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Major Andrew J. White, when he was president of the Columbia
Broadcasting System, 1927.
An advertisement for the 1921 Dempsey-Tunney fight broadcasts,
publicized by an early radio receiver manufacturer.
This
cover of the August, 1921 issue of “Wireless
Age” shows J. Andrew White at the microphone of WJY, the station where
he
broadcast the “Battle of the Century” fight between Jack Dempsey and
Jacques
Carpentier. This was a test transmission before the event.
White announces as singer Sophie Tucker broadcasts from the New York
Electrical Show over 2BZL, October, 1921.
A broadcast from the short-lived RCA radio station 2XR / WDY in Roselle
Park, NJ, 1921.
A
1923 cover illustration from "Wireless Age" magazine portrays Major
White broadcasting a fight from ringside.
Major White broadcasts a baseball game from his press box location,
1924.
Major White interviews Mel Sheppard, 1908 Olympics medalist,
over WJZ.
Major White and Ted Husing broadcast a Navy-Princeton football game for
WJZ, 1926.
New York Governor Al Smith
presents Major White with a silver cup as the “best looking and most
popular
announcer in America” at the 1925 Radio World’s Fair.
The presentation was broadcast over New
York’s WAHG (now WCBS).
An advertisement for the "Andrew White B Battery Eliminator".
Major J. Andrew White displays a
map showing the placement of microphones that will be used for CBS’s
broadcast
of the Republican National Convention from Kansas City in 1928.
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He
was nervous as he gripped the microphone and began
speaking. He had
never broadcast a
sporting event before. In
fact, almost no
one on the entire planet had done it.
He
was about to create an entirely new profession.
Early Years
James
Andrew White was born in 1889 and raised in New York
City. He spent his
youth as a beach
lifeguard and amateur boxer. After
he
completed his schooling, he built race cars and tried his hand at
selling
mining equipment, and then became a New York correspondent for the
“London
Times”. In 1911,
Guglielmo Marconi read
one of his Times articles about the conviction of three stock swindlers
and
hired him in 1911 to work for British Marconi in New York.
In
1914, American Marconi formed the National Amateur
Wireless Association (NAWA), and began publishing the magazine
“Wireless
Age”. White was
named editor of the
magazine, and began his long association with David Sarnoff, who was
the magazine’s
contract manager. During
World War I, in
addition to editing the monthly magazine, White was appointed as Chief
Signal
Officer of the American Guard, at which time he authored several books
for the
Army Signal Corps. This
work earned him
the title of Major, which he proudly appended to his name for much of
his
career.
In
1919, the Radio Corporation of America was formed to assume
the operations of American Marconi, and so White became an RCA employee. Sarnoff was
named the company’s commercial
manager.
The Dempsey-Carpentier Fight
The
big sporting event of 1921 was the boxing match between
Jack Dempsey and Jacques Carpentier, to be held at Boyle’s Thirty Acres
arena
in Hoboken, New Jersey, on July 2.
At
that time in America, boxing was almost as popular as baseball, and
this
“Battle of the Century” was going to be the “World Series” of boxing. Madison Square Garden
promoter Julius Hopp thought
it would be a publicity coup to broadcast the match by wireless –
something
that had never been done before. Broadcasting
was not yet established in 1921, and only a handful of Americans owned
radio
sets. Hopp first
called Hiram Percy
Maxim at the ARRL, but Maxim immediately dismissed the idea as
impractical. Next
he contacted Major
White at the NAWA – the other amateur wireless organization – who was
immediately interested in the project.
He brought the idea to Sarnoff, who had been trying
unsuccessfully since
1916 to promote his vision of transmitting to “radio music boxes” at
RCA. Sarnoff loved
the idea, and authorized $1,500
for the project. He
also offered to join
White at ringside for the broadcast.
The
project came together quickly. A
license was issued for a new station - WJY,
RCA’s first broadcasting station - which would operate for just one day. With the permission of
Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary
of the Navy, he was able to borrow a 3.5 kW Navy transmitter that was
being
built at the G.E. factory, and had it shipped by barge from Schenectady
to
Hoboken. The equipment was installed 2-1/2 miles away from the stadium
at the
Lackawanna railroad station, where an antenna was strung from an
existing radio
tower to the building’s clock tower.
