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| Ted co-stars with Irene Beasley, popular radio contralto. CBS |
Here it is, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience-from the days of crystal set and headphones to 1935's multi-tubed superheterodyne-from those first amateurish broadcasts starring the local soprano to today' s polished programs featuring the Metropolitan Opera-the whole story of radio's growth and stars and backstage personalities-with Ted Busing, the bad boy of radio, and one of America's favorite announcers, speaking-and telling all!
Ten Year’s before the “MIKE”
by TED HUSING
Photographs by Harris & Ewing
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| (Above) As master of ceremonies away back in 1926. (Right) An on- the-spot broadcast from a fire truck. He was the first sports announcer to pack a short-wave set. (Left) broadcasting and absorbing, Florida sunshine at Miami. CBS |
"Okay, Husing, take it away" - and one of the most popular radio announcers in America begins a thrilling broadcast. Culver Service
YESTERDAY I HAD my nose broken. Wait a minute-I know what you newspaper boys say. That one doesn't have his nose broken but suffers a broken nose. In this case, though, I did have mine broken. By a surgeon. Some of the acoustics experts and sinus engineers decided my voice would have a bit more resonance if my antrums were widened. Or is it antra?
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Vaughn de Leath, radio's first songbird.
Milton J. Cross, dean of announcers.
S. L. Rothafel ("Roxy"), pioneer radio showman. ..NBC Alexander Woollcott's mikeside manner-a close-up of the urbane Town Crier. Rudolf H. Hoffmann photo
David Sarnoff, one of radio's leading executives. Keystone
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Anyhow, since the technical people had spent years perfecting microphones especially for my vocal vibrations, I didn't see how I could hold back on my antrums, personal as they are to me. So I went to the sawbones, took a couple of shots of coke and had 'em broken out.
Well, the point is, it's quite a jump in progress between the present, when even facial surgery is called upon to help bring radio's voices out intelligibly, and the broadcasting of only a dozen years ago. About that time Jerry Sullivan was announcing from WQJ in Chicago. Jerry was a fair entertainer who went over big on the air for four years on a single gag-the way he pronounced Chicago. Tchuh-then a pause-cahgga.
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| A studio in Radio City. The walls are equipped with sliding panels for adjusting the acoustic properties of the room. NBC Drawing dy George Howe Football has been Ted's pet enthusiasm since he mascoted the Columbia varsity in 1915. His play-by- play broadcasts of big games are unrivaled for accuracy. continued on page 177 |
That Tchuh-cahgga of Jerry's wowed 'em in those days. Remember, the big kick in radio then was getting any reception at all, so a tidbit like Jerry's whimsy stuck out like a moving raisin in a bun.
Radio is now such a vital part of everyday life, it is hard to realize in how short a time it has sprung up. It is hard to believe that only twelve years ago nobody had yet heard of a theme song and that the word "mike" was just an Irishman's name. No orchestra, except the symphonies, yet had a national reputation; no crooner yet competed with the movie idols for the fan letters of lovesick janes. Great singers, great musicians, great actors of the speaking stage were only names to the masses.
If you want to measure that progress, remember back to the early 1920's when transmission blooped and howled, and reception, to call it that, was a hobby with a handful of the mechanically minded. Anything that made a noise went for broadcasting. The air was Hickville on Saturday night.
Ted Husing as a kid at Coney Island. That was long before program broadcasting was invented-though not so very far back in time!
Think back about some of this early bedlam, such low-down vaudeville as that committed by the "Blaa Club," for example, or the "Red Onion Club," or the "Cuckoo Club" (not to be confused with the later "KUKU Hour" conducted by Raymond Knight). If you were an early radio listener, you must have picked up one or another of those ethereal misdemeanors. Compare them with the suave entertainment nurtured last Christmas afternoon by Alexander Woollcott over the Columbia-System-the urbane wit of the master of ceremonies himself, his polished introductions, his graceful method of "throwing" the program to other stations, and the talent he presented- Beatrice Lillie, Lionel Barrymore and numerous lesser artists.
