'Thanks for being my friend': Columbus radio icon Sam Simmermaker signs off after 64 years

COLUMBUS, Ind. – When Sam Simmermaker was a kid growing up in Star City in northwest Indiana, he could pick up St. Louis Cardinals’ games on the radio on WDZ out of Tuscola, Ill. The afternoon games. This was the late 1940s, before 50,000-watt powerhouse KMOX blasted Cardinals’ games to 44 states on a clear night.

In the late ‘40s, though, a Cardinal-loving kid living in Indiana had to get creative.

“What a struggle,” Simmermaker said with a wry smile. “A night I could pick up a station out of Miami, Oklahoma, by stringing a wire from the neighbor’s barn to our back porch.”

Harry Caray, the Cardinals’ radio broadcaster, painted those pictures for a generation of Cardinals’ fans. A young Simmermaker was enamored. With the Cardinals, of course. But so too with Caray’s precision calling the games.

“This was before the ‘showman’ portion of his career,” Simmermaker said. “He was an excellent baseball announcer. Just riveting.”

He did not realize it at the time, but those hours listening to Caray and the Cardinals set him on a path in his own career that – after 64 years with the same company, White River Broadcasting in Columbus – will officially come to a close Friday. At Simmermaker’s request, there will be little fanfare at WCSI 1010 AM to honor the man who called play-by-play for multiple generations of athletes in Columbus.

Simmermaker never had his own catchphrase; he borrowed “Holy Cow!” from Caray. But Bob Morrison, general manager at White River Broadcasting and a colleague of Simmermaker’s for 30 years, said there is a good reason.

“He wanted every broadcast to be about the young men and women who were playing the game,” Morrison said. “It was never about Sam. The main reason he never had his own catchphrase was because it was more important for him to say the names of the players correctly and staying on top of it all. You cannot fake the heart Sam puts into every broadcast. It’s impossible.”

There is another line, a message that comes from Simmermaker’s heart more than a catchphrase possibly could, that he hopes to leave listeners with when he signs off for the final time. It will likely come Friday when WCSI broadcasts its “Sign Off With Sam” program from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., with several local leaders coming in studio to pay tribute.

“I tell people I have just five words in parting,” Simmermaker said. “Thanks for being my friend.”

***

Simmermaker is 92. Let’s get that out of the way. Considering his mental and physical health, his age is truly just a number.

“His health has been excellent,” said Fran, his wife of 64 years. “He climbs those 54 bleachers at the football field, carrying that equipment. He never had a roadie, never had anybody set up for him.”

Despite his love of Cardinals’ radio, Simmermaker did not envision himself going into broadcasting. Not at first. He was a voracious reader growing up in Star City, a Pulaski County community that saw its school consolidate into Winamac High School in 1968.

He read the Chicago Tribune, South Bend Tribune, Indianapolis Star, Louisville Courier Journal and St. Louis Globe Democrat.

“My first love, if you will, was to be a sportswriter,” he said.

After he graduated from Star City in 1950, Simmermaker enrolled at Indiana University, which offered a bachelor’s degree in radio for the first time in 1950 and established its department of radio and television three years later. It was perfect timing for Simmermaker.

“I can’t tell you what turned the tide,” he said of his career path changing from newspaper to radio. “But I thought, ‘This sounds like a good idea.’ Maybe I could describe what happens as it happens as opposed to waiting until the next morning or afternoon to put my product out there.”

After a short stint in the Army, Simmermaker briefly worked for A.C. Neilsen ratings firm in Chicago before getting his first radio job with WKAM in Goshen, hosting “Wake up with Sam” in the mornings. From there he moved on to WTTV (after working for Ruben Advertising in Indianapolis for about three months), where was hired to write commercials in 1958. He also was on the air calling Indianapolis Indians’ games on TV, which he did until 1963.

But just a few days before he married Fran in December 1959, Simmermaker was called about a radio opening at WCSI in Columbus. The job was for an assistant news director and color for local sports broadcasts. The location was ideal, considering Fran was teaching home economics at Seymour (she taught for 38 years). Simmermaker called the general manager, Jack Douglas, and accepted, though he asked a favor.

“I said, ‘Can you wait until we get back from our honeymoon?’” he said. “We went to an exotic location: French Lick. It was about 35 miles from her hometown (tiny Campbellsburg in Washington County).”

Simmermaker officially started at WCSI on Jan. 1, 1960. He was 27 years old.

***

No one stays in the same job this long without loving it. No one stays in the same job this long, period. What keeps Simmermaker going?

“Mountain Dew,” he said.

He doesn’t drink coffee, tea or alcohol. Once he was asked to do a commercial for a beer sponsor when he worked the Indianapolis Indians’ games. He poured the beer in the glass and it filled with foam and spilled over the top. Cut!

