Perhaps it was the fact that both of my grandfathers passed away before I was old enough to remember them. Maybe it was the enthusiasm that he had for local high school sports. Or it could have been the fact that I spoke to him on the phone several times every day, but of all the people I got the chance to meet during my nearly 13 years working for the Recorder, the one who had the most impact on my life was Walter Koblinski.
The man who will forever be remembered by the Recorder Sports Department as “Kubie” passed away on Thursday at the age of 92. I like to think that if he had any final words, they would have been, “OK, bye.”
Kubie came into my life when I first started at the newspaper in December, 2006. I didn’t know who he was the first time I picked up the phone and had him begin asking me questions about the local sports scene. When I got off the call, which nearly always ended with his trademark and abrupt, “OK, bye,” I turned to former colleague Mark Durant and asked him who I had just spoken to.
“You just got your first Kubie Report,” Durant laughed.
The Kubie Report was a daily fact of life in the newsroom. You always knew who was calling when the phone rang around 5 p.m. It was Kubie, who would be rehashing the news from the day on the professional circuit, while also calling to discuss what was going to be taking place on the high school schedule. I’d be lying if I said that he didn’t occasionally know about things before I did. The 5 p.m. call was the first of several more to come each day, as Kubie would call with updates and news that he found while watching ESPN or listening to local games on the radio.
It didn’t take long for me to develop a kindred relationship with Kubie. I quickly learned his phone number (774-2565) and wrote that number down on the top of my desk calendar every single month for the duration of my time at the newspaper, even though I no longer needed it. Just a habit I never broke. And Kubie quickly started referring to me as “dat Polish guy,” something he didn’t stop calling me for as long as I worked there.
One of my favorite things was calling him any time there was a major upset on the high school scene.
“Noooooo,” he would say in a drawn out response. “How’d dat happen?”
He just loved to talk about the teams and players in Franklin County. It was infectious. There were plenty of times that we would be swamped with calls coming in and Kubie would ring and want to hear about the day’s scores. I can remember letting other phone lines ring simply because I was talking to Kubie. It probably drove Durant crazy, who would be answering calls and putting people on hold like he was taking orders at Village Pizza. I like to think I never blew Kubie off due to being too busy. I probably told him I needed to call him back plenty of times, but I like to think I always kept my promise.
Our relationship grew over the years. I began calling him while I was riding back from games to talk about them, and would call him on the weekends whenever championship games were played that I was covering. He wanted to be the first to know. Probably because he wanted to call his buddy George Bush and give him the news.
He fancied himself a reporter in some ways. Whenever he would write a “Letter to the Editor” he would ask me if I had “read his story” in the newspaper. Another phrase he often uttered was “Don’t say nothin’ but …” and then tell you his secret when he had a juicy bit of gossip about a team or player. He had his sources, and sometimes knew of things that weren’t always fit for print.
The only problem with his bluntness was that I began taking him to games and sometimes had to slide away from him. He traveled with me to basketball games and baseball games and sometimes I would sit with him, while other times he would walk around and talk to whoever listened. I smile now as I remember the times when I had to walk away from him if we were sitting in a crowd. “That first baseman couldn’t hit a beach ball,” he might say, causing me to look around and make sure that no one else heard.
On Friday afternoon I spoke with Bush, who may be the biggest supporter of Turners Falls athletics alive. He agreed that Kubie may have been the most passionate fan of sports throughout Franklin County. His support was not limited to just one sport, and many times he would write his “Three Cheers” letters to the editor to show his admiration for teams.
My best memory of Kubie also summed him up in my eyes. We traveled to Pittsfield one summer for a Post 81 American Legion playoff game. Before I picked him up from Greenfield Acres Apartments on Congress Street, he got us each a cheeseburger from McDonald’s as well as granola bars and waters. We had lively conversation on the way, witnessed a great baseball game, and then talked about it the entire ride home.
Everyone who got a chance to know Kubie has a story about him. Former Recorder sports reporter Kyle Belanger (who wrote from 2001-06 and also remembered Kubie’s number without any help when I talked to him Friday) told the story of when Kubie was excited about buying his first cell phone. He brought it with him to a Post 81 Legion game that Belanger brought him to, and had planned to call former Recorder editor Gary Sanderson with the score. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get it to work and went to Belanger with his problem. When Kubie showed the phone to him, Belanger immediately knew the problem. It was a cordless phone, not a cell phone.
“I was lucky enough to spend five years in the newsroom and there are a few markers that you can use when you feel like you’ve officially been accepted into the Franklin County sports scene,” said Belanger, who now teaches journalism at Springfield College. “In my estimation the most significant to me was when Kubie actually learned my name and started asking for me by name. The next part of the graduation is when Kubie asked to go along on road trips. I still break out some of my letters that Kubie would write to me in some of my classes now to show the impact that local community journalism has on real people.”
Current Recorder sports editor Jeff Lajoie first stepped foot in the newsroom on Hope Street as an 18-year-old in 2004. He would cover football games while attending UMass, work some shifts answering phones on the high school desk. Like me, it also didn’t take him long to cross paths with Koblinski.
“I honestly think that Kubie was the first person I ever talked to on the phone,” Lajoie recalled. “And no one warned me or tipped me off about him so I was just this confused kid listening to this guy go on about whether Greenfield had a shot against Putnam, or something like that. You’d just answer the phone and he would start talking sports. It didn’t matter to him who picked up, he wanted your take and he wanted to tell you what he thought.”
Like Belanger, I also still have all the letters and cards Kubie wrote to me over the years. Sadly, I had not seen Kubie in about two years. We all lost contact with him at one point when he stopped calling. No one immediately knew why, but after a while we found out he had moved to Charlene Manor nursing home in Greenfield. I still don’t know the reasons why. But the calls stopped coming, something I missed.
And now he is gone. My heart goes out to all those student-athletes who are missing out on sports right now. But I also feel sorry for people like Kubie. I don’t know if it is a coincidence that his passing came at a time when there are no sports. Despite having never really played them growing up, he loved sports with a passion. This must have been a dreadful time for him.
I’m sure he is now up in heaven having a lively conversation about Franklin County sports with the one other rabid area fan I met while working at the paper, Michael “Ace” Kelley, who passed away in 2014 at the age of 48.
When sports eventually return, and they will, Franklin County teams will have one less fan. Although I’m sure Kubie will still be keeping an eye on things from up above. He can’t help himself. Perhaps he is even giving his Kubie Report to plenty of people in heaven. What I know for sure is that he made a lasting impact on my life, even if he never knew it.
Ok, Bye.
Jason Butynski is a Greenfield native who wrote for the sports department of the Recorder from 2006-2019.