That matinee registered tops in radio amusement, but on that same day news broadcasting had also set a new high in the Empire Christmas Party staged by the British Broadcasting Company and sent to the United States by short-wave. This was a thrilling dramatization of the boast that the sun never sets on the British Empire. The New Zealand sheepherder laughed into the mike that while he was willing to celebrate Christmas with the Empire's party, it was really December twenty-sixth with him. In the hill country of India a British bugler was just playing taps. Midafternoon traffic was humming through the new vehicular tunnel under the Mersey at Liverpool, a Christmas-morning ice carnival was in progress in. Toronto, and at Vancouver the announcer in the shortwave station above the city spoke of the lights outlining the bay as the more eager children were getting up to see what Santa Claus had brought them.
Within a space of ninety minutes the radio brought us the pageant of English home and colonial life. A New South Wales fisherman paused from drawing his net, and above the noise of the surf spoke his Christmas philosophy. A tender on the new bridge across Sydney harbor collected tolls from automobiles. Kaffirs employed in a gold mine of the Rand chanted a savage rhythm. Planters in Africa, Asia, Central and South America told of their lives. Lonely islanders off the coast of Scotland joined the party. London bells chimed; a parish choir sang in an English village church. Winter exchanged oral greetings with summer, the tropics with the poles, as radio shrank the climes and dominions of the British Empire to the dimensions of a shepherd kingdom at history's dawn, when the ruler sat on the council rock and addressed all his subjects at once.
And at the end of this cosmic council of good will the King spoke to his people, too-spoke in a kindly, thoughtful voice but one full of majesty. How many persons listened to him-one hundred million, two hundred million-who knows? The whole British Empire and much of the United States, at least. Yet King George was seated in his quiet study, with only a microphone in front of him. Through it he spoke to those multitudes!
From the Blaa Club to the Town Crier, from studio readings of ticker-tape bulletins into the mike to the B.B.C.'s Christmas broadcast-and there are kids not yet in high school whose lives have spanned the whole evolution! The drama and excitement of that swift development I am going to try to impart in the story that follows, together with something about my own part in it. Or maybe vice versa. Anyhow, let's get on with it. Okay, Husing take it away.
And so, after a musical curtain, we go back to a day in late November, 1901, when a child was born in a room above a quiet corner saloon in the Bronx. Old Man Husing-bless him! he'll be reading this-was of Danish blood and former German nationality; the mother of Austrian descent. The momentarily proud parents named their new son Edward B., little recking that, condensed to Ted, it would some day be a swell radio tag. But there weren't even airplanes then.
Husing Senior was a club steward, in which profession he picked up many a tip, both monetary and financial. The former he banked; the latter he stored up in his memory. Club-stewarding was migratory; and so there are boyhood memories of living in Johnstown, New York, in Gloversville, New York, and up on Morningside Heights, when the old man became steward of the Catholic Club at Columbia University. Here young Ted first became interested in sports, hanging around the gyms and playing fields, and becoming mascot of the varsity baseball team, the basketball team, and (in 1915, when Columbia resumed football after a ten-year vacation) of the varsity eleven. Hence nowadays, when the newspapers once more vote Husing the most popular sports broadcaster, Ed Kennedy, Andy Coakley, Harry Fisher and Carl Merner, the swimming, baseball, basketball and track coaches at Columbia, point with pride to their former water boy.
No use holding out on you-in spite of these genteel contacts young Husing turned out to be a hellion. The old man whaled him, his mother died a thousand deaths, but it did no good. An early ambition to become a technical engineer (with his father all set to put him through college) died before a new interest. Men were fighting in Europe. Stuyvesant High School established a training unit-one of the few public schools in America that did-and, coming up as a freshman, Husing went military, thinking and dreaming only of heroic command. Unfortunately, he couldn't take it; and after a few months Stuyvesant High gave him the air for insubordination.
It was no better at Commerce High, to which he transferred. At both Stuyvesant and Commerce he made the squads of various teams, only to be thrown off for bad deportment. Commerce finally decided it could raise its scholastic standing by getting rid of Husing.
Then followed a period on the bum, as it is called. The experience included shilling for a street carnival and working in Kansas and Iowa wheat fields.
This country got into the war, and under the name of Hastings and by the use of a phony birth certificate Husing enlisted in the Regular Army. Assigned to the Intelligence, with duties taking him to Boston, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Washington, even to Charleston. More travel. After the armistice and his discharge, he met a girl and in twenty minutes asked her to marry him. She looked pityingly at the eighteen-year-old lad.