Simmermaker was a natural on the air, though. When he started broadcasting at WCSI, Bill Stearman was the boys basketball coach at Columbus. The Bull Dogs were the toughest ticket in town, reaching the Final Four of the single class tournament in 1964. The 1968 team, led by Indiana All-Star and future Vanderbilt standout Tom Arnholt and Steve Welmer, who would go on to star at Evansville, played in the most memorable game of Simmermaker’s career.

It was the regional championship against Shelbyville, played at Columbus’ 7,000-plus capacity Memorial Gym. In front of an overflow crowd, Columbus rallied from a 14-point second half deficit for an 83-80 win.

“That was the game of the decade, I guess you could say,” Simmermaker said.

Columbus lost the next week in the semistate to Shortridge. Stearman led the ’64 team to the state finals and, after Columbus split into two high schools in 1972, led Columbus North to the state finals in ’75. When Simmermaker reached 30 years on the job in 1990, Stearman told the Columbus Republic: “He’s one of a kind. He is, I guess you could say, a tradition.”

The split into Columbus North and East created more work for Simmermaker. But work never seemed to bother him. For years, Simmermaker would report the local news and sports at 5:30 a.m., then various reports through the morning. In the evenings, he would take calls at home from coaches and players for his morning reports. If he was missing scores – and these were the days before cell phones – coaches could expect a call at home.

The Simmermakers’ children, daughter Joan and son Jeff, would have to use the pay phone down the street if they needed to make a call. Otherwise, they were on call to help compile results.

“Our phone,” Fran said, “was a business phone.”

He still compiles those scores and results. In the past decade or so, in addition to his radio duties, he posts the nightly results on his personal Facebook page. He will make the eight-minute drive from his home to the radio station at around midnight and record 4½- and 2½-minute broadcasts that air several times in the morning, along with appearing on colleague John Foster’s morning show.

“I could probably do it from home,” he said. “But I’m just not that electronically gifted or inclined.”

In his 64 years, Simmermaker estimates he has missed less than five assignments.

“One time I remember he was so hoarse that he couldn’t be on the broadcast,” said Fran, 88. “But he still went and kept score.”

Simmermaker never saw himself as the star. But for many of the athletes he covered, an interview with him might be the only time they are ever interviewed.

“There isn’t a bigger joy than hearing a story about how it was such a huge deal when Sam interviewed me when I was playing baseball or basketball or whatever,” Morrison said. “Because Sam was a star. And still is a star. That’s the legacy of what he has done and continues to do.”

Morrison, who started on the job in 1993, is nicknamed “Rapid Robert” by Simmermaker – an ode to former Cleveland Indians’ pitcher Bob Feller and Morrison’s lifelong favorite team. That is a Simmermaker staple: Nickname assignment.

***

Though his official last day is Friday, Simmermaker will broadcast a Hauser baseball game on Monday morning in the sectional semifinals at South Ripley. He will also have Columbus East’s game on Friday night in the sectional at Shelbyville and follow both teams as long as they go in the tournament.

Then what? Some part-time work? An occasional broadcast?

“No,” Simmermaker said. “I want to pull the plug completely.”

He still might get to a game on Friday nights. That is ingrained in him after more than six decades on the air. So is Fran’s tradition of turning on the radio to listen to her husband call the games. She had never been to a baseball game until their fourth or fifth date when Sam took her to a Cardinals-Reds game in Cincinnati.

“A doubleheader,” she said. “The longest day.”

But she does enjoy listening. Her Friday nights, after a long week of teaching, were for catching up on laundry or other jobs around the house.

“I’m a listener,” she said. “An avid listener.”

Not just sports. She runs into people in Columbus who remember finding out from Simmermaker that school was cancelled or what they were having for school lunch that day.

There was a time when Simmermaker thought being a baseball play-by-play announcer might be his calling. He sent tapes to Louisville, had an audition in Wood River, Ill., and once had an interview lined up in Moberly, Mo., for a job. “Maybe I can sneak into the Cardinal family in some manner,” he said. He was with his family in St. Louis at the time, watching his kids splash in the hotel pool. He knew Moberly might be a great stepping stone for him.

But he knew what he had at home.

“I called them and thanked them and said, ‘I’m going to stay here in St. Louis and enjoy the rest of the weekend,’” he said. “We loved the town of Columbus. It embraced us and continues to do so.”

Simmermaker’s awards are many. Indiana Sportscaster of the Year in 1976 and 1997 from the National Sportscasters and Sportswriter Association. He was inducted into the Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association Hall of Fame in 1998, the Indiana Associated Press Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006.

Those awards are great. But the real treat for Simmermaker is hearing from the fans who have listened to him over the years.

“The fans that stop by before the game, after the game, the fans that see you in the grocery store or on the street,” he said. “I think I’ll miss that association as much as calling the games. When you hear, ‘I heard you talk about my granddaughter on the radio, thank you very much.’ That kind of warms the cockles of my heart. It still does.”

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Sam Simmermaker hanging up microphone after 64 years on Columbus radio