NONFICTION - Feb. 20, 1994

FRIDAYS WITH RED: A Radio Friendship by Bob Edwards (Simon & Schuster: $21; 240 pp.) In his latter years, you still would have had to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over on Red Barber--7:35 a.m., to be exact; Fridays. Even at that hour it was hard to ruffle the self-styled Ol’ Redhead. Prickly, opinionated, benign, altogether delightful, Barber held forth for four minutes a week on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” the program’s most popular spot from 1981 until his death in 1992, at 84. Six hundred spots there were; 600 opinions. He talked about whatever he felt like: the weather in Tallahassee; cats and camellias; Euripides and Ethel Merman and “Cosi Fan Tutte”; his two favorite books (Winston Churchill’s “History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and the Episcopalians’ “Book of Common Prayer”) . . . Say what? asks the late riser; surely you’re not talking about the Red Barber, our Red Barber? Indeed: beloved broadcaster of the Dodgers, in a day when you could walk the breadth of Brooklyn and never miss a pitch, so ubiquitous were the tuned-in radios; the man who stamped into Webster’s “the catbird seat” and the “rhubarb”; the man for whom an elusive baseball was “slicker than oiled okra,” whose reaction to a spectacular play was “I’ll be a suck-egg mule!”

We might have known there was more to Red Barber when he commented on an error-prone infielder, “Like the Ancient Mariner he stoppeth one of three.” NPR knew, and wisely gave Red his head. Bob Edwards, “Morning Edition” host who jump-started Barber for 12 years, does not intend a biography here, just a tribute, a Festschrift . His is a pleasant book, unremarkable, though on the flint of Barber’s perfectionism, we catch a glint of his professionalism. Vin Scully, one of Barber’s young proteges, says it best: “He cared.”