BILL STERN - "THE COLGATE SHAVE CREAM MAN."
A PROFILE IN PAIN
The Golden Age of Network Radio produced many top line sportscasters with voices recognized by millions - Graham McNamee, Ted Husing, Clem McCarthy, Red Barber, Mel Allen and Don Dunphy, to name just a few. The most popular and highest paid of them all was Bill Stern whose rapid fire play calling and melodramatic Colgate Sports Newsreel caused his critics to wisecrack that he never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Yet, Stern’s own story went untold for 20 years - how he achieved his greatest popularity and won a string of critics’ polls as America’s Best Sportscaster while becoming increasingly addicted to morphine and other potent prescription drugs.
Bill Stern was born in 1907 to the family of a wealthy Rochester, New York, clothing manufacturer. He was bitten by the show business bug at an early age, preferring Variety to textbooks. Often skipping school to spend his allowance at matinees, young Bill’s grades suffered. His parents shuttled him to a succession of expensive private schools until he finally landed at Pennsylvania Military College in 1925 where he quickly learned that his family’s money had no influence beyond the admissions office and he had to study to earn his degree. He also learned some of the finer points of football by quarterbacking the school’s team which would help him in later life.
The crash of 1929 and ensuing Depression wiped out much of the Stern’s family fortune forcing Bill, now with a college degree, to go to work. He found temporary employment as a cloth cutter in his father’s struggling Michaels-Stern pants factory in Rochester but he yearned for a career in show business. Always one to act on impulse, he left Rochester and headed for New York City in January, 1931. Encouraged by his girlfriend, Beta Rothafel, daughter of famed showman Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, he got a job at her father’s 5,900 seat Roxy Theater off Times Square as a $16 a week usher.
Bill and Beta became engaged and he was promptly given a newly created job at the theater with the title, “Assistant To Assistant Stage Manager,” for $30 a week. But Stern surprised his fiancé’s father with his conscientious attitude and tireless work habits. A few months later, while Roxy was in Europe scouting talent, the theater’s stage manager and his assistant both suddenly quit. Bill impulsively sent Rothafel an overseas telegram asking for the stage manager’s job - and salary. Roxy rewarded his brash arrogance with a one word reply, “Yes.” The job carried a raise to $150 a week - but led to a breakup with Beta.
Roxy left his namesake theater in 1932 to operate Radio City Music Hall, the new 6,000 seat art-deco showplace he envisioned with John Rockefeller, Jr. Rothafel and took his entire staff with him, including his 25 year old stage manager, Bill Stern. After an opening on December 27th with a performance plagued by technical problems that crawled along for six hours, Radio City adopted the Roxy format of four combined movie and stage presentations a day and became the country’s most successful theater.
Stern had his stage productions running smoothly and became fascinated by the presence of another tenant in the huge Rockefeller Center complex, NBC with its Red and Blue radio networks. Because they were neighbors, Bill decided to get acquainted with John F. Royal, NBC’s Program Director, and put him on Radio City’s unlimited “comp” list in 1934. When the no-nonsense Royal confronted Bill about his motives, it came out that the young stage manager with the commanding voice wanted to work for NBC, preferably in its sports department like his idol, Graham McNamee.
Royal decided to get Stern off his back and told him to accompany McNamee to Baltimore on September 29th and he’d get a brief chance to display his play-by-skills in NBC’s coverage of the Navy vs. William & Mary game. McNamee generously timed Stern’s audition to include a Navy touchdown which Bill handled with the drama that would become his trademark. Royal was impressed and gave his newcomer a few more limited assignment/auditions. New York Daily Mirror critic Nick Kenny wrote a glowing review which included, “…This year’s coming ace football announcer, it seems to me, is Bill (NBC) Stern. It is Stern’s first year. … He loves the game too well to garnish it with synthetic excitement. … Keep it up Bill!”
But during the week of the 1934 Army-Illinois game Stern attempted to garnish his career with synthetic enthusiasm that cost his job. He contacted friends and relatives asking them to wire John Royal praising his play-by-play of the game. Unfortunately, he failed to tell them when to send the telegrams. As a result, Royal’s office was flooded with compliments for Stern’s work before the game was played. Royal had no tolerance for the stunt and promptly terminated the humiliated Stern‘s tryout period.
Bill continued working at the Music Hall through the winter and spring of 1934-35 but broadcasting was in his blood and football season was just a few months away. He contacted a family friend who owned Stein’s, a chain of men’s stores that sponsored college football games on radio in the south.
The radio job included duties at the chain’s headquarters and leaving Radio City but it didn’t begin until August 1st. Nevertheless, Bill gave advance notice to the theater in June and was immediately shown the door. He took the month to drive to Charlevoix, Michigan, and visit relatives who were vacationing there. It would be the first of two automobile trips that changed his life.
