Out of popular demand (ok, I’m lying, no one has demanded, or even asked), I thought I’d post one more baseball clip this week. This is another true rarity. Baseball fans have probably heard Russ Hodges’s “The Giants won the pennant! The Giants won the pennant!” ad nauseum, — especially Brooklyn fans who suffered mightily after Bobby Thomson hit the home run in the third game of the 1951 playoffs that sent the Giants into the World Series and broke the hearts of Dodger fans. There was hardly a soul in New York who didn’t think they had the pennant in the bag when they went up by 13 and a half games in August (Little did they know that the Giants were illegally stealing signals, but that’s another story). Still, it was one of baseball’s greatest moments. Some say the greatest.
The clip is usually about a minute long, and it is great, but as it turned out in the middle of the ninth inning, a technologically savvy Dodger fan had used an early version of the tape recorder to record the action so he could later taunt his buddies who were Giant fans. Despite his misery , he saved the tape (I would have tossed it into the Gowanus Canal), and it eventually found its way onto an LP. That’s where this comes from. It’s a full eight minutes of opera-level tragedy if you ask me, but still marvelous to hear.
As much as it pains me, here’s a video of the home run. The opening commentary was done for a commercial collection.
Click here to listen to the recording, which begins with Whitey Lockman up at the plate.
And imagine you are hearing it on this:
Oh, I forgot to say how we got to talking about baseball when Bob Stein of Voyager came over to my apartment. It was because of this, my Ebbets Field brick, probably my most treasured possession:
I had kind of decided to ease up a little on posting again so quickly, mostly out of fear that I’ll soon run out of interesting stuff (and interesting things to say about it) in a week, but I realized that the World Series is about to start, and since I’m probably going to spend tomorrow night sitting in front of the TV, I thought I’d upload this glimpse of one of the most monumental moments in baseball history to the site.
Back in the early 1990s, the Voyager Company was experimenting with a new media format called CD-ROM. Remember those? Anyway, one of the company’s partners had seen my New York book and thought there might be a CD-ROM in it. There wasn’t, but we got talking about baseball, and lo and behold we realized there was a CD-ROM in the sport’s always fascinating history. About a year later, “Baseball’s Greatest Hits” came out, and I still think it’s a pretty amazing disk, with 65 of the greatest calls in baseball history — the original ones, too, not reproductions of incredible moments such as Carl Hubbell striking out five straight future Hall of Famers, Bobby Thomson’s home run, even Roseanne mangling the Star Spangled Banner. I spent a few days poking around a closet in the Hall of Fame library where they just tossed stuff people had sent them over the years, and so I also got to include interviews with many Hall of Famers, including Ty Cobb and sound bytes from the original Hall of Fame ceremonies in 1939. We also put in video, columns by Red Smith and even a trivia game. All of it is introduced by the great Mel Allen.
The disk is long since out of print, but I thought I’d share with you my favorite video from the project. It’s a home movie taken from the stands of Babe Ruth supposedly calling his shot during the 1932 World Series against the Cubs. I might get an email from the owner of this clip asking me to take it down, but if not, take your time, run it a few times, especially at the higher magnifications, and let me know what you think. Did he or didn’t he? Get out your eyeglasses and see for yourself.
(It could take a few moments to load, so you might have to be patient, but believe me, if you’re a baseball fan it’ll be worth it). Click here to see the film.
On the other hand, you have to admit it’s perfect in this case:
My oral history of New York City ended with the onset of World War II. After the book came out and it was somewhat of a success, I entertained the idea of a sequel. This book, I thought, would cover New York City during the war. I did a few interviews, and they were pretty interesting, but then I happened to see an article about early television, and I was suddenly busy for the next six years.
I remember talking to my buddy Lenny Del Genio about the war. Lenny was a sweet guy but also a former boxer who had been rated the No. 1 lightweight contender in the world. He later became a part-time actor (his claim to fame was shooting out Moe Green’s eye in The Godfather). It was either he or his wife who was an air raid warden during the war. I remember one of them telling me that the job basically entailed walking down the street and yelling at people to pull down their blackout curtains or turn off their lights and then accepting heaps of verbal abuse for doing so. So much for patriotism.
It was a great interview, but mostly because Lenny loved to play the guitar and sing, and we did a medley of Mills Brothers songs during the interview. I don’t remember what he said, but I’ll never forget our sing-along. Hey, look at me, I’m a World War II air raid warden!
Yup, the hat is the real deal. Also, In connection with my research, I happened to pick up a pile of World War II ration books. This one still had the stamps in it. Here’s what it looks like:
Here’s the back:
And here are the stamps. Clearly, Mary had an in with the butcher, because all the stamps are still in the book.