"How are you going to support a wife?" she asked.
That hadn't occurred to him. Under her encouragement he tried out several jobs, getting fired from all of them. Finally he answered an advertisement calling for young married men to be furniture salesmen. He was taken on and made good as a dealer's representative in a wholesale house. After a year or so, he'd saved enough money, and he and "Bubs" were married. An officer of the furniture house read of the license and fired Husing for untruthfulness.
Meanwhile, Dad Husing had become a realtor. He located near Tenth Avenue at Sixty-ninth Street. That was eighteen years ago, and he's still there.
These biographical details out of the way, I come to the main story and the first person. I was twenty-one years old and married, out of work, and a baby was coming. For about a year I shuttled around in New York trying to place myself. One day I met an old Stuyvesant High pal, Ernest W. Rovere, who'd gone on to college while I was bumming around the country and selling furniture. He told me he had a swell job-radio announcer-and explained all about it.
"How'd you get it?" I asked him.
"Through an ad," he told me. "They wanted a college man, cultured, expert in music, and all that. I had the qualifications--or said so."
While there wasn't anything in this for me-I hadn't been to college, had I?-I was interested. As a Boy Scout I'd fussed some with wireless myself-worked spark sets in the homes of other Scouts and learned the Morse and continental codes. But at that time there was a greater excitement than the embryo radio. The Florida real estate boom was starting. Dad was beginning to have more confidence in me. He agreed to stake me to a fling at the Florida racket. In St. Petersburg I formed a partnership with a young Texan, we took options, and in a few months were rich--on paper. But try and get it!
It looked as if I'd get the wife and child down soon, when a telegram came for me-Father very sick; come at once. Then and there I knew that Florida real estate was not for me. I sold out to my partner at a ruinous figure, crammed the cash in my pockets and ran for the train. In Washington next morning there was an hour's stop. I walked into the station, bought a New York newspaper and sat down to read it-the want ads, of course. Under "HELP WANTED-- MALE" I found this:
RADIO ANNOUNCER-Must be young, married, conscientious, social by nature, college graduate, have knowledge of the terminology of music and ability to say the right thing at the right time. Box X611.
Remembering how Erny Rovere had grabbed off a job by answering a similar ad, I walked to the telegraph counter and sent Box X611 a eulogy of myself. I mentioned my cultured background, pinned a B.S. on myself and dilated on my passion for concertos and operas. I signed it E. B. Husing and gave my address on Tent' Avnoo.
If they didn't actually ask to see the sheepskin, I felt pretty confident about the cultural part of it. Maybe I grew up on the sidewalks of New York, but I was never a dese-dose guy. Association with small-town boys upstate and with the sons of Columbia. professors had given me an early ideal of correct speech. And, too, as a kid I was nuts about books.
That's funny to me now, for I wouldn't give a dime a dozen for books. I never read them. It's as much as I can do to keep up with the sport pages. I've got a book, though-only one which I consult habitually. It's a heavy tome, always open on la revolving stand-Webster's Unabridged.
When I got home that afternoon, two pieces of good news awaited me. Dad had passed the crisis and was getting well, and there was a message for me to ! report to the Radio Corporation of America, Stations WJY and WJZ, next morning.
I was one of about a hundred bright young men competing for that job. Followed a week of auditions in which our numbers were thinned down, until finally there were just six of us left. It began to dawn on me that in claiming musical knowledge I had taken a large bite. It was this musical test that was knocking most of them off.
At the last moment I got a break. The assistant studio manager was a West Point graduate. He took a fancy to me, especially when he learned I had served in the Regular Army. As my ordeal approached, I went to him and made a clean breast of it. He briefly told me how to pronounce the Italian allegro-non-troppos, and wrote out for me a phonetic list of composers' names- Gounod equals "Goo-no," Chopin equals i "Show-pan"-like that.
I passed the musical audition, though not exactly with flying colors.
Next came extemporization. The studio judges took me last of all, but I was ready for them. The day before there had been a bad airplane crash, and I had primed myself with every word printed about it in the papers. I sat down at a microphone alone in the studio, while the committee watched and listened from the control room, and began to talk. Long before that audition was over I knew I had at least one gift to bring to radio - the gift of gab.