Bill met his cousin, Harriet May, in the lakeside community of northwest Michigan and immediately fell for the 19 year beauty. The two became inseparable in their short time together and became engaged despite her parents’ protests that she was still a student at the University of Michigan and nine years younger than her suitor. The couple reluctantly promised to wait and Bill reported for his new job at Stein’s where he was assigned to its Shreveport, Louisiana, branch and was named play by play announcer for the Centenary College football games on powerful KWKH. (1)
Centenary College was a football power in 1935 and Bill called its early season victories over Arizona and Texas A&M to the plaudits of his station and sponsor. He and his broadcast partner, Jack Gelzer, reported Centenary’s first loss - a 19 to 13 defeat at the University of Texas on October 12th - and planned to drive from Austin back to Shreveport on the following day. It would be the second automobile trip that changed his life.
Bill was driving his new Plymouth convertible with Gelzer by his side and recalled in his autobiography: “Now we were in the flatlands of Texas…doing better than 80 miles an hour…out of nowhere a car crossed the road directly in front of us…There wasn’t even time to swerve to one side…we piled head on into the side of the other automobile.” (2)
Gelzer and the occupants of the other vehicle were unharmed but Stern was pinned beneath the wreckage with a badly fractured left leg. An ambulance was summoned from the nearby east-central Texas hamlet of Teague and he was transported to its “hospital“ on the second floor of the town physician‘s home. He was given anesthesia, his leg was set in a cast and he was assured he would be soon be on his way. It didn’t work out that way,
A week of intolerable pain and morphine shots to ease it passed when his parents intervened and made arrangements for Bill - and a nurse armed with more morphine - to travel by train back to New York.City’s Hospital For Joint Diseases. Once there, doctors were shocked to discover that Bill's dirty, gashed and broken leg hadn’t been cleaned before the cast was applied. An infection developed within the cast and led to gangrene. The leg had to be amputated above the knee.
Six weeks of hospitalization and painful weaning from morphine followed, highlighted only by Harriet’s tender letters of loving encouragement and surprise visits from NBC’s John Royal who began showing up unexpectedly one morning to demand that Stern recover quickly and get back to work at the network!
True to his word, Royal appointed Bill to NBC’s team of announcers working college football games during the 1936 season and he was paired with Bill Slater for Blue’s coverage of the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day, 1937. (3)
Bill’s work earned him a full time staff job at the network paying $75 a week and he married Harriet May on April 29, 1937. (4) McNamee and Slater both left NBC’s sports department over the summer which left Stern as its lead football announcer for Blue’s coverage of the 1937 college football season beginning with the College All Star game on September 1st in Chicago and climaxing four months later with the Sugar Bowl on NBC from New Orleans. Along the way he began Blue’s weekly quarter-hour Sports Review on Sunday, December 5th at 11:45 a.m. Bill Stern’s voice was becoming known to millions. The only problem was the distraction of his painful leg, his inability to sleep and his growing dependence on sleeping pills.
Bill’s need for pills but didn’t hamper his work through the 1938 football season - his career was just getting stronger. He was named runner-up to Ted Husing of CBS in the Sportscaster category of the annual Radio Daily poll of newspaper critics and he was assigned to the 1939 Rose Bowl game on NBC as his reward. Five months later he made broadcasting history when he announced the first televised baseball game, Columbia vs. Princeton, from Columbia’s Baker Field on May 17, 1939, for NBC’s experimental W2XBS. In June Stern branched into boxing on Blue with his blow-by-blow coverage of the Joe Louis vs. (Two Ton) Tony Galento Heavyweight Championship fight from Yankee Stadium which led to his weekly assignment as lead announcer for Adam Hats’ Friday Night Fights on Blue. (5)
Changes in the weather brought what Stern later described as, “unrelenting, hammering pain,” from nerve ends of his partially amputated left leg. This on-going grief was compounded in 1939 by frequent attacks of kidney stones which he called, “…among the most agonizing ailments a man can have.” Fortunately, doctors were always on hand with morphine to ease the pain and relax his nervous system to allow the stones to pass. Then a urologist discovered tumors in Bill’s kidneys and called for a series of cystotomy bladder surgeries, each requiring overnight hospitalization accompanied by heavy doses ions of morphine or Demerol.
The Radio Daily poll named Stern its Top Sportscaster in 1940, a spot he’d hold for 13 consecutive years during which he was also the distinctive sports voice for MGM’s News of The Day newsreels and narrator of Columbia Pictures’ World of Sports ten minute shorts. On April 15, 1941, he was appointed NBC’s Director of Sports and its lead voice. He was on his way to an income that would reach over a quarter million dollars a year by the end of the decade.
Yet, despite the wide range of major events he described spontaneously over the span of his sportscasting career, Bill Stern is best remembered for a weekly, scripted quarter-hour that paid him $2,500 per broadcast at its peak, The Colgate Sports Newsreel.
Thousands of words have been used over the years to describe Stern’s weekly quarter hour mix of fact and fancy - "some true, some legends, some hearsay" - delivered in his over the top melodramatics. This profile is spared the attempt. Instead, the samples of Sports Newsreel posted below allow you to draw your own conclusion - if you can stop laughing long enough.
