Al Helfer

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Al Helfer was a Major League Baseball radio announcer for 17 years. He was known by the nick name "Mr. Radio Baseball" [1] He worked six World Series, ten All-Star Games and regular broadcasts for several teams, among them the New York Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers and Oakland Athletics. He worked the "Game of the Week" along with Dizzy Dean in the early fifties, though they often argued and never got along [2]. He also did the broadcast of the Army-Navy Game during the 1940s and 1950s and several Rose Bowl games.

Helfer played football and basketball at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania and he took his first job as a sports reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after graduation, also working the football games of the Pittsburgh Panthers team for radio station WWSW. He started working on broadcasting recreations of baseball games in 1933 for Pittsburgh Pirates games.

He joined Red Barber as the regular broadcast team of the Cincinnati Reds in 1935. He left Cincinnati to join CBS in 1937, working a few baseball games and a lot of football games. He was reunited with Barber on the Brooklyn Dodgers broadcasts in 1939. They worked together until 1941, when Helfer joined the Navy during World War II.

When he returned the Dodgers job was no longer available, so he started doing the "Game of the Week" broadcasts. He did eventually rejoin the Dodgers for their last years in Brooklyn, calling their final home game and introducing the players to the crowd for the final time.

He worked a number of teams after that, including the Houston Colt 45s first season and the Oakland Athletics first season on the west coast.

He was married to a vaudeville performer known as "Ramona" [3] and remarried to a woman named Margret in Sacramento, California his last 3 years of his life. He retired around 1969 and died on May 16, 1975.

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