Tag:

broadcast

The Jackie Kennedy White House Tour — A Smash TV Hit

On the evening of Feb. 14, 1962, 56 million Americans were riveted to their television sets, watching the Jackie Kennedy White House tour.

During the broadcast, the First Lady showed CBS newsman Charles Collingswood through the White House. She had great pride in her work restoring the mansion and reversing the depredations of the Eisenhower years. In the broadcast, she told the stories of significant historic pieces — and made sure to mention her wealthy donors.

It didn’t please everybody. Novelist Norman Mailer, assigned to cover the show for Esquire magazine, panned it. A popular comedian mocked it.

But the public loved the Jackie Kennedy White House Tour.

White House Restoration

Jackie Kennedy had made it her mission to restore the building’s historical character, and she succeeded. As she told Collingswood, the mansion had hardly anything in it made before 1902.

She spent a year tracking down missing furnishings and finding donors to fund the White House restoration. She begged, borrowed and scrounged to fill the White House with original antiques.

“The American people should be proud of it,” she said. “We have such a great civilization. So many foreigners don’t realize it. I think this house should be the place we see them best.”

By the time of the TV special, she’d gotten rid of the bedroom curtains she called “seasick green.” She redecorated the hallway that looked like a “dentist’s office bomb shelter” and threw out the “Pullman car ashtray stands.”

Chris Collingwood and Jackie Kennedy on her White House tour.

Dedication

The First Lady relished the project of making the White House elegant again. Kennedy’s civil rights liaison, Harris Wofford, recalled what happened when he brought Martin Luther King to the mansion to meet with the president.

“We got in the elevator to go up, and it went down instead,” Wofford recalled. “Jacqueline Kennedy got on, in jeans and soot on her face. And I introduced her to Dr. King.”

She then said, “‘Oh, Dr. King, I just wish you had been in the basement with me this morning, looking at Andrew Jackson furniture, you would have been thrilled down there’.” When they got off, she said, “‘But you have other things to talk to Jack about, I know’.”

Wofford called her charming but wacky. King’s response? “My! Wasn’t that something?”

Jackie Kennedy White House Tour

President John F. Kennedy easily talked CBS into broadcasting the First Lady’s tour of the White House. Scheduled for Valentine’s Day, TV Guide teased the show with a cover photo of Jackie Kennedy close up with slightly tousled hair and a direct gaze.

In honor of the holiday, the First Lady wore a red dress and walked Charles Collingwood through the Executive Mansion. She had to forgo her three-pack-a-day cigarette habit during the broadcast.

Despite her frozen half smile, the breathy sing-song voice and her wooden delivery of an endless list of items, most critics praised the show. One called it ‘television at its best.’ She even won an Emmy, the only First Lady to do so.

Norman Mailer thought it stunk.

Panning Jackie Kennedy

Mailer had met her at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, just down the road from his summer home in Provincetown.

“I liked her,” he wrote, “but she was a phony.”

He knew what her voice sounded like, and it was nothing like the breathy, sing-song delivery he heard on the televised Jackie Kennedy White House Tour.

Norman Mailer panned the Jackie Kennedy White House tour.

In his essay, An Evening With Jackie Kennedy, he wrote that the first sound of her voice “produced a small continuing shock.”

He objected to the endless list of items and the wealthy people who donated them. It depressed the viewer with facts, he wrote, more than 200 of them – 400 if you count repetitions.

“As the eye followed Mrs. Kennedy …through the Blue Room, the Green Room, the East Room, the State Dining Room, the Red Room; as the listeners were offered a reference to Dolly Madison’s favorite sofa, or President Monroe’s Minerva clock, Nellie Custis’ sofa, Mrs. Lincoln’s later poverty, Daniel Webster’s sofa…the presentation began to take on the undernourished, overdone air of a charity show, a telethon for a new disease,” he wrote.

But then he cut her some slack – sort of: “Somehow it was sympathetic that she walked through it like a starlet who is utterly without talent.”

Norman Mailer received no more invitations to visit the Kennedys in Hyannisport.

