While acknowledging Don Robbs’ remarkable 40-year run as the radio voice of University of Hawaii baseball, it’s good to remember that’s not all he has done here. This was actually his night job.

“He’s a lot more than a guy with a silky voice,” Jim Young said. “In my opinion he saved public television in Hawaii.”

Young was the executive director of PBS from 1980 to 1993 and hired Robbs as operations manager. Later, Robbs returned as director, with the difficult task of converting PBS from a state-funded entity to a non-profit because the state had cut support.

“He had to do some unpopular things like cutting staff, but he figured out how to make the transition,” Young said. “If he hadn’t done it the station might not be here.”

Leslie Wilcox, now the president of PBS Hawaii, was a contractor there (moderator of “Insights”) during Robbs’ tenure.

“We all know Don as a comfortable, relaxed and fun person, but there’s another side where he’s had to deal with anguish,” she said. “There were some very tough unforeseen budget cuts and he had no choice but to let people go. He was as supportive and personable as possible.”

Robbs’ time at PBS is just one chapter in a broadcasting career spanning 60 years that started when he was a disc jockey while in college at St. Cloud State, a few miles from his hometown of Litchfield, Minn.

The other constant in his life even before then was baseball. He was a bat boy for a semi-pro team and played second base on his high school squad.

Today, Robbs, 79, does his final Rainbows game as the radio play-by-play announcer.

“I never made a living from baseball, but it’s been a common thread of my life,” said Robbs, who has worked around 2,500 UH games.

Again, he’s not just the voice. It was Robbs who came up with the idea of putting UH baseball on the air.

In 1977, UH hosted the NCAA West Regional at Aloha Stadium. Robbs was working at KHVH as news director.

“I went to (owner) Bob Berger and said, ‘I think we should broadcast those games.’ Berger gave me a quizzical look and said, ‘We can’t sell it. No one will buy college baseball.’”

Maybe they weren’t buying college baseball, but sponsors bought phenom pitcher Derek Tatsuno and the Rainbows. The ’Bows went 0-2 in that regional, but two years later Tatsuno had become one of college baseball’s all-time greats and won 20 games in 1979.

“In ’79 (the broadcasts) started making money,” Robbs said.

A year later UH was in Omaha, Neb., at the College World Series. So was Robbs, calling the games for the fans back home.

Mike Trapasso became the program’s permanent head coach after Les Murakami stepped down due to health reasons in 2000. Rainbow Stadium is now Les Murakami Stadium. Younger fans think of Kolten Wong before Derek Tatsuno as the program’s all-time superstar.

Through all the change Robbs has been the program’s one constant, even despite some serious health challenges.

“Doing something for 40 years is amazing,” Trapasso said. “But with Don you know he’s been doing something he loves for 40 years. He’s been blessed, and we’ve been blessed to have him in the booth all these years.”

Sometimes he didn’t even have a booth.

“Put it this way: Robbs is the best,” Murakami said. “And conditions didn’t seem to matter to him. I remember road games, like at USF, he did the game from the girls’ dorm. He did games out in the rain. And at BYU out in the snow, didn’t matter to him.”

Maybe because he was from Minnesota.

But after his arrival in Hawaii in 1962, Robbs seemed content at home in the islands, or Japan — other than brief ventures on the continent including as a station owner in Salem, Ore., and leading baseball vacation trips to the West Coast.

Lew Matlin, a longtime Major League Baseball executive (and father of UH athletic director David Matlin), was GM of the Hawaii Islanders in the early ’60s when Robbs did PA duty for the Triple-A team. He said he has no doubt Robbs could’ve had a career as a big-league play-by-play man.

“I don’t think he ever really had his eye on the mainland,” Tom Moffatt said.

Moffatt and Robbs worked together during the reign of the “Poi Boys,” when KPOI’s charismatic and innovative disc jockeys’ popularity had the station dominating the local airwaves.

“KPOI had taken over the town in 1959,” Robbs said. “The most creative people I’ve ever known. We didn’t make a lot of money, but we had a lot of fun.”

One stunt featured a jousting match between Moffatt and Ron Jacobs on boats in the Ala Wai Canal that attracted 5,000 spectators.

“It was before corporations controlled radio. We just came up with ideas and did it,” said Moffatt, who remains active as a legendary entertainment promoter. “Don was the stable one.”

Robbs had been stationed in Korea and Japan while in the Army prior to his stint at KPOI. (“They asked me where I wanted to go. I said Germany, so they sent me to Korea,” he said.)

He returned to Japan in time to work for that country’s largest public relations firm at the 1964 Olympics. Seiko — the first non-Swiss company entrusted with timing events at the Olympics — was one of his accounts.

After a year at a radio station in San Francisco, Robbs returned to Hawaii. During the late 1960s and ’70s he did a variety of TV and radio jobs. They included news anchor at KHVH-TV (which later became KITV), hosting “Hawaii AM” (which became “The Don Robbs Show”), and following Al Michaels and Ken Wilson as Les Keiter’s No. 2 on Hawaii Islanders radio broadcasts.

“Les taught me to do the re-creates. We re-created almost all the road games,” Robbs said. “Les was an absolute master.”

Later, he was station manager and news director at KHVH (radio) and hosted and produced the weekly TV “Sports Page” with Star-Bulletin sports editor Jim Hackleman.

Robbs also found time to host the Easter Seals Telethon 31 years.

He tried to retire about 15 years ago. “It lasted two months. Mike Kelly made me a consultant at KCCN, and I ended up being general manager for a time at KKEA.”

Angioplasty kept him out of action only briefly, but three years ago Robbs suffered a stroke and underwent quintuple bypass heart and hernia surgery and a procedure to clear blockage in his carotid artery.

In a comeback even more incredible than UH making up a 10-0 deficit in a 1980 win against New Mexico, Robbs was back in the booth to start the 2014 season.

“In a way, UH baseball saved his life,” said his son and broadcast partner, Scott Robbs. “He made it a goal to get back in the booth. It motivated him every day to get better and work.”

Don thanks Scott, and many others, for helping him in his return to health and what he calls his “avocation.”

Now, he can go out on his own terms.

“I could not have written a script for my life any better,” said Robbs, who looks forward to more traveling and time with his grandchildren. “A small-town boy from Minnesota doing all kinds of things I never thought possible. It’s been fun.”

Coincidentally, or not, another baseball broadcaster forever linked with his team retires at the end of this season.

“He’s the Vin Scully of Hawaii,” former UH pitcher Chris Walz said of Robbs, and is not the first to do so.

In some ways, Don Robbs was much more than that.

Not bad for a moonlighter.