1926 | The Pecan Park Eagle

Posts Tagged ‘1926’

You’re On The Air: A 1926 Review

February 25, 2016

You’re On The Air (By Graham McNamee, 1926):

A Contemporary Book Review Published in the Helena Independent

September 12, 1926

Radios, which have brought the world into closer contact, reunited families and long lost friends, are now a common piece of furniture in American homes. On January 1, 1926, there were 5,200,000 receiving sets in the United States alone.

Graham McNamee, announcer for WEAF, the largest New York City broadcasting station and author of “You’re On The Air,” is heralded the country over as the outstanding radio announcer. McNamee has acquired the ability to individualize and particularize every emotion, whether he is announcing a world series baseball game or a prize fight. The radio may be a marvelous invention and still be as dull as ditch water unless it allows the play of personality. A machine amounts to less than nothing unless a man can ride it. McNamee has been able to take a new medium of expression and through it transmit himself – to give out vividely (sic) a sense of movement and of feeling. Of such is the kingdom of art.

In his book, “You’re On The Air,” published by Harper and brothers, and written in collaboration with Robert Gordon Anderson, McNamee takes you back stage and explains the integral mechanism of the radio. During the past four years, he has broadcast world series games, prize fights, foot-ball games, president’s addresses, and innumerable ground operas.

McNamee was raised in St. Paul and in 1920, with the help of his mother, he studies vocal under such teachers as Madame Esperanza Carrigue. After a successful career as a vocalist, he became interested in radio and in 1922 became announcer for WEAF.

The radio game is young, for up to 1922, it was practically unheard of, but in the last four years, fortunes have been made and lost, huge factories have sprung up all over the land, tens of thousands of radio stores have been opened and the air is full of myriad voices spreading news and messages, music and song, to a listening world.

“A broadcaster should have an acquaintance with literature and of sports, a pleasing voice, a good disposition and control of his temper, as well of the microphone through which he is announcing,” says Mr. McNamee. “One in training for such a position should never, even in off hours, indulge in strong language. If he does not swear off swearing, he is apt to get mixed up sometimes through habit, and use expressions that are all too descriptive, particularly in broadcasting a stirring baseball game or a rattling good prize-fight.”

The perfect teamwork of operators, plantsmen, program makers, the mastery of that vast tangle and network of wires, the accuracy and synchronization, the timing of the programs to a split second, are as much of a poem as any ever written in print – and it gives a new respect for the achievement of man.

~ Helena Independent, September 12, 1926, Page 14. *

Graham McNamee

Once in while, intentionally or inadvertently, news writers draft some thoughts for history. This review was one of those times. Our only regret at The Pecan Eagle tonight is that we are unable to give individual writing credit where it is due. This piece was journalism at its finest. The review captures Graham McNamee as a man ahead of his times, a man who reached far, and taught many, the art of the craft that is live event broadcasting. The fact that McNamee’s world grew larger than baseball alone should never have been a diminishing factor of his role as the trail-blazing father of the play-by-play broadcast. As the author of this piece plainly stated: “A machine amounts to less than nothing unless a man can ride it.” – Graham McNamee both rode the bull and wrote the book on baseball play-by-play over the radio. A couple of kids we remember as Red Barber and Mel Allen, among all others of their great generation, grew up with an open mind and full ear to what McNamee was teaching all of them.

Congratulations again, Graham McNamee, on your 2016 Ford Frick Award. ~ Your day of vindication is at hand by this recognition from the Baseball Hall of Fame.

____________________

Bill McCurdy