Vaughn Meader

Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3176477

Vaughn Meader’s wildly popular album satirizing the Kennedys

Another New Englander, comedian Vaughn Meader, poked relentless fun at the Jackie Kennedy White House Tour. Meader skyrocketed to fame with his impersonation of the Kennedys on his record album, The First Family. During the four-minute bit, a stiff newsman asks her to point out the paintings. She replies, “There’s this one and this one, and that great big one over there and this little teeny one down here.”

She describes the Richard Nixon dumbwaiter, the Dolly Madison pinochle room and the Woodrow Wilson ping-pong room. And entering the Blue Room, she said, “We decided to leave it just the way President Blue had it originally.”

Still, the world loved the Jackie Kennedy White House tour, as it was distributed to 120 countries.

To listen to Vaughn Meader’s bit, The Tour, click here.

To see a documentary about the Jackie Kennedy White House Tour, click here.

Image of Norman Mailer By Grlucas – Norman Mailer Society Conference 2006, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63095348. Vaughn Meader album cover Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3176477. This story updated in 2022.

0 comments 4.6K views

The Jimmy Fund Jimmy Survives, Gives Ted Williams a Thrill

Einar Gustafson was a 12-year-old cancer patient who launched the Jimmy Fund in 1948 and then quietly succumbed to the disease.

Or so most people thought.

Dr. Sidney Farber with a patient

Einar had been at the heart of a publicity stunt to raise money for cancer research. His doctor, pioneering cancer researcher Sidney Farber, had insisted he be called ‘Jimmy’ to protect his privacy. The publicity stunt was so successful the fund was named after “Jimmy.” And Dr. Farber emerged as a leader in the drive for government funding of cancer research.

Einar Gustafson returned home to New Sweden, Maine, and lived a full and vigorous life. At the age of 63, he emerged as the original Jimmy and had a memorable visit with Ted Williams, the godfather of the Jimmy Fund.

The Jimmy Fund

He was born Carl Einar Gustafson Aug. 18, 1935 on a New Sweden potato farm. At age 12 he felt a pain in his abdomen while walking to school. He had non-Hodgkins lymphoma of the small bowel and underwent surgery in Caribou. Then he had another surgery in Lewiston.

His doctor referred him to Children’s Hospital in Boston, where cure rates maybe reached 30 percent. There, Einar’s doctor, Sidney Farber, had begun raising money for cancer research with a group of charitable show business people called the Variety Club.

Einar Gustafson in his Braves uniform.

On May 22, 1948, radio star Ralph Edwards was to ask for donations on a broadcast of his radio show, Truth or Consequences, from Children’s Hospital.

For the coast-to-coast broadcast, Farber selected Einar, a cute, polite Boston Braves fan who longed to watch games on television.

During the broadcast from “Jimmy’s” bedside, Boston Braves players paid him a surprise visit. They marched into his room with hats, bats and a small Braves uniform. Edwards announced “Jimmy” would get a TV set if they raised $20,000. Before the Braves left Children’s Hospital, people had showed up at the door with dollars, quarters and dimes for Jimmy.

Dr. Farber suggested they name the fund drive the Jimmy Fund.

Within a year the Jimmy Fund raised $231,485.51, “Jimmy” got his television and the Braves won the pennant.

“Jimmy” (Einar Gustafson) gets his TV.

Sidney Farber

When the Braves left for Milwaukee in 1953, the Red Sox adopted the Jimmy Fund and slugger Ted Williams became its most fervent advocate. His brother Danny had died from leukemia at age 39, and Williams raised millions for the charity.

“Back in the 1950s, Dr. Farber told me, `Ted, we’re gonna find a way to save these kids’,” remembered Williams.

Sidney Farber was a Jewish doctor from Buffalo, N.Y. He had graduated from SUNY Buffalo in 1923, a time when Jewish students often couldn’t get into U.S. medical schools. So Farber went to Germany, where he did so well as a first-year student he qualified to enter Harvard Medical School. As the first pathologist at Children’s Hospital, he is considered the father of pediatric pathology as well as the father of modern chemotherapy.

Dr. Farber realized breakthroughs in the treatment of disease had to be promoted. He began advocating for cancer research funding, often appearing before Congress as a leader in the drive for government funding for cancer research.

