Time for some reorganizing. JHeroes hasn’t had a “Sports” heading on its main menu, but there have been at least a half-dozen posts and pages over the years with baseball, football and boxing themes. Here’s a list of the date-stamped blog “posts” I’ve tagged with the “sports” category name so far: https://jheroes.com/category/sports/ …

Those include stories of general-assignment reporters like Clark Kent and Lois Lane and their editor Perry White getting involved with crimes or scandals involving local sports teams (including copyboy Jimmy Olsen’s youth teams), and Daily Sentinel sports reporters bringing the Green Hornet into a baseball-gambling story, and another episode involving a football player.

Come to think of it, the Hornet even got involved with scalped and counterfeit Rose Bowl tickets once!

“Shorty Bell,” the young reporter played by Mickey Rooney in the short-lived series by that name, confronted a “Crooked Hero” from the boxing world. The world of college sports met college journalism in at least one episode of “The Halls of Ivy.” In that story, an Ivy College board member went after a student journalist who had inspired a campus football star to question his dedication to the sport.

Among radio’s other title-star journalist heroes, I suspect that Casey, Crime Photographer, the reporter-editor couple on Bright Star, or Randy Stone, columnist hero of Night Beat, and other fictional reporters on radio may have been involved with sports stories, but I haven’t found them yet. At least given the prominence of the sports pages in 20th century newspapers, it seems that should be the case. So far, searching RadioGoldIndex’sonline plot summaries for sports-related keywords have produced mixed results. One Casey, Crime Photographer result was intriguing, but probably not something to classify as a sports story: “A phony swami, guarded by a Senegalese boxer, claims to be able to contact the dead.”

Title and summary scans reveal a boxer and a rodeo star in the titles of “Bright Star” episodes, that Fred MacMurray’s reporter character once acted as a high school football coach, and that Irene Dunne as editor in chief once took over the sports page. There is also a development threat to a local ballpark. I’ll be listening, although my previous time spent with “Bright Star” left me exhausted by the sitcom sweetness of its 1950s’ “career-woman editor pursues oblivious employee” theme.

Columnist Randy Stone’s “Night Beat” with its late deadlines kept him away from afternoon sports events, but not from after-hours dramas involving a champion swimmer, a former football star pressured to kill someone, two brothers who compete as jockeys, and a prize fighter beaten up for refusing to take a dive.

I’ve already written about reporters as secondary characters in a couple of episodes of “The Adventures of Frank Merriwell,” a radio series based on dime novels and short stories about a (fictional) Yale sports hero. And when old-time radio went to the movies, it must have brought back more sports-journalism stories, although the Hepburn-and-Tracy classic “Woman of the Year” is the only one that comes to mind. In it, Spencer Tracy is a sportswriter and Katherine Hepburn, brilliant political columnist, needs to learn about baseball, among other things.

The one legendary real-life sportswriter on the “Real Life” menu-of-pages so far is Grantland Rice, mostly because someone turned his autobiography into a radio series. Could be others to add…

Note: This is a start… “Getting organized” is my summer 2025 theme. To be continued… and perhaps it will lead to the word “Sports” joining the main menu atop the home page. The menu is limited to one-word headings by the width of our current page template. If you haven’t noticed, some of those headings hide a lot — “Movies” and “Real-Life” in particular — both hold particularly long lists of sub-pages. Maybe I will expand the “Themes” heading and work “Sports” in there as a sub-page. Hmm. Any suggestions for other improvements in the menu, which appears as a drop-down on smart phones and across-the-top on larger screens?

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With more than 500 episodes of “The Whistler” in the Old Time Radio Researchers’ collection at the Internet Archive, you can hear its spooky-voiced narrator introduce suspenseful and ironic stories about people from many walks of life. For the story “Night Final,” Jan. 28, 1948, the main character was a newspaper reporter:

“She was a newspaper woman, and a good one. Words came easily to her — fresh new interesting ways of saying what she saw, or felt, or heard. Her critics and colleagues agreed that regardless of her shortcomings as a person, Helen Conover was a superlative reporter — holder of the guild award for on-the-spot reporting, the first woman to win such an honor.”

When she gets a divorce, her husband has another assessment of her career, with a slight echo of Hildy Johnson’s speech about leaving her editor husband in “His Girl Friday.” But Helen’s husband isn’t an editor, he’s just angry about her infidelity:

“You’re a great girl, a fine reporter. I resent losing you, I admit it. It’s just too bad you didn’t take enough time out from your reporting to learn to be a woman.”

