It may very well be that this essay should be entitled “Back to the Future.” In my current situation, I am of course unable to see the action taking place on television. I listen to the dialogue on television and in many cases, I can determine who the speaker may be but in other cases I have to ask my wife or other people around me as to who is the speaker.
In baseball games, which I have long prized, I miss the beauty of a fielding gem or the swing of an expert batsman. On the other hand, I do not appreciate the chatter that comes from television announcers that has very little to do with the game in progress. It seems to me that there is idle chatter having nothing to do with the game that takes place until the proceedings are finished. Tom Seaver and Keith Hernandez, two Met heroes, are examples of announcers who chatter endlessly about other things than the ball game taking place in front of them.
I said that this essay ought to be about going back to the future and that had to do with my replacing the television set with a radio. In the 1926 World Series, the Saint Louis Cardinals defeated the New York Yankees in seven games when Grover Cleveland Alexander struck out Tony Lazzeri in the ninth inning and my home town, Saint Louis, went absolutely wild. My recollection of the celebration of that game is the first memory that I have in my memory bank. From that time on, I have been a fan of radio and now I find that the people on radio broadcasts are much more to the point and have fewer distractions such as interviewing fans and asking which kind of ice cream do you like at the ball park.
Growing up in Saint Louis meant following the Cardinals, and to a lesser extent the Browns, religiously. The games were broadcast live from Sportsmans Park where both the Cardinals and the Browns played. When the Browns or Cardinals were out of town, the telegraph reporters gave summaries about the state of the game to the announcers in the Saint Louis radio stations. These reports would have been about the score of the game and it might even include such things as who hit a home run and who struck out whom and so forth.
On days when the Cardinals or Browns were out of town and there was no local game, telegraphic reports were sent to the radio studio and it was up to the announcer to recreate the game using his imagination. The announcer might say that the pitcher is winding up and he is ready to throw the ball, but then there might be an interruption in the telegraph process and the announcer would be stuck there with the pitcher holding the ball for several seconds. Under this arrangement, the announcers were able to give very artful demonstrations of the play in progress even though they had not seen it.
Remember, these were Depression times and the radio stations could not afford to send their announcers to the games being played in other cities. They had to rely on telegraphed reports. Hence, the need to recreate the ball game.
During most of the years as I was growing up, there were two announcers in Saint Louis who were the sports directors of the station and who were also the announcers of the ball games of the Saint Louis Cardinals and the Saint Louis Browns. On KMOX, a powerful station, the sports director was a man named France Laux. Further down the dial was a radio station, WIL, where the announcer was Johnnie O’Hara. Laux was a straightforward announcer who, I suspected, had no sense of humor at all. He had trouble recreating the games that were sent to him by telegraph. O’Hara, on the other hand, was a gregarious fellow who seemed to love recreating the games right out of his mind as he got a telegraph report. If the telegraph report said that the pitcher threw a strike, O’Hara would say that he wound up and that he delivered a spitball to the outside corner. That is clearly not what the telegraph report said, but that was what O’Hara colored it to be.
France Laux also, as sports director of KMOX, had a program called “Stars of Tomorrow.” In that program, Laux would visit neighborhood industrial teams and high schools and would interview their star players on a cumbersome piece of equipment that would record their thoughts which he would play later on his sports program. At that time it was a very complicated process. On this one occasion, when I was playing in an industrial league game on a Sunday, France Laux appeared early in the proceedings to interview our fleet center fielder, Vernon Ludloff. Laux would start the interview by saying, “And what star of tomorrow do we have here?” The star of tomorrow would say his name and would then say hello to everyone. In this case, France Laux asked Vern Ludloff, “What star of tomorrow do we have here?” and Ludloff got his script mixed up. Vernon was supposed to say, “Hello everyone, I’m Vern Ludloff.” In point of fact, Vernon said, “Hello Vernon Ludloff, I’m everybody.” France Laux did not use that quote on his broadcast that evening or any other evening. So I guess that Ludloff fell from the stars of tomorrow array.
In recent years, on television there is a tendency to use attractive young women who know nothing about the game being played, and ask them to give a two-minute report in-between innings or, in football games, between periods and time-outs. Even the best broadcasting team that I know of, which consists of Jon Miller and Joe Morgan, have been inflicted by their management with this device. On occasion when the attractive young woman begins her spiel, she will often fail to end it before the next batter comes to the plate. So far, that sort of arrangement has not come to radio. It afflicts only television. These young women are nice to look at but they add nothing to the game; indeed they detract from the game.
My New York grandchildren gave me an XM Radio for Christmas in 2005. On that radio, I can hear classical music, a better class of country music, music from the 1930’s and 1940’s, as well as ball games from all over the country. Because it is a satellite radio, I can keep track of billiard games on the moon, cricket games on Saturn, and pool playing on Venus. It is a remarkable radio that has provided me with unheard of pieces of important information.
So in the end my problem with my eyesight is not all that bad because I get a better description of the games from radio. There is more straightforward talk about the game in progress as well as the rumors involving the players such as trades and that sort of thing that may be taking place at the time. Actually, at this point, while I do not have an option to watch television, I must say that going backwards many years to the radio broadcast has its merits. I don’t miss television all that much any more and I have come to again appreciate the skill of the radio announcers. And finally, I must admit that without radio I would not have been able to hear Mr. Ludloff tell everyone that he was everybody. That memory is 65 or 66 years old and it is nowhere near being forgotten. So if you go to Saint Louis and run across Vernon Ludloff, please tell him “I’m everybody.”
E. E. CARR
June 6, 2006
Essay 196
~~~
Kevin’s commentary: The essay of the beast: 6/6/06! I was thinking as I read this essay that if Pop went back to the future with his satellite radio, I suppose that I’ve gone “forward to the future” by completely replacing television in my life with the internet. However, even internet broadcasts of games that I follow have unfortunately been afflicted by the “interview babes” who know next-to-nothing about what’s happening, and are rather there chiefly to be seen. So I guess that department is a win for the radio all around.
Pop’s memory continues to astound. I would be hard-pressed to come up with the names of any local media personalities from Austin, and that was only six years ago. I guess I really just never had much reason to pay attention to them, and I preferred music to talk shows whenever I was in my car, which of course was the only place where I was ever exposed to radio.
As far as ol’ Vernon is concerned, I wonder what he’d think if I told him that upon reading the title to this essay, I thought I was about to get an essay about a profound philosophical observation. I expected to hear Pop’s take on a person making a statement about, perhaps, empathy for others. But no, he was a not-quite baseball star who couldn’t keep his lines straight — which honestly makes for a better essay anyway, most likely.