That broadcast with “Jimmy” at Children’s Hospital had been a turning point in the history of cancer treatment, bringing it into the glare of publicity. No longer was it a silent shame.

The Real Jimmy

Ted Williams in 1939

Dr. Farber kept in touch with Einar Gustafson until he died of a heart attack in his office at age 69 in 1973. Almost everyone else assumed Jimmy had succumbed to the disease.

In 1997, Einar Gustafson’s sister Phyllis Clauson of Chelmsford, Mass., wrote to the Jimmy Fund to tell them her brother was still alive.

Jimmy Fund Director Mike Andrews dismissed the letter. They’d had a lot like it – like Elvis sightings, said Andrews, a former Red Sox second baseman.

Karen Cummings, a Jimmy Fund fund-raiser, took the letter seriously. She tried to find Einar. One day her phone rang.

“This is Jimmy,” he said. “Heard you were lookin’ for me.”

A Most Wonderful Man

Einar had returned to Boston regularly to get chemotherapy as a boy. He grew to 6’5″, graduated from Caribou High School, drove trucks, married his high school sweetheart and had three daughters. Eventually he moved to Buzzards Bay and started a building company. His wife died in 1986, and he remarried. When he emerged as the original Jimmy, he was running a trucking business out of New Sweden

He explained why he had kept his identity quiet: “We were taught when we were kids you didn’t talk about those things. You didn’t talk about sickness.”

Statue of Ted Williams outside Fenway Park.

Einar became a spokesman for the Jimmy Fund. He drove a truck emblazoned with the charity’s logo and slogan: “Because it takes more than courage to beat cancer.” He threw out the first pitch at a Red Sox-Yankee game at Fenway in 1998. In 1999, Maine held a Recognition Day for him, and he was named honorary chairman of the Jimmy Fund.

“He turned out to be the most wonderful man,” said Andrews. “If we had tried to create a Jimmy, we couldn’t have done better. And he was just thrilled to be part of it.”

Jimmy and Ted

In 1999, Ted Williams came to Boston for an All-Star event and he toured the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Williams said the Jimmy Fund was the softest spot in his heart about the New England people.

He heard “Jimmy” was at the clinic, too. “Where’s this Jimmy?” Williams yelled. “I want to meet this Jimmy guy!”

The two men sat in rocking chairs and chatted.

“This is the biggest thrill of my trip, right here,” Williams said.

Einar Gustafson died of a stroke on Jan. 21, 2001, at his home in Caribou. Ted Williams died a year and a half later.

Contribute to the Jimmy Fund on Aug. 14, 2024, and your donation will be doubled. To join the fight against cancer., click here.

Image: Einar Gustafson with TV By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64477481. Einar Gustafson in Braves uniform By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64477546. Ted Williams statue By Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK – Ted Williams, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64154662. Fenway Park By Cdv1014 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51854591. This story was updated in 2024.

2 comments 5.2K views

The Capture of the I’m Alone, New England’s Uncatchable Rumrunner

For six years during the heart of Prohibition, New England Coast Guard patrols often saw the Gloucester-rigged schooner I’m Alone sailing off into the distance toward the open ocean. That was as close as they could get to the suspected rumrunner. She was fast and her captain cagey, and if not for an overdue New Hampshire library book they might never have unlocked her secrets at all.

Everyone had a pretty good idea what the I’m Alone was up to offshore. She wasn’t the only Canadian-registered boat that moved up and down the coast between Canada and Belize. They all provided a ready supply of alcohol for eastern U.S. cities parched by Prohibition.

$175,000 in liquor seized in Dorchester Bay from rumrunners. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The I’m Alone

The I’m Alone weighed in at 200 tons and 125 feet long, and she could carry 2,800 cases of liquor. Like other large schooners, she would load up with liquor in a foreign port, then stay out at sea out of the Coast Guard’s reach. Smaller rumrunners would pull alongside, take on a load of booze and blaze into port hoping to beat the Coast Guard and any other chase patrols. Once empty, the big supply boats would sail away to reload.

When the Coast Guard approached, the larger ships would simply move farther out to sea. International law prevented the Coast Guard from interfering. It was one of many of the cat-and-mouse games rumrunners played with law enforcement during Prohibition.