Stern traced the beginnings of the Sports Newsreel back to the summer of 1939 when Stuart Sherman from Colgate-Palmolive-Peet’s advertising agency, Benton & Bowles, approached him to do a weekly sports show with universal appeal. The two worked quickly together and the first show debuted on Sunday, October 8th at 9:45 p.m. ET capping Blue’s popular hour led by Walter Winchell‘s Jergens Journal with his 19.3 rating. It was a long drop to Stern‘s debut season rating of 4.8 but it was a beginning. The 1940-41 season showed a slight improvement to 5.8 - compared to Winchell’s whopping 24.1.
Colgate moved Sports Newsreel to Saturday night at 10:00 on NBC for two seasons beginning in 1941-42 which meant very long and tiring Saturdays for Bill during football season. But even in his tired and often drugged condition, he continued to push his season ratings up to 7.7 in 1941-42, then 8.8 in 1942-43.
The switch to Sports Newsreel’s timeslot for the next eight years - Friday at 10:30 p.m. ET - began on August 13, 1943. The move paid off in Stern’s first double digit rating, a 10.1 average for the 1943-44 season and 58th place in the annual rankings. An episode from May 12, 1944, with FBI Director J Edgar Hoover is posted below.
The 1944-45 season brought another double digit rating, a 10.4, however its ranking fell to 63rd. Two episodes of Sports Newsreel from this season are posted below: March 30, 1945, with guest Lena Horne and Stern’s tear-jerking tribute to Notre Dame's Knute Rockne, and April 27th with Henny Youngman and stories involving both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. (6)
Sports Newsreel’s ratings tumbled in 1945-46 season to 6.9 when it lost the lead-in of Amos & Andy’s 15.1 rating. A&A's Top 20 sitcom was replaced by Molle Mystery Theater which lost 50% of their audience. In addition, Gillette moved its Friday night fights opposite Stern from Mutual to Blue/ABC which increased the boxing bouts’ ratings by 50% to 4.6. Samples from Sports Newsreel during this period are posted below. From September 14, 1945, Stern travels to Detroit and interviews The Lone Ranger, (Brace Beemer), and on December 7, 1945, he presents Joe Louis while including a self-congratulatory story that's really a stretch.
During this period Bill sought pain relief two or three times a week and added morphine derivative Dilaudid to the mix. In his words, “By 1945 I had become so accustomed to the drugs that I had to have them.” He also had accumulated a list of “understanding” physicians in his travels who could be relied upon to supply them without question. Nevertheless, he continued his heavy schedule of assignments and the millions who heard him week after week had no clue that he had become a drug addict.
Three episodes are posted below from this period: On December 13 1946, Guy Lombardo presents a boat racing story, December 27th's show features a year-end review with guest Eddie Cantor and from October 10, 1947, Sports Newsreel’s 8th Anniversary show features Gene Autry. The 1946-47 rating was again 6.9 but in 1947-48 bounced back up to a 9.1 for the season. As the ratings increased so did the ridicule that was heaped upon Stern and his overblown dramatics underscored by a male quartet and Hammond organ stings.
Stern justified Sports Newsreel's far-fetched format in his autobiography: “As I had feared in the course of my research, there simply weren’t enough dramatic sports stories available. I needed two a week that hadn’t been told anywhere else. … Then the thought occurred to me that in movies of people whose stories lack dramatic elements the stories are ‘dressed up’ to provide dramatic punch. This is done constantly and with unrestricted imagination…it’s known as dramatic license. I proceeded to use those same techniques.
"… I am certain that no harm was ever done to anyone through our recounting of these admittedly dramatized stories. Yet some sports reporters, angered at my toying with the basic facts…reviled me with their typewriters….”
Radio critics got their licks in, too. New York Herald-Tribune critic John Crosby wrote: “Stern created his own little world of sportsdom, where every man is a Frank Merriwell, every touchdown an epic feat of arms and coincidence stretches like a rubber band to fit every conceivable situation. In spite of the malarkey Stern tells about them, athletes are only too happy to appear on his program because, while the truth gets badly mangled, the athletes themselves invariably are cast in heroic dimensions.”
Despite his critics and increasing reliance on pain killing drugs, Bill kept rolling along. without missing a beat as evidenced in the Sports Newsreels posted below. On January 2, 1948, former sportscaster and future President Ronald Reagan appears along with a review show’s top stories of the year, and Grantland Rice announces Look magazine’s All-American football team on December 2, 1949.
Stern's 1948-49 rating average slipped to 8.7 in the downward trend that would affect most of Network Radio with the growth of television. The number plunged to a 5.9 in 1949-50 and 4.4 in 1950-51. In what must be a record for sponsor loyalty, The Colgate Sports Newsreel was never a Top 50 program over its twelve rated seasons on the air. What’s more, it failed to reach the Top 100 in five of those seasons.
Bill had his rare champions in the press, too. The Atlanta Journal’s Ed Danforth wrote: “Stern has the most popular sports program on the air. He deals in dramatic episodes, the heart-throbs of sports and brings to the microphone notable histrionic talents. Only envious rivals say he hams it up. Stern is courageous. Where the dull facts of an incident lack warmth, Bill supplies the deficiency. Bill dares to breath the warmth of humanity, of curious coincidence and melodramatic coincidence into a commonplace incident and leaves his hearers in an emotional glow.”
