As part of Major League Baseball’s upcoming event at Rickwood Field, AL.com and The Birmingham News will be producing weekly stories that showcase the history of Rickwood Field, and history of baseball in the state of Alabama.

“Rickwood: The legacy of America’s oldest ballpark” takes a deep dive at stories from the Negro Leagues to MLB icons playing at the historic venue, and how things are progressing as “MLB at Rickwood Field” takes place on June 20, 2024 between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals.

Rebecca Remley remembers visits to her grandparents’ house in Fort Smith, Ark., some 420 miles from the front steps of Busch Stadium in downtown St. Louis.

It was the 1960s; there was no air conditioning, and windows were open throughout the military base. Radios were dialed in, and Remley remembers walking down the street to the sounds of Harry Caray and Jack Buck calling the play-by-play of a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game.

“You’d just walk up and down the street, and never miss a play,” said Remley, 66, a lifelong Cardinals fan who lives in the Glen Iris neighborhood of Birmingham, approximately 500 miles from the Gateway Arch but a mere 4-mile jaunt to Rickwood Field, where the Cardinals will serve as the “home” team for their June 20 game against the San Francisco Giants during Major League Baseball’s “A Tribute to the Negro Leagues.”

It’s the first known in-season Major League Baseball in Alabama. While it will honor Willie Mays, a Giants alum, the official home team for the game in Birmingham is the Cardinals. And that carries a bit of symbolism for the St. Louis squad, as historians often recognize the Cardinals as the favorite professional sports team for the “Greatest Generation” who lived in states to the West and South of St. Louis.

There are several factors that play into the perfect mix for the Cardinals in the years before the Braves relocated to Atlanta in 1966, and the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958: Geography, startling personalities who now populate Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame, and a 50,000-watt powerhouse of an AM radio station with signal that still stretches into the Gulf of Mexico.

“I definitely remember that if we were in a car traveling, we’d pull up KMOX and listen for as far as we could,” said Sharon Owens, 62, a lifelong Cardinals fan and resident of Morris – 482 miles from Busch Stadium. “I remember hearing Mike Shannon and Jack Buck.”

50,000-watt powerhouse

Indeed, the radio station Cardinals fans today recall their parents and grandparents tuning into was and still remains 1120 AM on the dial, branded as “Voice of St. Louis,” and considered in the 1960s as a pioneer in talk radio.

KMOX has been the broadcast home of the Cardinals since Garnett Marks – dubbed as “Rhino Bill,” named after a tire shop that was advertising with the radio station at the time – first called Cardinals games in 1927.

A few years later, the powerful radio transmitter was installed. From there, the station’s reputation was born as the Cardinals fan base began to be rooted not only in eastern Missouri and southern Illinois, but beyond into Southern states like Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi.

Radio listeners in Alabama could also pick up the games and KMOX can still be heard – depending on the weather and interference from other signals – well into the Deep South. KMOX is said to be heard in over 40 states and as well as East Africa, Guam, and Canada.

National publications have taken note. The station was the subject of a 2013 story in The New York Times entitled “Trying to Outrun the Cardinals’ Long Reach,” in which reporter David Waldstein left Busch Stadium ahead of Game 4 of the World Series between the Cardinals and Boston Red Sox, and chronicled his KMOX listening experience as he drove South into northern Mississippi.

KMOX personalities have also been identified in South Alabama. According to Bill Wilkerson, a late radio broadcaster who worked at KMOX from 1969-1999, he was once recognized by a fan once during a pre-game banquet ahead of the Senior Bowl in Mobile, according to a quote reprinted in a 2014 Sports Illustrated piece about the station.

Mobile is over 640 miles from Busch Stadium.

“I reached for a seat at the same time, and I said, ‘Excuse me,’” Wilkerson said in the article. “The guy said, ‘I know who you are.’ I said, ‘I’m not from Mobile.’ He said, ‘I am, but I know who you are. You’re from KMOX. I listen to you every night.’”

Bob Costas, the legendary NBC Sports broadcaster who was full-time with the station from 1974-1981, told AL.com last month that until MLB’s expansion in the 1950s, the Cardinals were the westernmost and southernmost team in Major League Baseball.

“KMOX had 50,000 watts and 200-plus stations as part of the network,” Costas said. “They had fans in the Southwest. They had fans in the Southeast. That includes Alabama. They had probably the most far-flung fan base for a long period of time. It was because of where they were geographically stationed and because of the reach of KMOX and the stations in its network.”

