Memories from the Microphone, livre ebook

Voices of the Game

Curt Smith is “…the voice of authority on baseball broadcasting.” —USA Today

#1 New Release in Photography, Baseball Statistics, Photo Essays, and Photojournalism

In this second in a series of Baseball Hall of Fame books, celebrate the larger-than-life role played by radio and TV baseball announcers in enhancing the pleasure of our national pastime.

Commemorate the 100th anniversary of baseball broadcasting. The first baseball game ever broadcast on radio was on August 5, 1921 by Harold Wampler Arlin, a part-time baseball announcer on Pittsburgh’s KDKA, America’s first commercially licensed radio station. The Pirates defeated the Phillies 8-5.

An insider’s view of baseball. Now you can own Memories from the Microphone and experience baseball from author Curt Smith. He has spent much of his life covering baseball radio and TV, and previously authored baseball books including the classic Voices of The Game.

Relive baseball’s storied past through the eyes of famed baseball announcers. Organized chronologically, Memories from the Microphone charts the history of baseball broadcasting. Enjoy celebrated stories and personalities that have shaped the game—from Mel Allen to Harry Caray, Vin Scully to Joe Morgan, Ernie Harwell to Red Barber.

Also discover:

• Images from the Baseball Hall of Fame’s matchless archive
• Anecdotes and quotes from Curt Smith’s original research
• Interviews with broadcast greats
• Little-known stories, such as Ronald Reagan calling games for WHO Des Moines in the 1930s
• Accounts of diversity in baseball broadcasting, including the TV coverage of Joe Morgan and earlier Hispanic pioneers Buck Canel and Rafael (Felo) Ramirez
• A special section devoted to the Ford C. Frick Award and inductees since its inception in 1978

Also take a nostalgic trip down baseball's memory lane with other Baseball Hall of Fame books:  Picturing America’s Pastime, So You Think You Know Baseball, and Baseball Memories and Dreams.

From Chapter 1:

An old British Broadcasting Company radio series, ListenWith Mother, began each program by asking, “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.” On Friday, August 5, 1921, baseball on the air began commercially, if not always comfortably, over America’s first licensed radio station, Pittsburgh’s KDKA. This year hails a century of the pastime ferried to the republic through the air by the wireless, as it was first known, and later television.

Since baseball has long seemed wed to each, it is natural to assume that it must have long been in harmony with both. In fact, Harold Arlin was winging it that August afternoon at Forbes Field in suburban Pittsburgh as he described the first major-league baseball game ever broadcast—play-by-play, carried by a microphone—inventing an art form as he spoke.

After that game’s final pitch—Pirates 8, Phillies 5—Arlin’s voice was critiqued by a listener as “clear, crisp, resonant, and appealing.” In time, as “The Voice of America,” it made him what The London Times called “the best-known American voice in Europe”—indeed, “the world’s most popular radio announcer.” He also invented the celebrity interview in the 1920s, emerging for a while as a celebrity himself.

Such a future would have seemed more improbable than the sheer fact of radio—sound, through the air!—when Arlin, twenty-five, and several other Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing engineers visited the company’s KDKA rooftop East Pittsburgh studio. “What’s that?” Harold had said several days earlier, eying the shack studio from outside the plant. Now he saw a microphone in studio about which the same question could be posed. “It looked like a tomato can with a felt lining. We called it a mushophone.”

Earlier that day, Tuesday, November 2, KDKA received a broadcast license as the first commercially licensed radio station: thus, eligible to broadcast. Moreover, it had a lot to announce—since the date was Election Day, KDKA’s on-air debut reporting Warren Harding’s presidential landslide over James M. Cox. According to The New York Times, “curiosity led Arlin” to apply for the on-air job. He was hired, instantly—in another precedent, popularly known as the world’s first radio announcer.

Born in LaHarpe, Illinois, raised in Carthage, Missouri, and schooled at the University of Kansas, Arlin, in an exquisitely small field, was starting at the top. In 1921, he aired the first football (Pitt-West Virginia), did Davis Cup tennis, and gave baseball scores. That August 5, Harold drove to the city’s Oakland section and bought a seat at Forbes Field, putting a scorecard on a wooden plank and converting a telephone to microphone. Looking for programming, he said, “I just set up shop.”

What did the pathfinder sound like that afternoon? KDKA then had only one-hundred-watt power v. today’s fifty thousand. Few people had a wireless. Arlin noted how radio’s inaugural weaved. “Sometimes the transmitter wouldn’t work, or crowd drowned us out. We didn’t know whether we’d talk into a vacuum, or someone would hear.” The game itself lurched: first inning, Philly, 4-2, on Cy Williams’ homer; later, Bucs, 5-4; the Phils tied at five; eighth-inning singles give Pittsburgh the W. Thirteen runs on twenty-one hits careened around the yard, including three Pirates’ doubles and a triple. By today’s criteria, the game took an inexpressible hour and fifty-seven minutes.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Foreword

Prologue: "Present at the Creation” (Introduction: 1921 First Radio Game)

Chapter 1: “The Pioneers” (1920s: Those Who Began the Craft)
Chapter 2: “Both Sides Now” (1930s: To Broadcast or Not)
Chapter 3: “An Accent on Sound” (1940s: The Migration North)
Chapter 4: “That Old Feeling” (Early 1950s: The Wireless Goes Network)
Chapter 5: “Legend In Your Own Time” (1950s: Local Television’s Sunrise)
Chapter 6: “Millennium in the Morn” (1950s-’60s: Network TV’s Debut)
Chapter 7: “Light in the Midnight Door” (1960s-’70s: Shining Booths Amid the Night)
Chapter 8: “I Sing the Songs” (1960s-’80s: Network TV/Radio Blooms)
Chapter 9: “Across the Rubicon” (1970s-’90s: Cable and Company)
Chapter 10: “We Shall Overcome” (1960-Present: Minority Voices)
Chapter 11: “Technology Meets the Sandlot Kid” (2000-Present: New Voices and Devices”)
Chapter 12: “Postlogue: A Sonnet Read Upon the Heart”
Chapter 13: “The Sound of Cooperstown” (Frick Award History)

Bibliography
Index
​About the Author