How Ronald Reagan Faked It ‘Til He Made It: His Early Years in Radio in…Des Moines?

And we returned to Our American Stories. Up next, a story from our great affiliate, News Radio 1040 WHO in Des Moines, Iowa. For WHO’s 50th-anniversary celebration in 1974, a famous alumnus of the station was present: the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan. His career started there as a broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs. Let’s take a listen.

Now, it’s hard to make a younger generation in this Space Age comprehend the hold that radio had on the American people. Nothing has ever been known that quite matched it for impact and for the grip that had had on the people. Even that great movie colossus, Hollywood, with the motion pictures that were family entertainments for so many years—how do you explain to young people today that radio was so fat fascinating that the great motion picture theaters of the day used to have to advertise that you could come to the movies and not miss Amos and Andy, because they’d interrupt the show? The lights would go up, and the screen would go dark, and the man would come out and turn on the knob of a radio set sitting on the stage, and for 30 minutes, you’d sit and listen to a radio show, and then the movie would start in again. The miracle of sounds of the outside world, the magic world of entertainment with an infinite variety, was brought into the living rooms of even the most remote cabins. But more than radio was responsible for this; there was something else that the theater couldn’t match, even though it’s tried down through the centuries. Good theater requires stimulating the imagination of the people; and this, with drama, with music, with words. Radio had to produce everything: the image from the mind of the audience. The voices and the sounds became images in the mind. There was no way to re-create the pictures. For example, you could not on television or in movies make a funny, week-after-week running gag out of Jack Benny descending into his money vault and have it be a belly laugh every time. But it was the creaking doors, the sound of the rattling chains, the hollow footsteps descending deeper and deeper into the dungeons, and finally, that last creaking door opening, and that little quavering voice saying to Jack, “Hello, Mister Benny, how is President McKinley doing?”

