Alva Review-Courier -

When Walter Cronkite was ten years old, the Cronkite family moved from Kansas City to Houston, Texas. Some of the South’s cultural conventions of the time shocked the former mid-westerner. The mistreatment of African Americans was quite disturbing, and he received a rather shocking introduction to conventional southern manners when addressing teachers.

In his first day in fourth grade in a southern classroom, his class was asked to solve a rather complex math problem that, if solved correctly, resulted in a simple answer. Wanting to start out on the right foot with new people, Cronkite had dressed for class in his Sunday best. He enthusiastically held up his hand, and said the answer was “four.” The teacher’s response was to tell Cronkite to stand in the corner until he could answer the question properly. Twenty minutes later he was asked again what the answer was. Again he replied that the answer was four. And again he was told to stay in the corner. Later Cronkite learned that the proper response was “four, ma’am.”

When he was in high school, he became the editor of the school newspaper. And upon graduation he enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, but dropped out of college after his junior year. He then went to work at the KCMO radio station in Kansas City as a sports announcer – dealing primarily with football games, and doing some of his own “creative telegraphed play by play.”

In the early 1930s, college football games that were not broadcast live by the major networks could be rapidly coded into telegraphed accounts of the games by knowledgeable sports writers of the time. Then the “almost” contemporaneous accounts of the games could be sold and sent out by wire to individual stations who bought the games for broadcasting.

It was then up to the radio stations to find “creative announcers” such as Cronkite who could do advanced research of the game, and inject interesting “filler material” that made the account of the game sound exciting and spontaneous. Successfully done, fans “listening to a game” would think that the announcer was present at the site of the game, rather than merely reading a telegraphed account of the game. (Doesn’t this sound a little like some of the circumstances in the movie “The Sting,” starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford?)

Fans were generally unaware that the announcer was actually present in the fan’s local city. The system generally worked pretty well ... except for the times when the telegraph feed system failed to function for various reasons.

During such times, it was expected that announcers like Cronkite would “call a time out” while the feed was being restored. But they had to come up with a few phantom plays (i.e. “fake them convincingly”) to smooth out the game’s progress, until the telegraph system would be working again. This was not too difficult when the wire would act up for only a few minutes. But in one notable instance during a Notre Dame vs. Southern California game, the wire was down for a grand total of almost 30 sweat-stained, nerve-wracking minutes.

Left to his own designs as to how to fake out thousands of radio fans for almost half an hour, Cronkite cooly made up a fictionalized partial game in which the teams went back and forth between the twenty yard lines without scoring. Then when the telegraph system came back on line, he planned to have the teams score in quick succession to make up for the missing actual action before the game ended.

To Cronkite’s great relief, the wire was indeed eventually restored running before the game ended. And he was indeed fortunate that the fictionalized details of HIS interim game were not widely compared with later radio summaries of the game or the next day’s newspaper accounts.

Because radio stations engaging in telegraphed games were concerned that announcers of such games would develop personal radio followings that might leave the station if the announcers changed employers, Cronkite was not allowed to use his actual name on the air. Therefore Cronkite chose to be known as Walter Wilcox for the telegraphed games. Decades later when TV network personality Cronkite was chatting with (then) President Ronald Reagan, he discovered that President Reagan had done the same sort of telegraphed accounts of baseball games on radio, and had to get creative any time the wire went down during baseball broadcasts.

Radio station humor at Kansas City largely took the form of pranksters trying to get the announcers to broadcast something that was grossly untrue without any last-minute fact checking. Such pranks might take the form of putting untrue news flashes as “FLASH: City Hall is burning down!” in front of harried announcers during an on-going broadcast. Cronkite for the first and only time lost his job when he over-ruled radio management during a broadcast of news having questionable accuracy.

But shortly thereafter, he was hired to broadcast live college games in person by WKY radio station, an NBC network affiliate located in Oklahoma City. WKY radio was a first-class operation owned by the Daily Oklahoman and Times, which had taken note of Cronkite’s creativeness in his telegraphed versions of college football games.

The radio station felt he would be perfect in the role of broadcasting the Oklahoma Sooners football games. Cronkite did not want to get back into radio, and consequently asked for a salary that was three times larger than his last one, expecting to be turned down. Without hesitation, WKY management agreed, and wanted to know what kind of equipment and support personnel (player spotters, etc.) he would need, and how soon he could start.

Despite the new job’s promising beginning, the first game’s broadcast was an unqualified disaster, largely because a lighted up control board didn’t work properly, and the player spotters were not at all accurate in providing timely information. Early the next morning Cronkite was summoned into Mr. Gaylord’s office, where he was told that the news organization’s owner had enjoyed the first broadcast, but he was certain that certain unspecified bugs in it would be worked out before the next game. As usual, Mr. Gaylord was quite correct.

To be continued.