WJY
would broadcast on the longwave frequency of 1600 meters (187 kHz), and
the
Navy promised to keep the frequency clear of interference during the
broadcast. Signal
tests showed the
station had about a 200 mile coverage radius.
Meanwhile,
an army of amateur radio operators, headed by the
prominent amateur and RCA engineer J. Owen Smith (2ZL), installed radio
receivers and Magnavox loudspeakers in theatres and assembly halls
across the
Northeast. Tickets
were sold to hear the
broadcast, with the proceeds benefiting the American Committee for
Devastated
France.
A
major obstacle presented itself when AT&T refused to
let RCA connect their telephone line to a transmitter.
(AT&T and RCA were already adversaries in
their battle for dominance of the radio field.)
To work around the problem, White hired a high speed
telegrapher to send
the text of his reports over a Western Union line to the transmitter,
where
they were to be typed out and read over the air by Owen Smith. Listeners would never hear
White’s voice
directly.
As
the station was being assembled, White contemplated how he
would describe a boxing match over radio.
A former amateur boxer, he rehearsed by shadow
boxing in front of a
mirror while describing his actions.
It
was hot on July 2, and White sat for four hours in the
hot sun in his white starched shirt, describing the fight into the
microphone,
with Sarnoff at his side. The
main event
took place after several preliminary bouts, and Dempsey knocked out
Carpentier
in the fourth round. The
battery on the
phone line failed at the end of the broadcast, and a transmitter tube
failed
midway through, and Smith burned his hands replacing the hot tube. Nonetheless, the entire
program managed to reach
an estimated audience of 350,000 – easily the largest radio audience to
that
time.
WDY
The
WJY broadcast generated tremendous publicity for RCA,
and made Major J. Andrew White an overnight celebrity.
The success of the broadcast finally convinced
RCA executives of the importance of radio broadcasting, and they
immediately
filed an application for the company’s first broadcast license. The license for 2XR was
issued to RCA on
September 19, 1921. White
would become
the station manager.
While
2XR was being built, White set up a demonstrator station
at the New York Electrical Show in October of 1921.
RCA supplied a 250 watt transmitter, and White
broadcast daily on a frequency of “approximately” 200 meters using the
call
sign 2BZL. The
station was housed in a large
room that supported an audience of up to 1,600 persons, and from there
White
broadcast both live and recorded music daily to the New York City area. 2BZL also broadcast the
plays of the World
Series game as they were phoned in from the Polo Grounds.
Meanwhile,
the construction of 2XR was progressing at a
General Electric factory in Roselle Park, NJ.
The WJY transmitter was reinstalled there, inside a
hexagonal studio
lined with draperies. 2XR
went on the
air December 14, 1921, and a few days later the call sign was changed
to WDY. J.
Andrew White was the station and program manager,
and J. Owen Smith was his chief operator and announcer. Engineers R.H. Ranger and
Ernest V. Amy were
the only other members of WDY staff. WDY
broadcast Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings from 8:00 to 10:00 PM
on 360
meters (833 kHz). Westinghouse’s
new radio
station, WJZ in Newark, occupied the frequency on alternate nights.
White
immediately found it difficult to attract talent for
his broadcasts, and he never knew from one night to the next what he
was going
to put on the air. Despite
his
well-established contacts with the performers of New York’s Great White
Way, he
had trouble getting them to travel the sixteen miles to Roselle Park –
an
industrial area with limited passenger train service.
His big event was the Friday night “Radio
Party”, and for it he would entice performers to make the trip with a
promise
of dinner and wine, and sometimes also free publicity in “Wireless Age”
magazine. One of
the vaudeville
performers who made the trip was the future radio star Eddie Cantor,
who made
his first broadcast over WDY.
It
shortly became clear that WDY’s location was causing more
problems than just the access of talent.
