Bob Jenkins quietly made his way into Montgomery County a few years ago, retiring to some private acres outside of Crawfordsville. His passing this week has not been so low-key, as the person who was involved with race coverage on scene, on the radio and on television at the highest levels has been silenced.
You can go to multiple social media sites and read of his life and his career, from his birth in Liberty, Indiana to the press boxes of every major race track in the nation, and then, in his last years, the public address booth at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, so we won’t spend lots of time poring over all those details, as incredible as they were.
Bob moved here to find some quiet and some country. His wife had passed away, and he was slowing down his career.
Slowing down, but not stopping, and always helping, always finding a minute to say hello or see what was going on.
Bob left the grind of television and radio, and was just helping out with the public address work at the Speedway, a huge part-time job to say the least.
But he still made time to lend that famous voice to a few local events.
“What an incredible moment it was when we heard a broadcast legend was going to live in our community,” noted Dave Peach, the General Manager of WCVL-WIMC Radio. “We had a chance to have Bob in studio for interviews and voice work. Bob had an enthusiastic voice that simply put — just made you feel good. Then you realized that voice called the biggest races on the biggest stages.”
That making you feel good part came naturally for the small-town guy who called himself the ‘luckiest guy in the world.’
“Bob would just sit down and talk to you, talk to anyone,” said Howdy Bell, who was an executive with the local radio stations years ago, but much more visibly, was a member of the radio broadcast team that called the 500.
Bell, who was on the IMS crew from 1961 until 2003, was already on the team when Jenkins got his first chance, and watched the younger announcer go from one spot to another, and then to the anchor role and then move on to television.
“I knew Bob when we were both at WIRE in Indy,” Bell said. “He broke in doing the farm reports and I used to chide him about hog prices and those reports. I introduced him once at an Indianapolis Racing Memorial Association event as the former farm report guy and it might have been the one time he wasn’t too happy with me. He was always nice to everyone, though, and just simply a good guy.”
The new guy, though, had to pay his early dues.
“It was Race Day,” Bell remembered, “and Sid Collins (the first anchor of the IMS Network) had made arrangements for us to have breakfast at a hotel restaurant about 7 a.m.. Then we got a police escort to the track to go to work.”
“Well, Bob had just joined the network,” he continued, “and we only took one van in, so there was Bob, sitting on the floor in the back of the van, heading in to work at the Indianapolis 500.”
Jenkins made his way from the floor of that van to the highest levels of media coverage of not only the 500, but NASCAR and more racing.
I personally remember Bob from Thursday Night and Saturday Night Thunder. They were small race tracks like Raceway Park and Winchester, where the accommodations were not quite as lavish as at the Speedway.
Brent Harris, Sports Information Director at Wabash, was also a member of that crew that installed cameras, changed batteries during races and tried to stay out of the way of fast cars.
“I was a rookie on the Saturday Night Thunder broadcast crew when I first had the opportunity to meet Bob Jenkins,” Harris said. “I had listened to Bob’s coverage of the Indianapolis 500 over the years and knew his legendary voice when I was introduced to him. That same easy-going, friendly, and welcoming voice I had heard on the radio helped me immediately feel part of the ESPN broadcast family. Whether it was in the truck, the broadcast booth, or in the pits prior to the start of the race, or at the Jenkins home on the Fourth of July at one of Bob’s crew get-togethers, He always made everyone feel at ease.”
There were plenty of nights where the weather was never agreeable (hot, wet, cold, windy, always crowded) and with the lower budgets and new technology that was being worked with, every show was an adventure. Bob and the other announcers were never afraid hours before the racing started to come down to the pits and if not always give a hand or turn a wrench, at least lend some moral support.
Those nights were in addition to the countless hours he and a very few others worked for hours putting together shows that had highlights from race tracks around the country the week before. Those highlights would arrive sometimes in the early afternoon, have to be edited, put together in some format, and then aired just a few hours later. The instant technology of today was nowhere to be found back then.
“I didn’t realize until a lot of years later just how many things guys like Bob and Paul Page did,” Bell said. “They were involved in so much.”
As the years wound down, Jenkins was involved less, but always gave it the best, but he never wanted to be the center of attention,
It just found him.
“Years later I had a chance to reconnect with Bob after he moved to Crawfordsville,” Harris recalled. “He came to a community talk about the Indianapolis 500 with several Wabash College connections. Bob came to hear the talk and sit in the audience, with no thought of bringing any attention to himself. He wanted to take in the event, just as he did with each of the broadcasts. He never made any event about himself. You felt like he was welcoming you into his home to share the experience.
His unmistakable voice over a PA system, or even just in a conversation, made you know that things were in good hands.
A few years ago, we had a fund-raising event down at Elston Park for MUFFY. It was the Police vs the Firefighters, and I was involved with the nuts and bolts of softball.
Well, imagine my surprise when Dave Peach showed up to help us out with the PA work with a guest.
Dave is the PA voice of Butler, and one of the best announcers around.
He just happened to have Bob Jenkins, the voice of the Indianapolis 500, with him, and the two of them grabbed a perch on E3 and delighted the crowd for the evening.
“To have the honor of working with him at that charity event (Montgomery United Fund Softball) was one of the highlights of my career,” Peach noted.
It was pretty neat out of the field too.
Bob is gone, but all the classic finishes, close calls and all the rest will live forever on tape and in our memories.
Just a guy from Liberty, who found his way to Montgomery County, and in between stood on the biggest stages of the world.