Jim Walker, a professor emeritus of communications at St. Xavier University in Chicago and author of “Crack of the Bat: A History of Baseball on the Radio,” said while KMOX was an “important influence,” it was the “very aggressive use of a radio network” that stretched as far South as Jackson, Miss., that helped expand the Cardinals fan base during and after World War II.

“KMOX is the station people remember the most, and it’s the most influential of those stations, but they had a tremendous number of stations in smaller markets and larger ones,” Walker said. “They realized quickly that radio, once embracing it in the 1940s, was a way to expand its brand. The Cardinals were, by far, the most aggressive franchise in spreading radio. And it went out far – Texas, Arkansas, more western states to Colorado … there wasn’t anything else.”

Legendary broadcasters, teams

Strong radio personalities helped sell the game and expand the fan base beyond its St. Louis roots.

But the bombastic days of Harry Caray’s “Holy Cow!” didn’t happen for more than 20 years until after the first Cardinals game on KMOX was broadcast in 1927. Marks, the broadcaster, wasn’t an experienced baseball announcer at the time but was a singer who had a baritone voice and wrote for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, according to Donna Halper, a radio historian and consultant who has researched and written about baseball broadcasting history for the Society for American Baseball Research.

“The owner of the radio station went into the newspaper’s newsroom and (selected the broadcaster) based on whether they know baseball,” said Halper, who is known as the radio disc jockey that discovered the rock band Rush in 1974. “It wasn’t state-of-the-art. These guys sound like they are reading a script. But if I’m hearing Major League Baseball, and if I’m listening to a game in 1929, I’m excited to be hearing the game at all. They were like the pioneers.”

Over time, the presence of the game on the radio helped to develop deep bonds between baseball fans and the radio broadcasters. The Cardinals had plenty of notable personalities who delivered the games on KMOX: Frank Laux (1929-1943), Dizzy Dean (1941-1946), Caray (1945-1969), Jack Buck (1954-1958 and then 1961-2001), Joe Garagiola (1955-1962), and Mike Shannon (1972-2021).

“By the 30s, there is a state of the art that is developing and it’s a theater of the imagination,” Halper said.

KMOX’s wide reach made them an integral fabric of the game for fans in so-called “SEC Country.”

And perhaps there was none more enthusiastic and recognizable as the bespectacled Caray who was creating a national reputation while broadcasting Cardinals games on KMOX years ahead of his tenure as the affable broadcaster on WGN-TV calling the Chicago Cubs games and directing the Wrigley Field faithful in singing “Take Me out to the Ballgame.”

The enthusiasm once caught the attention of the country’s most popular singer, Elvis Presley, who listened to the Cardinals while in Memphis, Tenn.

“Elvis was a big fan of Harry Caray,” Costas said. “When he found out Harry was in town sometime in the 60s to broadcast a St. Louis University basketball game, he sent his limo to Harry’s hotel to pick him up and bring him to Graceland, have some Budweiser’s, and talk about the Cardinals.”

Halper said the relationships developed by Cardinals fans and their radio broadcasters – not unsimilar to other baseball markets, although over a wider geographic reach – was underscored by the number of fans going to ballgames carrying their radios.

“I’ve gone to tons of games (in general),” Halper said. “I went to games where I physically saw people sitting in the ballpark watching the game and listening to the radio play-by-play on their transmitter. People bonded with their announcer. They thought of their announcer as a best friend. Radio back then was not adversarial. It was like a best friend.”

It also didn’t hurt that the Cardinals were successful during radio’s ascent, winning three world championships in the 1930s and 40s, two in the 60s, and the National League pennant in 1968. Even during the 1950s, when the Cardinals were not competing for championships, the franchise was boosted by the popularity of Stan Musial, considered one of the best hitters in baseball history.

“That’s a big part of it,” Costas said. “When radio is becoming part of the story of baseball, you have the Gashouse Gang of the 30s, you’ve got great championship teams in the 40s. And even though they didn’t win a pennant from ‘46 to ‘64, you still had the whole career of Stan Musial as the best hitter in the National League. And they always had great broadcasters. Harry Caray and Jack Buck at the same time. It’s a whole lot of broadcasting talent.”

Black listeners

The Cardinals and their regional expansion occurred while the Negro Leagues had almost no presence on the radio. In fact, radio didn’t exist at all for Black baseball players until the first Negro League Baseball game was broadcast on Aug. 7, 1942 – 15 years after the first Cardinals game was broadcast on KMOX.

