Radio age (Jan 1927-Jan 1928)

24 RADIO AGE for February, 1927 them. It is interesting to conjure up a vision of the listeners far away on lonely farms, in prim little villages, the type who have had no contact with anything in the world of sport, let alone a thing as revolutionary as a prizefight, drinking in the vivid account of that battle. And the crowning event to many of them as it was to the eleven-year old whose father allowed him to stay up for the finish was the opportunity of boasting to less fortunate ones. "And I heard Gene Tunney speak himself." A night or two later the small boy was able to say, "And I heard Gertrude Ederle," though personally the only thought we were able to carry away from Miss Ederle's discourse was that Channel swimmers seem to exist entirely on chicken. But to return to Major White and the fisticuffs. One of the most absurd criticisms we heard was from a man who said: "I couldn't understand that announcer. He sounded like he was excited." Well, my word! and a couple of sentences! Who wouldn't be excited? We know the air in our living-room was fairly electric, and we couldn't see the contest. When psychologists tell us how extremely difficult it is for the average human being to give an accurate description of even an unimportant happening, and how in criminal trials three supposedly reliable persons will give three totally different versions of the same event, doesn't it seem a little remarkable that a man can think so quickly and put his thoughts into intelligible words in the fraction of time it took the agile Tunney to sidestep one of Dempsey's lunges? It requires a little more than a quick eye and a gift for gab. A pretty agile mind, working on all six seems to be the chief requisite for reporting a championship ring battle, and anyone who listened to Major White knows that he possesses it. Back of the Scenes ONE doubts if a dozen of the listeners to this great broadcast even gave a thought to the tremendous mechanical and technical work involved in its suc cess. The radio audience has had so many marvelous things done for it that it accepts everything as a matter of course, and the attitude of some of our blase friends of the dial-twisting fraternity leads us to believe that if we were back in 1917, and some enterprising station corraled the rights to broadcast from the western front, the listeners wouldn't bat an eyelash, but someone would probably complain that the machine guns were too close to the microphone. But whether the listeners were impressed or not, the broadcasting of the fight was quite an achievement. Held up until the eleventh hour because of the difficulty of finding an advertiser willing to pay the exorbitant fee Mr. Rickard demanded for the privilege, it was only on the Monday preceding the fight that the contract was closed with Mr. Smith which made the broadcast possible, and all the The Magazine of the Hour mechanical difficulties had to be solved in three days. And there were many. In addition to the WJZ hook-up, there was the complicated WEAF chain, to say nothing of dozens of independent stations clamoring to get in on the big event. But under the direction of Carl Dreher, chief engineer of the R. C. A. stations all the technical complications were met and overcome, and the fight went on the air, and into thousands of living-rooms, where the unique spectacle of father, mother and the children all listening to the account of two huge men pummelling each other to the accompaniment of considerable spilt gore probably gave the reformers much food for thought. And then this past fall there was that event, decidedly impromptu in nature, that for the time being represented to thousands of people the most impor ( Continued on page 55) Andrew J. White, who with McNamee, as alternate, announced the Dempsey-Tunney fight recently