The WDY antenna passed over the railroad tracks
alongside the factory
building, and any time a train passed under the antenna, the station
would
drift off frequency, and the carbon soot that spewed from the
locomotives
coated the antenna insulators, causing them to leak radio energy from
the
antenna. At the
same time, the
Westinghouse station, WJZ, was performing much more reliably and had
better
coverage. In June,
1921, Westinghouse
had joined the “Radio Trust” of patent holders that included RCA,
General
Electric, and AT&T, and so the cooperation between RCA and
Westinghouse was
improving daily. Ultimately,
RCA elected
to merge WDY’s operations with the Westinghouse station, allowing WJZ
to be on
the air every night. And
so WDY broadcast
its last program on February 24, 1922, just over two months after its
debut.
WJZ
After
WDY’s short-lived existence, J. Andrew White’s continued
in his principal job editing “Wireless Age” magazine, but he also
started to
work for WJZ on a contract basis as a sports announcer.
On June 26, 1922, White called the
Welterweight fight between Benny Leonard and Jack Britton over WJZ. For the first time, he was
able to describe a
fight directly as he saw it from ringside, without a relay announcer. Radio shops in New York
installed
loudspeakers on the streets outside of their stores, and thousands of
people
heard “This is WJZ, the Radio Corporation-Westinghouse broadcasting
station in
Newark, New Jersey. A
blow-by-blow
description of the Leonard-Britton championship bout will now be given
from the
ringside at the New York Velodrome.
One
moment please, while we make the connection.”
Then the major’s voice boomed out, along with the
sounds of the crowd,
the calls of the referee, and the footsteps of the boxers. Listeners felt they were
“there” for the
first time.
On
May 12, 1923, White announced the Willard-Johnson
heavyweight fight. Soon,
expanding out
from boxing, he was broadcasting many different kinds of sports events
on
WJZ. He called the
first live World
Series game that year, connected to WJZ over Western Union lines from
the
stadium. For
those games, J. Owen Smith
was broadcasting’s first spotter, moving cards with players’ names
around on a
large cardboard diamond while White described the action.
In
1923, RCA purchased WJZ from Westinghouse and moved it from
the Newark factory to Aeolian Hall in midtown Manhattan. WJZ was quickly becoming
one of the most
important stations in the country, and White’s prestige as a sports
announcer was
rising with it. His
skill at describing
a sporting event was universally admired, and he was soon being called
“The
most famous announcer in radio”. He
was recognized
for his impartiality and lack of prejudice.
Major White’s gift of observation made his word
pictures of the scene so
vivid that listeners felt they were actually present at the contest. “I play the game myself,
emotionally”, he
said. “I am ‘in’ every play and I let myself go, vocally, with all the
intenseness that I would use if I was actually carrying the ball.” One
of
his favorite, and much admired, stunts was to pick out a small incident
that
told a story, tragic or humorous, and typified the emotions that swayed
the
crowd. “White
paints word pictures that
other minds could feast upon. So
accurate are his descriptions that anyone who has ever attended a game
at the
Polo Grounds can visualize the plays perfectly,” said one admiring
radio
columnist. “Those
who listen to J.
Andrew White cannot help but admire his painstaking attention to the
details,
side lights and human interest stuff that permits every listener to be
one of
the excited fans in the grandstand.”
The
Major’s voice was soon being heard weekly over WJZ.
Other boxing matches followed:
The Dempsey-Firpo fight in September, 1923;
the Goldstein-Lynch match in March, 1924; and the Firpo-Wills contest
in
September, 1924. White
also called a
number of college football games.
His
broadcast work was now occupying so much time that he quit his position
as the
editor of “Wireless Age” magazine at the end of 1923.
On
September 1, 1924, Major White announced the feature race
from Belmont Park - the first ever broadcast of a horse race. “J. Andrew White, who has
described every
type of sporting event which the radio has so far carried to its
distant fans,
will be at the microphone in the judge’s stand.
Direct wires, especially installed for this event,
will carry his voice
to the radiocasting studio, where it will be ‘put on the air.’” In 1925, White became the
first to announce a crew
race, the Child’s Cup Regatta on the Harlem River.
Stationed on a power boat following the
oarsmen, his reports were sent to the WJZ studio via shortwave for
rebroadcast.