Will she be the heroine, villain or victim of her own story? Be prepared with a “what could go wrong?” routine news story about the circus coming to town, the memorable image of an attractive, confident reporter in a “red bolero jacket” (This is not an undercover assignment!), and another newspaper woman involved in the kind of double-twist ending that the Whistler’s plots were famous for. Give a listen.

Note: The quotes are thanks to an online copy of  the script, via the Generic Radio Archive…

The regular “Aunt Jenny” at The Gazette is out of action, and Fibber McGee volunteers to replace the advice columnist for a day, with wife Molly as his secretary.

Old-time radio programs of all kinds worked newspapers and journalism into their plots now and then, including one of radio’s biggest hits, “Fibber McGee & Molly,” which ran for more than 20 years.

Searching more than 1,200 McGee titles and plot summaries for words like “columnist,” “reporter” and “editor” quickly turned up this 1950 episode, which includes a visit to a newspaper building, from newsroom to pressroom, complete with the roar of the presses punctuating the punchlines.

While there is no page one news in the half hour, we do visit the softer side of the oldtime daily paper; along with Aunt Jenny, we encounter the crossword editor, a local doctor doubling as medical columnist, and even the classified ads are good for a groan-producing joke.

McGee, although perhaps not the most reliable source, delivers an endorsement: “Newspapers are a great institution, Molly. Where would we be without ’em?” — while Molly reflects on the romance of the newsroom itself, over the clatter of typewriters:

“My, I just love a newspaper office, McGee, pencil shavings all over the floor… the smell of printer’s ink and old cigar butts…”

As I recall, series co-creator Don Quinn was married to a reporter, as well as having a famous talent for puns and wordplay, which this McGee episode is certainly full of… along with some reminders of 1950 culture, values, and a closet full of what the kids today call “Dad jokes.”

Prepare to wince for various reasons at a joke about a “cub” reporter, some old fashioned banter about a secretary sitting on the boss’s lap, one dated skin-color reference, and the ultimate use of the home-delivered newspaper as a wrapper for domestic detritus.

(Note to early readers: This entry in the blog was composed entirely with the WordPress Android app, and I’m happy to see that its MP3 player link works. If there are other problems, or if you have other newspaper related Fibber McGee episodes to recommend, add a comment below.)

Ottmar Mergenthaler already had been the subject of a Cavalcade of America historical-biography radioplay in 1937, but here he is getting the Hallmark Hall of Fame treatment 16 years later… a story that includes a suspenseful beginning for anyone who doesn’t recognize his name. Perhaps in 1953 it was still familiar? (Certainly Hollywood star Lionel Barrymore, the narrator, was better known then.)

This starts as an “Everything must begin with a dream” romance-in-America immigrant drama, and then a man walks into the shop and explains how a newspaper — remember them? — was set in type, one letter at a time, a process little changed in the 400 years since Gutenberg spread the magic of movable type.

Mergenthaler, originally a watchmaker, went the next step… and his Linotype machines, full of cogs, levers, molten lead and matrices, fed news into the columns of daily newspapers — and more — for a century. Of course Hallmark Hall of Fame took liberties to compress his life and invention within its broadcast half hour. For more detail, see the PDF of the printing history newsletter linked beneath the illustration.

Personal perspective: My own byline was set in hot type for most of my first decade as a newspaper reporter. But then optical and digital “cold type” arrived — even before that American Printing History Association publication about the 1986 Linotype centennial — and Mergenthaler’s inventions became museum pieces.

The Old Time Radio Researchers Group has updated its Hallmark episode collection at the Internet Archive, and WordPress has updated the smartphone app I’m using to post this, and the combination made this posting painless, along with voice to text on my smartphone.

Thanks to the collectors who save, restore, digitize and freely share radio recordings, and to the Internet Archive, which hosts them in such a way that I can link to them, and also to the programmers who make WordPress. They all make it possible for me to share my search for newspaper journalism related stories from the golden years of American radio broadcasting. If only Mergenthaler could see this system at work!

— Bob Stepno

In 1921, William Allen White writes an editorial when his 16-year-old daughter dies, not an obituary, and in 1954 Hallmark Hall of Fame uses his process of writing it to frame the story of her father, perhaps America’s most famous small town newspaper editor, on the tenth anniversary of his own death.

