STERN, William ("Bill")

(b. 1 July 1907 in Rochester, New York; d. 19 November 1971 in Rye, New York), popular sports-caster of the 1930s and 1940s, famous for his fictionalized sports vignettes and hyperbolic play-by-play style.

Stern was the second of two sons of Isaac Stern, head of Michaels-Stern, a large clothing firm, and Lena Reis Stern, daughter of a wealthy Cincinnati family. Stern's father was generous with material possessions but not with his time. His mother was austere but kind. Stern's interests in sports, theater, and entertainment began in childhood. He announced mock sporting events from the shower and practiced his saxophone, confident of future fame. He formed an orchestra called "Bill Stern and his Bluegrass Music." When the band was underpaid for an engagement, Stern's father paid the deficit.

Stern attended Rochester public schools, was expelled from Hackley Preparatory School in Tarrytown, New York, and failed out of Cascadilla Preparatory School in Ithaca, New York. He finally graduated with a B.S. from the Pennsylvania Military College in Chester, Pennsylvania (PMC). At PMC, Stern learned about work for the first time. He advanced to captain adjutant, controlled his temper, got decent grades, acted in vaudeville, led the school orchestra, and participated in football, tennis, basketball, boxing, and rowing. After graduation in June 1930, he drove his new Pierce Arrow car, a gift from his father, to Hollywood to become a movie star. He failed interviews, squandered his father's funds at the Agua Caliente racetrack, and returned to Rochester after three days of digging postholes for $5 a day on the RKO parking lot.

Stern managed to land a job as a sports announcer at Rochester radio station WHAM in 1925. The job involved traveling around the country attending sporting events, and within a few years Stern had tired of it and quit to move to New York City. By 1931 he had advanced from usher to assistant stage manager at the immense Roxy Theater, and later became the first stage director of Radio City Music Hall in the Rockefeller Center. In October 1934 Stern shared two minutes with the National Broadcasting System's (NBC) Graham McNamee announcing the Navy–William and Mary football game in Baltimore. He worked part-time at NBC for the rest of the season. Stern quit Radio City in June 1935, and while on vacation met his cousin and future wife, Harriet May of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The couple married on 29 April 1937; they had three children.

Stern was hired at KWKH radio in Shreveport, Louisiana, and announced his first play-by-play football game on 12 October 1935. Eight days later, he lost a leg in a serious automobile accident while driving across Texas. In 1936 he worked as a full-time announcer for NBC. His first bowl assignment was the Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans on New Year's Day 1937, in which Army played Navy.

In October 1939 Stern announced his first Colgate Sports Newsreel, a weekly sports program. He reflected, "I decided on a show which would deal with stories with an O. Henry twist; stories set to music, and fableized and dramatized for appeal to the housewife as well as the sports-hungry husband." A male quartet opened the show with "Bill Stern the Colgate shave-cream man is on the air. Bill Stern the Colgate shave-cream man with stories rare.…"

Stern narrated fictional events of sports heroes and ordinary people, beginning "Portrait of an athlete!" or "Portrait of a man!" He earned the nickname "Aesop of the Airways" from anecdotes such as "And that little Italian boy with the baseball bat is now the Pope." Stern claimed that the inventor Thomas A. Edison's deafness resulted from being beaned by the pitcher Jesse James in a baseball game. In another fable Stern said Abraham Lincoln's dying words to Colonel Abner Doubleday inspired the game of baseball. Reporters disliked Stern's distortion of facts. Undaunted, Stern countered, "I was living the make-believe world of the theater and the license I took was basically harmless."

In 1939 Stern began interviewing entertainment and sports celebrities, including Babe Ruth, Leo Durocher, Joe DiMaggio, Judy Garland, Margaret Truman, Jack Benny, Ronald Reagan, and Frank Sinatra. Stern traveled to broadcast remote "on-the-scene" reports of football, tennis, golf, basketball, baseball, horse-racing, crew racing, hockey, track and field (including the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the 1948 London Olympics), bowling, skiing, rodeo, and boxing. He covered most of Joe Louis's title fights.

As a result of his accident in October 1935 in which he lost a leg, Stern took nighttime barbiturates and daytime Benzedrine along with morphine injections. By the end of 1941 he received weekly shots, and by 1943 these had increased to twice a week. By 1945 he was taking Demerol, Dilaudid, and morphine. He also experienced severe pain from kidney stones, a secondary factor that prolonged his dependence on morphine. In 1950 he tried a four-day cure, only to realize he was a "legal addict."

Stern was NBC's first sports director, from 1940 to 1952. During that span he was rated first place sportscaster in the Radio Daily poll every year, and he also received awards from Motion Picture Daily, Radio and Television Mirror, and Scripps-Howard. For fifteen years Stern made two MGM newsreels per week, filmed a sports short once a month for Columbia pictures, and appeared in movies: Pride of the Yankees (1942), We've Never Been Licked (1943), Stage Door Canteen (1943), Here Come the Co-eds (1945), and The West Point Story (1950). Stern earned nearly $5,000 a week for twelve years.

Stern began working for ABC-TV in September 1953. On 1 January 1956 in the ABC-TV box above the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, Stern began announcing the starting lineup for the New Year's Game between the University of Pittsburgh Panthers and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. His voice froze; morphine and sleeping pills stopped him cold. Stern entered the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, on 16 June 1956 for treatment and left clean on 22 December 1956.

On 6 March 1957 Stern returned to the airwaves with what critics described as the clearest commentary of his life. Later, with Oscar Fraley, Stern wrote The Taste of Ashes (1959), explaining his addiction. He also worked before his death as sports announcer for the Mutual Broadcasting Company. Stern suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Rye, New York. His devoted fans remembered his sign-off in the 500th Sports Newsreel broadcast in 1949: "This is Bill Stern wishing you all a good, good night."

Stern's autobiography, written with Oscar Fraley, The Taste of Ashes (1959), presents a candid picture of Stern's life, balancing his career and his struggle with drug addiction. Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, The Big Broadcast: 1920–1950 (1972), is a reference digest for the golden age of radio, with outstanding details about sports and sportscasters of the period, including Stern. John Dunning, On the Air (1998), describes the format of Stern's Sports Newsreel, quotes the quartet that accompanied the broadcasts, and explains Stern's legendary contribution to radio. Ron Lackmann's updated edition of The Encyclopedia of American Radio: An A–Z Guide to Radio from Jack Benny to Howard Stern (2000), provides the dates and times Sports Newsreel was aired and lists celebrities who were interviewed on the show. Stern's picturesque style is clearly demonstrated in "More Lateral than Literal," Time (6 June 1949). Obituaries are in the New York Times (21 Nov. 1971) and Time and Newsweek (both 29 Nov. 1971).

Sandra Redmond Peters