In 1980 the Baltimore Orioles won 100 games. It was a great season. Except they didn't make the postseason. What does that have to do with Towson? Not much, but I happened to be in old Tiger Stadium the night the New York Yankees beat the Detroit Tigers to eliminate the Orioles from winning the American League East. It was September 26, 1980. How do I know the exact date? Because I was in Detroit to broadcast the Towson football game the next day against Wayne State.
There were 30,863 other people in Tiger Stadium that night besides me to watch the Yankees win 7-5. One of those 30,863 was my broadcast partner for the next day's football game, and one of my oldest and dearest friends, Steve Melewski. Many of you may know Steve from his coverage of the Orioles, or from his time at WBAL radio.
What we didn't know is that we would be spending longer than we thought in Detroit that weekend. We left with the team from BWI on that Friday morning, and we stayed in a downtown Detroit hotel. Steve and I were juniors in the Mass Comm department. We actually spent more time at the college radio station, WCVT, now WTMD, then we did in class.
At that time, WCVT was totally student run. It was a tremendous learning facility for those of us who wanted a career in radio. At the time, there were more than 100 students who worked at the FM and carrier current AM station located in the basement of the media center. By the time you graduated, you could have done just about everything there is to do in radio: news, sports, DJ, programming, and what I loved the most, play-by-play.
When we got to Detroit, and realized that we weren't far from Tiger Stadium, off we went. The next morning we got up, went to Wayne State and broadcast the Tigers 23-14 loss to the Warriors. After the game, we got on the team bus and headed to the airport for an early evening flight. The football players would be on that flight. The coaching staff would be on that flight. The trainers and team managers would be on that flight. Steve Melewski and I would not be on that flight.
As we were standing in line, I remember Gordy Combs who was then the defensive coordinator coming up and asking us if we were good to go and we said yes. Famous last words. Now for those of you under the age of 40, I have some explaining to do. In 1980, you checked in with paper tickets. They came in a packet that had your stapled tickets in them. When you got the packet it had tickets for where you were going and for when you returned. Two sets of tickets.
We get to the check in counter, hand the woman our packets, waited for her to rip them out and send us to the departure gate. She looked at us and told us that there were no return tickets in our packet. We looked back and said "What??" She told us again, "you have no return tickets."
So here we were, two 20 year old college goofs, who had never really travelled on our own, wondering how the heck we were going get back to Baltimore.
Steve got angry and told the woman, "when that plane leaves my buddy and I better be on it!!" She was unfazed. Well, the plane left and we weren't on it.
We ended up calling the radio station general manager, who like us was a college student, and she said if we paid for two more tickets the station would reimburse us. Yeah right. Between the two of us we had about 10 bucks to our names. The other problem is that there were no more flights to Baltimore that night. So here we are, upset our college team lost, upset the Orioles were eliminated from the playoffs, no money, nowhere to stay, and not a lot of money to eat.
We ended up calling my father who agreed to buy the tickets with his credit card with the promise the radio station would reimburse him. So we go back to the counter to buy the tickets for a flight to DC that night, not knowing how would get back to Baltimore.
When we get back to the counter, the same woman tells us that there has been a miracle. Someone back at BWI found our return tickets. So she tells us we can get on the next flight to DC. At this point Steve has had enough. Through no fault of our own, we had missed our flight, been in panic mode for about two hours, and he looked at that woman and said "Ma'am, I don't know how you are going to do it, but you are getting us back to Baltimore."
How did they do it?? They put us up in a hotel, gave us a voucher for a free meal at Bob's Big Boy, and flew us out the next morning at 7 am. I wanted the 10 a.m. flight but Melewski said "We are getting out of this town as soon as we possibly can."
I can't tell you how many times we have talked about that trip over the last 40 years.
Stay safe, stay calm and stay six feet away from everyone.