But even though radio became a full-grown giant in those Depression days, it had a lusty, pioneering spirit. Even those of us who were beginners were allowed to be innovative and experimental, and many things went on the air without the benefit of a production meeting and interoffice memos. My own beginning was an example. I walked into a station for the first time I’d ever been in one. I’d knocked on a lot of doors—I don’t know how many I’d been turned away from—to get a job. All I wanted to do was say, “I’ll do anything in the station,” because I wanted to be a sports announcer someday. And finally, it came this station’s turn, and old Peter MacArthur, one of nature’s most unforgettable gentlemen, sat there behind his desk and said, “Where have you been? We’ve been announcing for applicants for auditions, and we’ve just had an audition and hired an announcer yesterday.” This was too much for me, after all the frustration, and I said, “How the hell does a fella ever get to be a sports announcer if he never gets inside a station?” And down the hall to the elevator, which fortunately was in the basement, and before I could get up to the floor where I was, Pete, handicapped by arthritis, coming down the hall on his canes, screaming at me to wait. And he said to me, “What did you say about sports?” And I told him. And he said, “Do you know anything about football?” And I said, “I played it for eight years.” Peach said, “Come with me,” and we went into a studio. He stood me in front of a microphone. He says, “I’m going away. You won’t be able to see me, but I’ll hear you. When that little red light goes on, you start broadcasting an imaginary football game and…” Make me see it.” Well, one of the smartest things I did, there was a game the year before that we’d won in the last 20 seconds with a 65-yard touchdown, so I knew enough names of the two teams that I wouldn’t have to fish for names. So I stood in front, and when the light went on, I figured we’d better start in the middle of the fourth quarter because I wasn’t about to get caught from the kickoff on. And I started with a chill wind coming in through the end of the stadium and the long blue shadows settling over the field, and there we were in battle down there and trailing by six points. And I took us all the way up, finally, from our own 35-yard line in this 20-second dash for the touchdown, and they crossed the goal line, and I grabbed the microphone and said, “That’s all.” And Pete came in and in those Depression days, said the golden words, “Be here Saturday. We’ll give you five dollars in bus fare broadcasting the Iowa-Minnesota game.” It was only much later that I learned that Ed Reimers was the fellow they’d hired the day before. And when I read the formal audition that he had taken, I blessed myself for being a day late, because I never could have passed it. Ed would have had the job. Don’t worry. Well, you know, we learned. I learned the importance of commercials because later on, when the football season was over, I was on the staff, and one program that I came to (and instructions were kind of sketchy in those days; you were sort of on your own) was to go to a remote pickup from a mortuary in Davenport, where we would pick up some beautiful organ music for a half-hour. I read all this, but nobody told me much about it, and the organ music was beautiful, and I decided that it just wouldn’t be esthetic to mention an undertaking parlor in connection with this beautiful music, so I didn’t. I found out the next morning how important it is to mention the name of the mortuary. It was providing 30 minutes of free entertainment to the station. Radio wasn’t in the news business at all. The network stations were on a telegraph wire. Our engineers could all, with the ticker dot-and-dash Morse code, talk to each other. And one night, while I was sitting on duty late at night, all alone in the announcer’s booth, every half-hour, interrupting the orchestras that were coming from NBC and giving the call letters and all—one of the engineers came in with a scrawled message: “Just been talking with the ticker to KFI in Los Angeles,” and I interrupted the network orchestra to say that there was a giant earthquake in Los Angeles in February of 1933. Gave whatever information they’d got, and they kept coming in with the bulletins. We were supposed to go off the air at 12 o’clock. At 2 o’clock in the morning, we were still giving bulletins. By that time, everybody that worked for WHO (they all, you found out, listened to the station) were in there. They were on the telephones. Everybody in Iowa with a relative in California—and that was everybody in Iowa—was calling in wanting to know what had happened. About 2 o’clock in the morning, with a perfect finish you couldn’t have written yourself, the last message came from KFI that said, “We’re getting out of this building. We think it’s going next.” Well, that was a news broadcast, but the swift-moving world of radio WOC (who became WHO, you’ve been told, a 50,000-watt Clear Channel), and I found myself sponsored for a twice-daily sports summary—and I might say, period—because we had a stock ticker of that old-fashioned kind, with a tape that spelled out the scores of baseball or basketball or football, or whatever was going on. But from there on, it was just up to me as to what I was going to say to fill those two 15-minute periods. So I used to sneak out in the street and buy the early edition of The Register and Tribune, the rival organization, read the sports section, and go in and ad-lib 15 minutes of sports news. All of us had the right to express ourselves, and the freedom at times extended to airtime. Now, my brother had just gotten out of college, and he came out to visit me. He was jobless, as was everyone in those days. He was sitting in a studio waiting for me to finish, where once we would then go to one of the more famous Des Moines institutions known as Moonlight Inn. It was a Friday night, and the schedule said I was to fill it with records. There was nothing coming from the network. In those days, you went in and picked out your own records. So we went in and we picked out all the college songs we could find because the next day I’d be broadcasting a football game from Iowa City. And then we went on, and I decided to interrupt the records every once in a while and predict how the games were going to turn out on the following day. And I noticed he was sitting across the desk waiting, and he was shaking his head “no” on some of my predictions. So I turned on the microphone that was in front of him and I said, “My brother’s here in the studio, and he doesn’t agree with what I’m saying. Who do you think is going to win that game?” And we argued, and we played music. Arguing came easy. We’d been doing it for years. We did it. And the funny thing is, the next day, we were in Iowa City at the game, and pretty soon this became a regular feature of Alred, debating how the games were going to come out, and coming on Saturday nights with the scores of the games and giving our percentage and how we’d done on which one was the winner and picking the most victors. He went on from there to become an announcer, and as you’ve heard, a program director and finally senior vice president of McCann Erickson. I went on, earning an honest living.

And you’ve been listening to Ronald Reagan tell one heck of a story about how things used to be: that story of his audition and how he got his first gig. Well, that’s just a beauty. When we come back, more of Ronald Reagan and his 50th-anniversary celebration in 1974 of the great powerhouse iHeart station, WHO, here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories and our final segment of Ronald Reagan’s speech at the 50th-anniversary celebration of News Radio 1040 Wight Show in Des Moines, Iowa. When we last left off, Reagan was telling us how he got his job at Wight Show and his life in sportscasting in the early days of radio. Let’s return to Ronald Reagan.

