From Those Were the Days:

1942 - CBS Radio debuted Our Secret Weapon. It was a program that featured Rex Stout (creator of fictional detective Nero Wolfe), who countered lies being broadcast by the Axis powers through shortwave radio.
10:17:07 AM    comment []  trackback []  

“C-O-L-G-A-T-E! Colgate presents Bill Stern!”

You’ve no doubt turned a radio on—at home or in your car—and have come across the throbbing, emotional tones of Paul Harvey (“Hello America…stand by for news!”); be it one of his daily “newscasts” or his popular The Rest of the Story feature. Harvey’s heavily theatrical style of long pauses and hyperbolic emphasis—designed to lift even the most mundane news event out of the ordinary—can readily be traced back to the Golden Age of Radio…to “America’s number one sports reporter,” Bill Stern.

Born in 1907, Stern developed “a flair for the buskin” at a relatively early age, toiling away in stock companies and vaudeville, and by 1931 he had landed a job as assistant stage manager at New York’s Roxy Theater. (He would also work at Radio City Music Hall in a similar capacity during the mid-1930s.) A tryout at the National Broadcasting Company ultimately led to his being employed as an announcer for the Blue Network’s Friday night fights, sponsored by Adam Hats, from 1934-38. In 1938, Stern began his popular association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, narrating the studio’s weekly newsreel News of the Day, and in 1939 he became the first to do play-by-play for the first televised sporting event.

On radio, he began a 15-minute show over NBC Blue on December 5, 1937 entitled The Bill Stern Sports Review, and two years later, he began his successful stint on The Colgate Sports Newsreel. Newsreel would last nearly a decade on the air, switching to the main NBC network in the fall of 1941, and often as a Friday night staple. To the strains of Mad’moiselle from Armentières, a singing quartet would introduce him thus: “Bill Stern the Colgate Shave Cream man is on the air/ Bill Stern the Colgate Shave Cream with stories rare/Take his advice and you’ll look keen/You’ll get a shave that’s smooth and clean/You’ll be a Colgate Shave Cream man…”

Then for the next quarter-hour, Stern would hold forth with melodramatic sports accounts involving presidents, movie stars and other important celebrities; he would spin yarns about dead jockeys winning horse races or corpses scoring the winning run in a ball game (a player succumbs to a heart attack while rounding third and collapses at home plate). He imbued these sagas with a dramatic flair that would have been right at home in a daytime soap opera, complete with organ music (by Murray Ross), dramatizations and humming contributions from the aforementioned quartet. He was even known to relay the same tale on multiple occasions (sometimes only a year apart), with each version containing wildly contradictory “facts.” In a large sense, Bill Stern was to sports broadcasting what the Weekly World News is to newspapers; as the old adage goes, he never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

In Stern’s defense, The Colgate Sports Newsreel did issue a caveat-emptor heads-up at the beginning of each broadcast, observing that the content contained “some legends, some hearsay—but all so interesting we’d like to pass them along to you." A former writer for Stern once confessed that half the anecdotes were complete fabrications, but added defensively: “It ain’t easy to dream those things up.” Audiences would learn, for example, that Thomas Edison’s near-deafness was the result of being hit by a baseball…thrown by none other than Jesse James. Another classic fib involved Abraham Lincoln on his death bed, summoning Abner Doubleday and telling Ab with his last breath: “Keep baseball alive. In the trying days ahead, the country will need it.”

“In spite of the malarkey Stern tells about them,” wrote New York Herald-Tribune radio critic John Crosby, “athletes are only too happy to appear on his program. This is understandable because, while the truth gets badly mangled, the athletes themselves are invariably cast in heroic dimensions.” But it wasn’t just athletes (like Babe Ruth) who joined Stern at mike-side—other celebrities to appear as guests include Herbert Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jack Benny, Ronald Reagan and Orson Welles.

How did Stern’s propensity for playing fast and loose with the truth sit with his peers? Sportscaster Grantland Rice was apoplectic over one of Bill’s sagas, which had Rice convincing a skinny boxer to quit the sweet science and take up a singing career, after allegedly hearing the pugilist sing in the shower. (“…And that young man, ladies and gentlemen…was Frank Sinatra!”) Red Barber, who was most assuredly the polar opposite of Stern’s broadcasting style once observed that the two of them “were contemporaries, at times competitors, but we didn’t spend much time around each other. I guess you could say we just didn’t see anything in the same light.”

I checked out four Stern shows last night at work—his guests were Jerry Colonna, Rudy Vallee, Zachary Scott and Susan Hayward. (I enjoyed Colonna’s anecdote, by the way—he tells of a boxer from Boston who quit the business and launched a comedy career instead…”and that man…was Fred Allen!”) The CD labels these shows from 1953, which can’t be right since Colgate relinquished sponsorship in 1951—plus, the announcer (Arthur Gary) promotes NBC’s Saturday night “Hour of Fun,” which consisted of The Judy Canova Show and A Day in the Life of Dennis Day, and Day’s program left the airwaves in 1951. (Since Gary also mentions Hayward’s latest film, Tulsa, it’s a safe bet that these Newsreel shows were probably broadcast around 1949. Why Radio Spirits would mislabel these…well, I think I just answered my own question.)

Stern continued on without Colgate over NBC from 1951-53 with Bill Stern Sports, then switched to ABC for a three-year stint hosting Sports Today. On New Year’s Day in 1956, Stern suffered a nervous breakdown while on the air announcing the Sugar Bowl. He did recover to work for Mutual Radio in the 1960s, and later revealed in his autobiography, The Taste of Ashes, that the breakdown was brought about by his addiction to morphine—which was prescribed to him after he lost a leg in an automobile accident in 1935.

To be honest, I wasn’t all that entertained by The Colgate Sports Newsreel, and I believe the reason for this was that I wasn’t exactly certain what was truth and what was complete bull-doody. (It’s nice to know that Stern paved the way for future broadcasters with this approach, and yes, Rush Limbaugh, I’m talking to you!) In a world that nowadays has difficulty separating news from entertainment and vice versa, Bill Stern serves as a shuddery foreshadowing of just what was to come. “And that’s the three-oh mark for tonight.”
10:11:47 AM    comment []  trackback []