About Me
Harry Caray (born Harry Christopher Carabina, March 1, 1914 — February 18, 1998), was a beloved TV and radio broadcaster for four Major League Baseball teams, lastly the Chicago Cubs of the National League. Prior to becoming the Cubs' main play-by-play broadcaster, he worked TV and on KMOX Radio for the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago White Sox. He also worked one season (1970) for the Oakland Athletics. He died of a heart attack in 1998 after a series of strokes.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Caray made his debut in 1945 with the Cardinals, but was fired in 1969 amid rumors of a personal relationship with the daughter-in-law of August Busch, Jr., who owned both the Cardinals and the Anheuser-Busch breweries. Caray was well known to his Cardinal radio audience for drinking and advertising a competing brand of beer before the Busch family acquisition of the team. Caray attributed his firing to a business-related grudge. After a season with the Athletics, Caray broadcast for the White Sox from 1971 to 1981, and then for the Cubs from 1982 to 1997.He was extremely popular among the citizens of St. Louis and later, of Chicago, and was known as much for his public carousing and jovial spirit as for his sportscasting; it was not for nothing that he was proclaimed "The Mayor of Rush Street" during his Chicago years, referencing Chicago's famous bar-hopping neighborhood. In the years before his death, his skills as a broadcaster gradually declined due to illness and the effects of age, a remarkable recovery from a 1987 stroke notwithstanding. This led some people to say that he should retire, and in fact he was retained well beyond the normal mandatory retirement age of WGN-TV announcers. But his popularity was such that the normal rules were suspended. His tendency to mispronounce players' names (often humorously, such as trying to say a complicated name backwards), was widely parodied.In addition to baseball, Caray called University of Missouri football and St. Louis Hawks basketball in the 1950s and '60s. Nationally, he broadcast three World Series (all involving the Cardinals) and three Cotton Bowl games.
