Memories from the Microphone: A Century of Baseball Broadcasting
318
Memories from the Microphone: A Century of Baseball Broadcasting
318Paperback
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781642506754 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Mango Media |
| Publication date: | 08/03/2021 |
| Pages: | 318 |
| Sales rank: | 1,053,196 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
In 1998, Smith joined the University of Rochester faculty as Senior Lecturer of English. He teaches Public Speaking using video, text, and lecture, and Presidential Rhetoric, etching how U.S. presidents from Calvin Coolidge to Joe Biden communicated through language and delivery. He is also a Gannett News Service columnist, analyzing politics, culture, and sport through what pollster John Zogby calls “his mastery of language.”
Smith began his career as a 1970s Gannett reporter, 1980-82 The Saturday Evening Post Senior editor, and 1983-89 speechwriter for several Cabinet members of the Reagan Presidency. He was a 1989-93 White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush, addresses including the “Just War” Persian Gulf speech; address on the USS Arizona Memorial site on Pearl Harbor’s fiftieth anniversary that Senator John McCain termed “moving … thick with emotion”; and later Bush’s 2004 emotional eulogy to Ronald Reagan.
In 1992, Smith released the updated version of Voices of The Game, the history of baseball radio/TV that Publisher’s Weekly called “monumental.” It became a Smithsonian Institution series that The Washington Post styled “a mesmerizing memory lane” and then highly-rated three-part 1994-95 ESPN TV series. Since then, Smith has hosted other Smithsonian, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, XM Satellite Radio, and a decade-long National Public Radio Upstate New York series Perspectives, named by Associated Press “Best in New York State.”
Smith’s most recent book is The Presidents and the Pastime. Others include Pull Up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story; George H.W. Bush; A Talk in the Park; What Baseball Means to Me; Windows on the White House; and Mercy!, a tribute to Fenway Park. He has contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Baseball, the National Museum of American Jewish History’s Chasing Dreams, and more than a dozen volumes of the Society of American Baseball Research—and addressed, among others, the White House Historical Association, Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, and Great Fenway Writers Series.
Smith has written about baseball or politics for, among other publications, American Enterprise Magazine, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, and The Washington Post. He has appeared on network radio/TV programs including ABC’s Nightline, Armed Forces Radio, BBC, CBS This Morning, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox News Channel, History Channel, MSNBC, Mutual Radio’s Jim Bohannon and Larry King, and Radio America.
Born and raised in Upstate New York, the State University of New York at Geneseo graduate was elected in 1993 to the Judson Welliver Society of former White House speechwriters. Smith is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award broadcast committee and the National Radio Hall of Fame steering committee. He lives with his wife Sarah and two children in Upstate New York.
Known as “The Human Vacuum Cleaner,” Brooks Robinson is regarded as arguably the best defensive third baseman the game has ever seen.
Robinson began his career with the Baltimore Orioles – the only team he ever played for – in 1955, and for 23 years dazzled fans on the field with his glove. Off the field, he was humble and gracious.
Robinson retired after the 1977 season and the Orioles wasted no time in retiring his No. 5. He led all AL third basemen in fielding percentage 11 times and assists eight times. His 2,870 games at third base rank No. 1 on the all-time list.
He was so beloved in Baltimore that sports writer Gordon Beard wrote: “Brooks (Robinson) never asked anyone to name a candy bar after him. In Baltimore, people named their children after him.”
Robinson was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1983.
Read an Excerpt
An old British Broadcasting Company radio series, Listen With 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 IllustrationsAcknowledgements
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
What People are Saying About This
“Curt Smith, by far my favorite baseball broadcast historian, hits another literary home run with this new volume, documenting everything from the origin of Dizzy Dean’s nickname to Ted Turner’s brainstorm of a SuperStation. Through extensive research, he reveals that the Phillies once had three flagship TV outlets, that Milwaukee lost a team by failing to promote through television, and that Bill Campbell once co-hosted a radio/TV series with Connie Mack. Who knew?”
—Dan Schlossberg, national baseball writer, forbes.com
“Curt Smith’s knowledge of the history of baseball broadcasting and its foremost practitioners is unsurpassed.”
—Bob Costas, 2018 Ford C. Frick Award winner
“If your heart and soul is filled with baseball, I guarantee there is a radio broadcaster who put it there. Broadcasters are part of your family, every day, creating a picture and a soundtrack for your life. Thank you, Curt Smith, for bringing them to life–for me to remember, for everyone to enjoy!”
—Suzyn Waldman, New York Yankees broadcaster
“Another quintessential Curt Smith book, another tape-measure grand slam by our treasured voice of authority on the voices that have endeared themselves and enchanted us throughout our baseball lives.”
—Ed Randall, long-time host of Talking Baseball and host of Remember When on SiriusXM Radio