Baseball's Babbling Brook

His first full season of baseball began in the spring of 1939, when he was the No. 2 announcer after Arch McDonald, broadcasting both for the Yankees and the New York Giants. The next season McDonald went to the Washington Senators, and Allen moved up. Allen was in the infantry from 1943 until early in 1946; in a rare burst of intelligence the Army made use of his broadcasting experience by assigning him to a public relations program. When he came back to New York he signed a contract with the Yankees (for $17,500 then, for he's not saying how much now) and has been with the club ever since. Along the way, he has also broadcast basketball games, tennis matches, dog shows and horse races. Once he recorded the offstage voice for the game sequence in the Broadway production of Damn Yankees, and in a movie called The Babe Ruth Story Allen's voice described Ruth's then remarkable 60th home run. "The fact that I was only 14 years old when Ruth hit that homer didn't seem to faze the director," says Allen of the movie. "That gives you a rough idea of what kind of movie it was."

Inasmuch as Mel Allen has been doing basically the same job for more than two decades, it would be reasonable to suppose that much of his enthusiasm has faded. But for Allen, with no wife or children, no hobbies and, with the exception of popular fiction and magazines, no interests beyond sport, it isn't so. Each game he sees is a new and challenging experience. He doesn't just look at it, he lives it. "My job on Monitor" he says, "is pleasant and it pays well, but it is not the sort of thing that keeps me in this business. I could never be just an announcer. I think I'd go back to law if I had to do that. But my work as a sportscaster, dad gummit, is a creative thing. The players on the field are the actors, and I, in a sense, am the narrator putting the things they do into a story." Allen sometimes gets so carried away by his narration that he paws the air and gesticulates, pounds his neighbors and shifts to the edge of his seat. It is a technique that leaves him completely bushed after a game.

"In a business never known for hard work, Mel has built a reputation for hard work that makes us all uneasy," says Lindsey Nelson. "In the early days of radio it was enough for the announcer to say, 'The sky is blue, folks, and the band sounds mighty pretty, so let's listen.' Now the listeners are too sophisticated for that, and Mel spends far more time getting ready for a broadcast than he does giving it. He gives the listener everything he could ask for."

Once Mel Allen got over the idea of returning to a law practice in Alabama and accustomed his family to the same thing, he moved them all to New York in 1940. His sister has married and gone her own way, his brother works for him and his mother and father live with Mel in a $75,000 house in Westchester County. It is a close-knit family, and everybody is fairly happy, except perhaps Mrs. Israel. She openly resents the fact that her son "never married anybody but those New York Yankees." She has seen Mel woo and abandon possible brides, and she doesn't laugh at the crack made by a friend: "Here comes Mel Allen with the future Miss Jones." And she begrudges the demands made on him by his public.

"Once I thought it would be nice to go to dinner with the whole family," she said the other day. "So we go to a little out-of-the-way restaurant out near Esther's house on Long Island. No sooner do we walk in the door, than here come the kids, the mommas, the poppas, the grandmommas and the grandpoppas, all holding these little autograph books. Later this man gets angry because Mel says he'll have to check his appointment book before promising to make a speech to the man's club. Then this boisterous blonde tries to sit in Mel's lap. It was too much. Me, I wanted to be at home in my kitchen, eating a sandwich with Larry."

But, she is asked, would she wish her son Mel to be anything less than the success he is? Anna Israel answers with rue: "I wish he was a shoemaker. A married shoemaker."