The Sports Newsreel was cancelled in 1951. Colgate was investing its radio money in television and Sports Newsreel production costs had exceeded $200,000 annually. The final broadcast in the series, from June 29th is posted below in which Stern tells listeners, “…I'll be back in the fall, same time, same station, with a new sponsor,” but it never happened.
Stern signed a new contract with NBC in September, 1951, guaranteeing him $500,000 over three years but required his vacating the title as the network's Sports Director when NBC brought Tom Gallery in from the DuMont television network to run its sports department. Bill stayed with NBC doing college football play-by-play on television and a 15 minute early weeknight sports report on radio. But by June,1952, his years of frequent pain killing injections from physicians and his self administered doses of sleeping pills at night and Benzedrine tablets to wake up finally took their toll. Harriet placed him in a New England private hospital for its primitive version of detox. After several weeks Bill was pronounced “cured” and fit to return to work.
When he returned to NBC Gallery, told him that sponsor General Motors didn't want him on the network’s 1952 television team covering NCAA football but he could do the games on NBC Radio if we wished. Obviously stunned, Bill accepted the radio assignment and then returned to his urologist for his first shot of morphine in three months. He assured himself that he had the drugs under control and handled the 1952 NBC Radio football schedule with the professionalism expected of him. The network showed its appreciation for his job well done by returning him to NBC-TV and its coverage of the 1953 Cotton Bowl game.
New York Times critic Jack Gould wrote after that game:: “Bill Stern, the veteran sportscaster, showed a rare brand of courage and common sense yesterday. Noted for years as an announcer who practically never stopped talking, he completely altered his technique in giving NBC-TV an account of the Tennessee vs. Texas Cotton Bowl game. He was a reporter, not a chattering and artificial expert and it was an immense improvement.” It was also his last assignment for NBC.
Stern had been planning a daily sports show behind the scenes with Augie Busch, owner of Budweiser Beer, and decided to offer it to ABC which jumped at the opportunity to land a famous personality with his own built-in sponsor. Bill's signed off his last NBC program on Friday, August 7, 1953, and began his new evening show on ABC on September 14th.
Bill's new three year radio and television contract with ABC paid him a total of $180,000 annually. The sum paid for a lot of pain killers and Bill slid back into his old haunts looking for friendly physicians who were happy to respond to his needs for a price. He collapsed during ABC-TV’s coverage of the 1956 Sugar Bowl game and returned to a private hospital in New York City to kick his insidious habit again.
When his Budweiser contract expired in 1956, Bill’s nightly quarter hour on ABC was picked up by Allstate Insurance and he also did a nightly five minute sports capsule on television. Neither lasted long. He was back on morphine shots, Demerol and Dilaudid tablets, but nothing seemed to help ease the pain of his leg and kidney stones. Harriet was running out of patience and Bill was running out of second chances at ABC which had learned to have replacements standing by in case its marquee sportscaster didn’t show up or was too drugged to perform.
Finally, at Harriet’s ultimatum, Bill voluntarily committed himself to the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 16, 1956. The treatment required six excruciating months of withdrawal and daily counseling before he was finally released three days before Christmas. (7)
Stern returned to the air in February, 1957, as host of a short-lived weekday morning show on WINS/New York City and in September he began a series of daily sports reports on Mutual, which, for a period beginning in 1958, was sponsored by Colgate. He was back on the air for Colgate but more importantly, he had finally won his long battle with drugs.
Bill Stern's own "Three-oh mark" came on Friday, November 19, 1971. Following his final Mutual broadcast of the week he suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Rye, New York. He was 64, beside his devoted Harriet and forever free of the relentless pain he had endured since the Sunday morning accident on a lonely Texas highway in 1935.
(1) Centenary College of Louisiana dropped its football program at the end of the 1947 season.
(2) Bill Stern’s autobiography, The Taste of Ashes, was co-authored with sportswriter Oscar Fraley and published in 1959 by Henry Holt Co. (Fraley is best known today for co-writing The Untouchables with Elliot Ness.)
(3) Bill Stern joined the NBC football announcing crew that included Graham McNamee, Don Wilson, Ken Carpenter and Bill Slater. Wilson later gained fame as Jack Benny’s announcer, Carpenter became a familiar voice on Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall and Slater was host of Mutual’s long running panel quiz Twenty Questions.
(4) Bill and Harriet Stern were married for 34 years until his death in 1971. Their union produced a son, Peter. and two daughters, Mary and Patty.
(5) NBC’s Blue Network and Adam Hats lost their contract to Mutual and Gillette for promoter Mike Jacobs’ Friday night fights in May 1941.
(6) Although never given broadcast credit or mentioned in Stern‘s memoirs, sports historian and author Mac Davis is credited by broadcast historians as Sports Newsreel's writer. Stern is widely credited with having an influence on the format and delivery of ABC's popular newsman, Paul Harvey and the content of Harvey's daily five-minute feature, The Rest of The Story.
(7) Stern’s candid account of this period is told in vivid detail in his autobiography.
