the broadcast crew during the Ohio State game last October. I had been inside the Penn State radio booth a couple of times in the previous 20 years, but those were brief visits to say hello. This was different, but it was a time warp. I looked around and not much seemed to have changed. MAKING THE CALL Corey, left, Ham, center, and Jones call last year's Blue- White Game. Ham and Jones have been working side by side in PSU's radio booth since 2000. Photo by Steve Manuel

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