ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 22, 1997 TAG: 9702240036
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK STAFF WRITER
GIVE OR TAKE A FEW, he's been the voice of 1,721 basketball games and 350 football games.
``A pleasant good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to....''
For Pete's sake, doesn't it almost always begin that way? That voice, it just cuts through the pregame anticipation, over the loudspeakers. Even before you stand for the National Anthem, you're getting good wishes from ... just who?
If you've attended a sports event played with a ball in the Roanoke Valley over the last 40 years, or a Virginia Tech football or men's basketball game for the last 20 years, chances are you've heard the voice of Emerson Bickert Petersen. He has called so many of your names and your friends' names for so many years.
You can call him Pete. Everyone does. If there is a sports voice in the Roanoke Valley, no TV or radio talking head need apply. Petersen, an Illinois native who came to a foreign place sight-unseen with his wife, young son and a Midwestern voice, was the first General Electric employee in the Roanoke Valley.
That was in 1955. Just over a year later, his voice was heard over a public address system for the first time. It was from that now-gone tiny pressbox atop the roof at Municipal Field in Salem. The late councilman and later to be civic center manager, Jack Dame, needed a replacement doing PA at an Andrew Lewis High School football game. Petersen, who had been one of Dame's spotters, was asked to do it.
``I don't know if I was good, or terrible,'' Petersen said. ``Nobody said. Nobody ever does. I just keep on doing it, and I'd like to keep doing it. I watch myself more closely now. I'm up at an age now where things will deteriorate.''
Petersen will turn 74 next month. Give or take a few, he has called 1,721 basketball games and 350 football games. He worked Roanoke Valley and Blue Ridge district high school basketball tournaments this week, and today Petersen will help open the Old Dominion Athletic Conference men's tourney at the Salem Civic Center. He'll head to Cassell Coliseum for Sunday's Duquesne-Tech game, then be back in Salem for Monday night's ODAC final.
The games the Salem resident can't fit into his schedule - he's been retired for 11-plus years, but you'd never know it - are often worked by one of his sons, David, who is assistant principal at Blacksburg High School. Another son, Roger, a lawyer in Norfolk, spent one summer doing PA for the Salem Pirates.
Petersen's wife, Ellen, a substitute teacher in Salem, doesn't go to hear her husband's sports work, perhaps because she has to listen to him talk at home about his beloved golf exploits at Hidden Valley Country Club. Their daughter, Ann Hartman, works for First Union Bank. The Petersens have seven grandchildren.
Unlike most people, they know more than their grandfather's voice. Petersen can't count the number of people who see him, but don't know him until he opens his mouth. Then they say, ``Aren't you the guy who announces the Salem High football games?''
Yes, he is. He also used to do high school games at Victory Stadium, where he also called Roanoke Buckskins minor-league football games. At the Roanoke Civic Center, he called games for the American Basketball Association's Virginia Squires, the two Roanoke high schools, and the Mason-Dixon, Metro and Southern conference tournaments.
He has called Lewis and Salem High football, used to do Salem High hoops, is the Salem Civic Center's signature voice, works the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl and has been the voice of Roanoke College basketball for almost 30 years. He also is in his 19th season as the football and men's basketball announcer at Tech; his longtime friend, then-Hokies coach Charlie Moir, helped Petersen get the job.
That led to the afternoon at Cassell when Louisville basketball coach Denny Crum strolled up to Petersen before a game and tried to talk Petersen into becoming Louisville's PA man at Freedom Hall for the Metro Conference tournament. ``I'll fly you out there and fly you back,'' Crum said.
``I think he was joking,'' Petersen said more than a decade later.
Crum wasn't. He liked Petersen's style - enthusiastic, without being a ``homer.''
It's obvious Petersen likes the home team, just not too obvious. His trademark ``That's a walk'' when an official calls traveling on a visiting player is about as far as Petersen will stretch the boundaries.
Petersen's voice isn't making him rich; he is paid $50 or less per game, and the fees he pays to two spotters for each football game come out of that total.
He doesn't call baseball anymore, although he announced games at Municipal Field for a short time. That's where Moir, who had been hired as Roanoke's basketball coach, heard Petersen and walked up to the press box with the Maroons' athletic director, Buddy Hackman, and asked Petersen if he would become the Maroons' PA man.
``There was one night when Roanoke and Old Dominion were playing at the Roanoke Civic Center,'' Petersen recalled. ``They were great rivals and had great programs in Division II, and Charlie and Sonny Allen [the Monarchs' coach] were great friends. Roanoke had a big lead, and Charlie's up yelling at one of the officials.
``He's right there next to me, and so I said, `Relax, Charlie, the game's in the bag.' Well, the mike was on. So, here comes Sonny down the row. He bends over and says to me, `Pete, you're absolutely right, but you don't have to tell everybody in the damn building.'''
More than a mouth
The voice, it seems, everyone knows. Petersen, the man, isn't as public, although considering his life's work, it seems he would be well-known.
