Baseball's Babbling Brook

Two years later Julius Israel moved his family again—this time to Birmingham—and there Melvin finished high school, dated the prettiest girl on the block and enrolled in the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He was only 15 years old and, because of his precocity, they called him Skyrocket. To save the expense of putting him up in a dormitory, the Israel family moved to Tuscaloosa, too. "About all I was able to afford was a roof over his head," says Julius Israel.

Characteristically, Mel Israel spent little time under that roof. Tall, skinny and physically immature, he was cut quickly from the varsity baseball team. He turned instead to intramural baseball, to writing sports for the school paper, to the drama club and, when necessary, to his books. To help his father meet expenses, he worked Saturday in Brown's Dollar Store selling shoes. After a good day he would take five of Brown's dollars home.

By the time he was a senior, Mel had entered law school, was teaching a class in speech and was sports editor of both the student paper and the annual. He was also earning his varsity A as student manager of the baseball team, working as sports stringer for out-of-town Alabama papers, writing scripts for the football coaches' radio show, playing sandlot baseball and announcing downs and yards to go on the P.A. system at Alabama football games. One fall afternoon in 1935 the late Frank Thomas, the football coach, got a call from a Birmingham radio station. It had suddenly lost its sportscaster for Alabama and Auburn football games. Did Thomas have any suggestions? Sure he did. Mel Israel.

"I wasn't really interested," says Allen now, "but it was a sure $5 a game if I got the job." To see that he did, Allen prepared for his audition by boning up on an earlier Rose Bowl game that he hadn't seen, and came to the station to deliver a stirring account of how Alabama tied the score against Stanford in the last minutes. Charmed as much by Allen's account as by the recollection of that happy day in Pasadena, the station manager hired him.

Allen was already in his third year of law school, and he took his broadcasting job so lightly that in one early game he lost track of a down. To square himself with the scoreboard he squeezed in a line buck for no gain while Alabama was still in its huddle. Nevertheless, he got the job again the next season, but was unavailable the one after that. He was busy instead on the CBS network. The following fall he called the first baseball games he'd ever seen from a broadcasting booth: the 1938 World Series.

As he had done in Birmingham, Allen got his job with CBS almost accidentally. In New York on a skylarking Christmas vacation, he strolled into the CBS studio one evening to see a program being broadcast. He mentioned his association with the CBS affiliate in Birmingham to a night supervisor, and for no better reason than curiosity let himself be induced to audition. The next question he heard was, "When can you start?"

"Gosh damn," says Allen, using one of his wild expressions (others are "dad gummit" and "jiminy cricket"). "I like to fell over when they said that. I didn't want to start anytime, I told them. I was a graduate lawyer, ready to start my practice most any day. And besides, I had a job teaching speech at the university and getting $1,800. So they said, $45 a week, think it over."

Mel thought it over when he got home. "I told him it was plain foolishness for a boy to go all the way through law school just to talk on the radio," says Julius Israel. "And I told him if he went he'd never come back." Neither was the elder Israel friendly to the network's suggestion that Mel change his name for, as they put it, a more euphonious sound and one not so—uh—inclusive of all the tribes. Mel answered his father that, well, he meant only to go on for a year. The experience would broaden him, he said, give him a bigger outlook on things. Oh, let the boy go, Mel's mother put in. What did it matter what he did for one year, and what did it matter what he called himself for that time? Call yourself Morgan Hall, a solicitous friend suggested, thinking of a euphoniously named building on the university campus. Or call yourself Mel Thomas, suggested Frank Thomas. So Melvin Israel, who has always liked travel and mellifluousness, packed his bags, borrowed his father's middle name and went north. He honestly meant to be home 12 months later, but he never made it.

Mel Allen began broadening his outlook by getting up in time to open the network at 6 a.m., introducing to the stirring nation organ stylings on the Mighty Wurlitzer. Three weeks later he was assigned to a sponsored nighttime show (his salary spurted up to $95 a week), and a couple of months after that he broke into sports.

A prerequisite for sports announcers is an ability to carry things along without benefit of script, and Allen demonstrated an unapproachable talent for that on his first assignment. In a day when networks pirated events from one another, CBS sent Allen aloft in a DC-3 to describe a Vanderbilt Cup race on Long Island ( NBC had hoped for exclusive ground-based coverage). Circling over the course, Allen was obliged to talk for 52 minutes, describing nothing at all because the race was being delayed by a rain shower. The race never did get away, but from then on Mel Allen's career in sports announcing was off and running.