Copyright © 2016, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
The Golden Age of Network Radio produced many top line sportscasters with voices recognized by millions - Graham McNamee, Ted Husing, Clem McCarthy, Red Barber, Mel Allen and Don Dunphy, to name just a few. The most popular and highest paid of them all was Bill Stern whose rapid fire play calling and melodramatic Colgate Sports Newsreel caused his critics to wisecrack that he never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Yet, Stern’s own story went untold for 20 years - how he achieved his greatest popularity and won a string of critics’ polls as America’s Best Sportscaster while becoming increasingly addicted to morphine and other potent prescription drugs.
Bill Stern was born in 1907 to the family of a wealthy Rochester, New York, clothing manufacturer. He was bitten by the show business bug at an early age, preferring Variety to textbooks. Often skipping school to spend his allowance at matinees, young Bill’s grades suffered. His parents shuttled him to a succession of expensive private schools until he finally landed at Pennsylvania Military College in 1925 where he quickly learned that his family’s money had no influence beyond the admissions office and he had to study to earn his degree. He also learned some of the finer points of football by quarterbacking the school’s team which would help him in later life.
The crash of 1929 and ensuing Depression wiped out much of the Stern’s family fortune forcing Bill, now with a college degree, to go to work. He found temporary employment as a cloth cutter in his father’s struggling Michaels-Stern pants factory in Rochester but he yearned for a career in show business. Always one to act on impulse, he left Rochester and headed for New York City in January, 1931. Encouraged by his girlfriend, Beta Rothafel, daughter of famed showman Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, he got a job at her father’s 5,900 seat Roxy Theater off Times Square as a $16 a week usher.
Bill and Beta became engaged and he was promptly given a newly created job at the theater with the title, “Assistant To Assistant Stage Manager,” for $30 a week. But Stern surprised his fiancé’s father with his conscientious attitude and tireless work habits. A few months later, while Roxy was in Europe scouting talent, the theater’s stage manager and his assistant both suddenly quit. Bill impulsively sent Rothafel an overseas telegram asking for the stage manager’s job - and salary. Roxy rewarded his brash arrogance with a one word reply, “Yes.” The job carried a raise to $150 a week - but led to a breakup with Beta.
Roxy left his namesake theater in 1932 to operate Radio City Music Hall, the new 6,000 seat art-deco showplace he envisioned with John Rockefeller, Jr. Rothafel and took his entire staff with him, including his 25 year old stage manager, Bill Stern. After an opening on December 27th with a performance plagued by technical problems that crawled along for six hours, Radio City adopted the Roxy format of four combined movie and stage presentations a day and became the country’s most successful theater.
Stern had his stage productions running smoothly and became fascinated by the presence of another tenant in the huge Rockefeller Center complex, NBC with its Red and Blue radio networks. Because they were neighbors, Bill decided to get acquainted with John F. Royal, NBC’s Program Director, and put him on Radio City’s unlimited “comp” list in 1934. When the no-nonsense Royal confronted Bill about his motives, it came out that the young stage manager with the commanding voice wanted to work for NBC, preferably in its sports department like his idol, Graham McNamee.
Royal decided to get Stern off his back and told him to accompany McNamee to Baltimore on September 29th and he’d get a brief chance to display his play-by-skills in NBC’s coverage of the Navy vs. William & Mary game. McNamee generously timed Stern’s audition to include a Navy touchdown which Bill handled with the drama that would become his trademark. Royal was impressed and gave his newcomer a few more limited assignment/auditions. New York Daily Mirror critic Nick Kenny wrote a glowing review which included, “…This year’s coming ace football announcer, it seems to me, is Bill (NBC) Stern. It is Stern’s first year. … He loves the game too well to garnish it with synthetic excitement. … Keep it up Bill!”
But during the week of the 1934 Army-Illinois game Stern attempted to garnish his career with synthetic enthusiasm that cost his job. He contacted friends and relatives asking them to wire John Royal praising his play-by-play of the game. Unfortunately, he failed to tell them when to send the telegrams. As a result, Royal’s office was flooded with compliments for Stern’s work before the game was played. Royal had no tolerance for the stunt and promptly terminated the humiliated Stern‘s tryout period.
Bill continued working at the Music Hall through the winter and spring of 1934-35 but broadcasting was in his blood and football season was just a few months away. He contacted a family friend who owned Stein’s, a chain of men’s stores that sponsored college football games on radio in the south.
The radio job included duties at the chain’s headquarters and leaving Radio City but it didn’t begin until August 1st. Nevertheless, Bill gave advance notice to the theater in June and was immediately shown the door. He took the month to drive to Charlevoix, Michigan, and visit relatives who were vacationing there. It would be the first of two automobile trips that changed his life.