The other candidates they had cut off after ten or fifteen minutes. They let me keep going. My watch showed twenty minutes, twenty-five. Busing was getting groggy. Thirty-five, and I took the count. I looked up to see how my stuff had gone over. The control room was empty!
Disheartened and humiliated-somebody might at least have waited to tell me I was putrid-I slunk home. I had scarcely reached there when I had a phone call. Despair changed to rejoicing. Nobody had walked out on me; the chiefs were simply in a huddle in another room electing me to the post. Extemporization did it. But there was still a formality-I had to be approved by the great David Sarnoff, then as now the guiding spirit of radio and the man to whom the government was beginning to turn in its first attempts to control the growing anarchy of the air.
Out I rushed and bought me a hand-me-down dinner suit-my first. That night, handsome as the devil in my new elegance, I visited WJZ. The great Sarnoff took a look at me and nodded. The job was mine-at forty-five bucks a week. Date: September 13, 1924.
My first broadcast-the first time I ever spoke into a live mike-remains, of course, a vivid spot in my memory. The funny thing about it was, I didn't know I was making it. I got down to the studio early the next morning after I was hired, but spent most of the day hanging around on the outskirts.
About the middle of the afternoon Milton Cross, the senior announcer, led me into a cavern-it would look like a closet now in comparison with our modern studios-where a broadcast was just winding up. It was a good-sized room, the walls of which were hung all the way around with some undulating curtain material, gray in color and rough in weave. Even the ceiling was draped with this stuff, and the studio door was padded.
There was but one break in the walls. In the middle of one side was a wide, short window set in like a hotel showcase, or as if maybe they'd planned originally to have it an aquarium. Behind this glass I could see a guy in earphones sitting at a table in front of a lot of electrical equipment. This was the studio operator controlling the volume of the broadcast with his dials and switches.
At one end of the room a small dance band was grouped around a battered baby grand piano and playing in bored fashion. Now and then a fiddler or a cornetist would get up and play a few bars close to the standard mike at the piano, then resume his seat.
Besides this mike, there were three or four other microphones on standards scattered about the room, and a couple of table mikes on the announcer's table as well.
These objects were about all there was in the studio room, except for a few extra chairs.
For a minute or two we stood at one of the standard mikes just outside the control window. The orchestra finished its final number, Milton hit the chimes and identified the station. Then he asked me if I would read some market reports to him. I thought it was some sort of test to see where I could fit in. We sat down at the table side by side, and I took the paper Milton handed me and began: . "We bring you now today’s reports from the livestock and produce markets as furnished," and so on.
Then followed a bunch of figures. I began wading through them. It took me twenty-five minutes to finish.
"How's that?" I asked brightly.
Instantly Milton raised a hand to silence me, threw a switch and signed off the station for the afternoon.
Then I realized I had been speaking for a broadcast. I had been talking to New York-all of New York! I visualized the wilderness of Brooklyn, the suburban trains threading through the suburbs of New Jersey, Long Island and Westchester -I had been speaking to all that. Actually, my voice had gone only into a few radio stores and to the few set owners interested in market reports!
I tried to get up but to my astonishment my legs refused to work. Right then I developed a mike fright that has never since entirely left me.
What was the position of radio when I crashed its gate? Three names of announcers of the present-day type were already fairly well known to the public. Major J. Andrew White, who was to be my first model and tutor, was known for his sports broadcasts. It was he who described the Dempsey-Carpentier fight for the mike-the first news broadcast to make a stir in this country.
Graham McNamee was building a reputation as a news and sports announcer for the infant hookup controlled by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's station WEAF. Norman Brokenshire, on WJZ's midget circuit-it actually went as far West as Chicago!-was creating a sensation with his chatty come-in to-my-parlor announcements.
These three were the heralds of radio entertainment as we know it now, but none of them in 1924 was as famous or as popular as anyone of a wide group of local station announcers scattered over the country, who had built up personalities, or rather characters, for themselves under various whimsical tags. If you were an early BCL (radio slang for listener), you must have known all of them-"The Hired Hand" at Dallas, Texas, "The Little Colonel" at Atlanta, "The Bellhop" of St. Louis, "The Merry Old Chief" at Detroit, "Gloomy Gus" of Lincoln, Nebraska, "The Solemn Old Judge" at Nashville.
