Mel Allen
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Mel Allen (February 14, 1913 – June 16, 1996) was an American sportscaster, best known for his long tenure as the primary play-by-play announcer for the New York Yankees. During the peak of his career in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Allen was arguably the most prominent member of his profession, his voice familiar to millions. In his later years, he gained a second professional life as the first host of This Week in Baseball.
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[edit] Early life and career
Allen was born Melvin Allen Israel in Birmingham, Alabama. (Biographer Stephen Borelli notes Allen added the middle name Avrom, to honor a grandfather of his with that name who had died.) The future sportscaster was educated as a lawyer, but a boyhood love for baseball led him to become first a sports columnist and then a radio announcer. He attended the University of Alabama where he was a member of Zeta Beta Tau Fraternity as an undergraduate. He went on to earn a law degree from Alabama as well.
During his time at Alabama, Israel served as the public address announcer at Alabama football games. In 1933, when Birmingham's WBRC asked Alabama coach Frank Thomas to recommend a new play-by-play announcer, Thomas suggested Israel. His first broadcast was Alabama's home opener that year, against Tulane.
Soon after graduating in 1937, Israel took a train to New York City for a week's vacation. As it turned out, one week became 60 years; he settled in New York and lived in the New York metro area (first New York State, then Connecticut) for the rest of his life.[1]
While on vacation, Israel auditioned for the CBS Radio Network as a staff announcer. CBS executives already knew of Israel; the network's top sportscaster, Ted Husing, had heard many of Israel's Crimson Tide broadcasts. Israel was hired at $45 a week.[2] He often did non-sports announcing such as big band remotes or game show announcements. Among the game shows, he did Truth or Consequences. He would serve as an understudy to both sportscaster Husing and newscaster Bob Trout.
In his first year at CBS, he announced the crash of the Hindenburg, interrupting Kate Smith to do so. He first became a national celebrity when he ad libbed for a half-hour during the rain-delayed Vanderbilt Cup from an airplane.[1]
[edit] Broadcasting career
[edit] Baseball
In 1938, Israel landed his first major baseball assignment, as color commentator for the World Series. This led Wheaties to tap him to replace Arch McDonald as the voice of the Washington Senators for the 1939 season; McDonald was moving to New York as the first full-time radio voice of the Yankees and Giants. However, Wheaties gave in to owner Clark Griffith's desire to have Walter Johnson behind the mike.[2]
Israel didn't have to wait long for a break, however. In June 1939, Garnett Marks, McDonald's partner on Yankee broadcasts, twice mispronounced Ivory soap, the Yankees' sponsor at the time, as "Ovary Soap." He was fired, and Israel was tapped to replace him. McDonald himself went back to Washington after only one season, and Israel became the Yankees' lead announcer.[2]
In Stephen Borelli's biography How About That!, the author states that it was at CBS's suggestion in 1937, the year Melvin Israel joined the network, that Israel go by a different on-air last name. He chose Allen, his father's middle name. He legally changed his name to Allen in 1943.
Allen was the voice of both the Yankees and the Giants until 1943, when he entered the United States Army during World War II. While in the service, he broadcast on The Army Hour and Armed Forces Radio.
After the war, Allen began doing Yankees games exclusively. During this time, Allen and the Yankees were virtually one and the same, in part because of the Yankees' frequent World Series appearances. Allen eventually called 22 World Series on radio and television--including 18 in a row from 1946 to 1963. Even when the Yankees didn't appear in the Series (which only happened four times in 18 years), Allen's popularity was such that he was always tapped as the play-by-play man. He also called 24 All-Star Games.
Indicative of his popularity during the 1950s, he was one of the first three celebrities spoofed in the just-created Mad comic book. In the second issue, Allen, Leo Durocher and Yogi Berra were all caricatured in a baseball story, "Hex!", illustrated by Jack Davis.
After Russ Hodges departed from the Yankees booth for the New York Giants, a young Curt Gowdy was a broadcast partner for two seasons 1949-50, brought in from Oklahoma City after winning a national audition. Gowdy, originally from Wyoming, credited Mel Allen's mentoring as a big factor in his own success as a broadcaster. Gowdy became the play-by-play announcer for the Boston Red Sox in 1951.
