RIP Roy Storey

Just got news that Roy Storey, long-time Bay Area radio sportscaster, died last week at his home in Desert Hot Springs. He was 85.

His Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame page is here: http://www.bayarearadio.org/people/storey.shtml

Name the sport and I think Roy covered it at some time: hockey, football, basketball, auto racing, indoor soccer, baseball re-creations. He was the lead play-by-play announcer for a number of WHL teams before the NHL expanded westward in 1967-68 -- the San Francisco Seals (paired with a young Bill King!), Los Angeles Blades and San Diego Mariners of the WHA.

Along with Larry Albedi and Bruce Flanders, he was part of the team that handed public address duties at nearly every major racing event at Sears Point and Laguna Seca.

He suffered a serious brain injury when he crashed his Corvette during a race at Laguna Seca sometime in the early '60s -- and never achieved the same success afterward. But he still had a golden voice.

I moved back to the Bay Area after graduating from college in 1981, but radio stations in the fifth-largest market in the country don't usually hire wet-behind-the-ears 23-year-olds. So I kicked around at odd jobs, including working as a security guard dispatcher at a retirement community called Rossmoor.

Storey lived there, and I got up the courage to call him one day to chat about radio. He invited me to his home, and told me of his plans to buy time on the local AM station for a nightly sports talk show. Now, you have to realize that in 1982, that was crazy talk -- 25 hours of sports talk a week? But he offered me the chance to run the board and do score updates.

I took him up on it, and we somehow pulled it off for almost a year before the station was sold and the show was canned. However, the new owners hired me as their new news director -- for a $50 a week raise -- and three years later, I was covering Space Shuttle launches as a CBS Radio correspondent.

I got a chance to call Roy on the phone a couple of years ago when I was at Auto Club Speedway for NASCAR.COM. He was bed-ridden after a series of strokes, but we talked almost an hour -- I told him all the things I had done since then -- and I thanked him for getting my career restarted. I know there are a number of guys in the business who were helped along by Roy.

I found one of his cassette tapes while digging through a box in the garage over the weekend and wondered how he was doing. I didn't know he had passed.

Thanks, Roy. It's a tough day here. But I can't help but think of him yelling "SHOT ON GOAL!" and smile.

 

Great pipes. I listened to those shows you did with him in the Bay Area - good stuff. RIP Roy.

 

Boy, this brings back some childhood memories. When our family lived in San Diego in the 70s, he was the Mariners' play-by-play guy, as maumann noted. Very good voice; one of the better hockey announcers I've heard. Hope he's describing another slick Andre Lacroix feed to Wayne Rivers for the score upstairs.

 

Think the last time I heard about Roy Storey was in the early 80s, and the SID at St. Mary's mentioned he was doing a show on a station in that area and was getting trounced in the ratings by KNBR. He was playing some of his recreations until the contract expired. RIP.

 

Storey reminded me (for some reason) of dialing in KDWN from Vegas on Sunday nights and listening to Lee Pete (I remember he had Jim Brown as a co-host and Roger Mayweather was always seemed to be hanging around). Sadly, Pete died in 2010.