WOW!
By the way, I'm still kicking(and gambling).......had Western Carolina this evening(as you probably did as well).
Currently grinding away at 5-10 No Limit Holdem more then anything.
By the way, is Lee Pete still alive?
Lee Pete thankful for a great life
On July 4, 1939, knowing he had a disease for which there was no cure, Lou Gehrig nonetheless stood in front of 60,000 fans at Yankee Stadium and said, "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."
Lee Pete knows how Gehrig felt - not lucky to have an incurable illness, but lucky to have lived his dream.
Pete, a onetime star football and baseball player at Libbey High School and at the University of Toledo, lived his dream too. He is legendary in the western states for his Las Vegas-based radio career that spanned more than three decades.
And, now, Lee Pete has come home to Toledo. He has come home to die.
Gehrig called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis "a bad break." Pete calls it "this problem I have."
ALS is far from a pleasant way to go. The nerve cells and spinal cord degenerate, muscles atrophy, one function after another shuts down. All the while, the mind remains unaffected.
For that we are fortunate because Pete has 82 years of memories to share. And his voice, which a Vegas writer once called, "a deep, smooth bass, the greatest voice in the history of talk radio," is still wondrous, still fueled by hazy cigar smoke, despite beginning to weaken.
Old-time Toledoans will remember Pete both for his hall-of-fame athletic careers and as a restaurateur and barkeep.
Lee was a bon vivant and ladies man who made the nightly rounds, whether it was at one of the joints in which he had a stake - the Town and Country, where the upper crust of Ottawa Hills always paused for a martini, up with a twist; the Kenwood Colonial, where he and well-known partner Gus County packed in 300 customers a night, or Alfie's, where he and the lovely Gloria Weaver served up a strip steak topped with bordelaise sauce that would make your mouth weep - or whether it was one of those eateries owned by his best buddies, the Skaff brothers.
All the while, Pete dabbled in local radio. He teamed up with Doug Tabner on a few Ohio State football broadcasts and then found his way into the booth with both Don King and Jerry Keil for UT games. He was folksy, he was knowledgeable, and, my goodness, there was that voice.
"I was single for about 30 years between marriages," Pete recalled. "There was this British guy who always hung around at Alfie's, and his girlfriend was pressuring him to get married. He always told her, 'When Lee Pete gets married, I'll marry you.'•"
There came the day that Lee, who suddenly realized he was "getting too old to chase around dames," and his girlfriend, Lila, went downtown to the courthouse and married.
"We went to Alfie's that night, walked in, and showed the guy our rings, and he fainted," Pete said, laughing.
Lee soon sold his interest in Alfie's to Weaver and headed for a new life in Las Vegas with his new wife, arriving just before Christmas in 1970. He took a management job at Caesar's Palace and started doing a sports talk show a couple nights a week on a low-watt radio station.
Pete dismisses the suggestion that he was a sports talk pioneer, but he definitely was the first at one aspect of the business. Sports books were just becoming big earners for the Vegas casinos, and one of them, the Castaways, proposed a live, on-site radio program on sports betting where Pete and his guests, the town's best-known handicappers, would discuss games, break down match-ups, set point spreads, and give scores.
Remember, this was before cable TV sports networks and before the Internet wired scores and stats and betting lines into homes. The show was an instant hit and with two moves it became the biggest thing on the western airwaves during the early '80s. Pete moved his program to 50,000-watt KDWN and to the Stardust, Vegas' biggest and best known sports book, and a show called The Stardust Line would go on to be the longest-running sports betting show in radio history.
The station, known as K-Dawn, has a powerful night-time signal that is heard north to British Columbia, south into Mexico, east to the plains states, and west to islands in the Pacific. "We reached 38 million people, and about half of them were bookies," Pete joked.
His first weekend partner on the show from the Stardust, where they built an elevated broadcast stage in front of some 700 seats, was Jim Brown, the Hall-of-Fame running back. It was a full house when guests like Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Archie Moore, and others would show up to join Pete on the air.
"Joe Namath came on one night, and there must have been 1,000 people there," Pete recalled. "The fire marshal came in and went nuts."
Pete said he was making $250,000 during his peak years and is very much aware of who was paying him. Vegas was controlled by the mob back then, and the Stardust was owned by some guys from Chicago whose noses, said Lee, "were bent into their left ears. The guy I worked for was really nice to me. I don't think he'd killed more than 10 people. But what the hell? I'd been in the bar business where you'd grind it out and hope to break even and here these people were paying me a quarter mil a year to do radio.
"My old buddy Bob Snyder - you remember him, the old TU and NFL coach - came out and did the show with me one night. He said, 'I have to get one of these gigs. This is easy and fun.' And that was the truth. That's why I enjoyed it. I'm basically lazy, you know."
Here are a couple other interesting things about Pete - he never liked his voice, but he always liked it better after a couple scotches; for several years he hosted a TV sports handicapping show with Jim Feist, called Proline, that was seen in more than 30 million homes on cable; he made a handsome living and became a household name out west, but he said the best job he ever had was tending bar in Toledo, and, hold onto your hats for this one, he says he never bet a dime.
"Lila gambled enough for both of us," he said. "She was a slot machine freak."
A few years back, Lila became ill, and Lee ended his radio career to take care of her. Along the way, early in 2005, Pete was diagnosed with ALS, aka Lou Gehrig's disease.
In mid-June of 2005, the phone rang in the Toledo home of Patti Cartlidge, a retired teacher who has been Lee's friend for 60-plus years and someone who has become, he said, his angel.
"I buried Lila yesterday," said a somber Pete, who went on to tell of his own medical situation.
"What are you going to do, kiddo?" Patti asked.
"I have some time, but I guess I'm eventually going to have to look for a place to take care of me because I'm told I'll be pretty crippled up before I go," he said.
Patti had a better idea. He should come home to Toledo. She'd take care of him. After all, what are friends for?
Nine months ago, Lee Pete did just that. Home to the old south end, where he starred at Libbey. Home to the university, where he helped start up football after a three-year hiatus during World War II, and where he left as the most accomplished quarterback to that point in school history and was enshrined in the Varsity T Hall of Fame. Home to where his name and face once were recognized in every corner of town. Home to Toledo. He went west to find fame and fortune. But he has come home to die.
"The places I've been, the things I've done," Pete said, his voice trailing off. "It's been a helluva life. It's a real mess now, my friend, but if I have to go through this, I'm glad I at least got a disease named after a ballplayer."
Dave Hackenberg is a Blade sports writer.
At a Hawks game w/ my wife...spoke w/ Keith Magnuson
talk about a nice/cool guy...
http://www.bpclassic.org/images/keith2_sml.jpg
:aktion033:aktion033:aktion033
rip..sir
talk about a nice/cool guy...
http://www.bpclassic.org/images/keith2_sml.jpg
:aktion033:aktion033:aktion033
rip..sir
Ken "Cheato" Lay
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