Among Allen's many catchphrases were "Hello there, everybody!" to start a game, "How about that?!" or "Going, going, gone!" on home runs and "Three and two. What'll he do?"[1]
Allen famously lost his voice during the 1963 World Series, in which the Dodgers defeated the Yankees in a four-game sweep.[2]
[edit] Other sports
Fittingly for a man who got his first breaks in Alabama and New York calling college football, Allen did a number of bowl games: 14 Rose Bowls, 2 Orange Bowls, and 2 Sugar Bowls. For many years Allen also provided voiceover narration for Fox Movietone newsreels.
Allen also served as play-by-play announcer of New York Football Giants games on WCBS-AM in 1960 - with some of the games also being carried by the CBS Radio Network. Allen was behind the WCBS mike when Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Chuck Bednarik levelled Giants running back Frank Gifford during a clash at Yankee Stadium.
Allen hosted Jackpot Bowling on NBC in 1959. He became host after Leo Durocher quit to return to coaching. Allen's lack of bowling knowledge made him an unpopular host [3], [4] and that April, Bud Palmer replaced him as the show's host.
[edit] Radio host
In the early 1960s, Allen hosted the three-hour Saturday morning segment of the NBC Radio program "Monitor." He also contributed sportscasts to the program until the late 1960s.
[edit] Fired by the Yankees
In 1964, the Yankees made the World Series for the 15th time in 19 years -- but Allen wasn't there. Back in September, before the end of the season, the Yankees informed Allen that his contract with the team would not be renewed. In those days, the main announcers for the Series participants always called the World Series on NBC. Although Allen was thus technically eligible to call the Series, Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick honored the Yankees' request to have Phil Rizzuto join the Series crew instead. It was the first time Allen had missed a World Series for which the Yankees were eligible since 1943, and only the second World Series (not counting those missed during World War II) that he'd missed since he began calling baseball games in 1938.
On December 17, after much media speculation and many letters to the Yankees from fans disgruntled at Allen's absence from the Series, the Yankees issued a terse press release announcing Allen's firing; he was replaced by Joe Garagiola. NBC and Movietone dropped him soon afterward.
To this day, the Yankees have never given an explanation for Allen's firing, and rumors abounded. Depending on the rumor, Allen was homosexual, an alcoholic, a drug addict, or had a nervous breakdown.[1] Allen's sexuality was sometimes a target in those more conservative days because he hadn't married (and never did).
Years later, Allen told author Curt Smith that the Yankees had fired him under pressure from the team's longtime sponsor, Ballantine Beer. According to Allen, he was fired as a cost-cutting move by Ballantine, which had been experiencing poor sales for years[1] (it would eventually be sold in 1969). Smith, in his book Voices of Summer, also indicated that the medications Allen took in order to maintain his busy schedule may have affected his on-air performance. (Stephen Borelli, another biographer, has also pointed out that Allen's heavy workload didn't allow him time to take care of his health.)
Allen was Merle Harmon's partner for Milwaukee Braves games in 1965, and worked Cleveland Indians games on television in 1968. But he would not commit to either team full-time, or to the Oakland Athletics, who also wanted to hire him after the team's move from Kansas City. Despite the firing in 1964, Allen remained loyal to the Yankees for the remainder of his life, and to this day -- years after his death -- he is still popularly known as the Voice of the Yankees.
Eventually, the Yankees allowed him to again perform as a speaker at special Yankee Stadium ceremonies, including Old Timers' Day, which Allen had handled when he was lead announcer. While Yankees broadcaster Frank Messer (who joined the club in 1968) became emcee for Old Timers' Day and special events like Mickey Mantle Day from the 1960s onward, the Yankees made sure to also invite Allen to call the actual ballgame between the Old Timers and to take part in player's number-retirement honors.