Bill met his cousin, Harriet May, in the lakeside community of northwest Michigan and immediately fell for the 19 year beauty. The two became inseparable in their short time together and became engaged despite her parents’ protests that she was still a student at the University of Michigan and nine years younger than her suitor. The couple reluctantly promised to wait and Bill reported for his new job at Stein’s where he was assigned to its Shreveport, Louisiana, branch and was named play by play announcer for the Centenary College football games on powerful KWKH. (1)
Centenary College was a football power in 1935 and Bill called its early season victories over Arizona and Texas A&M to the plaudits of his station and sponsor. He and his broadcast partner, Jack Gelzer, reported Centenary’s first loss - a 19 to 13 defeat at the University of Texas on October 12th - and planned to drive from Austin back to Shreveport on the following day. It would be the second automobile trip that changed his life.
Bill was driving his new Plymouth convertible with Gelzer by his side and recalled in his autobiography: “Now we were in the flatlands of Texas…doing better than 80 miles an hour…out of nowhere a car crossed the road directly in front of us…There wasn’t even time to swerve to one side…we piled head on into the side of the other automobile.” (2)
Gelzer and the occupants of the other vehicle were unharmed but Stern was pinned beneath the wreckage with a badly fractured left leg. An ambulance was summoned from the nearby east-central Texas hamlet of Teague and he was transported to its “hospital“ on the second floor of the town physician‘s home. He was given anesthesia, his leg was set in a cast and he was assured he would be soon be on his way. It didn’t work out that way,
A week of intolerable pain and morphine shots to ease it passed when his parents intervened and made arrangements for Bill - and a nurse armed with more morphine - to travel by train back to New York.City’s Hospital For Joint Diseases. Once there, doctors were shocked to discover that Bill's dirty, gashed and broken leg hadn’t been cleaned before the cast was applied. An infection developed within the cast and led to gangrene. The leg had to be amputated above the knee.
Six weeks of hospitalization and painful weaning from morphine followed, highlighted only by Harriet’s tender letters of loving encouragement and surprise visits from NBC’s John Royal who began showing up unexpectedly one morning to demand that Stern recover quickly and get back to work at the network!
True to his word, Royal appointed Bill to NBC’s team of announcers working college football games during the 1936 season and he was paired with Bill Slater for Blue’s coverage of the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day, 1937. (3)
Bill’s work earned him a full time staff job at the network paying $75 a week and he married Harriet May on April 29, 1937. (4) McNamee and Slater both left NBC’s sports department over the summer which left Stern as its lead football announcer for Blue’s coverage of the 1937 college football season beginning with the College All Star game on September 1st in Chicago and climaxing four months later with the Sugar Bowl on NBC from New Orleans. Along the way he began Blue’s weekly quarter-hour Sports Review on Sunday, December 5th at 11:45 a.m. Bill Stern’s voice was becoming known to millions. The only problem was the distraction of his painful leg, his inability to sleep and his growing dependence on sleeping pills.
Bill’s need for pills but didn’t hamper his work through the 1938 football season - his career was just getting stronger. He was named runner-up to Ted Husing of CBS in the Sportscaster category of the annual Radio Daily poll of newspaper critics and he was assigned to the 1939 Rose Bowl game on NBC as his reward. Five months later he made broadcasting history when he announced the first televised baseball game, Columbia vs. Princeton, from Columbia’s Baker Field on May 17, 1939, for NBC’s experimental W2XBS. In June Stern branched into boxing on Blue with his blow-by-blow coverage of the Joe Louis vs. (Two Ton) Tony Galento Heavyweight Championship fight from Yankee Stadium which led to his weekly assignment as lead announcer for Adam Hats’ Friday Night Fights on Blue. (5)
Changes in the weather brought what Stern later described as, “unrelenting, hammering pain,” from nerve ends of his partially amputated left leg. This on-going grief was compounded in 1939 by frequent attacks of kidney stones which he called, “…among the most agonizing ailments a man can have.” Fortunately, doctors were always on hand with morphine to ease the pain and relax his nervous system to allow the stones to pass. Then a urologist discovered tumors in Bill’s kidneys and called for a series of cystotomy bladder surgeries, each requiring overnight hospitalization accompanied by heavy doses ions of morphine or Demerol.
The Radio Daily poll named Stern its Top Sportscaster in 1940, a spot he’d hold for 13 consecutive years during which he was also the distinctive sports voice for MGM’s News of The Day newsreels and narrator of Columbia Pictures’ World of Sports ten minute shorts. On April 15, 1941, he was appointed NBC’s Director of Sports and its lead voice. He was on his way to an income that would reach over a quarter million dollars a year by the end of the decade.
Yet, despite the wide range of major events he described spontaneously over the span of his sportscasting career, Bill Stern is best remembered for a weekly, scripted quarter-hour that paid him $2,500 per broadcast at its peak, The Colgate Sports Newsreel.
Thousands of words have been used over the years to describe Stern’s weekly quarter hour mix of fact and fancy - "some true, some legends, some hearsay" - delivered in his over the top melodramatics. This profile is spared the attempt. Instead, the samples of Sports Newsreel posted below allow you to draw your own conclusion - if you can stop laughing long enough.
