Howard Baum loved numbers.

Whether they were scribbled on a bowling scorecard or on the custom-designed worksheets he used in the Carter-Finley Stadium broadcast booth, he loved the way his figures, written with his color-coded pens, told a story to be shared with the hundreds of thousands of people devoted to his Fayetteville, North Carolina, bowling alley, or with the NC State fans listening to radio broadcasts of football, basketball or baseball games on the Wolfpack Sports Network.

Here’s the most remarkable number of all: Baum was the Wolfpack’s one-man in-game stats crew for 59 years.

During that time, he recorded all of running back Ted Brown’s rushing yards, all of point guard Chris Corchiani’s NCAA-record assists, all of Torry Holt’s receiving yards, all of guard Julius Hodge’s ACC Player of the Year records and all of quarterback Philip Rivers’ passing yards. He dutifully wrote those numbers down and handed them to his broadcasting partners, from the first Voice of the Wolfpack, Bill Jackson, to the most recent, Matt Chazanow.

He often sat in between familiar play-by-play announcers and color commentators to hand them stats to use on the air, from Wally Ausley and Garry Dornburg to Gary Hahn and Tony Haynes.

Baum, who died at his home in Fayetteville on Aug. 27 at the age of 92, was a constant silent presence on the radio network that launched in 1960. Baum had befriended Jackson in the early 1960s when he invited bowling alley owners and media from around the state to play golf in Fayetteville and visit his B&B Lanes bowling facility, just outside the gates of Fort Bragg.

Baum was so actively involved in promoting the sport through the Bowling Proprietors Association and the Bowling Proprietors of the Carolinas and Georgia that in 2008 he was elected to the International Bowling Hall of Fame.

Baum, a native of Cleveland, did not go to NC State. He turned his love of sports and numbers into a high school passion, then a college education, earning a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Finance.

After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, he opened B&B Lanes with his cousin in 1959. In 1967, Jackson asked Baum to be his spotter for football broadcasts, identifying players on the field with his binoculars from the press box.

“He said, ‘I’ll give you $10 a game, a parking pass and a free meal in the press box,’” Baum said in a 2008 interview. “I told him I would do it and keep a few stats on the side.

“I’ve been doing statistics for football ever since.”

Television networks would often hire Baum away from the Wolfpack Sports Network to keep their stats. At the 1978 Tangerine Bowl, the stats crew failed to show up, so Baum agreed to do the postseason game’s official stats — as long as he could give all the important numbers to his radio crew first.

“I knew he was something special early in my NC State career,” Hahn once said. “He would write all these numbers and pass it to me. The stuff he was giving me was great, but by the time it got to me, it would be too late to use on the air.

“So I talked to our engineer at the time and asked him if he could rig a system so Howard could talk to me in one ear of my headset. I’d hear myself in the other ear. That way, Howard’s information could get to me immediately and I could put as much of it on the air as possible.”

Haynes remembers when Baum started feeding him stats that were different from what was on the football stat sheet. It was stuff like yards after the catch and other kinds of hidden yardage. Haynes mentioned some of those numbers to former football coach Chuck Amato, who quickly came to rely on that information for every postgame press conference.

“I love it,” Baum said of keeping stats back when he was a young man of 74. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I am as excited now as I was when I first started doing it. I will keep stats as long as I can.

“I think I know what the broadcasters are looking for. I think it makes the broadcast better.”

Baum continued to keep stats for home football and men’s basketball games through the 2025-26 school year. His lifetime hobby was celebrated at the final home men’s basketball game.

Sports wasn’t Baum’s only passion. He also loved eating, cruises and eating on cruises.

“Howard loves food,” Hahn said. “He doesn’t eat to live as most of us do. He lives to eat. As soon as one meal is over, he’s planning the next one. We can be sitting on the runway at Raleigh-Durham airport and Howard has already done research about all the restaurants at our destination.

“Once he gets into his ‘countdown to dinner mode,’ he’s like a freight train without brakes. You can’t stop him.”

The stumpy man with a raspy voice was a lively presence in the broadcasting booth and the press box. He could tell a joke and take a joke from his many friends in the media. And like the late Frank Weedon, NC State’s legendary former sports information director and associate athletics director, Baum was a walking encyclopedia of Wolfpack basketball and football history.

Baum may not have gone to NC State, but both his daughters, one son-in-law and three of his six grandchildren did. He so dearly loved the school that gave him a chance to pursue his lifelong hobby that his last words were the money line from the school’s iconic “Red & White Song”:

“Go State.”

In Campus Characters, we explore some of the people who, through the years, have given NC State’s campus a different spice and flair. If you’d like to suggest someone to profile, email Tim Peeler at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.