All these radio "characters" were essentially parlor entertainers-amateur comedians and philosophers. They were the first to throw comedy into the bored American home. Even New York City had one of them-"N.T.G.," of Station WHN, an ex-divinity student named Nils Thor Granlund and known to his friends as Granny. He clowned, read poetry in exaggerated ham fashion, insulted performers at the mike, and started the first phony radio feud-with Harry Richman, whom he introduced to the air.
In 1924, came the first radio popularity poll, and the announcers' cup went to "The Solemn Old Judge" (George D. Hay of WSM, Nashville). Even so, the doom of all the Solemn Old Judges and Merry Old Chiefs was already in the stars. Two developments put them out-the network and the commercial program.
It's funny now, considering their present revenues from leased wires, to remember that the telephone and telegraph companies at first resisted the use of their lines by radio. Until about 1922, no station had ever broadcast a remote-control program-a program originating outside the studio and brought in by wire. The phone experts said it wouldn't work, and besides, they couldn't tie up their service for a handful of radio fans.
WHN, in New York, went to the mat with the phone company, wired a hotel dining room, and put on a demonstration. The broadcast was perfect, and the eyes of the telephone wizards opened. Here was dough to be had. They began wiring other places in New York from which entertainment could be picked up.
This was the first step toward the network. The second step originated in the brain of George McClelland in WEAF, then a subsidiary of American Tel. & Tel. Hook two stations together by wire for the simultaneous broadcast of a single program, McClelland argued, and you could wholesale long-distance to commercial advertisers. By leased wires he linked to WEAF a station in Boston, one in Philadelphia and one in Washington. W JZ retorted by leasing Postal Telegraph wires and joining six cities, including Pittsburgh and-Chicago.
Familiar, easy and cheap as long-distance telephoning is now, a dozen years ago the average citizen used it only in some life-or-death emergency. So, to sit in a Manhattan apartment and hear the voice of somebody in Chicago come clearly out of your loud-speaker-it knocked the pioneer set owners for loops.
The parlor entertainers couldn't compete with that for thrill. But it was the commercial program, which the new networks were fostering, that put them out for keeps. Advertising was a solemn thing. The commercial sponsors wanted dignity in charge of their broadcasts, the salesman's voice, somebody who could put over the advertising message. They wanted a Graham McNamee, a Norman Brokenshire. They wanted, if I may say so, an Edward B. Husing. Not until the top comedians of the stage went on the air did they discover that they could kid their advertising and still get results.
When I breezed into WJZ in 1924, the rudimentary networks were functioning, and several commercials were broadcasting regularly. Among entertainers becoming known on the nets there was, of course, Vaughn de Leath, New York's original radio girl. Jones and Hare were winning popularity, as were "The Record Boys"-Al Bernard, Sammy Stept and Frank Kamplain. Vincent Lopez was experimenting with an "identification melody"-a musical tag that was later to be called an "air mark" and finally (via Hollywood) "theme song."
Harry Reser and his Eskimos were coming along, as were also, I believe, Harry Horlick and the Gypsies. Other orchestras beginning their air careers were Frank Black's, Nat Shilkret's and Gus Haenschen’s. The Record Boys were the first to keep a musical background running through a program. Vincent Lopez' original identification melody was "When You Come Down to New York Town."
Against these pioneer network features still flourished the troubadours of radio's pastoral age-sponsored itinerants who went from station to station donating entertainment and in return being permitted to broadcast the advertising of backers. Wendell Hall, still a popular radio performer, was one of these strollers.
At WJZ I joined a group of four announcers - Milton J. Cross, Norman Brokenshire, Lewis Reid and the late John B. Daniel. Tommy Cowan, New York's oldest announcer, who began his mike career in 1920, had been at WJZ but had gone over to another station. He now announces for WNYC, New York's municipal station. Milton Cross remains the dean of big-time announcers.
Newspapers were starting radio departments full of blueprint diagrams; strange four-dollar words like "heterodyne" and "neutrodyne" were jumping out at subway readers, and from the "L" people observed broomsticks and clothes props supporting wires on New York's tenement roofs-the advance saplings of the forest soon to materialize. A gentleman named Hazeltine and another named Flewelling were cashing in selling circuit diagrams to amateur set builders.
