= = = George Grapman wrote in message
= = = ...
Joel Rubin wrote:

I've asked this question before, but now that the most famous
practitioner of this art has died, it seems time to ask it again.

At one time, bandwidth was so expensive that not only couldn't you
post a large binary in a non-binary group -) but it was too expensive
to get a broadcast-quality phone line to broadcast a Chicago Cubs game
over radio station WHO in Des Moines.

So, someone like Ronald Reagan would sit in the studio at WHO, reading
a telegraphed ball-by-ball description of the Cubs-Pirates game at
Forbes Field, and would dramatize what he read off the wire.

This is not a great art but it can be made exciting and informative or
it can be deadly dull. By all reports, Reagan was good at it. This
helped lead to his later career in Hollywood.

Well, anyway, I'd like to know if the telegraphic reproduction of the
San Francisco Giants game over WAAT in Hackensack, NJ, during the 1958
season, was the last such broadcast, and, since I was about 7 years
old, then, I should like to know the details.

I remember Les Keiter doing the recreations in 1958. I thought it was
WMCA which had been the NY Giants station but i could be wrong. Mutual
Radio did a game of the day at least as late as '57.
Two stories about re-creations:

When I was very young I went to summer camp in western Jersey. The
mutual game was blacked out in major league cities but we got it from a PA
(Stroudsberg?) station. I used to think that the announcers had a hectic
schedule as they would be in NY, St.Louis, Washington and Chicago on
consecutive days.


" This may be urban legend but is still funny. The re-creations would
start after the actual game to allow for the possibility of the ticker
breaking down. When this happened the announcer would have the batter
fouling off pitch after pitch. If need be there was a heated argument and
is all else failed they would fake a rain delay. A man in a small town
tells his wife that he is going to the Cubs game. She listens to the game
and hears the announcer describe a torrential downpour that delays the
game. At dinner she asks about the weather and is told ," Honey, it was a
beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky". "


GG - LMAOROTF ) ~ RHF

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