An American Life Read online

  After taking over as faculty advisor for theater arts after-school activities, she increased the number of student productions and I began trying out for all the plays. One of the plays she staged was Journey’s End, and when I won the part of Captain Stanhope, I was in heaven.

  Miss Johnson organized a drama society that allowed students who were interested in dramatics to work together year round instead of just the weeks before a new play was staged. During my junior year, she took it upon herself to get Eureka invited to a prestigious one-act play contest at Northwestern University.

  For college actors, the competition was comparable to the Super Bowl. Hundreds of colleges around the country, including all the big schools—Princeton, Yale, and so forth—competed for invitations to bring student actors to the competition. I never learned how Miss Johnson pulled it off, but she wangled an invitation for tiny, 250-student Eureka College, the only school accepted that year that didn’t have a full-time dramatic arts department.

  For our entry, she selected Aria da Capo, a one-act play by Edna St. Vincent Millay that was set in ancient Greece and had an antiwar theme. I played a shepherd strangled before the final curtain by Bud Cole, my football teammate, fraternity brother, and one of my best friends. Death scenes are always pleasant for an actor and I tried to play it to the hilt.

  To our delight, Eureka placed second in the competition and while we were relishing this success, it was announced I was one of three performers who had been selected to receive individual acting awards. Afterward, the head of Northwestern’s Speech Department, the sponsor of the contest, called me into his office and inquired if I’d ever thought about making acting my career.

  I said, “Well, no,” and he said, “Well, you should.” It was quite a thrill for a young man trying to set the course of his life.

  I guess that was the day the acting bug really bit me, although I think it was probably orbiting pretty close to me for a long time before that, even before Journey’s End and my student plays at Dixon High.

  After we moved to Dixon, I fell in love with the movies. I couldn’t count the number of hours I spent in the darkness of our only moviehouse with William S. Hart and Tom Mix galloping over the prairie or having my eyes turned misty by the cinematic perils that befell Mary Pickford and Pearl White. And when I was ten or eleven, one of my mother’s sisters came to Dixon for a visit and our whole family went out to a silent movie. I don’t remember its name, but it featured the adventures of a freckle-faced young boy and I enjoyed it a lot. Afterward, I overheard my aunt talking to my mother about this young star and saying she thought I had the potential to become a child actor. “If he was mine,” she said, “I’d take him to Hollywood if I had to walk all the way.”

  Her remark didn’t plant any visions in me—or Nelle—of rushing off to Hollywood. But it did make me feel good and from then on, whenever I went to a movie featuring a young boy, I fantasized about how much fun it would be to act out a part in a movie.

  By my senior year at Eureka, my secret dream to be an actor was firmly planted, but I knew that in the middle of Illinois in 1932, I couldn’t go around saying, “I want to be an actor.”

  To say I wanted to be a movie star would have been as eccentric as saying I wanted to go to the moon. Hollywood and Broadway were at least as remote from Dixon as the moon was in 1932. If I had told anyone I was setting out to be a movie star, they’d have carted me off to an institution.

  But I had an idea. Broadway and Hollywood were a long way from Dixon, but not Chicago, the nation’s hub of radio broadcasting.

  In those days, commercial broadcasting was beginning to grab the hearts of America. When “Amos and Andy” came on the air, the whole world stopped: If you were at a movie theater, they’d shut off the projector, turn on the lights, and a radio set would be placed on the stage while everybody sat quietly in their seats for a half hour listening to the latest episode.

  Radio was magic. It was theater of the mind. It forced you to use your imagination. You’d sit in your living room and be transported to glamorous locales around the world, and eavesdrop on stories of romance and adventure brought to life by a few actors and vivid sound effects transmitted over the radio waves—a squeaking door or a horse galloping across the desert. It’s sad that we’ve now had several generations who’ve never had a chance to use their imagination in the way we did.

  Radio had created a new profession—the sports announcer—as radio’s influence grew in America. 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.

  At Eureka, I’d listened to their broadcasts religiously and sometimes, when we were lounging around the TKE house, I’d pick up a broomstick, pretend it was a microphone, and do a mock locker-room interview with one of my fraternity brothers to get some laughs.

  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. There was a summer hotel at the park called The Lodge that attracted well-off families, mostly from Chicago, who returned year after year to spend their vacations in the country. Over the years I’d taught the children of many of the families how to swim and their fathers had often come up to me and said they’d help me get a job after I’d gotten my college diploma. The Depression had changed all that: A lot of people didn’t take summer vacations in the summer of 1932 and among those who did, few were in a position to help me get a job.

  There was an exception, a Kansas City businessman who told me he had contacts with people in several businesses and asked what line of work I wanted to go into now that I’d graduated from college. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I wanted to go into the world of entertainment. I knew it would have sounded ridiculous. But he pressed me for an answer, putting me on the spot: “You have to tell me what you want to do,” he said.

  Although I couldn’t bring myself to mention acting, I remembered those mock broomstick interviews in the TKE house and said: “I have to tell you, way down deep inside, what I’d really like to be is a radio sports announcer.” (I’d seen several movies in which sports announcers played themselves and thought there was a remote possibility the job might lead me into the movies.)

  Then I got what turned out to be the best advice I’d ever received. He told me he had no contacts in radio but it might be better for me that he didn’t. If he asked a friend to give me a job, he said the friend might do it, but probably feel no obligation to do anything else for me. It was probably better, he said, for me to do things on my own from the beginning. Then came his second piece of advice: He suggested I start knocking on radio station doors, not mention sports announcing, but say I was a believer in this new industry and was willing to take any job to break into broadcasting. And he told me not to be discouraged by turndowns; sometimes, he said, salesmen had to knock on 250 doors before making a sale.

