On Saturday morning, even though I was going to spend the day covering high school wrestling, before I headed out the door, I threw on some Husker gear.
Despite the fact that my alma mater may disown me for wearing the Scarlet and Cream so openly, I felt like, on that day, all Nebraskans needed to unite as Huskers.
After all, Husker Nation had just lost one of its most iconic voices.
It may seem a bit odd for the publisher of your hometown newspaper to comment on the death of Nebraska’s radio play-by-play announcer, but the fact of the matter is that, for a lot of us, through the misery and the celebration— especially on the football field and baseball diamond—Greg Sharpe lived the emotional roller coaster that has been the past eighteen years right alongside us.
Sharpe passed away on Friday after a fight with cancer. He was sixty-one.
Whether in the fall or the spring, I spent many a Saturday— or in the case of baseball, even a Sunday—listening to Sharp document the successes and failures of the Huskers on the gridiron and diamond. While the game was easy to watch in the fall, when it came to baseball season, Sharpe was one of the only outlets. While I am not much of a baseball fan, his call of the Huskers on the diamond was an easy way to fill the silence as I worked away in my office.
Not only a talented voice on the radio who could paint you a picture of what was occurring on the field, Sharpe also had the ability to make the broadcast seem personal. In that vein, I always enjoyed his introductions to the tunnel walk, when he would rattle off a list of random towns across Nebraska—Chadron, Hershey, Potter, Fairbury, among the many—in which his voice was almost surely booming.
Last week, Nebraska athletics lost one of its most memorable voices, and the airwaves in the Cornhusker State will likely never be the same on Saturdays in the fall.
However, Sharpe’s voice isn’t the only one that Nebraska has lost this year.
It has taken me a minute or two to put my thoughts together, but late last month, the longtime publisher of the Elm Creek Beacon-Observer, Norm Taylor, passed away.
This came as a surprise to me when I received a phone call from Elm Creek informing me of the news. No, not because about a decade ago the obituary for a man by the name of Norman Tyler had been published—Norm Taylor quipped at the time that some people didn’t pay enough attention and were surprised to see him out and about the following week— but because to me, Taylor had seemed to be one of those individuals who would live forever.
As a novice newspaper publisher when I purchased the Beacon-Observer in 2013, Norm had been a bit of a mentor to me during my early years in the newspaper business. He had been out of the trade for several years at that point, but he still had a bevy of information about the coverage area, knew almost everything you could want to know about Fort Kearny Conference athletics in the past half century or so, and was well acquainted with the people of western Buffalo and eastern Dawson counties.
While, like me, a lot of people knew Norm from his work with the newspaper or his deep ties to American Legion baseball in the Platte Valley—Norm would send the newspaper the Legion baseball schedule well before the state basketball tournament ever tipped off—after reading his obituary, I remembered that, as a journalist, Norm had already been around the block a time or two before he ever published an edition of the Beacon.
In 2014, the Elm Creek Buffaloes were state rated and opened their season in Grant. Wanting to see the team that had already generated so much ink before they had ever teed up the ball, I decided to head west on the first Friday night in the fall. Thankfully, Norm agreed to come along for the ride.
During our trip to Perkins County—and the following year on a trip to Lincoln to watch Amherst play in the state basketball tournament— Norm told me some of the highlights of his career, including his years working for the Omaha World-Herald during a time of historic unrest in Nebraska’s largest city.
Of course, the stories of Norm’s biggest headlines were always complimented by anecdotes—he once told me that he never missed a publication date due to winter weather, a factoid that came to the forefront of my mind when a winter storm beset the area last Wednesday— and tales about his family and friends both in the area and beyond.
While Norm Taylor hadn’t put a word into print in over a decade, like Sharpe, the power of his voice in the area he served was unmatched. Taylor made high school athletes become stars in the pages of his newspaper, just like Sharpe made college football and baseball players local legends on the airwaves.
