Breaking Walls

As recounted by hall of famer Bob Feller, the summer of 1941 proved to be one of the greatest seasons in Baseball history. Ted Williams hit .401 for the Boston Red Sox — the last man ever to do so, while Joe Dimaggio hit in fifty-six consecutive games and won the AL MVP for the New York Yankees.

The Yankees met the surprising Brooklyn Dodgers in the world series. The Dodgers drew the most fans in baseball that year, but lost to the Yankees in five games.

Two months and one day after the last world series game...

Both players and citizens alike joined the war effort. The Dodgers drew 1.2 million fans in 1941. They still led the league, but drew only 661,000 in 1943. Many stars lost three seasons to World War II. A few would never return. Almost 420,000 Americans died during the war.

When the war finally ended, jubilation turned to atomic fears. Meanwhile in Brooklyn, the Dodgers drew 1.7 million fans in 1946 and again led The National League in attendance. It set the stage for the most important moment in Baseball history.

Jerome Hanna "Dizzy" Dean was born on January 16th, 1910 in Lucas, Arkansas, only attending school into the second grade. He made his professional debut in 1930 for the St. Louis Cardinals, sticking with the big club in 1932. The team was soon nicknamed the Gashouse Gang for their on and off field exploits.

Two years later Dean was the 1934 World Series team’s ace. His brother Paul was also on the pitching staff. For the next three years Dean won seventy-eight and lost just thirty-two. Paul won forty-three games of his own. The Cardinals biggest rivals in the 1930s were the New York Giants.

Even with Dean’s brilliance, his Cardinals won only one world series before arm troubles derailed his career. He then went into broadcasting, calling Baseball for radio, and then TV, from 1941 through 1965.

He had his own radio show for NBC in the summer of 1948. During that summer’s all-star break, the Brooklyn Dodgers fired their longtime manager Leo Durocher. Durocher signed with the Giants, who moved their manager Mel Ott to a front office position. All three New York teams missed the playoffs that year.

That same summer Gordon McLendon founded a U.S. radio network called the Liberty Broadcasting System. McLendon built the network up to nearly five-hundred affiliates, second in size only to the Mutual Broadcasting System. His success led to restrictions on Major League Baseball broadcasts in minor league franchise areas and blackouts within a seventy-five mile range of major league cities.

It was a disaster for the network, which folded on May 16th, 1952.

In 1939 the just-heard Mel Allen became the New York Yankees radio announcer. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama on February 14th, 1913. While attending the University of Alabama he became the public address announcer for the Crimson Tide football team.

In 1933, when radio station WBRC asked Alabama coach Frank Thomas to recommend a new play-by-play announcer, he suggested Allen. Allen graduated from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1937. Shortly after he took a train to New York City for a week's vacation. While there, he auditioned for a staff announcer's job at CBS. CBS’ top sportscaster, Ted Husing, had heard many Crimson Tide broadcasts. Allen was hired for forty-five dollars per week.

Although he was calling Baseball, Allen continued to announce other shows on the Network. He was CBS announcer for the Duffy’s Tavern pilot, which aired on Forecast July 30th, 1940.

After Ruth and Gehrig retired, Joe DiMaggio became the next Yankee legend. The Yankees main rival, the Boston Red Sox, were led by fellow future Hall-of-Famer Ted Williams. Norman Corwin riffed on this rivalry during his production of “Between Americans”, for Screen Guild Theatre which aired the night of December 7th, 1941. Both players missed three seasons in the mid 1940s while at war. Ted Williams missed most of two more during the Korean conflict.

In forty-four seasons from 1921 to 1964, The New York Yankees won the World Series twenty times. The dynasty began with Babe Ruth’s sale from the Boston Red Sox after the 1919 season.

Ruth learned his craft in an orphanage in Baltimore, making the Red Sox as a teenager in 1914. He quickly established himself as the best left-handed pitcher in the American League, but he could hit a ball further than anyone had seen.

Over the next few seasons, the Red Sox slowly converted him into an outfielder. In 1919, he broke the Major League record, hitting twenty-nine home runs. The Red Sox drew 417,000 fans to Fenway Park, but they finished in sixth place. After that season, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees. The Red Sox had won five of the first fifteen world championships. They wouldn’t win another for eighty-six years.

The 1919 Yankees were competitive. They finished seven games out of first place and drew 619,000 fans to the Polo Grounds. But the stadium’s main tenant was The New York Giants. The Giants drew 708,000 fans.

Neither team won the pennant. The National League was represented by The Cincinnati Reds, while the American League champions were the Chicago White Sox. The White Sox lost the series five games to three under suspicious circumstances, and eight men — including Shoeless Joe Jackson — were barred for life for throwing games.

Baseball needed a hero and Babe Ruth, now in the nation’s biggest city, was that man. In 1920, his first year with the Yankees, the team drew 1.2 million fans. The Giants drew 929,000 fans. Giants manager John McGraw wasn’t happy with Ruth’s popularity. McGraw was a savage competitor who’d been involved in baseball since the late nineteenth century. Grantland Rice’s show once dramatized a story about McGraw. Meanwhile in Brooklyn, The Robbins drew 613,000 people to Ebbets Field in Flatbush. New York was the capital of baseball.

