Jack Buck, 1924-2002
The voice that helped me go to sleep many, many summer nights during some tumultuous pre-teen and teenage years has been silenced. He was the broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals my entire life, and his voice is the source of some of my best childhood memories. Not just the highlights:

"Swing and a long one ... Go crazy, folks! Go crazy!" after Ozzie Smith's left-handed home run in the 1985 National League Championship Series, which vaulted the Cardinals into the World Series against Kansas City.
"I don't believe what I just saw!" after Kirk Gibson hit that homer in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series -- still the greatest thing I've ever seen in a baseball game.
Silence, then "Pardon me while I stand and applaud," when Mark McGwire hit his 61st homer in 1998.

... not just the highlights, but the routine, also. And the not-so-routine; I heard of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake from Jack Buck, who was broadcasting over a phone line when he should have been calling Game 1 of the World Series.

Buck and Mike Shannon were the Cardinals' broadcast team during the late '70s and early '80s, when I was just becoming a baseball fan. But from an even younger age, I was familiar with Buck's voice from many nights on my grandfather's front porch out in the middle of nowhere, where Cardinals baseball was his link with the rest of the world.

I would always try to keep myself awake long enough to hear Buck say, " ... and that's a winner!" to wrap up a Cardinals victory. Some nights I succeeded. Even after I left Missouri, I'd find myself trying to pull in KMOX in St. Louis to catch a little bit of the Cardinals' game -- not so much because I was a Cardinals fan; I never really was for any reason other than proximity -- but because the voice of Jack Buck over baseball was one of the greatest things I had ever heard.

His son Joe is behind the microphone at Cardinals' games now, and he's very good. He should be, because he learned from the very best.