RADIO YEARS

In those days, commercial broadcasting was beginning to grab the hearts of America. Radio had created a new profession - the sports announcer. Broadcasting play-by-play reports of football games, people like Graham McNamee and Ted Husing had become as famous as some Hollywood stars and often they were more famous than the athletes they reported on. After my graduation in June 1932, I went back to Lowell Park for another summer so I could save some money and begin paying back my debt for overdue tuition. At summer's end, I decided to hitchhike to Chicago to hunt for a job as a radio announcer. I met rejection everywhere I went.

When I suggested I wanted to become a radio announcer (I never mentioned my real goal of becoming a sports announcer), I was practically laughed out the door, usually without even an interview. "In Chicago," the program director of NBC radio told me, "we can't afford to take people without experience. You've got every reason to try for a job in radio, but first go out to what we call 'the sticks.' You'll find someone who'll take you on and give you experience; then one day, you can come to Chicago." After my disappointment, I confessed to Jack about my unsuccessful job-hunting expedition in Chicago and mentioned the suggestion from the woman at NBC that I try for a job in the sticks. He asked me what I knew about radio stations outside Chicago, which was the source of all the programming people in Dixon listened to.

Radio was so new that many Midwestern towns still didn't have a commercial station, but I knew of two or three in the tri-cities area. I started with stations on the Illinois side of the Mississippi but struck out, then crossed the river into Iowa. My first stop was station WOC in Davenport. I took the elevator to the top floor and asked to see the program director. A few seconds later I was shaking hands with a ruddy-faced Scotsman who was balancing himself on a spindly pair of canes. I gave my usual pitch about my willingness to take any job to get a start in radio. "Where were you yesterday?" he demanded. He said he did have any opening for an announcer and held auditions for it the day before. "The job's filled. Where ye been?" he said as if I were a little backward.

In a daze, I left his office and headed for the elevator, shattered by the bad luck. "How the hell," I said as I walked away, quietly, but loud enough for him to hear, "can you get to be a sports announcer if you can't even get a job at a radio station?" I reached the end of the hall and pushed the elevator button. As the door opened, I heard Pete's canes shuffling toward me, then a raspy voice, as rough as sandpaper. "Hold on, you big bastard," he said. "What was that you said about sports announcing?" he asked. I told him I wanted to get a job in radio because eventually I wanted to become a sports announcer. "De ye know anything about football?"

"I played football for eight years in high school and college."

"Could ye tell me about a football game and make me see it as if I was home listening to the radio?"

"Yes, I'm sure I could," I replied with the bravado of youth. Pete led me into a studio and stopped me in front of a microphone. "When the red light goes on," he said, "I'll be in another room listening. Describe an imaginary football game to me and make me see it." Suddenly the red light flashed on. I looked at the microphone and improvised:

"Here we are in the fourth quarter with Western State University leading Eureka College six to nothing. Long blue shadows are settling over the field and a chill wind is blowing in through the end of the stadium." I let the teams seesaw across the field for almost fifteen minutes, then began leading up to that final play, an off-tackle smash. On the play, the right guard - that was I - was supposed to pull out of the line immediately after the ball was snapped, lead our interference through the line, and take down the first defensive player in the secondary. I missed the linebacker by a mile and don't know to this day how Bud ever got through to make the touchdown. But during the game that I broadcast for Pete MacArthur, a right guard named Reagan leveled a block on the linebacker so furiously that it could have killed him. Bud not only reached the end zone and tied the game, but drop-kicked the point-after-touchdown and won it for Eureka, 7-6. With Eureka's fans cheering, I ended the broadcast, saying: "We return you now to our main studio."

"Ye did great, ye big SOB," he said. "Be here Saturday, you're broadcasting the Iowa-Minnesota Homecoming game. You'll get $5 and bus fare." Once I was on the air, I tried to make the most of my opportunity and chose phrases and adjectives I hoped would give listeners visual images that would make them think they were in the stadium, and I laced my descriptions with background about the players and teams that I hoped would demonstrate that I knew what I was talking about. When the game was over, Pete said I'd passed the test and that he wanted me to broadcast Iowa's three remaining games of the season for $10 each. But after the final game, Pete told me the station didn't have an opening. He said if something came up, he'd call me, but with the Depression growing worse daily, he sounded as if there wasn't much hope.

The winter of 1932-1933 was very cold. Like a lot of other people in Dixon, I spent Christmas and New Year's out of work and without prospects. The only job on the horizon was another summer of lifeguarding at Lowell Park. In February, however, I got a telephone call that changed everything: Pete MacArthur said one of WOC's two staff announcers had quit and he offered me his job, starting at $100 a month. "I'll be there tomorrow," I said. The day I arrived for work in Davenport, they put me on the air. I was a disc jockey before they invented the term: As staff announcer, I played phonograph records, read commercials, and served as a vocal bridge between our local programming and network broadcasts. I was not an immediate success as a radio announcer, to put it mildly. Nobody had bothered to give me any instructions on how to be an announcer and I quickly proved it on the air. I stumbled over my words and had a delivery as wooden as a prairie oak. I'd have hated to have to pay for some of those first commercials I read over the air. But what really got me in trouble was a commercial I didn't read.

One of my assignments was to present a half-hour program of organ music from a local mortuary; the mortuary provided the organist in exchange for a discreet plug identifying it as the source of the music. However, the nature of this quid pro quo was never explained to me, and one night I decided I didn't like the idea of following a romantic song like, "I Love You Truly" with a veiled commercial for an undertaker, so I omitted the plug. Understandably, the mortuary was unhappy and complained. After my previous weeks of on-the-air bumbling, the station management decided that it was time for me to find another career. Then one of those things happened that makes one wonder about God's having a plan for all of us. My job was given to a young teacher, and the station asked me to help break him in. While I was doing it, I mentioned how I'd been hired and then fired. When he heard the story, he demanded a contract from WOC that would provide him with job security; he didn't want to give up the relative security of teaching and then wind up in the same fix as I. But WOC didn't give contracts to anyone and turned him down. He quit the next day and the station manager asked me to stay until they could find someone else.

I agreed to stay on one condition: They had to assign someone to help me improve my on-the-air delivery. Pete and other friends went to work on me and gave me a crash course on radio announcing, and I began reading over the commercials before airtime and practicing my delivery to get the right rhythm and cadence and give my words more emotion. Whatever I did during those few days worked: After another week or two, the talk at WOC about replacing me stopped. Then, enter another break for Dutch Reagan. WHO, our sister station in Des Moines, he said, needed someone to broadcast the Drake Relays, one of the top track meets in the country. I got the assignment. A few weeks later, the Palmer Company received a permit for a 50,000-wat clear channel station in Des Moines. We were told WOC was closing and all of us were going to WHO. Until then, both stations had operated only low-power 1,000-watt transmitters with limited range. There were only fifteen 50,000-watt clear channel stations in America at the time and to work at one was the biggest thing in radio.

Overnight, WHO became one of the most powerful NBC stations in the country, and because I'd gotten good marks for my reporting on the Drake Relays, I was offered the post of sports announcer. I spent four years at station WHO in Des Moines and they were among the most pleasant of my life. At twenty-two I'd achieved my dream: I was a sports announcer. If I had stopped there, I believe I would have been happy the rest of my life. I'd accomplished my goal and enjoyed every minute of it. Before long, during the depths of the Depression, I was earning seventy-five dollars a week and gaining the kind of fame in the Midwest that brought in invitations for speaking engagements that provided extra income I could use to help out my parents.

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster