Reds Announcer Nuxhall passes away

[MicroBob]

Didn't even occur to me to post about this earlier but I just thought of it now for some reason.

Anyone who was anywhere near Cincinnati in the 70's or 80's pretty much couldn't get away from Joe in all of his broadcasts as well as his Kroger's commercials.
Not exactly the greatest of announcers ever, he was more Harry Caray than Vin Scully, but he frequently made the broadcasts fun and served as a decent straight-man to Marty Brennman's sarcasm.

I remember getting his autograph when I was 12 or so and meeting him again a couple times as an adult as well. I reintroduced myself to him during spring-training in 96 and said that I was from Oxford, OH and he just beamed since that's very close to his home-towns of Hamilton and Fairfield and insisted that they had to mention me on the broadcast which they did.

"Marty and Joe" were a Cincinnati institution and these days when I hear Reds broadcasts with Marty and whoever else is in the booth with him, even his son Thom, it just doesn't seem the same.

For 6 months out of every year Marty and Joe's voices were part of my evening more often than not and my Dad would usually fall asleep to them.
In the 80's they frequently would only have 50 or 60 games on TV, mostly the road games, so to follow any of the 100+ other games required listening to the radio broadcast on one of the 8-zillion stations on the Reds Radio Network that pretty much covered all of OH, IN, WV and KY.

Nuxhall also holds the major-league record as the youngest player ever to appear in a major-league game when he was only 15 when he pitched 1 game for Cincinnati in 1944.


http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs...PT04/311160012