Bill Stern

From BR Bullpen

William Stern

Biographical Information[edit]

Bill Stern was a broadcasting pioneer who was the announcer for the first-ever televized baseball game on May 17, 1939. It was a college game between Princeton University and Columbia University played at Baker Field, Columbia's home ballpark in New York, NY, and broadcast on experimental station W2XBS to a handful of viewers.

That particular accomplishment was part of a long media career that had started back in 1925 when he did radio play-by-play for college football games in his hometown of Rochester, NY. Born into a well-to-do family, he was an indifferent student and was expelled from the exclusive boarding school he attended. It was only after he had started works as a broadcaster that he attended college, where he thrived, and after graduation, he went into broadcasting after unsuccessfully trying to become an actor. He was eventually hired by NBC. In addition to the historic baseball game, he also broadcast the first-ever televized college football game on September 30th (Fordham University vs. Waynesburg College). He later became the sports director for NBC, then switched to ABC in 1956. He was one of the most successful and recognized sportscasters of his time as the host of a series of radio shows featuring sports stories.

He appeared in a number of movies, including The Pride of the Yankees (1942), and in a series of 10-minute shorts entitled "Bill Stern's World of Sports" that were shown in theaters around the country, at a time when it was commong practive to show newsreels and other short films before a feature film. He wrote a number of books, including Bill Stern's Favorite Baseball Stories, in which he pleaded for Fred Goldsmith to be recognized as the true inventor of the curve ball, and not Candy Cummings. His storytelling style was very popular and imitated by a number of other broadcasters. He was a regular panelist on a game show broacast on ABC called The Name's the Same.

In 1935, while working as a broadcaster in Shreveport, LA, he was in a car accident travelling back from a game broadcast in Texas in which he suffered a broken leg; the injury was treated negligently, gangrene set in and the leg ended up having to be amputated. He rose in the broadcast business in spite of his handicap, but had to take painkillers for the rest of his life, his addiction motivating his departure from NBC and his retirement at a relatively young age in the late 1950s. He published his autobiography, A Taste of Ashes, in 1959. He passed away in 1971 and has since been posthumously inducted in the American Sportscasters Association Hall of Fame as part of its inaugural class in 1984 inand the National Radio Hall of Fame. He also has a star in his name on Hollywood Boulevard.

Related Sites[edit]