Back in 1944, Dupont’s Cavalcade of America also dramatized White’s life, including another of his famous editorials and more about his political influence. I wrote that longer page about that episode a few years ago when I was making my way through Cavalcade’s historical profiles.

(Eventually I’ll incorporate this Hallmark broadcast into that page. For more radio dramas about historical journalists, see the menu item “Real-Life.”)

In a rare crossover between my personal research interests in Old Time fiddle music and Old Time Radio, I stumbled onto the Grand Ole Opry of September 25, 1943, with Cousin Minnie Pearl being introduced as “our girl reporter from Grinder Switch” with a comic description of the attributes of a good reporter…

This is at least something to file away under references to the ubiquitous presence of newspapers in 1940s American culture…

“You know neighbors, someone said to be a newspaper reporter you must have an eye like an eagle (or does he say “needle”?), a nose like a gimlet, and an ear that can catch the faintest sound of news. Well, our girl reporter has all of those and a new Sunday go to meeting dress besides…” — announcer

This is also the first time I’ve seen the reference to gimlet and nose, as opposed to the usual cliche about being gimlet-eyed… “A piercing nose for news” would be an odd mixed metaphor, but a gimlet was a piercing tool… as opposed to the gimlet cocktail which is named for its creator… At least according to this combined source at Grammarist. Could the Grand Ole Opry announcer be making a subtle reference to cliches about reporters and cocktails? I don’t think Minnie Pearl was ever associated with drinking, but I have not listened to a lot of these early episodes yet.

GrandOleOpry 09-25-43

That MP3 file of the episode came from one of the collections of Grand Ole Opry episodes at the Internet Archive. The Country Music Hall of Fame digital archives are more thoroughly documented and searchable, including 473 references to Minnie Pearl who is nicely profiled at Wikipedia), but I haven’t inspected them all to determine whether she was frequently given this “reporter” introduction.

Long before the advent of Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure, “The Clue in the Clouds” was a technology-rich episode of “Casey, Press Photographer,” more often known as “Crime Photographer,” one of the longest-running old-time radio dramatic series to feature newspaper reporter characters.

That’s “technology rich” if 1944 aviation and darkroom or studio-photography tricks are “technology” enough for you. But I did notice the “clouds” in this episode title and decided to write about it on a day when an AWS outage put “cloud computing” in the headlines.

In this story, Casey and Ann Williams have suspicions about a private helicopter crash — not many private helicopters buzzing around in 1944! — and the guy they are suspicious about turns out to be a photographer himself, complete with snapshots of his adventures on a tropical isle.

I’ve written about the Crime Photographer series several times before, including its movie, comic-book and TV spinoffs, but somehow never got to this episode. It’s easy to see how the show might have appealed to fans of the newspaper racket, or of photography, or of saloons with great piano players — all of which have roles to play in this mystery.

You do get some banter between Casey and his editor Bert (“If that ‘heliocopter’ turns out to be a Halloween witch on a broom, you’ve shot your last picture for me!”), and the stereotype of the reporter spending part of his life on a bar stool at the Blue Note Cafe, and both men and women having a place in the newsroom. Ann sometimes does seem to be more “sidekick” to cameraman Casey, but remember she, or an unnamed rewrite man, is the one who writes the stories in that Morning Express.

“Time and deadline wait for no man — or woman either,” as Ann says, just after noting an important clue, soon to emerge from the clouds of Casey’s darkroom developer tray.

(No name is mentioned, but the editor does tell Casey and Ann to give their early research on the helicopter crash to a rewrite man, and an obit writer, the kind of “behind the scenes” newsroom detail I love to hear in these 1940s radio dramas.)

The Los Angeles Daily News is the real hero in this August 1951 “Dragnet” episode, The Big Screen, part of an Old Time Radio Researchers group collection at the Internet Archive… A reporter on the paper’s TV-radio beat has uncovered cases of fraud in the new business of home TV repair.

“Not everyone has one yet,” says Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday, who has a television set’s “channel selector” explained to him in one scene. Webb would bring the Dragnet series to the TV screen that December. Dragnet had been on radio since 1949 and would continue there until 1957, overlapping with the popular 1951-1959 TV series.

Newsman Jack Kennett explains how he even went undercover as a solder-salesman to learn more about the shady side of TV repair. And he found a whistle-blower who started his own honest repair business and was happy to spill the details on a corrupt bigger company he had worked for.