Stern traced the beginnings of the Sports Newsreel back to the summer of 1939 when Stuart Sherman from Colgate-Palmolive-Peet’s advertising agency, Benton & Bowles, approached him to do a weekly sports show with universal appeal. The two worked quickly together and the first show debuted on Sunday, October 8th at 9:45 p.m. ET capping Blue’s popular hour led by Walter Winchell‘s Jergens Journal with his 19.3 rating. It was a long drop to Stern‘s debut season rating of 4.8 but it was a beginning. The 1940-41 season showed a slight improvement to 5.8 - compared to Winchell’s whopping 24.1.
Colgate moved Sports Newsreel to Saturday night at 10:00 on NBC for two seasons beginning in 1941-42 which meant very long and tiring Saturdays for Bill during football season. But even in his tired and often drugged condition, he continued to push his season ratings up to 7.7 in 1941-42, then 8.8 in 1942-43.
The switch to Sports Newsreel’s timeslot for the next eight years - Friday at 10:30 p.m. ET - began on August 13, 1943. The move paid off in Stern’s first double digit rating, a 10.1 average for the 1943-44 season and 58th place in the annual rankings. An episode from May 12, 1944, with FBI Director J Edgar Hoover is posted below.
The 1944-45 season brought another double digit rating, a 10.4, however its ranking fell to 63rd. Two episodes of Sports Newsreel from this season are posted below: March 30, 1945, with guest Lena Horne and Stern’s tear-jerking tribute to Notre Dame's Knute Rockne, and April 27th with Henny Youngman and stories involving both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. (6)
Sports Newsreel’s ratings tumbled in 1945-46 season to 6.9 when it lost the lead-in of Amos & Andy’s 15.1 rating. A&A's Top 20 sitcom was replaced by Molle Mystery Theater which lost 50% of their audience. In addition, Gillette moved its Friday night fights opposite Stern from Mutual to Blue/ABC which increased the boxing bouts’ ratings by 50% to 4.6. Samples from Sports Newsreel during this period are posted below. From September 14, 1945, Stern travels to Detroit and interviews The Lone Ranger, (Brace Beemer), and on December 7, 1945, he presents Joe Louis while including a self-congratulatory story that's really a stretch.
During this period Bill sought pain relief two or three times a week and added morphine derivative Dilaudid to the mix. In his words, “By 1945 I had become so accustomed to the drugs that I had to have them.” He also had accumulated a list of “understanding” physicians in his travels who could be relied upon to supply them without question. Nevertheless, he continued his heavy schedule of assignments and the millions who heard him week after week had no clue that he had become a drug addict.
Three episodes are posted below from this period: On December 13 1946, Guy Lombardo presents a boat racing story, December 27th's show features a year-end review with guest Eddie Cantor and from October 10, 1947, Sports Newsreel’s 8th Anniversary show features Gene Autry. The 1946-47 rating was again 6.9 but in 1947-48 bounced back up to a 9.1 for the season. As the ratings increased so did the ridicule that was heaped upon Stern and his overblown dramatics underscored by a male quartet and Hammond organ stings.
Stern justified Sports Newsreel's far-fetched format in his autobiography: “As I had feared in the course of my research, there simply weren’t enough dramatic sports stories available. I needed two a week that hadn’t been told anywhere else. … Then the thought occurred to me that in movies of people whose stories lack dramatic elements the stories are ‘dressed up’ to provide dramatic punch. This is done constantly and with unrestricted imagination…it’s known as dramatic license. I proceeded to use those same techniques.
"… I am certain that no harm was ever done to anyone through our recounting of these admittedly dramatized stories. Yet some sports reporters, angered at my toying with the basic facts…reviled me with their typewriters….”
Radio critics got their licks in, too. New York Herald-Tribune critic John Crosby wrote: “Stern created his own little world of sportsdom, where every man is a Frank Merriwell, every touchdown an epic feat of arms and coincidence stretches like a rubber band to fit every conceivable situation. In spite of the malarkey Stern tells about them, athletes are only too happy to appear on his program because, while the truth gets badly mangled, the athletes themselves invariably are cast in heroic dimensions.”
Despite his critics and increasing reliance on pain killing drugs, Bill kept rolling along. without missing a beat as evidenced in the Sports Newsreels posted below. On January 2, 1948, former sportscaster and future President Ronald Reagan appears along with a review show’s top stories of the year, and Grantland Rice announces Look magazine’s All-American football team on December 2, 1949.
Stern's 1948-49 rating average slipped to 8.7 in the downward trend that would affect most of Network Radio with the growth of television. The number plunged to a 5.9 in 1949-50 and 4.4 in 1950-51. In what must be a record for sponsor loyalty, The Colgate Sports Newsreel was never a Top 50 program over its twelve rated seasons on the air. What’s more, it failed to reach the Top 100 in five of those seasons.
Bill had his rare champions in the press, too. The Atlanta Journal’s Ed Danforth wrote: “Stern has the most popular sports program on the air. He deals in dramatic episodes, the heart-throbs of sports and brings to the microphone notable histrionic talents. Only envious rivals say he hams it up. Stern is courageous. Where the dull facts of an incident lack warmth, Bill supplies the deficiency. Bill dares to breath the warmth of humanity, of curious coincidence and melodramatic coincidence into a commonplace incident and leaves his hearers in an emotional glow.”