In the studios the rattling, squawking paper microphone-that's right, Husing, go technical on us-had given way to the carbon-diaphragm mike, still used in portable work. It was succeeded by the condenser mike, now the one most widely in use, though two other types-the dynamic microphone and the ribbon mike, which is a vibrating ribbon of steel-are coming into the studios. The engineering sharps say the microphone of the future will be of the inductive type.
People in 1924 were learning about A, B and C batteries. The plug-in set was not to appear for three years yet. By the end of 1924, two million commercial sets had been sold in the United states. Loud-speakers had supplanted earphones, the speaker being a magnetic diaphragm amplified by a megaphone.
Western Electric had not yet brought out its revolutionary loud-speaker-a vibrating pin at the apex of a parchment cone. That loud-speaker pointed its cone toward you. The final development was to reverse the cone and put it into a stout cabinet, which acted as a sounding board.
Transmission from the studios was no better than the early sets deserved. Most stations used cheap transformers, which fact lay at the root of their broadcasting imperfections. Yet in spite of roaring transmission, in spite of hick programs, in spite of the whistling, crackling reception, it was still all magic-this self-contained apparatus with which you could snatch free entertainment out of the air.
Stations needed identity on the air and, radio being the flower of science and the Machine Age, gave themselves robot names-combinations of letters. Previous to commercial broadcasting, radio's use had been largely at sea. For quick identification, ships on the Atlantic Ocean used the letter K to begin their designations in code, and those on the Pacific W. Land radio reversed this system, and took W for the Atlantic and Gulf side and K for the West. Today, every radio station along Atlantic tidewater from Maine to Texas has the W identification initial except two-KDKA at Pittsburgh and KYW, in Chicago.
Most station names, like WEAF and WJZ in New York, have no significance beyond mere identification, but a few of these letter combinations have an inner meaning. WINS, New York, for instance, is International News Service's station.
Besides their letters many stations adopted identifying sounds of one sort or another-chimes, metronome ticks, cuckoo clocks, and so on. Some even had station theme songs, played from records during interludes. The most-played song of all time-publicly played-is one that was never a hit and which few listeners have ever even heard-Ted Lewis' "Good Night," a melody based on the bugle-call Taps. One-third of all the broadcasting stations in America and many in foreign countries use it to sign off with late at night. At one time there were three hundred American stations playing it.
Any song hit nowadays gets from fourteen to fifteen thousand radio renditions a week. At this writing "No, No, a Thousand Times No" is going strong, making it (this week) No, No, One Million Four Hundred Thousand Times No; though by the time these tidings are in print the young lady of the ballad may be down to a couple of thousand refusals a week, so short and merry is the ride radio gives a hit. Yet for seven years Ted Lewis' "Good Night" has averaged two thousand public performances a week!
Once radio caught hold of the public imagination, it grew much too fast for its clothes, filling the air with chaos and the studios with confusion. The Federal Radio Commission was created, and it straightened out the one-an event which made the public more radio-conscious than anything else that occurred. Internal evolution-plus the organization of station owners and managers into the National Association of Broadcasters-took care of the other.
As I say, the first programs were hit-or-miss affairs. The growing number of set owners demanded something better. In the studios it began to be apparent that people liked music at luncheon and dinner and loved to dance in the evening; that morning was a good time to address women, and so on. That brought the program man into existence.
He lined up talent and laid out broadcasting schedules for days in advance, so that listeners would know what they were tuning in on. He insisted on written and timed continuities and made the first beginnings with dialogue and dramatic presentations. Hence, rehearsals, calling for some sort of stage director. This need brought in still a new type of studio employee, called the production man.
Up to this time the stars of the stage and screen had lifted their eyebrows in radio's direction. These new production men brought in real actors, and the ball kept rolling until now the greatest stars clamor to get before the mike.
When commercial programs got a foothold, the advertising agencies organized radio departments and wrote the continuities for their own broadcasts. Naturally, they wanted the supervision of these shows, so they also hired production managers. Today, at any important broadcast, two production men sit in the control room-one, from the agency, directing and speeding up the performance, and the other, the studio man, standing by.
The first man from Broadway to make a success in radio was Samuel Rothafel, who devised his own programs and broadcast from the Capitol Theater the famous act called Roxy and His Gang. In two years he built up such a following that he could build a theater of his own, by selling stock to his radio audience.