Ok, just to prove that this isn’t all about early TV (although a lot of it will be), here’s a lovely Christmas card:
Now, take a look to see who it’s from:
What is especially ironic about the card is that I got it from a friend of mine, the late Bill Reuben, a legendary New York City journalist and character and a lifelong fighter against everything that J. Edgar Hoover stood for. Bill was a great hero of the 1950s. It was his columns for The National Guardian about the Trenton Six (the North’s Scottsboro case) that saved the defendants from the electric chair (an inspired Bill’s lifelong interests in false confessions). A couple of years later, he wrote a series of articles about the Rosenberg Case that inspired a wordwide movement to free the couple. While the effort was of course doomed to failure, no one has been able to write about the case since then without addressing (usually unsuccessfully) Bill’s arguments. I recently wrote about Bill as part of an introduction for a book I’m writing about Alger Hiss — a book based on Bill’s research. It’s long, so I’ve condensed it into a pdf that can be downloaded here.
For a while, Bill was married to Miriam Soloviev, who in her time was a pretty famous violinist. She toured Europe toward the end of World War II with Paul Robeson. Here’s a shot of Bill and Miriam with Paul:
One of the places they went to was Hitler’s bunker. Here’s a souvenir shot from that visit:
I’ve also uploaded some pdf excerpts from Bill’s series on the Rosenberg case and the Trenton Six. Click the links to download them.
Ted Smith was an RCA engineer who was in charge of keeping the NBC exhibit running at the 1939 World’s Fair. That exhibit was really NBC’s coming out party. It not only sold a lot of TV sets, but it also marked the beginning of a regular broadcasting schedule (more about that another time) for the network. The exhibit also exposed thousands of people to television for the first time when the company set up a camera and a special see-through TV set and people lined up for hours to stand in front of the camera as their friends got to watch them be “televised” on the closed-circuit system.
Those who did so even got a card attesting to that fact. Here’s one of them:
And here’s Ted, photographed through the TV as he stood before the camera:
Ted had such great stories. I remember one, about what certainly had to be television’s first wardrobe malfunction:
“Philco had a camera at the University of Pennsylvania swimming pool. They would just keep the camera running to test their transmission. Our people would tune in occasionally to test their own equipment. Merril Trainor called them one day and said, ‘You know your camera at the swimming pool? Do you know some men are swimming without bathing suits?’ ”
He told another one which has a great picture to go along with it. I’ll leave that for another post. But I don’t want you to think this is only about television, so tomorrow I’ll move on to something different.
When I was researching The Box, I met Bill Parker, who started off in television, working for the inventor U. A. Sanabria in the 1920s. Later, he went to work for Philco and RCA. Bill was a lovely guy and shared some terrific stories. At one point in the conversation he mentioned he had some video from the early 1940s, taken when he was working for W3XE, the still-experimental Philco station in Philadelphia.
A few days later a package arrived in the mail. I popped the cassette in my VCR and then my eyes nearly popped out. There on my TV was actual footage taken from the 1940 Republican convention, not coverage that appeared on TV but of the TV coverage from the convention center in Philly. He also had a silent clip from a live dramatic performance at the station. These were little experimental dramas the stations put on to test their operation in the years before TV went commercial. Because the TV cameras were not very sensitive and needed lots of light, those little shows were very tough on the actors, and I heard lots of stories from people who were nearly fried under the hot lights. One one show, the prop person let a glass of water sit under the lights until the water nearly boiled. The actor who was to drink the glass of “poison” let out a scream when he put the glass to his lips, except he wasn’t acting and had to go to the hospital with third-degree burns. I also remember an old RCA exec relating how they could tell when the lights were too bright: the actor’s hair would catch fire, which apparently happened often enough.
Anyway, here’s a few minutes from Bill’s film.
Click on the photo to see the video.
A few years ago, my wife and I were out in Los Angeles, and we stopped in at the Television Academy to say hello to some of the people I worked with after my second book, The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961, was published. The academy had contacted me because they were interested in setting up their own oral history project, videotaping the pioneers of early television before moving on to current movers and shakers. It was a great idea (you can see many of the interviews, including a few I conducted, online, here). A couple of years later, when my bank account was close to empty and I needed a way to pay the rent, I saw a little money in my collection of tapes that I had recorded for the book. Thankfully, the Academy bought them, figuring that researchers might find something helpful in them.
On our visit, I asked about what happened to the tapes. It turned out the few hundred TDK cassettes that I had bought for less than .99 each, were now bar-coded and called “The Jeff Kisseloff Collection.”
Fast forward to a few days ago when a carpenter was replacing some rotted boards outside my office. The vibration from his hammering knocked a picture frame off my wall, and the various pieces of ephemera looked like litter on my carpet. I picked the pieces up with renewed interest. There was some real history in the pile, and even more around my office — old photographs, videos, ephemera, letters, recordings and more. It’s probably egocentric of me to think that that history that might interest a few people, but what the hell, here I am, thinking that someone might enjoy seeing selections from the Kisseloff Collection (as opposed to the Jeff Kisseloff Collection) and hearing the stories that go with them. If people do enjoy it, I’ll keep updating the site.
Feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.