Ted
Husing
One of White’s
career accomplishments was mentoring a young
announcer who became one of radio’s best-known sportscasters. Ted Husing was a young
staff announcer at WJZ,
assigned to introduce Major White’s broadcasts of baseball re-creations. For these away games, to
avoid the high cost
of phone lines, White would broadcast while comfortably seated in the
studio,
re-creating the game’s action from tickertape accounts sent to him from
the
stadium. One day,
Husing told White that
he wanted to become a sports broadcaster too, but White advised him to
first go
out and play some football to learn the sport.
Husing took his advice, spending a season playing
amateur football, and
then in the fall of 1925 he told White he was ready to broadcast. White pulled some strings
with the WJZ management
and had Husing assigned to work with him for the broadcast of a
Penn-Cornell
game.
When
he arrived at the stadium for the broadcast, Husing
found himself alone in the broadcast booth as it approached broadcast
time –
White had not yet arrived! Swallowing
hard, he took the microphone alone and proceeded to work his way
nervously
through the pre-game show. Just
as play was
about to begin, Major White waltzed into the booth and took over the
microphone. “I’ll never forget his broadcast”, Husing wrote. “He just marched in cold,
picked up the
microphone, and the river of words began flowing.
A masterpiece was winging through the
air. He used strong
words, simple words,
colorful words, and he didn’t have to grope for them.
I made a mental note to put in some cram
sessions with a dictionary.”
With
that broadcast, Ted Husing had found his life’s calling. White and Husing teamed up
for several more
broadcasts, including the Princeton-Navy game in 1926. In the process, they built a
friendship that would
last both their lifetimes.
Political Convention Broadcasts
In June of 1924, RCA
sent Major White to Cleveland to
broadcast the Republican National Convention over WJZ and WGY in
Schenectady. WEAF,
the competition
AT&T station, was also sending its star announcer, Graham
McNamee, to cover
the event, and AT&T refused to rent phone lines to WJZ for the
broadcast. RCA was
forced to carry the
event over noisy, inferior Western Union lines.
But White’s broadcast was relayed from WGY to G.E.’s
shortwave station
KFKX in Hastings, Nebraska, where it was re-transmitted to the West
Coast and
heard over KGO in Oakland, California, making this White’s first
coast-to-coast
broadcast. At the
convention, Calvin
Coolidge received an easy nomination after just three days of debates
and
speeches.
Later
that same month, White also broadcast the Democratic
convention from Chicago, teamed up with WJZ announcer Norman
Brokenshire. Unlike
the orderly Republican event, the
Democratic convention lasted for 16 unruly days, and it took 103
ballots before
the Democrats could choose their eventual nominee, John Davis. Coolidge easily trounced
Davis in the general
election that fall, and White and Brokenshire then broadcast the
inauguration
on March 4, 1925 for a small network of stations.
(Graham McNamee was also there, announcing
the event for the much larger WEAF network.)
WJZ - WEAF Merger
By then, the
competition between RCA and AT&T – and by
proxy, between WJZ and WEAF – was becoming white hot, but it came to a
sudden
end on July 21, 1926, with the surprise announcement that AT&T
was selling
its interests in WEAF and its fledgling radio network to RCA. AT&T forever
exited the broadcasting
field while RCA turned the WEAF network into its new National
Broadcasting
Company, and AT&T began reaping huge profits by leasing its
broadcast lines
to the new network.
WEAF’s
studios were moved over the now-crowded WJZ studios
at Aeolian Hall, and the former competitors were suddenly partners. The marriage of the two
stations was not an
easy one, and many careers were jostled as the staffs were merged. Among other changes, J.
Andrew White and
Graham McNamee were now to become sportscasting partners.
The
first test of this relationship took place on September
3, 1926, when WEAF and WJZ broadcast the giant Dempsey-Tunney fight
over a
temporary hookup of 30 stations. (This
was just weeks before the establishment of the NBC network on November
15.) J. Andrew
White called the action,
and easily outclassed McNamee, who seemed unnerved by his new co-star
role. “Radio
Broadcast” magazine wrote that Major
White’s broadcast was “as perfect a piece of work as we have ever heard
over
the radio, and we hope every aspiring sports reporter in the country
heard it
to take a lesson from it. In
contrast to
Major White’s fine job was the miserable exhibition made by McNamee,
whose duty
it was to handle the mike during the one minute rests between rounds.
Never has
this star announcer been more off his form.
He hemmed and hawed and blustered about, and got
utterly nothing said.”
Nonetheless,
in the shakeup that followed, White found that his
role with the new NBC network was diminished, and he left the company
in the fall
of 1926. He had
been developing other
business interests, including a part interest in a radio retail store,
and for
a short while he promoted the sale of the Andrew White Battery
Eliminator, an
AC power supply for battery sets.
On
Broadway, he played the role of a radio announcer in the production
“Black
Boy”, which gave 37 performances in October and November of that year. And he was always in
demand as a banquet
speaker and master of ceremonies for events around New York. In May of 1927, his voice
was heard again on
the NBC Blue Network as the announcer for the Sharkey-Maloney fight.
Hail Columbia!
The next big step in
J. Andrew White’s career came in early
1927, when he was approached by New York Music Promotors Arthur Judson
and
George Coats. They
wanted him to invest
in their new radio company, the United Independent Broadcasters, Inc. They had just signed a
contract with the
Columbia Phonograph Company to underwrite a new national radio network,
which
would be called the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System. Because Judson and Coats
were not
broadcasters, they needed someone with celebrity status and ample radio
experience to head the company and attract investors.
Intrigued by the possibilities, White bought
200 shares of the new company and became its president.
The
Columbia network debuted on September 18, 1927,
broadcasting from temporary studios at WOR in New York.
Major White was the master of ceremonies for
the opening three- hour broadcast, carried by sixteen stations in the
Northeast. The
Opening Day programming
featured a performance of "The King's Henchman", performed by a cast
of performers from the Metropolitan Opera. Other programs featured
classical
selections by members of the New York Philharmonic, and the
Philadelphia
Symphony Orchestra, among others.
Thereafter, Columbia broadcast for ten hours a week
– 2 hours each on
Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday evenings, and Sunday afternoons.
But
the new network was instantly in financial peril.
Expenses were huge and advertisers were
scarce, and after just a few weeks of operations, Columbia Phonograph
pulled
out and the paychecks for the network’s twelve employees stopped. Desperate for new backing,
White, Judson and
Coats convinced Isaac and Leon Levy of their Philadelphia station,
WCAU, to buy
controlling interest for $135,000.
Sam
Paley, owner of the Congress Cigar Company, was also brought in as an
investor. The name
of the network was
shortened to the Columbia Broadcasting System – CBS.
Just
two weeks after the network’s debut, the biggest
sporting event of the year was to be the “long count” rematch of Tunney
and
Dempsey in Chicago, where Dempsey would try to regain his heavyweight
title. , White was
naturally eager to
broadcast the bout, but NBC had an exclusive contract for Graham
McNamee to
transmit the fight over a 58-station NBC hookup.
White tried an end run around NBC, attempting
to order an AT&T line into the Soldiers’ Field stadium “in the
interest of
widening our network’s scope of service”, but his attempt was quashed
when the
event manager, Tex Rickard, refused to allow the installation of the
line. Andrew White,
America’s premier boxing
sportscaster, sat helplessly on the sidelines as McNamee broadcast to
an audience
of 50 million people.
On
Christmas Day, 1927, White hired Ted Husing, the man he
had formerly mentored at WJZ. Husing
began
as White’s assistant, but he quickly worked his way into the role of
sportscaster. Husing
would be CBS’s primary sports announcer
for the next 20 years, edging out Graham McNamee to become the
country’s premiere
radio sports broadcaster.
One
of White’s most important tasks at CBS was the signing
of new affiliate stations. More affiliates meant the network was more
attractive
to advertisers, who were desperately needed as the network proved to be
a giant
sinkhole for money. Sponsors
were hard
to come by, and if a CBS salesman was able to convince a prospect of
the value
of radio, he would usually sign a contract – with NBC!
Losses were running about $20,000 a week, and
by August of 1928, the network had lost $1 million.
But as the investors were on the verge of
shutting down the network, they received a telegram from White
announcing he
had just closed a $750,000 contract with Vitaphone, the talking picture
subsidiary of Warner Brothers. The
agreement would bring the voices of Vitaphone’s actors to the network,
which
would be great publicity for that company’s films.
William Paley
The deal saved the
network from financial
collapse long enough for the owners to entice 27-year-old William Paley
to
invest in the failing company. Paley
was
intrigued by the offer - he had managed his father’s Philadelphia cigar
company
advertisements on WCAU and the Columbia network and had been impressed
with radio’s
impact on cigar sales. He
quickly agreed
to buy 50.3% of the company for $503,000.
And so, barely a year after the struggling network’s
first broadcast,
Paley moved to New York and took charge of its operations.
Paley
quickly turned Columbia’s business. He
made crucial changes to the affiliate
agreements, and signed dozens of new stations and important major
advertisers,
tripling the revenue in just a few months.
He changed the programming emphasis from high-brow
music to more mainstream
tastes, signing the Paul Whiteman Band and a young singer named Bing
Crosby. Vaudeville
entertainers and
comedians began appearing on the Columbia Network, including Jack
Benny, Burns
and Allen, and Fred Allen. In
need of
more cash, he sold 49% of the company to Paramount Pictures (later
buying it
back in 1932). He
bought New York’s WABC
(now WCBS) and moved the studios out of WOR.
He
also completely reorganized the structure of the company,
naming himself president and demoting Andrew White to managing director. The task of affiliate
relations was taken
over by Paley and others, and White’s responsibilities were limited to
assembling
programs for broadcast. Although
he
continued to broadcast sports and handle programming, continued as the
network’s public spokesman, and worked his connections on Broadway to
sign
top-flight talent to the network, he no longer played an important hand
in the
day-to-day operations of CBS.
In
William Paley’s self-serving autobiography, As It
Happened, he minimized White’s contributions to the
beginnings of CBS: “The
nominal head of the network when I arrived was Major J. Andrew White, a
good
broadcaster, who was known around town for his natty dress, which
included a
pince-nez with a ribbon and a white carnation in his lapel. He had style.
Major White understood radio at the microphone, but
the business of
radio or radio operations were not his talent or even within his
knowledge. He took
no offense about
standing aside when I took over. He
was
happy to have someone take over the day-by-day running of the network
while he
put programs together.”
By
1930, White was becoming disillusioned with his lot at
CBS. Corporate
network broadcasting was
a far cry from the rowdy, Wild West days of early radio, and he felt
confined. He was
used to being an innovator, and missed
the celebrity spotlight that he attracted by being in the forefront. Now he was just one more
executive on an
ever-growing staff. Finally,
on April
23, Paley sent out a memo notifying the Columbia staff that "it is with
exceeding regret that I have to report that Major White has asked to be
relieved of his official connections." White
was retiring, ostensibly to relax and
play polo, and he sold all of his CBS stock to William Paley on May 1. Years later, Major White's
son, Blair, said,
"Paley thought CBS history started with him and didn't want any part of
my
dad. Shortly after he left, my dad sold all his CBS stock. Otherwise, I
would
have a butler."
After CBS
At
40 years old, Andrew White still had many productive
years ahead of him, and he enjoyed name recognition and a long list of
contacts
in the radio, sports and entertainment worlds.
His next two years were spent trying to form a new
national network, the
American Broadcasting System, which would distribute its programs via
transcription discs instead of using expensive AT&T phone lines. He proposed to distribute
Western Electric
transcriptions to a nationwide network by mail and express. But he never found the
financial backing to
get his network off the ground, later admitting he was “15 years ahead
of his
time”.
After
attempting several other unsuccessful business
ventures, J. Andrew White moved to California in 1940.
During World War II, White again became a
Signal Corps Major, “working 25 hours a day” writing textbooks and
devising
training schedules. After
the war, he
earned a doctorate of psychology degree and became a full-time
psychologist
while teaching a few courses at the University of Southern California.
In
1951, Major White returned briefly to radio– this time as
a disc jockey at KNX in Hollywood.
Now calling
himself simply Andy White, he co-hosted the program “Encore Night” with
Jim
Hawthorne. The
program was heard on
Tuesday nights at midnight, where White played pre-1930 recordings and
reminisced about earlier times. He
attracted a large, older fan base that enjoyed his stories and admired
his
knowledge of early popular music.
But
the program was short-lived, and White returned to relative anonymity.
Also
during these years, White reestablished his friendship
with his protégé, Ted Husing, who was now also living in Southern
California. In
1956, Husing had
undergone an operation for a brain tumor which caused him to lose his
sight, ending
his broadcasting career. On
June 7,
1957, White appeared briefly on a Ralph Edwards “This is Your Life”
television show
honoring Ted Husing. The
two men
remained friends for their remaining years.
Husing died in Pasadena in 1962 at 60 years of age,
and White died in
Los Angeles four years later at the age of 76.
Retrospective
Major
J. Andrew White was a true pioneer - a seminal figure
in early radio broadcasting, and the industry’s first real celebrity. He is mostly forgotten
today, undoubtedly
because he departed from radio just as it was maturing as a mass medium
and business.
It’s often
said that pioneers and
entrepreneurs do not always make good businessmen once a field becomes
well-established, and that appears to have been the case with Major
White. However,
there is no denying his impact on
the first decade of American broadcasting, or his status as a role
model for
the next generation of broadcasters.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
- The
History of Radio to 1926, by Gleason
Archer
- A Tower
in Babel, by Erik Barnouw
- First
Quarter Century of American Broadcasting,
by E.P.J. Schurick.
- Sports on
New York Radio - A Play-by-Play History, by
David J. Halberstam
- The
Golden Age of Boxing on Radio and Television: A
Blow-by-Blow History, by Frederick V. Romano
- My Eyes
Are In My Heart, by Ted Husing
- In All
His Glory, a biography of William Paley by
Sally Bedell Smith
- As It
Happened, a memoir by William S. Paley
- “Wireless Age”,
August 1921, “Voice-broadcasting the
Stirring Progress of the ‘Battle of the Century’”
- “Radio News”,
August, 1921, “Reporting the Big Scrap by
Radiophone”.
- “Wireless Age”,
Feb. 1922 ,“Radiophone Broadcasting Station
WDY”
- “Wireless Age”,
August 1922, “Radio Telephone gives Vivid
Description of Leonard-Britton Bout”
- “Wireless Age”,
July, 1923, “Three Knock-outs Give Thrills
to Radio Fans”
- “Wireless
Age”, October,
1923, “The Thrill That Left Millions Breathless”
- “Wireless Age”,
Nov. 1923, “Reporting Baseball Series to
Millions”
- “Radio Digest”,
August 1924, “Major White to announce sport
event”
- “Radio Broadcast”,
October 1924, “Meet J. Andrew White, the most
famous announcer in radio”
- “Radio Digest”,
November 1924, “Peer of sports announcers –
J. Andrew White”
- “Biddeford Daily
Journal”, Sept. 24 1926 – Dempsey-Tunney fight
- “Radio Broadcast”,
Dec. 1926, Tunney Dempsey fight
- “Scranton, Pa.,
Republican” , Sept. 20, 1927 –
Dempsey-Tunney rematch fight.
- “New York Times”,
Sept. 17, 1927, “Tries to block wire for
radio at bout: Rickard
asks Telephone
Company not to serve Columbia chain at Chicago contest”
- “RCA Broadcast
News”, May 1934 - “Pioneer Broadcasting” by
George H. Clark
- “Broadcasting
Magazine”, 8/27/51, page 78, “Andy
White Returns”
- “Billboard
Magazine”, 6/30/51 “Andy
White, Experts on Encore Seg”
- Wikipedia: WJY, Hoboken,
New Jersey
- “Radio and
Television Museum News”, December 2004.
“Early Radio Announcers” by Brian Belanger
- “The
1924 Radio Election”, By Don Moore http://www.pateplumaradio.com/genbroad/elec1924.html
This is a much expanded version
of an article that appeared in "Radio World" Magazine on April 25, 2018.
www.theradiohistorian.org
John F. Schneider & Associates, LLC
Copyright, 2018
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