Programs, however, had not gone far up this ladder when I walked into WJZ. We had a program man, but announcers wrote their own continuities.
As a cub announcer, I drew the least desirable work. I opened the station at nine o'clock in the morning and closed it at eleven-thirty P.M. The fifteen-minute broadcast was yet unknown; all our programs ran one-half hour or one hour. I did all the morning programs, the luncheon and dinner music, and announced the dance bands at night. I often had to announce four programs in a row. Sometimes I had simultaneous programs, one on WJZ and one on WJY. You went nuts with it, but it was grand.
We had only the two studios, but since three out of four programs came from outside, anyhow, and rehearsals were unknown, we didn't need any more. Besides the studios and a control room there was a reception room, a powder room, and offices for our rudimentary sales and promotion departments. You could put the whole layout into any modern main studio.
A year passed while I was getting my rudimentary training for the air. Major J. Andrew White was still doing all our sports broadcasts. He was what we called a retained announcer. His main job then was running a radio magazine, and he took our sports assignments on a contract basis. Major White's story of his epoch-making Dempsey-Carpenter broadcast-how he had to slug his way to the ringside-is one of radio's classics.
My first association with Andy White came early in October, 1925, when he broadcast the World Series games. This was a studio job. We had a man at the park who sent us a play-by-play description by ticker-balls, strikes, fouls and everything. From the tape Andy vocally recreated the game for the listeners. As the only announcer of the studio who had played baseball, I was assigned to help him. After that, Andy went on to broadcast football.
The first real break of my career came to me a few weeks later. Two days be- fore Thanksgiving Keith McLeod, our studio manager, walked into the studio and waved a couple of ducats tantalizingly under my nose. They were tickets for the Penn-Cornell game, to be played in the new Franklin Field in Philadelphia. I hadn't seen a football game since I was mascoting Columbia, so I begged for a ticket, pleading that I could help Andy White with the broadcast. Finally he agreed to ask our station director, the late Charles B. Popenoe.
The boss called me into his office. "So you're another one who thinks he can broadcast football, eh?" he remarked.
"I've played the game-if that's any- thing," I said.
He thought awhile and said finally: 'Okay. Get in touch with Major White."
Was I tickled? Andy said he would be glad to have my help, and we went over to Philly together Thanksgiving morning. At North Philadelphia, where we got off, Andy said he would take the "opportunity to see some members of his family in Philadelphia, since I could go out to the field for him in advance and see that everything was set up for us. He told me not to worry-he'd be along. ,
The upper deck of the grandstand at i Franklin Field was not yet finished. I found WJZ's station up in a monkey tower used for hoisting concrete. It was raining, and our only shelter was a tarpaulin thrown over the scaffolding.
Now the crowds were growing thick, the varsity bands were playing and cheer leaders doing their stuff-but still no Andy. As the seconds ticked off, I began to get nervous. Our signal came: "You're on the air," and there I was on the live end of a big hookup. At least it seemed big then. Washington was plugged in. So were Boston, Schenectady, Pittsburgh, and Canton, New York.
There was nothing to do but make a start. I began giving the color-the crowd, the weather, the music, the cheers. I couldn't say anything about the teams, because I didn't know anything about them. Then, just in time, the major arrived, and I introduced him to the listeners. He broadcast that game with no aids other than his eyesight and what information I could scribble on paper and hold up for him to read. In return, he allowed me to comment on the game between quarters.
When we were packing up our stuff that evening Andy said: "I think I'll use you in football next year, kid. You've got something."
Right then I began to figure out a system of quick and infallible identification of plays and players in football-work that resulted eventually in my electric annunciator which I now use with Les Quailey, my assistant, and about which I will have more to say later. From that day to this I have never ceased to prepare a whole year in advance for each season's football broadcasts.
In Philadelphia that Thanksgiving Day I discovered that for an announcer there was more to radio than enunciating genteel phrases in a plush studio. Radio could be a thrilling adventure-it was bound to become one. The outside announcer was about to join an army of excitement hunters into which he had been preceded by the newspaper and magazine correspondents, the news photographers and the newsreel men. He, too, was to see history made before his eyes. But the education of Ted Husing was still in the future.
Next Month-Ted Husing tells some "never told before" stories from behind the scenes in the broadcasting stations
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