October 1977: The Cruelest, Greatest Month

The WCBS radio broadcast of Game 6 of the 1977 World Series.


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© Tim Peeler, 2017

I have no idea how my dad talked my mom into letting me skip school for most of a week in the middle of October 1977. There we were, however, on a Tuesday afternoon, packing up his black Ford pickup, hitching up his 14 ½-foot fiberglass boat and heading towards Harkers Island on the North Carolina Outer Banks.

We probably had a few days off from school, and I wriggled out of practice for my eighth-grade football team. He knocked off from work as a plant engineer for a local tool-making company. At the age of 12, it was the first time I remember going east of Interstate-95, a full world away from our little three-bedroom house tucked deeply into the western North Carolina foothills.

Fishing was something we had done—grudgingly, on my part—since I was an infant, when my dad used to put a couple of bottles of formula in his tackle box and could make dual use of cloth diapers as hand towels after cleaning his daily catch.

We spent countless hours as a family on that old boat on Lake Norman, buzzing from crappie hole to crappie hole, trying to catch enough fish to fill the freezer. Sometimes we did, but often we just sat on the lake, turning pinker by the hour and sweating like a ham steak in a frying pan.

What made this trip special was that it was boys-only. No sisters, no mom. Along with a couple of dad’s fishing buddies from work, we were going to catch and prepare all of our own meals for the week. We were going to stay in a hotel near the beach. We weren’t going to go to bed at any particular time.

First, however, we had to get there in an uncomfortable, un-air-conditioned truck with nothing but an 8-track tape player, an AM/FM radio and set of speakers that seemed to be little more than a set of low-tech kazoos. From foothills to lighthouse, it was about 10 hours.

Oh god, the music. Three songs alternated on radio playlists that October:  “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone, “Nobody Does It Better” by Carly Simon and “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” by Crystal Gayle. I hate them all to this day.

What I really wanted to hear, like all junior high boys at the time, was Southern-style rock, the marriage of blues, country, folk and heavy metal, perfected by the Allman Brothers and Tom Petty, but also practiced by a handful of other bands with three guitars and long hair that we often heard on WROQ-FM in Charlotte.

With an abundance of good taste, dad had no interest in my music.

What we settled on, as we drove through the night towards the coast, was Game 6 of the 1977 World Series—played 40 years ago tonight at the old Yankee Stadium in the Bronx—

We listened to a lot of baseball on the radio when we were driving at night. The call-letter jingle for WOWO radio of Fort Wayne, Indiana, still echoes in my memory. Besides, the rare television entertainment we had at home came from WRET-TV, a UHF station in Charlotte owned by Ted Turner that had an evening lineup of comedy shows: “Sanford and Son,” “Bewitched” and the Atlanta Braves.

I never much liked the Braves, other than Hank Aaron and Biff Pocoroba. Back then, my only athletic devotion was to the West Lincoln Junior High, the Washington Redskins and the Boston Red Sox, the latter of which I knew only through  Monday Night Football halftime highlights and two-day old boxscores in the Charlotte Observer.

I became a Red Sox fan two Octobers before, watching the 1975 World Series on a 15-inch black-and-white television. My favorite players were outfielders Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice, two guys I later learned were as cuddly and lovable as feral cats. Didn't change my opinion of them, of course, nor my quest to collect every baseball card that featured either of them, something that ultimately failed thanks to the Fleer and Donruss corporations.

Dad has been a Dodgers fan since birth and a baseball player from the time he started walking. The first book I ever remember seeing him read was Roger Kahn’s Boys of Summer.

We bonded over baseball and an aversion to all Yankees, which were defined in our part of North Carolina as anyone from Catawba County to Canada. The pinstriped ones from New York, those swept by the beloved Reds in the 1976 World Series, were the worst. Like most non-Yankee fans, the player we disliked the most was hired gun Reggie Jackson, the controversial outfielder who had signed with the Yankees in the off-season as a free agent after one season with Baltimore. He had been tolerable when he played for Charlie Finley and Billy Martin, and alongside North Carolina native Jim "Catfish" Hunter, with the Oakland A’s, but his big personality made the insufferable Big Apple even less sufferable.

That night, we hoped the Dodgers would tie the series, which stood at 3-2 after they won two nights earlier in Los Angeles, thanks to a Don Sutton complete-game, 10-4 victory. Burt Hooton was on the mound for Tommy Lasorda’s Dodgers and Mike Torrez was pitching for the Martin's Yankees. After a first-inning error by Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent, Steve Garvey tripled to give the Dodgers a 2-0 lead.

Jackson came up in the bottom of the second and, with no regard for anyone, walked on four pitches. Couldn’t even be bothered to swing against Hooton’s dodging fastball. Chris Chambliss tied the game in the next at-bat with a two-run homer. The Dodgers retook the lead on a solo homer by Reggie Smith, but he was the last good Reggie to hit a home run that evening.

Jackson saw three more pitches in the game, from three different pitchers. He planted each of them over the outfield wall, three home runs on three consecutive swings. He had a two-run shot off Hooton, a two-run shot off Elias Sosa and a solo shot off knuckleballer Charlie Hough, becoming only the second player in World Series history, after Babe Ruth in 1926 and ’28, to hit three homers in a single game. Of his series-leading nine hits, five flew out of the park. He scored 10 runs and drove in eight, a postseason performance that still stands 40 years later. There was absolutely no denying his title as “Mr. October.”

We drove silently through the night to our inlet-side hotel.

The fishing trip was better than I could've imagined. We took dad’s little boat a couple miles out into the ocean, where we stumbled into a school of blues that filled our coolers. We got up in the morning and tooled around Cape Lookout, in the shadow of the lighthouse, just because we could. We dragged the boat onto the beach of Shackleford Banks, where the curious wild horses came right up to the boat to watch us cast our nets for bait.

It couldn’t have been more perfect.

The morning we left, Oct. 21, we managed to get reception again on the truck radio as we drove off Harkers Island. They were still talking about Jackson on the sports report, but the lead news was of a plane crash the night before that took the lives of three members of a Southern rock band, shortly after leaving a concert a concert in Greenville, South Carolina. It took three more top-of-the-hour updates to learn that the band involved was Lynyrd Skynyrd, which lost founder Ronnie Van Zant, singer Steve Gaines and his sister, Cassie, a backup singer, along with both pilots and an assistant road manager.

They played their last show at Greenville's Auditorium, a place where I later drove by every day to work for the Greenville News and Piedmont, where I covered Furman Paladin basketball and where I saw my only Bob Dylan concert.

I don’t remember the ride home from the Outer Banks. The Yankees had won the World Series. Jackson had become a hero of Ruthian proportions. And my favorite version of Southern rock had died somewhere in the woods of Gillsburg, Mississippi.

Through the years, I made peace with Yankees of all sorts and moved on from provincial music of the American South. But 40 years later, I still get a little blue whenever I hear the name Reggie Jackson or the song "Free Bird."