At the Safe for the Dave Niehaus Memorial

Hundreds of Seattleites walked through the rain to Safeco Field this afternoon to remember Mariners broadcaster Dave Niehaus. It was the largest such memorial since Kurt Cobain's in 1994. Cobain and Niehaus shared this gift: They were both storytellers.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion wrote. I will append this: We also listen to stories in order to live. And when the storyteller dies, we feel compelled to thank them for their life-sustaining work.

Niehaus and Cobain performed in different media, to be sure, but the stories they told weren't as different as you might think. For Niehaus, it was the annual struggle of the Mariners--a team with a lousy stadium, disinterested owners, and a knack for bad decisions--to compete with their wealther, smarter big brothers of baseball.

Even when people didn't come to the games, they were listening. The Mariners had some of the highest radio ratings in baseball. This was the early 1980s, a dismal time for America, the time when my father, born and raised in Seattle, tells me he first saw a man looking for food in a dumpster.

It's also the time when a young Kurt Cobain was growing up on the evenm more economically depressed Olympic Peninsula, first in Montesano, then in Aberdeen. Cobain's stories of struggle came from that experience. Who knows, maybe he even listened to Niehaus, whose voice was heard throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Cobain's death brough a massive crowd of teenagers to Seattle Center, to hear Courtney Love and others pay tribute to Cobain. Niehaus' death brought people of all ages, to hear the actors of this stories, former Mariner players, pay tribute to their narrator.

When their time to speak came, Mariners players--the actors in Niehaus' drama--recounted how he enriched their playing careers:

Ken Griffey, Jr. (who appeared via video): "You could always take something that he said home...it was always positive."

Dan Wilson: "As a player he could really make you feel like he conquered the world."

Edgar Martinez: "I loved to hear Dave Niehaus talk about my at bats. He made me feel better than I was."

Jay Buhner: "It's hard to imagine him not being here."

Mariner President Chuck Armstrong closed the program by annoucing that a statue of Niehaus will be built outside Safeco. But the statue will be mute. Now Niehaus' voice will live on in our memories.