The Sports Newsreel was cancelled in 1951. Colgate was investing its radio money in television and Sports Newsreel production costs had exceeded $200,000 annually. The final broadcast in the series, from June 29th is posted below in which Stern tells listeners, “…I'll be back in the fall, same time, same station, with a new sponsor,” but it never happened.
Stern signed a new contract with NBC in September, 1951, guaranteeing him $500,000 over three years but required his vacating the title as the network's Sports Director when NBC brought Tom Gallery in from the DuMont television network to run its sports department. Bill stayed with NBC doing college football play-by-play on television and a 15 minute early weeknight sports report on radio. But by June,1952, his years of frequent pain killing injections from physicians and his self administered doses of sleeping pills at night and Benzedrine tablets to wake up finally took their toll. Harriet placed him in a New England private hospital for its primitive version of detox. After several weeks Bill was pronounced “cured” and fit to return to work.
When he returned to NBC Gallery, told him that sponsor General Motors didn't want him on the network’s 1952 television team covering NCAA football but he could do the games on NBC Radio if we wished. Obviously stunned, Bill accepted the radio assignment and then returned to his urologist for his first shot of morphine in three months. He assured himself that he had the drugs under control and handled the 1952 NBC Radio football schedule with the professionalism expected of him. The network showed its appreciation for his job well done by returning him to NBC-TV and its coverage of the 1953 Cotton Bowl game.
New York Times critic Jack Gould wrote after that game:: “Bill Stern, the veteran sportscaster, showed a rare brand of courage and common sense yesterday. Noted for years as an announcer who practically never stopped talking, he completely altered his technique in giving NBC-TV an account of the Tennessee vs. Texas Cotton Bowl game. He was a reporter, not a chattering and artificial expert and it was an immense improvement.” It was also his last assignment for NBC.
Stern had been planning a daily sports show behind the scenes with Augie Busch, owner of Budweiser Beer, and decided to offer it to ABC which jumped at the opportunity to land a famous personality with his own built-in sponsor. Bill's signed off his last NBC program on Friday, August 7, 1953, and began his new evening show on ABC on September 14th.
Bill's new three year radio and television contract with ABC paid him a total of $180,000 annually. The sum paid for a lot of pain killers and Bill slid back into his old haunts looking for friendly physicians who were happy to respond to his needs for a price. He collapsed during ABC-TV’s coverage of the 1956 Sugar Bowl game and returned to a private hospital in New York City to kick his insidious habit again.
When his Budweiser contract expired in 1956, Bill’s nightly quarter hour on ABC was picked up by Allstate Insurance and he also did a nightly five minute sports capsule on television. Neither lasted long. He was back on morphine shots, Demerol and Dilaudid tablets, but nothing seemed to help ease the pain of his leg and kidney stones. Harriet was running out of patience and Bill was running out of second chances at ABC which had learned to have replacements standing by in case its marquee sportscaster didn’t show up or was too drugged to perform.
Finally, at Harriet’s ultimatum, Bill voluntarily committed himself to the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 16, 1956. The treatment required six excruciating months of withdrawal and daily counseling before he was finally released three days before Christmas. (7)
Stern returned to the air in February, 1957, as host of a short-lived weekday morning show on WINS/New York City and in September he began a series of daily sports reports on Mutual, which, for a period beginning in 1958, was sponsored by Colgate. He was back on the air for Colgate but more importantly, he had finally won his long battle with drugs.
Bill Stern's own "Three-oh mark" came on Friday, November 19, 1971. Following his final Mutual broadcast of the week he suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Rye, New York. He was 64, beside his devoted Harriet and forever free of the relentless pain he had endured since the Sunday morning accident on a lonely Texas highway in 1935.
(1) Centenary College of Louisiana dropped its football program at the end of the 1947 season.
(2) Bill Stern’s autobiography, The Taste of Ashes, was co-authored with sportswriter Oscar Fraley and published in 1959 by Henry Holt Co. (Fraley is best known today for co-writing The Untouchables with Elliot Ness.)
(3) Bill Stern joined the NBC football announcing crew that included Graham McNamee, Don Wilson, Ken Carpenter and Bill Slater. Wilson later gained fame as Jack Benny’s announcer, Carpenter became a familiar voice on Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall and Slater was host of Mutual’s long running panel quiz Twenty Questions.
(4) Bill and Harriet Stern were married for 34 years until his death in 1971. Their union produced a son, Peter. and two daughters, Mary and Patty.
(5) NBC’s Blue Network and Adam Hats lost their contract to Mutual and Gillette for promoter Mike Jacobs’ Friday night fights in May 1941.
(6) Although never given broadcast credit or mentioned in Stern‘s memoirs, sports historian and author Mac Davis is credited by broadcast historians as Sports Newsreel's writer. Stern is widely credited with having an influence on the format and delivery of ABC's popular newsman, Paul Harvey and the content of Harvey's daily five-minute feature, The Rest of The Story.
(7) Stern’s candid account of this period is told in vivid detail in his autobiography.
Copyright © 2016, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
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