The Giants and Yankees would meet in three straight World Series, and the Yankees would open up Yankee Stadium in the Bronx in 1923. Throughout the course of his legendary career, Babe Ruth hit .342 with 714 Home Runs, a lifetime on-base percentage of .474, and a lifetime Slugging percentage of .690.

Bill Stern interviewed The Babe for his March 22nd, 1946 Colgate Sports Newsreel. Any conversation about Ruth’s Yankees always included teammate Lou Gehrig, who was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1939 and forced to retire. Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech was broadcast on Independence Day, 1939. His disease is now also known by his name. Lou Gehrig passed away on June 2nd, 1941.

He was thirty-seven.

If you’ve tuned into Breaking Walls episodes before, you know I rarely editorialize. I’m just the messenger bringing the news. The origins belong to men and women who gave radio their blood, sweat, and tears through radio’s highest highs and lowest lows. I grew up in a home with my grandparents and great-grandparents listening to The Golden Age of Radio. It was a hobby and nothing more.

By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I came to a crux: Do I attempt to live out my childhood dream of being on the pitcher's mound in game seven of some future World Series, or do I focus on getting into one of the top art colleges in the country? I chose the latter. But it wasn’t an easy choice.

My high school art thesis centered around a rhetorical question: “What does it mean to me to be an American?” Since age eight Baseball has been one the strongest answers.

For those tuning in that aren’t baseball fans, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can say to make you feel emotion towards the game, but I can also try.

Take this clip for instance. It’s Wednesday, October 4th, 1995 and those damned New York Yankees are back in the playoffs for the first time in fourteen years. The Yankees captain is Don Mattingly. A beloved family man from Evansville, Indiana, for six seasons he was arguably baseball’s best player. Though only thirty-four, a bad back made him a shell of his former self.

Mattingly played seventeen-hundred-eighty-five regular season games before getting the chance to play in the playoffs. If you’ve watched enough baseball — especially with the Yankees — you know that ghosts are always around the corner.

And that’s essentially what tonight’s episode is: A ghost story. Some ghost stories are scary and some are sentimental. Sometimes, they’re a little of both.

Have you been enjoying Breaking Walls? If so, give the show a quick rating on whatever platform you listen, especially iTunes.

In Breaking Walls episode 137 we celebrate the Irish by focusing on St. Patrick’s Day on the air.

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Highlights:

• Fred Allen — The End and the Beginning

• Beat the Band

• Burns and Allen at the NYC Parade

• Bill Stern’s Sports Newsreel

• Dennis Day Returns from the Navy

• Fred Allen is King For a Day

• Elliott Lewis and Broadway Is My Beat

• The Death of Fred Allen

• Ending with Jean Shepherd

• Looking Ahead to Opening Day

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The WallBreakers:

http://thewallbreakers.com

Subscribe to Breaking Walls everywhere you get your podcasts.

To support the show:

http://patreon.com/TheWallBreakers

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The reading material for today’s episode was:

• Treadmill to Oblivion and Much Ado About Me — By Fred Allen

• On The Air — By John Dunning

• Network Radio Ratings — By Jim Ramsburg

• The Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Radio — By Christopher H. Sterling

As well as articles from

• The New York Daily News

• The New York Times

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On the interview front:

• Fred Allen was interviewed by Tex and Jinx on NBC Radio — November 24th, 1954

• Goodman Ace, Tallulah Bankhead, Jack Benny, Mort Greene, Jim Harkins, George Jessel, Doc Rockwell, Donald Vorhees, Pat Weaver, Roger White, and Herman Wouk spoke for Biography In Sound — May 29th, 1956

• Dennis Day and Phil Harris spoke to Chuck Schaden. Hear these full chats at SpeakingOfRadio.com

• Dennis Day and Elliott Lewis spoke to John Dunning for his 71KNUS program from Denver.

• Morton Fine was with Dan Haefele

• Jack Kruschen with Jim Bohannan in 1987.

• Orson Welles on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson

• George Burns spoke to Barbara Walters

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Selected music featured in today’s episode was:

• The Sails of Galway — By W.B. Snuffy Walden

• Overture on Hebrew Themes, Opus 34 — By Andre Moisan

• Someone To Watch Over Me — By Blossom Dearie

• The Minstrel Boy — By Jacqueline Schwab

• Swing into Spring — By Benny Goodman

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A special thank you to Ted Davenport, Jerry Haendiges, and Gordon Skene.

For Ted go to RadioMemories.com, for Jerry, visit OTRSite.com, and for Gordon, please go to PastDaily.com.

