Goodbye To A Legend
Hubbell Passes Away In Siesta Key, Florida

In this 1971 photo, Pete Hubbell and Jim Roselle engage in a “goofy golf” putting contest that started at the old WJTN studios on West Third Street in Jamestown and ended at Maplehurst Country Club in the town of Busti 6 miles away. Photo courtesy of the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame
It’s amazing what one can find on the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame website.
The latest discovery — in the form of a yellowed Post-Journal article — confirms what could easily be labeled as the longest round of golf, both in duration and yardage, in Chautauqua County history.
The exhibition putting match — “goofy golf,” according to the website — was played in 1971 between a pair of area icons — WJTN host Jim Roselle and its sports director, Pete Hubbell. The pair, who would both be inducted into the CSHOF years later, started their adventure at the radio station’s studios, which were then located in the Hotel Jamestown on West Third Street.
After putting their way out of the building, according to The Post-Journal account, they literally made their way down Third Street to Fairmount Avenue, and from Fairmount Avenue to the Big Tree-Sugar Grove Road, ultimately finding their way to Maplehurst Country Club in the Town of Busti.
The nearly seven-hour journey, which was sponsored by Collins Sports Shop and was the idea of Dana Lindstrom, a Collins’ employee, was reportedly captured by home movies and snapshots taken by spectators along the “course” and, I’m guessing, it included plenty of laughs.
“We hit a few cars and we lost about 24 golf balls in the fields,” Pete was quoted as saying, “but we had a lot of fun. … It went a lot smoother than I thought it would. We got real good cooperation from the police agencies, which helped out.”
The headline of the article that appeared in the next day’s newspaper read: “Hubbell Covers Six-Mile Golf Course With A 196.”
Appropriate choice of words. Because anyone who ever tuned into WJTN knew that Pete and Jim, who shot a 228, “covered” this neck of the woods via the airwaves as well as anyone ever has.
Sadly, Jim died in 2016 and, now, word has been received from Jody Hubbell Menz that Pete — her father — passed away last Sunday in Siesta Key, Florida. Both men were 89.
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My first introduction to Pete came in the early 1980s while I was a student at Jamestown Community College. In those days, the school featured one of the best NJCAA men’s basketball teams in the country, and it routinely played before standing-room-only crowds at the Physical Education Complex.
Naturally, Pete and Bob Finley — Pete’s broadcast partner back then — called the action for the radio station. After a regional victory that advanced Jamestown CC to the nationals, I vividly remember Pete and Bob joining the players as they paraded around the perimeter of the court waving their airline tickets in celebration for their trip to Hutchinson, Kansas, site of the NJCAA tournament.
I’m confident that if Pete were here now he would admit that he didn’t mind “rooting” for the local teams. To his listeners, he was the voice — oh, that smooth, silky voice — for all our local athletes as they performed on courts, fields and diamonds from the western Southern Tier to Erie County and venues in between.
For the record, the son of Ralph Hubbell, a legendary broadcaster in his own right and a Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame inductee, Pete made his WJTN debut calling the play-by-play for a Jamestown High School basketball playoff game in the 1960s.
“Pete’s knowledge of sports is incredible and his delivery is very smooth,” WJTN’s Terry Frank told The Post-Journal in February 1997. “I never heard him have a bad broadcast.”
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Arguably Pete’s most memorable play-by-play experience, however, came on Aug. 6, 1990, when he and Skip Pierce, another one of his broadcast partners, were calling the action for a Jamestown Expos game at what was then known as College Stadium.
The short version of the evening, played out in front of a crowd of nearly 2,000, goes something like this:
“Candid Camera,” a hidden-camera reality TV show which ran for decades beginning in 1948, made a stop in Jamestown that summer night. Peter Funt was the executive producer. Taped at the start of the regularly scheduled New York-Penn League game against the Niagara Falls Rapids, the gag was, according to an article in The Post-Journal, only known by the Expos coaching and front office staffs; Todd Peterson, the public address announcer; Post-Journal sports editor Jim Riggs; scoreboard operator Bob Payne; and that night’s umpires.
What followed was a series of nonsensical signs from the Expos catcher to the flustered starting pitcher, who was so flummoxed by it all, in fact, that he was ultimately tossed out of the game without having thrown a pitch. Funt, who posed as the home-plate umpire, and the catcher were wearing microphones.
The gag went without a hitch, courtesy of a huge assist from Hubbell and Pierce, who were unaware of the shenanigans playing out on the field.
“The beauty part was the play-by-play,” Funt told The Post-Journal decades later. “I shudder to think what it would have been like if we hadn’t had the voices of the radio announcers. It would have been kind of dull.
“I was pleasantly surprised when I finally did get back to the editing room and I was able to listen to the clean radio feed of these wonderful guys, I was just blown away. I realized immediately that this was the meat and potatoes of what we’ve got. They’re bringing the whole thing to life and yet they too were surprised.”
Ever the good sport, Pete recalled his memories of that evening during an interview with local sports historian Greg Peterson in 1998, which was also the year that Pete was inducted into the CSHOF.
“They handled it well,” Pete said that day. “It was a fun night.”
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A Buffalo native, Pete was born on March 22, 1936, graduated from Bennett High School and, later, Colgate University. After radio stops in Bradford, Salamanca and Batavia, Hubbell arrived in Jamestown in 1962.
“I heard this was a nice area and I had been over here a couple of times to visit, but I knew very little about Chautauqua County,” Pete told The Post-Journal in 1997.
It didn’t take long, though, before Pete came to love this little corner of the world, which also allowed him to continue to serve as the public-address announcer during NFL games at War Memorial Stadium — the former home of his beloved Buffalo Bills — from 1960 to 1972.
Pete’s many listeners — on Sunday afternoons at the old “Rockpile” on Buffalo’s east side and of the radio station 70 miles to the south in Jamestown — were the true beneficiaries.
“The first week I was in Jamestown, Russ (Diethrick) got a group together at the Town Club — I remember it well,” Pete told Peterson a generation ago. “We had almost every important sports figure in Chautauqua County there to meet me.”
As it turned out, it was just the beginning of a mutual-admiration society — via the airwaves and in person — that lasted decades.
Rest in peace, Pete.