You know, I have to tell you, I may have even done the first instant replay. It’s wonderful to be here for this occasion, but to have it also coincide with the Drake Relays, that great track classic of such national importance. I broadcast them. I broadcast them when it was snowing, and I broadcast them when it was steaming heat. But I remember one day we did it broadcast, and again it was pioneering. We shared the Penn Relays with NBC. Bill Stern was at Penn, and I was here, and we had “warrior phones.” We could talk to each other, and the audience could hear all of it, and then he’d broadcast an event and ask me what was coming up in Iowa, and I’d tell him what was coming up out here. But all day long, I kept telling him, “Bill, you’ve got to get it back out here for the quarter-mile, because we’ve got the greatest quarter-mile stars in the United States, were bound to break a national, if not a world record today. So get it back here for that.” So he got it to me in plenty of time, just in time for the public relations man at Drake University to bring in the President of Drake University gave a speech of welcome to our radio audience, and he did, and I sat there and I watched the quarter-mile event go by, and when he left the studio, I didn’t have the nerve to tell our radio audience that they’d missed the quarter-mile event. I knew it had to take about 48 seconds, so I just looked at my watch and I said, “Well, we’re just in time for the quarter-mile.” And with an empty track in front of me, in a dead-silent crowd, I broadcast for 48 seconds, brought him down the stretch: one, two, three, the way they came in. And if any listeners noticed a lack of background cheers, I covered that by describing the crowd as awestruck by the silence. Of course, I wasn’t always that successful with things like that. We did do baseball, and we did it, re-creating it from telegraphic reports, and there was no monopoly. Then there were a half-dozen other fellas broadcasting the same game from the ballpark, and you had to try to keep up with them, so the audience wouldn’t tune you out and get one of those fellas if you were too far behind the pace of the game. So when Curly Waddell (God rest his soul) was sitting on the other side of the glass, with through the headphones, would get that dot-and-dash. He’d start typing, and I’d start talking, and the thing would come through just in time. I’d say, “The pitcher comes out of the windup. Here comes the pitch!” And he’d hand me a piece of paper. You couldn’t read it. You couldn’t just suddenly scream, “Strike one!” and sell a lot of Wheaties. So you’d say, “And it’s a strike called, breaking over the outside corner to a pitcher that,” and so forth, and so on. Well, one day it was in the ninth inning, the Cubs and the Cards both contending for the pennant. Nothing and nothing. And I saw Curly start to type, and I had Dizzy Dean on the mound, and I said, “Dizz comes out of the windup! Here comes the pitch!” Sure, Curly was shaking his head “no,” but I thought he just didn’t like something. And I took the paper and said, “The wire’s gone dead!” I had a pitch on the way to the plate. There was only one thing you can do that doesn’t get in a scorebook. I had him foul it off, and I looked at Curly, and Curly looked at me, and I just couldn’t say to that audience: “…In the ninth inning, we’ve lost our service.” “…We’re going to pray give you a brief interlude of transcribed music.” So I said, “Diz Dean…” I slowed him down a little. I had him use the rosin bag a lot, and I had him shake off signs at length. They wind up. Finally, let go with another pitch, and he fouled that one off to the right, and then he fouled one off back of the stands. Then he fouled one off back of third base, and I described the fight between the two kids trying to get the ball. Then he fouled one off that just missed a home run by a foot. Now I’m beginning to sweat because I am beginning to set a world record for a man staying at bat, and that is good to get in the news. Just in the nick of time, Curly sat up, started typing, and I started another ball on the way to the plate, grabbed the wire and it said, “Jurgis popped out on the first ball pitched.” But you know, H.R. Gross had a little occasion when he overdid the informality of WHO. He came in with the evening news, and it was my turn to put him on. He sat opposite me at the desk, and I told him that there was a change of plans. We had a commercial coming on from the Tropical Room of the Hotel Fort Des Moines, and he’d have to get off early. He had a lot of news, and he didn’t want to get off early. I finally gave him the sign for one minute, and he kept shaking his head and reading news, and I gave him half a minute, and he kept on reading news. Finally, I just… When he paused for breath, I pushed the button and said, “Well, that’s the news for this evening. We’ve taken you out of the Tropical Room of the Hotel Fort Des Moines.” I pushed the button. But when I pushed that button, not only did the music come through from the Tropical Room, but I’d also turned on his mic. And his first move was to kick his chair across the room. And he then used some forthright language that I’m sure he’s used with great success on some of his more stubborn, do-nothing colleagues in the Congress. But the theme music was underwriting this, and the local police journeyed to the Tropical Room of the Hotel Fort Des Moines and said, “You’ve got some drunk in here!” They said, “You better shut him up, or we’re closing the room.” But H.R. Gross and WHO kept on pioneering. This station had its own accredited war correspondents in World War II and the Pacific and the European theaters. That great family of listeners here in the Midwest heard firsthand broadcast descriptions of the Battle of the Bulge and the signing of the surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. And always, with the new and the different. There was an emphasis on service during the war. WHO sold more than $6 million in war bonds to 25,000 investors in 46 states. There was a clothing drive conducted for the destitute in the war zones, and the News Bureau of WHO acted as a clearinghouse for the names of the needy foreign families. More than a quarter of a million parcels were sent to Europe. Radical communists in Greece, attempting to sabotage this program, resorted to burning down the post offices, but the people of Greece, in gratitude for the neighborliness of the people of the Midwest of America…