[edit] Return to the Yankees
Allen was welcomed back to the Yankees' on-air family in 1976 as a pre/post-game host for the cable telecasts with John Sterling, and eventually started calling play-by-play again. He announced Yankees cable telecasts on SportsChannel New York (now FSN New York) along with the regular crew of Phil Rizzuto, Bill White, Frank Messer, and occasionally Fran Healy.
Allen remained with the Yankees' play-by-play crew until 1985. and made occasional appearances on Yankee telecasts and commercials into the late 1980s. In 1990, Allen called play-by-play for a WPIX Yankees game to officially make him baseball's first seven-decade announcer.
Among the memorable moments Allen called in that stretch were Yankee outfielder Reggie Jackson's 400th home run in 1980, and Yankee pitcher Dave Righetti's no-hitter on July 4, 1983.
[edit] This Week in Baseball
In his later years, Allen was exposed to a new audience as the host of the syndicated highlights show This Week in Baseball, which he hosted from its inception in 1977 until his death. Between his Major League Baseball assignments and his announcing duties for the Yankees, Allen again became the embodiment of the national pastime's spirit. The only quibble some critics (including the New York Post's Leonard Shechter) had about Allen would be with his loquaciousness, both on the air and in one-on-one conversations.
[edit] Computer games
Mel Allen reached yet another generation of fans in 1994 when he recorded the play-by-play for two computer baseball games, Tony La Russa Baseball and Old Time Baseball, which were published by Stormfront Studios. The games included his signature "How about that?!" home run call, which he had first used almost fifty years earlier. Allen also used that signature during a cameo in the movie The Naked Gun.
Although he completed the work only about a year before his death, producer Don Daglow said in a 1995 interview with Computer Gaming World that
| “ | Allen was a dream to work with. If something sounded the least bit off, he caught it himself and self-corrected before you even had a chance to ask for another take. Sometimes he'd hear a problem live that we would only have noticed later. When he was reading the long list of numbers that would be spliced into sentences to announce batting averages and so on, he stopped suddenly and said, 'That's not good.' Then he started again and finished the list. When we checked the tape we heard that he had just started to get a sing-song rhythm from repeating too many numbers in a row, and he'd noticed before anyone else had. | ” |
[edit] Ford C. Frick Award
In 1978 Allen was one of the first two winners of the Baseball Hall of Fame's Ford C. Frick Award. (The other was his old MLB and CBS Radio colleague Red Barber, who for some time served alongside Allen as the Yankees' announcer after making his name with the Brooklyn Dodgers.) Allen was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1988.
[edit] Death and legacy
Upon his death at age 83, Allen was buried at Temple Beth El Cemetery in Stamford, Connecticut. On July 25, 1998, the Yankees dedicated a plaque in his memory for Monument Park at Yankee Stadium. The plaque calls him "A Yankee institution, a national treasure" and includes his signature line, "How about that?"
After FOX relaunched TWIB in 2000 (after a one-year hiatus), it used a claymation version of Allen, with his signature hat, to open and close the show until 2002.
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e Smith, Curt (2005). Voices of Summer. New York City: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0786714468.
- ^ a b c d Society for American Baseball Research bio of Mel Allen. Retrieved on 2007-05-07.
- ^ http://www.newspaperarchive.com/LandingPage.aspx?type=glpnews&search=mel%20allen&img=\\na0030\6540742\22888651.html
- ^ http://www.newspaperarchive.com/LandingPage.aspx?type=glpnews&search=mel%20allen&img=\\na0022\3055107\16080057.html
[edit] External links
- Mel Allen's biography (How About That! The Life of Mel Allen), a book by Stephen Borelli
- Alabama Communication Hall of Fame page on Mel Allen
- Baseball Hall of Fame page on Mel Allen
- Jewish Virtual Library page on Mel Allen
- Mel Allen at the Radio Hall of Fame
- Mel Allen at the Internet Movie Database
- Mel Allen, legendary Yankees voice, dies at 83
- The Baseball Biography Project - Mel Allen
- Monitor Tribute Pages, Mel Allen was a host in 1960s
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Ford C. Frick Award 1978 |
Succeeded by Bob Elson |
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