Published: April 22, 2007 11:27 pm         

The Off Season: Remembering Jim Jerome: One of the best men I ever knew

There’s a good chance that if you read this story, you’re going to smile at least a little. It’s about Jim Jerome, and if I knew him at all, I’d say smiling is what Jim most liked seeing people do.

Jim died late last month at 81. He hadn’t grasped his mike nor eyeballed his stat sheet, hadn’t carried on his customary commercial break banter with passers-by or opened a radio broadcast with his trademark “Hi everybody!” for years, but Jim was special to folks in Parke and Vermillion counties, special to anyone who met him.

A typical story about Jim comes from a cold January night some 25 years ago. Jerome, WAXI’s bi-county high school play-by-play man, sat shoulder-to-shoulder amid an overflow crowd in a steamy Rosedale gymnasium calling a game between the Hotshots and dreaded rival Rockville. The hosts were down at least 30 points, but Jim never lost his touch, calling the action as if the game was going down to the wire.

During a commercial break, a lady who had been listening to Jim and partner Charlie Bemis most of the night, tapped him on the shoulder and asked, “Are you broadcasting this game?”

Bemis, Jerome’s alter-ego on the air for 21 years, said it best in the eulogy he delivered at Jim’s memorial service April 14, and to me on the telephone last week: “Jim was so happy doing those games. He never wanted any of our kids to lose. He loved the grassroots kind of games at places like Montezuma and Rosedale and Rockville and Turkey Run. The games were exciting, and every once in a while they were even close.”

Jim covered his first basketball game in the winter of 1950 for WFMU out of Crawfordsville. By the time he hung up the microphone in 1998, he was an institution. “He was the best interview guy in the world,” Bemis said. “We were able to meet so many neat people through basketball and football games, and Jim just smiled through the whole thing. He never met a stranger.”

I can attest to that; the first time I met Jim, I was a 24-year-old varsity basketball coach who handled an open microphone like it was radioactive. I began to sit in with Jim and a half-dozen other coaches on his Saturday Sidelines show, and I was sure he must have thought me at first to be a dim bulb. It became a bit uncomfortable when he would ask me a question, then expect me to carry on a one-sided conversation while he swallowed a half a cup of coffee, finished off his bacon and eggs, or ran to the restroom.

It wasn’t hard to find Jim around town; the man kept busy. He was a bank vice president, a journalist, a master of ceremonies for just about every queen contest and pie-judging contest in the county, led tours at the historical museum, acted with the Parke Players, and worked quietly behind the scenes for the Lions Club and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Jim wasn’t just a good man; he was a good citizen, too. He served in the Army Air Corps during World War II and helped found Billie Creek Village.

Despite owning a resume that would have sent other folks in search of bigger hats, Jim never lost his self-deprecating humor, either. Bemis related a story about a time he, Jim and friend Larry Gambiani posed at the RCA Dome with “Sports Goofy,” for a picture that Jim proudly displayed.

“You know why I love that photo?” he would tell his friends. “It’s the only picture I have where somebody in it has a bigger nose than me,” he’d say, then undoubtedly follow the comment with that big, genuine laugh of his.

Years ago, I sat down with Jim at his home for iced tea and sports talk. We ambled through his house, looked through an overflowing filing cabinet, thumbed through old scorebooks, looked at pictures, shared a few stories. He told me that it had been a long time since 1950, that he’d had a good life, that he’d met a lot of nice people through his job.

When I left three hours later, I was amazed that he had never really made it in the big-time with a bigger radio station, had not had an even bigger following. The man had called games from Market Square Arena, the RCA Dome, Hulman Center and the beautiful relic of Butler Fieldhouse. He had been honored by the Indiana High School Athletic Association with a Distinguished Service Award, and, along with Bemis, had been named a Sagamore of the Wabash. But he also told me that day, “I’ve always lived in my own little world: small towns and small schools.”

Small towns and small schools maybe; big-time, nonetheless.

Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com or by mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808.