The latest of his many honors came from Lewis-Gale Hospital, where he was presented the 1996 Frist Humanitarian Award for volunteer work. Petersen occupies a corner office in the medical center's human resources department. He calls on patients, works as a corporate ambassador for Lewis-Gale, and uses his experience in personnel work in conjunction with the hospital administration.
Petersen and his friend, Carl M. Andrews, were the men who negotiated with Hospital Corporation of America to locate in Salem in the early '70s, when Petersen was president of the Salem-Roanoke County Chamber of Commerce.
His signature project was to bring a hospital to Salem. The day he announced that to business leaders at a luncheon, ``they told me I was a young whippersnapper, I didn't know what I was talking about, too dumb, too naive, and called me a damn Yankee,'' Petersen said.
``I left the restaurant, got a cab, and we went ahead and did it anyway.''
He works with the Boy Scouts of America's local Blue Ridge Mountain Council and is a board member for several local civic clubs and Lewis-Gale. He volunteers two afternoons each week in the Hidden Valley pro shop. He has been named Citizen, Father and Civic Leader of the Year by several organizations.
``That's the kind of person Pete is,'' Moir said. ``He does a lot of things to help out people, things nobody hears about. You call him, he's ready to help. He's been a great friend, besides being one of the best announcers I've heard. You call Pete and ask him, and he's there. Sometimes, you feel like you're taking advantage of him. He just wants to help.''
Petersen is a native of Morrison, Ill., about two hours west of Chicago. He was a 129-pound quarterback - called ``Petey'' - in high school, and went to Cornell College in Iowa on a tennis scholarship. Soon, he found himself running track.
``I hated that,'' he said.
World War II interrupted his schooling. Petersen joined the Air Corps, and attended Michigan State for six months, training to become a pilot.
He flew 35 bombing missions in B-17s over Europe. He ran two missions dropping food to the Dutch. He also flew two planeloads of French prisoners of war home to Paris from Austria. Awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, Petersen retired from the Air Force Reserve as a lieutenant colonel and commander of the 9480th Squadron in Roanoke.
After the war, Petersen returned to school, graduated from the University of Iowa, and, with his brother, opened a clothing store. General Electric built a plant in Morrison, and Petersen went to work there, in personnel. A few years later, he was asked if he wanted to move to another GE site: in Waynesboro, the Roanoke Valley or Bloomington, Ill.
Petersen moved with his wife and young son David, never having seen Southwest Virginia. As the first GE employee for what would be the Salem plant, he began interviewing prospective employees in an office he opened in Roanoke. It was on the second floor of the building that houses Aesy's Confectionery, near Fifth Street and Campbell Avenue Southwest.
``The day I walked in, July 5, 1955, I opened the window and pigeons flew out,'' Petersen said.
Petersen had been a small-college basketball referee in the Midwest, and hoped to continue when he moved to Virginia. The local officials' organization was headed by the legendary Pinky Spruhan. When Petersen inquired about calling college games here, Spruhan told him he would have to work his way up from sandlot games.
``That was the end of my officiating,'' Petersen said.
He had begun playing golf when he left the service in 1945. He still hits a couple of buckets of balls at least every other day.
``I love it; I'm just not any good anymore,'' said Petersen, whose one-time 6 handicap has about tripled. ``I know I can't be good anymore, but it's just part of me."
Baseball he doesn't like, but Petersen was a key member of the Salem Athletic Club when the organization returned minor-league baseball to the city in the '50s. He was one of the men who went with a flatbed truck to Yankee Stadium to haul the old seats from the House That Ruth Built to Municipal (now Kiwanis) Field, where they still are bolted to the concrete.
One year, the Rebels had Petersen listed as the club's groundskeeper in The Sporting News Baseball Guide, although mostly he just dusted off seats - until the day he told one manager he wanted to trade jobs. He actually managed one Appalachian League game in the late '50s.
``I put on the uniform, went down into the dugout, and I knew nothing about baseball,'' Petersen said. ``We got permission from [league president] Chauncey DeVault for me to do it. Well, I didn't know I was being set up by everyone as a great big joke. An umpire made a bad call, and some of the players asked me if I were going out to argue about it.
``So I did. I went out there and said, `Mr. Umpire, what kind of call was that?' The man said, `The right one.' So I turned around and went back to the dugout, and everyone, even the umpires, were laughing.''
That was the end of Petersen's baseball career, just at the start of his public-address announcing days. In recent years, Petersen has made it through a heart attack and a ruptured disc. His golf game may be worse for those, but not his voice.
``Ellen has been a real saint,'' Petersen said of his wife. ``All of those years of late supper or late snacks after I get home. She's put up with it because she knows I like it. I don't ever want to quit, but I know the day is coming when I'll have to.
``I still get nervous before every game. For 40 years, I've been getting nervous. And when I make a mistake, if I catch it, I'm just devastated. I go home, and I can't sleep. I try to be a perfectionist. I want to get it right. I know I'm slowing down behind the mike.''
LENGTH: Long : 194 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN KIM STAFF. 1. Pete Petersen makes an announcementby CNBwhile Tech cheerleaders entertain the crowd during a timeout in the
Georgia Southern game in January. color. 2. (headshot) Petersen. KEYWORDS: PROFILE