(I liked the extra touch of the reporter saying he double checked the whistle-blower’s background. This is no irresponsible quick-hit undercover expose, it is presented as careful investigative reporting by a respected local paper.)

And that’s when the newspaper brought the police into the story. Also, like a lot of reporters, this one also doubles as a photographer, discussing his nifty Leica camera and high-speed film that could take pictures in low light without a flash… He puts the camera to work in a police sting operation with Dragnet’s Joe Friday and a police electronics technician.

At the end of the broadcast, there is an extra tip of the hat to the LA Daily News and reporter Kennett for their cooperation.

When I get a chance, I’m going to see if I can find Kennett’s original TV-scam stories in some digital archive. Cast members are not named, so it’s unclear whether he might even have played himself. (I did check the spelling of his name, which wasn’t hard since once of his stories on another topic was entered into the Congressional Record.)

The “only the names have been changed to protect the innocent” aspect of this Dragnet-meets-newspaper tale is reminiscent of “The Big Story” series that dramatized a “how we got the story” newspaper adventure every week and gave the reporter a cash award. Like this one, those scripts often emphasized cooperation between reporters and the police.

Dragnet, brought to you by Fatima cigarettes, Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co.. The Big Story, brought to you by Old Gold cigarettes, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Ah, the 1950s.

An editor and “ace reporter” debated the news value and audience interest in a sensational murder case — versus coverage of the Korean War — in this December 1950 episode of “The Guiding Light” soap opera.

http://otrrlibrary.org/OTRRLib/Library%20Files/G%20Series/Guiding%20Light/The%20Guiding%20Light%2050-12-19%20Newspaper%20Has%20Story%20About%20Murder.MP3

Joe Roberts of the City Times walks a soap-slippery ethical tightrope here, brought to you by Duz Detergent. And doesn’t that commercial announcer’s voice sound a bit newsroom-familiar?

If you need to know what happened next (or previously), try the collected (but incomplete) episodes at the OldTime Radio Researchers Library.

I hadn’t listened to enough of this series to know how long the City Times newsroom characters were regulars, but the episode title “Newspaper has story about murder” caught my attention… and ethical details about interviews with the accused woman may be a plot point. Here’s a second 15-minute episode from the following day.

http://otrrlibrary.org/OTRRLib/Library%20Files/G%20Series/Guiding%20Light/The%20Guiding%20Light%2050-12-20%20Meta%20Is%20Charged%20With%20Murder.MP3

And the next day, the accused woman — suffering from amnesia, the soap opera curse — tells her lawyer that she talked to Roberts because she thought the former war correspondent was someone from her past, and she didn’t know he was a reporter.

http://otrrlibrary.org/OTRRLib/Library%20Files/G%20Series/Guiding%20Light/The%20Guiding%20Light%2050-12-21%20Robert%20Lies%20To%20Meta.MP3

“When a newspaperman is out to get a story, fairness doesn’t enter into his assignment. Get a story, by hook or crook,” the lawyer tells her, but Roberts isn’t that cynical.

The Guiding Light was created by Irna Phillips in 1937 and in the 1950s made the transition from radio to TV, where it continued until 2009.

From J.David Goldin’s radiogoldindex.com episode summaries and Wikipedia, it looks like the 1950 murder case courtroom drama continued for months — more than 100 episodes, with reporter Roberts’ stories weaving in and out of the plot and leading to (in a triumph of soap opera plotting over journalism ethics?) love and marriage.

Roberts was played by several actors through most of the years that the program was on both radio and television. The radio series ended in 1956.

Goldin mentions that announcer Clayton Bud Collyer, who identifies himself after the last commercial, also played a radio news reporter in a later episode of the courtroom drama.

But that man of many radio voices was also a much more famous reporter — playing both radio’s (tenor voice) Clark Kent and (baritone voice) Superman! However, for most of his years on The Adventures of Superman, Collyer’s name was not given on the air to maintain the Superman mystique… And saving him from typecasting.

One last journalism connection, presumably just a coincidence… But the murdered man behind that murder trial was an advertising executive named Theodore (Ted) White — not to be confused with newsman Theodore H. White , who became even better known for his The Making of the President books in the coming decades.

For other cases of newspaper reporters appearing in soap operas and romantic series, see the JHeroes Soaps page on the main menu above, or at this link.

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Updated from original Feb. 5, 2018, post.