Bob Fulton, who broadcast Arkansas Razorbacks football games during the coaching time of John Barnhill and Otis Douglas, was back in the state last week for a reunion with perhaps the only people who remember him primarily as a coach.

"How many junior high teams hold 54 th, 59 th and 64 th reunions ?," Fulton said to a Friday night gathering of 13, including spouses. "This is probably the last one, but who knows ?"

Between radio jobs, Fulton spent the 1944-1945 school term coaching football and basketball at Pulaski Heights Junior High in Little Rock. Using an offensive system adapted from Michigan Coach Fritz Crisler's book on the Single Wing, his team (Bill Wright, Kermit Tracy, Bill Crawford, etc. ) won the city football championship.

Fulton's first Pulaski Heights reunion had to be delayed until the late 1990 s - after he retired from 41 years of describing South Carolina Gamecocks football, basketball and baseball games, sandwiched around a 1965-1966 hitch with the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets radio network.

He spent part of last week's trip visiting with longtime friend Bob Cheyne, a rookie sports information director at Arkansas in 1948. Fulton was then the Razorbacks' football and basketball broadcaster.

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"I'll never forget," Cheyne said. "It was an Arkansas-TCU [basketball ] game at Fort Worth that year. At the end of the first half, Bob stood up during a commercial break and told me, 'I'm going to get a cold drink. Sit down here and talk until I get back.' That floored me. I didn't know what else to say, so I sat there and recited the halftime stats until he came back."

(During a 20-year SID career, Cheyne eventually handled radio play-by-play for Razorbacks football and basketball, in the process winning a half-dozen awards as state sportscaster of the year. )

Fulton grew up in Philadelphia. He recalls "a secret ambition" by the age of 7 to become a baseball announcer, with Philadelphia Athletics radio man Byrum Saam as his model.

At West Chester (Pa. ) State Teachers College, "a big fat 'F '" in a speech class prompted him to make a highly improbable transfer to College (now University ) of the Ozarks at Clarksville. Decades later, he was appointed to the school's board of trustees.

"I'm probably the only broadcaster who ever flunked speech," he said. "It was a fact I never mentioned in any resume for broadcast job applications."

He picked Ozarks, he said, "because it was supported by the Presbyterian Church and my parents were devoted Presbyterians." With a degree in speech, he started his radio career in 1942. In Arkansas, he worked for KLRA in Little Rock, KXLR in North Little Rock and KWEM in West Memphis through the 1940 s, and soon began doing Razorbacks games.

Invited to apply for a minor-league baseball broadcasting job at Pueblo, Colo., Fulton recorded an imaginary game between the Little Rock Travelers and Chattanooga Lookouts, and submitted it to an ad agency handling the Pueblo account. He reached Pueblo to find newspaper ads touting him as "one of the nation's finest play-byplay announcers."

To that point, he'd never worked a baseball game.

"There was some deception involved," he said. "They assumed I'd been doing baseball for the Travelers in the Southern Association. They didn't know Benny Craig had that job locked up."

Apparently he didn't have much trouble adjusting: He spent the 1954 season doing major league games on Mutual Radio. His Mutual colleagues that summer included Dizzy Dean, Al Helfer, Art Gleason, Buddy Blattner and Gene Kirby.

"Diz didn't even carry a pencil, and he never knew the standings," Fulton said. "But if a guy hit a curveball in the second inning, Diz could tell you that when the same batter came up in the seventh. When it came to pitchers, he had a mind like a filing cabinet."

Fulton had landed at Columbia, S. C., in 1952 for a minor league baseball job, but that fall, he started doing South Carolina football games.

After his Mutual season, he declined a chance to join the Cincinnati Reds broadcast crew in favor of sticking with the Gamecocks' program. It was a decision, he said, that he's never had cause to regret. He retired in 1994 and settled in the Columbia area.

Asked about his age, Fulton said, "My birthday is in December and at the moment I'm 87 and a half. When you reach a certain age, the halves get very important."