What Carlos E. Rivas could do with a pencil, a wooden box, the barest of teletype reports and an expansive imagination was magic akin to the exploits of the Major League Baseball stars he described.

For a generation of enraptured radio listeners here in the 1950s, Rivas was a creative voice that brought professional baseball to Hawai'i homes before transpacific technology got around to it.

His death this month at age 82 on the Big Island, following a lengthy illness, recalls a period when the state's sports fans, at the mercy of geography, depended on people such as Rivas, who were storytellers as much as sportscasters.

Rivas, a 1941 Punahou School graduate who attended the University of Washington and the University of Hawai'i, was a championship swimmer, an accomplished water sportsman, and a longtime media, advertising and public relations figure. He left his mark on everything from rodeo to polo.

But for many who grew up here in the 1950s, he is most fondly remembered for baseball re-creations so well done that it could be a while before listeners grasped that he wasn't at the game.

Before live television made the Island connection in 1966, accounts of games were left to those gifted in the art of re-creating them from notes teletyped from the Mainland site. In this, Rivas was among the first and best known in a long line of practitioners, including Les Keiter and Frank Valenti, of an art form that emerged in the 1940s and endured here until 1984.

A pencil rapped against a piece of wood simulated the whack of a bat, and taped crowd noise filled in the background. But with often the sketchiest of details to work from and frequent technical delays to overcome, creativity was a necessity.

"It all sounded real to me over the radio," said Craig Nahm, who grew up in Manoa. "Like Carlos was really there at the game. That is how I got more interested in baseball ..."

Those who saw him in front of a microphone were no less amazed. "I was mesmerized by the fact here was this guy sitting in a studio by himself with only a bunch of papers, a pencil and a wooden box in front of him making up this baseball game," said Pal Eldredge, K5 baseball commentator.

Rivas brought more than imagination to the microphone. He also made trips to spring training, taping interviews for future shows and getting to know the personalities of those whose games he would re-create.

"For a lot of us, who grew up in the '50s, he brought baseball alive," Eldredge said.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.