Wednesday night, after I’d scurried around the airport in Fresno, looking for luggage that wasn’t there, my cell phone vibrated but I ignored it and instead stepped to customer service and politely scolded the airline representative for shoehorning me into a connecting flight that, especially during holiday season, was unlikely to receive bags from my preceding flight into San Francisco. After filling out the forms and being told to drive on home to Bakersfield and wait for their call, I reached into my pocket, pulled out the phone, summoned my message, and heard the voice of a childhood friend tell me Stu Nahan had died earlier that day.

For kids growing up in Sacramento in the early and mid-1960’s, Skipper Stu Nahan was by several lengths the biggest celebrity in town.  Even Captain Sacto, Harry Martin, lacked Nahan’s dynamism.  Who else could’ve competed?  Governor Pat Brown to us was a rather portly and obscure figure.  Ronald Reagan hadn’t yet taken the town.  Pro sports were still a generation away, and provincial citizens of the capital city enjoyed moaning that Sacramento could never support anything big time and shouldn’t try.

Stu Nahan understood that and marked time as he hosted a children’s show featuring cartoons, Skipper Stu’s easy banter with kids on an imaginary boat, and his signature jest, “You’re a hamburger.”  In the evenings and late nights on TV he read the sports, and his insight and energy made many viewers feel they were, for the moment, in a major league city.  In my neighborhood of Sierra Oaks along the American River several miles east of downtown, kids who loved cartoons and sports were delighted that Skipper Stu lived among us.  We didn’t have to worry about rudeness when knocking on his front door.  We went to school with his eldest son, Mickey, probably the only kid in Central California who knew how to ice skate and play hockey.  Stu had starred as a goalie for McGill University in Montreal, where he was raised.

In the Nahan’s house, in the early 1960’s, I saw one of my first color television programs: Count Basie and his orchestra were playing, and after so many years of black and white programming the bright images exploded like the Fourth of July.  Upstairs, in the master bedroom, there was a laundry shoot to the washer room below.  I still haven’t seen another.  One of my most exciting experiences came a couple of years later when Stu called my home and challenged me to a sports knowledge contest.  His son and others had told him I studied statistics and history quite a bit.  We answered each other’s questions without a miss until I asked him one about the nationally ranked basketball team at Western Kentucky University, in Bowling Green where I’d lived until age five.

“Oh no,” he said.  “None of that obscure stuff.  Only the big leagues.”

“Okay.  Who was the pitcher when Babe Ruth hit his 60^th home run?”

That was a batting practice pitch for a guy like Stu Nahan.  “Tom Zachary,” he said.

He had too much talent and enthusiasm to stay in sleepy Sacramento.  In 1966 he moved to become Captain Philadelphia for the kids and broadcast professional hockey for the Philadelphia Flyers.  Two years later he landed in Los Angeles.  And that’s where the handsome and charming fellow belonged.  Late in his career, Stan Atkinson, the suavest of Sacramento newsreaders in the 1970’s and 80’s, commented in a newspaper interview that as fledgling TV talkers he and Stu Nahan had been “bad boys” and courted most of the blonds in the Sacramento Valley.  In that regard, a kid who lived on my street returned after a flight from Reno and excitedly told us he’d seen Skipper Stu on board with a beautiful lady.

In L.A. Nahan warmly delivered the sports news on television for 29 years and also worked in radio.  While at KABC Channel 7 he drove a car with the license plate “Stu 7” and publicly traded fusillades with the network’s most popular and unpopular sportscaster, Howard Cosell, whose paradoxical talent made him simultaneously acerbic and thoughtful, eloquent and verbose.  “Watch him,” Nahan commented.  “He tries to embarrass the other announcers.”  ABC executives generally routed them away from each other.  Nahan’s largest audiences came with his appearances as a sportscaster in all the Rocky films.

Since his passing, more than 40 years after his final broadcast from Sacramento, numerous local kids from the 1960’s have sent me emails.  The messages are similar.  Skipper Stu was by far the best we had and memories have not weakened.