In light of Vin Scully Weekend here in Los Angeles and his upcoming retirement, I wanted to post something about a personal experience I had with Mr. Scully many years ago that only a few of my close friends and family know about.  I remember it like it happened yesterday.

Being born and raised here in Los Angeles, naturally the Dodgers are my favorite baseball team.  I’ve been to countless Dodgers games in Chavez Ravine during good seasons and not-so-good seasons.  I’ve been to day games, night games, corporate ticket games- thank you Fuji Film for the best seats I’ve ever had along the 3rd base line, four rows in- kids baseball league games and construction crew games.  In 1988, I saw the team play during the regular season on their way to the World Series where The Bulldog was having the best pitching season of his career and Kirk Gibson made history against the formidable, heavily favored Oakland A’s with the Bash Brothers Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire in the lineup and sidearm closer Dennis “Eck” Eckersley in the bullpen.  The consensus at the time was that the A’s would easily win the World Series.  Well, we know how that turned out!

Throughout all of the various Dodgers eras like the 1988 World Series, Fernando Fever, the Daryl Strawberry train wreck, Steve “Mr. Clean” Garvey, Eric “Game Over” Gagne, the Yasiel Puig drama, and Clayton “Kersh” Kershaw’s spectacular pitching, it has always been the great familiar voice of Vin Scully calling the play-by-play that makes them memorable.  The players and coaches change over the years, but Vin Scully is the one common thread.

Back in 1988, I was working in the electrical trade in Los Angeles for a low-key but well connected and respected electrical contractor that had an A-List of customers.  I’m talking about clients that ran the spectrum; nouveau riche snobs, well known celebrities, business executives, politicians, arrogant actors and polite old-money families.  I have been in homes on some of the most heavily guarded estates that would surely blow your mind.  For example, one of these estates had a semi-circular driveway with four double-door garages on either side.  Inside the garages;  a collection of a dozen old and new museum quality Ferrari’s. Plus there was a full-time Ferrari factory mechanic on staff that told me his job was to make sure that every one of the cars was ready to drive at a moments notice.  Wow.

Some of these people treated me on a level of professional respect and would talk to me directly while others wouldn’t speak to me at all.  Like the time I went to a large estate in Beverly Hills to install smoke detectors and although the owner was standing right in front of me, she spoke to me through her butler standing next to her.  “Please tell the electrician to first start on the downstairs guest bedrooms and office before going upstairs.”  The butler repeated her words to me verbatim even though we were all standing within a few feet of each other!  It was surreal.

One summer workday morning I had a dispatch for an address in Pacific Palisades for a Mr. Vin Scully- 8:30 Prompt.  I read the dispatch twice before asking my boss Joe if this was “THE” Vin Scully and Joe assured me it was.  Apparently, Mr. Scully had just had a major pool and spa remodel that included state-of-the-art remote controls for the pumps, lights, slide and waterfall, but they were not working correctly and the pool contractor went AWOL.  I was pretty good at troubleshooting electrical controls, so the dispatch was handed to me.

Back then, before the Internet, GPS and Google Maps, we had these things called a Thomas Guide in our trucks, pretty much the the state-of-the-art maps of the time.  It was a thick metal bound book with a grid pattern overlay over sections of a city.  You could find an address by looking up the street name first and then cross-referencing it with the street number range and you would get something like Page 16, F-3 and within that little square on that page was your destination.  Well, it turns out that Mr. Scully was doing alright for himself and he was living in a very nice neighborhood north of Sunset Boulevard.

I loaded up my truck with everything I thought I needed for the day and drove out to Mr. Scully’s residence, starting from La Cienega and Venice boulevards and heading to Sunset Boulevard somewhere west of the 405.  I pulled up promptly to the gate at 8:30 and pressed the button on the intercom.

“Helll000; who is this?” came a very familiar voice over the speaker.  WOW- IT WAS HIM!  It was Vin Scully’s golden voice of Dodgers baseball talking to me!  It took me a second to regain my composure and I replied with something like “Good morning, Mr. Scully.  This is Kent from [contractors name withheld],  here to work on your pool equipment.”  Mr. Scully replied, “Hi, Kent, c’mon in!” And with that, the gate hummed open and I drove up the long curved driveway to the front door, and there he was; the legendary Vin Scully, standing on the porch in his pajamas, slippers and white robe, perfect hair, freshly shaven, with a mug of coffee in his hand.  Everything about him was perfect, like there was going to be a GQ photo shoot that day.

He pointed to a spot in the driveway and said, “You can park right over there.”  I parked where he indicated and I exited my truck with my clipboard and grabbed my tool belt from the back and walked up to the front porch where Mr. Scully was standing.  I expected him to whisk me along a side walkway to the back yard where the pool equipment was located, but instead he said “Good morning, Kent,” in that familiar warm cheerful voice of his and then he extended his hand for a handshake- yes, I actually got to shake hands with the legendary voice of the Dodgers on his front porch!  “C’mon on in buddy,” he said, and he walked me into his lovely front-cover-of-Better-Homes-and-Gardens quality of home and it was filled with family portraits and innumerable Dodgers memorabilia (including a Dodgers pinball machine!) and framed pictures of Mr. Scully standing next to many of the Dodger greats throughout the years and his various broadcasting awards all lined up in a bookcase.

He walked me over to the kitchen and then asked me, “Would you like some coffee or a doughnut or a bagel?”  I declined his kind offer of food and beverage and was ready to ask him to direct me to the pool controls when he began introducing me to his wife and mother.  Mr. Scully and his family were treating me like a guest or a family member instead of the perfect stranger I was, although you could argue since he knew I was coming, I wasn’t technically a “perfect stranger.”  I was pleasantly surprised by this.

After a few moments of light talk about the weather and the recent pool construction, the conversation moved on to the task-at-hand; troubleshooting the pool and spa system.  The pool contractor set up what then was a new, state-of-the-art wireless home automation control system called X10.  Simply put, X10 allowed you to control lighting and power throughout your home with small portable control boxes like this:

Mr. Scully walked me over to one of the pool equipment control panels in the house and began explaining and showing me how when he pressed a button labeled “Lights,” instead of lights, the waterfall started.  He then pressed another button that was labeled “Spa” but instead of a steamy bubbling cauldron, the waterslide water began to flow.  Then he walked me over to another control panel inside the pool house.  Same problem, but with different labels and button locations- one of which did not do anything.  It was a complete disaster.  “See what I mean?  The pool contractor spent days on this and couldn’t get it to work right.  Do you think there’s any hope of fixing it?” he asked in a slightly exasperated tone.  I assured him there was hope and he extended his hand again for another handshake and said, “Okay, Kent- have at it.  I have a limo to catch so I’ll be leaving shortly.  Help yourself to anything in the kitchen or pool house.”  And with that said, Mr. Scully turned around and walked away and let me loose in his fabulous house.

It took me several more trips to fix the control problem which required a combination of grounding some electrical enclosures and components at the pool and spa equipment area and adding some X10 range extenders and reprogramming the controllers, but I had it working flawlessly.  When I had the chance to show Mr. Scully how the system was finally working correctly, he was thrilled and truly grateful.  “Wow, Kent, you must be some kind of wizard!  Great job and thank you!” and he extended his hand for another handshake.

The most memorable thing to me was that every single time I revisited the Scully residence during this multi-day project, Mr. Scully’s demeanor was exactly the same- always cheerful, warm, friendly and inviting.  He probably doesn’t remember me, but I remember him, and to me, Vin Scully will always be that graceful, kind, down-to-earth gentleman I did some work for, and I’m thankful I met him.