I clearly remember the first time I met Bob Jenkins.  I was working at the radio station in Martinsville, Indiana and one of our rural county schools, Monrovia, was in the high school football playoffs in the 1970s.  I was assigned to call the game play-by-play.  Bob had been assigned by Network Indiana to provide reports on the game periodically.

I recall we talked a while before the game started.  In a business where egos can inflate to very large levels, Bob was as humble and regular as a person could be.  Anyone meeting Bob would learn to like him quickly.

It was many years later that I left the radio broadcasting business and went into the civil service.  But for several years in the 1980s, I took a working vacation and filed radio reports on activity at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway during practice and qualifying.

I recall a group of sports reporters that hung around the pits at the start-finish line where the race officials were measuring speed.  You had to be there in order to know the latest news.

Bob was almost always there and I enjoyed listening to the banter between him and the other members of the local sports media.  I wasn’t a regular, so I mostly listened, and learned a lot.

One could learn about auto racing by listening to Bob Jenkins.  He helped create NASCAR on cable TV as the anchor for the early broadcasts on ESPN.  He later worked the Indy 500 on race day for the world-wide radio network carrying the race and later for ABC Sports.  Bob accomplished so much in his career.

We both worked for Network Indiana for a few months in 1983, but he worked in sports and the newsroom where I toiled was on the other side of the building.  I rarely saw Bob during that time.

Bob Jenkins death was announced August 9th.  He had been fighting cancer for some time and I was hearing from his close friends that Bob didn’t have much time left.  But Bob left all of us a body of work to remember.  I am proud to have known him just a little.

My sincere sympathies to his family.