FanGraphs Audio: My 94-Year-Old Grandfather
Episode 540
The host’s 94-year-old grandfather, a guest on FanGraphs Audio when he was merely a 91-year-old and 92-year-old and also 93-year-old grandfather, is the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio, as well — recorded live on tape from his (i.e. that same grandfather’s) condominium in Jupiter, Florida.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 41 min play time.)
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Carson Cistulli has published a book of aphorisms called Spirited Ejaculations of a New Enthusiast.
The grandpa Cistulli episode is always best of the year!
Agreed! Mandatory listening!
Absolutely riveting. I loved every moment of it. Really makes me miss my grandpa.
Where do I direct pod-related correspondence to your grandfather at? @PapaCistulli?
This is awesome! Your grandpa is great.
By the way, congrats on you-know-who evidently being banned again.
Thanks! I didn’t really have a hand in getting my deranged clones banned, though. I’m just glad I came through that with my good name still intact.
Fantastic.
The pace of this podcast is too slow. While it would be easy to require that Grandpa answer more quickly, not allowing any silence betwen questions, the problem I have is with the pace of questioning. Cistulli needs a “shot clock.”
This is the first Grandpa Cistulli podcast I’ve had the pleasure of listening to. Was baseball in his day ever a topic?
My grandfather is also 94. He once had the Pirates offer him a contact at an independent tryout but turned them down. Ballplayers didn’t make as much as doctors back then. He’s still a doctor today. Not many 94 year old baseball players, so I guess he made the right choice
Always one of the podcasting highlights of the year. Here’s hoping for another twenty of these, assuming the younger Cistulli’s faculties remain intact.
Always the best podcast episode of the year, Cistulli. Great work. I love hearing from your grandfather.
So my father turns 92 this year (no, I’m not quite as old as you think — he was late to parenting). He’s been a baseball fan his whole life, going back to listening on the radio and even earlier to when he played on the town team back when every town and many companies had one. Every so often he’ll drop some crazy anecdote. My favorite was when we were watching the 2010 playoff run by the Giants, and all the beards (Wilson, Romo, etc) caused him to recollect a team he saw barnstorming through his town when he was a kid.
“Uh…” I responded, with growing incredulity, “You mean the ‘House of David’?”
“That was them! They were playing a Negro League team. Beards and blacks, it was all anybody in town could talk about that week”
I pressed him for details, but the beards was about all he could remember. That, and the Negro League pitcher was very good, and “a bit of a showboater.” Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember any names, “I was just a kid,” he protested.
Still, I remain convinced he saw Satchel Paige pitch a game.
I enjoy your non-baseball offerings every bit as much as your baseball-related work, Carson. Good stuff as always, sir!
It’s like StoryCorps comes to FanGraphs. Don’t ever change C.C. Made me buy hockey tickets to hang with my 77 year old Dad this weekend.
This annual interview always makes me want to visit with my grandpa more. Thank you Carson for reminding me how lucky I am to have my grandpa around. I shouldn’t take it for granted.
Just listened to all four podcasts. Swell stuff. My grandpa died a few years ago at 90 but such conversations with him were quite impossible. One could almost say that he disdained any sort of conversation. Watched a lot of Wheel of Fortune, tho.
On the subject of ice, there was a fantastic PBS special about the man who initiated the pre-refrigeration ice industry of cutting ice out of northern lakes and shipping it, packed in straw, to all corners of the earth, including the Tropics. I think it was a series of six shows documenting simple concepts that changed the world. That one was about Cold; there was also one about glass. Can’t recall the others.
Carson, don’t lose those copies of your great-grandparents’ passports. You mentioned to possibility of your grandfather getting Italian citizenship when he was 93 (although he wasn’t terribly interested). Indeed, the law in Italy is that if you can prove your grandfather was an Italian citizen, you can also become one. Thus, if you can convince your father to get Italian citizenship, with those passports as proof, you could then do the same. Italy’s quite nice and it’s hard to beat free health care. Wish my grandpa was Italian…