  At summer’s end, the beach closed and I informed my mother that I was going to take his advice. I’d ride along with Moon to Eureka, where he was going to enroll for another year, then hitchhike to Chicago to hunt for a job as a radio announcer.

  After driving with Moon to Eureka, I spent several hours with Margaret, whose father had recently been appointed minister of the local Disciples of Christ church. She was packing for a trip to a distant town in rural Illinois where she’d been lucky enough to find a teaching job.

  We had a sad parting, but knew that with things getting worse every day, separations were inevitable in the Depression. We both had to take jobs wherever we could find them.

  When I went on to Chicago, 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. The only encouragement I got was from the program director of the NBC station in Chicago
. A kind woman, she heard my appeal for a job, then told me I was in the wrong place. “In Chicago,” she said, “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.”

  Discouraged, I hitchhiked back to Dixon in the rain. By this time my summer earnings were almost gone and I needed a job of any kind. Then, several days later, after my hopes had soared, I lost the job at Montgomery Ward.

  7

  AFTER MY DISAPPOINTMENT over the Montgomery Ward job, 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.

  Jack was a practical man who firmly believed those announcements advising people to stay at home because there weren’t any jobs to be found anywhere. He’d been on the road himself and knew from experience how harsh the times were. But he also knew how disappointed I was after losing the job in Dixon and when I blurted out my dream of breaking into radio, I think his heart went out to me. He was a proud, ambitious man whose own dreams had been crushed by the Depression and I think he understood the fire that was burning inside me. I guess it was the same fire—a drive to make something of myself—that had always burned inside him. At that moment I thought again of Jack in that tiny little shoe store in Springfield and my heart went out to him.

  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 said I knew of two or three in the tri-cities area of Davenport, Moline, and Rock Island along the Illinois-Iowa border. And I said there were several others further to the west.

  Jack heard me out and said that if I wanted to test the advice of that woman in Chicago, he was willing to let me borrow the family car so I could go on the road and look for a job in radio.

  A couple of days later I got in our third-hand Oldsmobile and headed for the tri-cities, which were on the Mississippi River about seventy-five miles southwest of Dixon.

  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. In those days, the initials of radio stations’ call signs usually meant something and WOC meant “World of Chiropractic.”

  The station had been founded by Colonel B. J. Palmer, proprietor of the Palmer School of Chiropractic, whose optimism and farsightedness about the future of radio had also led him to acquire Station WHO in Des Moines.

  I’d learned during my job hunting in Chicago that if you wanted a job as a radio announcer, the person you applied to was the program director.

  After finding the campus of the Palmer School of Chiropractic, an office building in downtown 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.

  Peter MacArthur had crossed the Atlantic as a song-and-dance man, a member of Harry Lauder’s original vaudeville troupe, and toured America until arthritis nearly crippled him. Suffering terribly, he left the act in Davenport and went to the Palmer School of Chiropractic in hopes of finding relief from the cruel pain in his joints. He never found it, but his background in show business led to the offer of an announcer’s job at WOC and later a job as program director. In that part of the country, Pete’s Highland burr, as thick as oatmeal, was probably as familiar as the voices of Amos and Andy when he said: “WOC, Davenport—where the West begins, in the state where the tall corn grows.”

  Pete, whose cheeks had been burnished by the chilly winds of the Highlands until they were the color of copper, listened while 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 an opening for an announcer and held auditions for it the day before, after advertising the job for a month over the air.

  “The job’s filled. Where ye been?” he said as if I were a little backward.

  I didn’t want to tell him we didn’t listen much to WOC in Dixon.

  After losing the job at Montgomery Ward the week before, this was too much. 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.

  I turned around and saw him advancing toward me atop his canes, first on one and then the other, and let the elevator descend without me.

  “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.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  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.”

  My mind raced for something that would impress him. I decided I had to describe a game with high drama and an exciting finish, name names and describe specific plays. The names were the big thing. How could I come up with different names as I described a play?

  I decided the answer was to describe one of the games at Eureka in which I’d played; I’d know the plays and the players.

  The previous season we’d won a game in the last twenty seconds with a sixty-five-yard touchdown run by quarterback Bud Cole, my fraternity brother who had done me in on the stage at Northwestern. It was as exciting a game as I’d ever played.

  As I stood at the microphone, my only rehearsal for that moment had been those imaginary broomstick interviews in the TKE house. 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. . . .”

  (We didn’t have a stadium, we had bleachers, but I didn’t expect him to know the difference.)

  I let the teams seesaw across the field for almost fifteen minutes, then began leading up to that final play, an off-tackle smash. When we played that game, I never knew how Bud made it to the goal line. 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. . . .”

  When Pete clumped back into the studio, there was a smile on his face. “Ye did great, ye big SOB,” he said. “Be here Saturday, you’re broadcasting the Iowa-Minnesota Homecoming gam
e. You’ll get $5 and bus fare.”

  During the next week I read everything I could about the teams and Big Ten football. On Saturday, I took a bus to Davenport, met Pete at WOC, and drove with him to Iowa City along with a staff announcer Pete was obviously keeping in reserve in case I blew my chance.

  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.

  Well, not only could I now call myself a sports announcer, I’d gotten a hundred percent raise in a week’s time.

  For a twenty-one-year-old fresh out of college, broadcasting the Big Ten games was like a dream, and as the end of the season approached, I prayed the people at WOC would offer me a permanent job. 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.

  Once again, disappointed and frustrated, I headed for home.

  Back in Dixon, Jack reminded me that while I’d been talking about forward passes and quarterback sneaks, events a lot more important than football games had been occurring: Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected the thirty-second president of the United States by a landslide and Jack predicted he would pull America out of its tailspin.

  There weren’t many Democrats in Dixon and Jack was probably the most outspoken of them, never missing a chance to speak up for the working man or sing the praises of Roosevelt.