“If you were Black back then, and wanted to know what the Negro Leagues were doing, you physically went to the game,” Halper said. “There was a stadium announcer who would do the play-by-play. He would announce the teams and talk about what was happening and what the manager was up to and chatter between the innings and do an interview here or there.”

She added, “While I’m thrilled the people of the South could hear the games thanks to powerhouse stations like KMOX, as a media historian, it makes me sad about who couldn’t get a fan base that they might have gotten had it not been for segregation.”

Radio stations before the 1960s, Halper said, had limited options for Black broadcasts. She said most of the stations broadcast Black musicians, but a Negro Leagues broadcast was mostly off-limits.

Halper said there is no evidence of a Birmingham Black Barons broadcast, despite the phenomenal appeal of the 1948 squad and the arrival of a teenage outfielder – Willie Mays.

“It was the segregated South, and there are no Black owned radio stations until 1949,” she said, referring to WERD in Atlanta, founded by civil rights activist Jesse Blayton.

Where the Black audiences go? Halper said it would not have been surprising for Southern Black people to turn the dial to KMOX and listen to the Cardinals, even though the franchise did not integrate until 1954, when Tony Alston became the club’s first Black ballplayer. The Giants, a franchise in New York at the time, integrated in 1949.

Costas said that for Black baseball fans, the Dodgers became the rooting interest after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947.

“I know a whole lot of Black fans who attached themselves to the Dodgers after that with not just Jackie Robinson, but Don Newcomb and Roy Campanella and others,” Costas said. “I wouldn’t say the Cardinals were the only team of the South. The Dodgers, for quite a while, if you didn’t have a team of your own, the Dodgers were your team if you were African American.”

The Cardinals had appeal, though, because they could be readily accessed on the radio.

Lou Brock, the Hall of Fame Cardinals outfielder from 1964-1979, recounted a story in his Hall of Fame speech in which he remembers listening to a Cardinals game while living in Collinston, La. — 503 miles to Busch Stadium. He remembered listening to the Brookley Dodgers face the Cardinals, with Caray and Buck doing the broadcast.

“Through KMOX, baseball fed my fantasies about what life offered,” Brock said.

Alabama loyalties

The availability of the Cardinals through KMOX also had an impact on a young James Barrow years before the Braves moved to Atlanta. He grew up in South Alabama, graduated high school in Mobile and spent his youth following the careers of Musial and Bob Gibson while listening to the games on the radio.

Barrow was a pastor and businessman in Bay Minette who died at age 75 last year following a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.

His son, Bill Barrow, a national politics reporter with The Associated Press who is based in Atlanta, can recall his dad taking him to Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta during the 1980s, when Bob Horner and Dale Murphy anchored a team that struggled for years with losing records. As a youngster, Bill Barrow did not realize his father was a Cardinals fan at a time he was taking his sons to Atlanta to watch Braves games.

“It wasn’t until 1996, when the Braves and Cardinals were in the (National League Championship Series) and I was at my freshman year at Auburn when, after watching (the Braves win) Game 7 at the frat house that I called my dad to celebrate,” Barrow, 45, said. “He sounded so down. It wasn’t until then, and I was 18 years old and a freshman in college, that he never had flipped his loyalties. He was just a good baseball dad who took his sons to Atlanta. I realized, then, that he’s a Cardinals fan.”

Barrow said he believes his dad developed his fandom because of that AM radio station with the powerful reaches to broadcast the games as far south as Mobile.

“There is a great irony here that the only team that developed that kind of loyalty from the Greatest Generation was the Yankees and that was because they were on TV on Saturdays a lot,” Barrow said. “For the Cardinals, the southeastern part of the U.S. was their fan base.”

The impact of KMOX and AM radio is much less in today’s era of streaming services, MLB Network packages, and Sirius XM where almost any game can be accessed through a subscription.

But the impact of having powerful KMOX radio capturing a fan base deep into Alabama, still resonates with a fan base dubbed, “Cardinals Nation.”

“There is no question to this day, since a lot of baseball fandom is passed sown generationally, there is no question that the Cardinals have fans in the South despite the arrival of the Braves,” Costas said. “But this idea that I’m eavesdropping 800 miles away on a game broadcast for really the Cardinals fans, that mystique is less. But it definitely had a mystique for a very long time.”