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Thank you to:

Tony Adams

Steven Allmon

Orson Orsen Chandler

Phil Erickson

Jessica Hanna

Perri Harper

Briana Isaac

Thomas M. Joyce

Ryan Kramer

Earl Millard

Gary Mollica

Barry Nadler

Christian Neuhaus

Aimee Pavy

Ray Shaw

Filipe A Silva

John Williams

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WallBreakers Links:

Patreon - patreon.com/thewallbreakers

Social Media - @TheWallBreakers

Well, that brings our look at St. Patrick’s Day to the close, but not to worry the green fields of the mind will remain in April.

Next time on Breaking Walls, in honor of Major League Baseball’s opening day, we take a trip to the batter’s box and bring our radios with us. We’ll tell and hear baseball stories from some of the most famous broadcasters and players in American history.

Although Fred Allen’s death left an unfillable hole in mid-century comedy, it’s not as though there weren’t other humorists battling with networks and sponsors. Just ask Jean Shepherd.

Jean Shepherd was born on July 26th, 1921 in Hammond, Indiana. He served in the Army Signal Corps in World War II, and briefly attended Indiana University. Shepherd began his broadcast radio career in early 1945 on WJOB, later working at WTOD in Toledo, Ohio, in 1946. He spent the early 1950s at WSAI and WLW in Cincinnati, and had a late-night broadcast on KYW in Philadelphia. He moved to New York for WOR and debuted on February 26th, 1955.

The Jean Shepherd Show broadcast for almost twenty-one years to an audience all along the eastern seaboard, thanks to WOR's fifty-thousand watt clear channel signal. This is audio from his March 17th, 1967 broadcast.

By January of 1949 Fred Allen was worn out. He’d spent years battling with sponsors and with NBC. In December of 1948 his Sunday at 8:30 rating was a healthy 20 points, but after Edgar Bergen left NBC’s airwaves the network moved Allen’s show up a half hour to 8PM.

Meanwhile on ABC, Stop the Music’s popularity was soaring. Allen lost nearly half his audience in a single month. By March Stop The Music’s rating would reach 17.6, while Allen’s fell to 9.4 and Sam Spade’s fell to 11.3 on CBS.

Allen was a voracious reader, sometimes scouring ten newspapers a day for topical material. In the end, perhaps he just cared too much. By June with his rating down to an unthinkable 5.8, he’d had enough. The fifty-five year-old called it a seventeen-year radio career after June 26th, 1949. Jack Benny and Henry Morgan were his final guests. Fittingly, the program ran long and Allen’s network feed was cut off.

Although Fred Allen’s program came to a close, he was still under contract to NBC. When the network launched The Big Show, Allen became a regular. The ninety-minute program debuted on November 5th, 1950. It was an attempt to revive NBC’s Sunday night ratings.

It was hosted by Tallulah Bankhead, written by Goodman Ace with music by Meredith Wilson, announced by Jimmy Wallington, and a rotating star-studded cast. Ace had long been an admirer of Fred's work. Allen appeared on twenty-four of the show's fifty-seven episodes, including the landmark premiere.

Each episode cost over one-hundred thousand dollars to produce. Hopes were high. Before the show's launch the entire cast flew out to London for a lavish publicity stunt. Although Allen was as funny as ever, the British press was unimpressed and the show was a flop. Amazingly the show was brought back for a second season, but by the end NBC had lost a million dollars and made no dent into CBS's Sunday night ratings. After the final broadcast on April 20, 1952, Fred Allen was happy to walk away.

Allen did eventually break into television, first as the emcee of Judge For Yourself, and finally as a regular panel guest on the CBS quiz show, What's My Line.

Between 1954 and 1956 he also worked as a newspaper columnist and as a memoirist, renting a small New York office to work without distractions. There he wrote Treadmill to Oblivion, published in 1954, which reviewed his radio and television years, and Much Ado About Me, published in 1956, which covered the early years of his life.

Treadmill was the best-selling book on radio's classic period for many years. When it was published, he appeared on the Tex and Jinx radio show out of WNBC in New York on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, November 24th, 1954 to talk about his career. The show was broadcast from Peacock Alley at The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The weather was dreary, which only added to Fred's usual sense of sarcastic humor.

By 1954 Allen already had a heart attack. Always a letter-writer, he reflected upon the lifestyle changes he was forced to adopt in a note to friend Doc Rockwell. Taking a late night stroll up New York's West 57th Street on a blustery, cold Saturday night — St. Patrick's Day, 1956, Allen suffered a heart attack and died on the spot.

Fred Allen was 61.

Due to the public nature of his death, reporters were quick to arrive at the scene. The next day’s Sunday Daily News cover featured a photo of his body with the headline “Fred Allen Dies in Street.” His death sent the entertainment industry into deep mourning. Jack Benny was profoundly shaken. In truth, as funny as Benny was, he was never exactly the same without his old sparring partner.

During the following night's Sunday broadcast of What's My Line? host John Daly preceded the program with a special message to the viewing audience. Steve Allen took Fred's place on the panel. During the final ninety seconds of the program Steve Allen, Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf gave heartfelt tributes to Fred.