Everything changed, however, on the night of March 20, 1929, when the Coast Guard cutter Wolcott spotted the elusive I’m Alone in the waters off Louisiana.

The entire Coast Guard knew the I’m Alone, the most wanted boat afloat. In Halifax, countless entries in the customs logs showed her heading off to the French Island St. Pierre-et-Miquelon and from there to the Caribbean.

During the winter of 1928, I’m Alone shifted territory, heading to the West Indies, probably chasing southern tourist trade. As she sailed off the Louisiana coast, the cutter Wolcott stumbled across the I’m Alone.

Pursuit

With orders not to lose the boat, the Wolcott pursued the I’m Alone and hailed her. I’m Alone’s captain John T. Randell was a vigorous old veteran of the Boer War and World War I. He had become a rum runner by dint of lack of other work and the terrific pay.

The Coast Guard rum chaser Dexter. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

When confronted by the Wolcott, he declined to let the Coast Guard aboard. He invited the Coast Guard’s commander on board for a pleasant meeting, as the customs of the times dictated. But he insisted he was 14 miles off shore, beyond Coast Guard jurisdiction, and he would not agree to be inspected nor stop his ship.

The Coast Guard was just as adamant that he was within 10 miles of land. The stalemate continued for two days. The I’m Alone continued steadily out to sea with the Wolcott trailing, waiting while help arrived.

After two days, another Coast Guard vessel, the Dexter, joined the Wolcott. Together the two renewed their threats. They would board the I’m Alone or they would sink it. Again Randell refused, and the shooting started.

In little time the Coast Guard shot the I’m Alone through the hull below the water line. It sank, bow-first, beneath the waves. The Coast Guard picked up all aboard, but one man – Leon Mainguy – perished.

As the Coast Guard returned to port, an international firestorm brewed that they could not have anticipated.

The I’m Alone on the day she sunk.

Controversy

Rather than receiving accolades for capturing the toughest rumrunner afloat, the Coast Guard was under fire. Canada declared the attack piracy on one of its vessels – no more, no less. The French and British condemned it, and Washington began scrambling to change the story.

Soon, the United States dropped charges against Randell and his men. Though acknowledged rumrunners, all evidence had sunk to the bottom of the sea. Canada pressed for damages – some $386,000 – and it seemed the U.S. government would soon have to pay.

The U.S. could turn the tide if it could prove that U.S. criminals rather than Canadians owned the I’m Alone. Based on the years they had spent chasing it around the waters of New England, the Coast Guard strongly believed that U.S. citizens owned the vessel, despite its Canadian registration.

The Coast Guard would get its break in the unexpected form of a library book. Late in 1928, the Coast Guard had almost apprehended a boat carrying liquor from the I’m Alone. They had chased the boat, the Cheri, but the crew torched the vessel and narrowly escaped. On board, however, a library book survived the fire. It came from a New Hampshire library and it led prosecutors to a gangster named Danny Hogan.

Inside Information

As the witnesses from the vessel began talking, they first fingered Boston gangster John Magnus. Magnus owned a garage in Boston’s Back Bay, but prosecutors charged he really used it as a front for a huge liquor smuggling business. The I’m Alone, they said, was the centerpiece of the operation.

The more they dug into the operation, the more they understood the I’m Alone’s invincibility off the New England coast. Magnus bribed four Coast Guardsmen, including a top Coast Guard official, for information about where and when the Coast Guard patrolled. He also had access to the codes the Coast Guard used when they communicated via radio. In at least one case, the Coast Guard even watched as the I’m Alone unloaded liquor.

Armed with his inside information, Magnus communicated with his own partners via a large radio broadcast facility on Cape Cod. That allowed the I’m Alone to always stay out of reach and its customers to make it safely to land before the Coast Guard could catch up.

Big Seven

In exchange for some leniency, Magnus explained the history of the I’m Alone. Built in 1923, he had bought the boat because of its speed – twin 100-horse-power diesels aided by sails powered the ship. The name, I’m Alone, referred to Magnus’ decision to operate independently rather than as part of an organized entity like the Big Seven Group, made up of future Mafioso.

But he corrected the misapprehension that he still owned I’m Alone. In 1928, library patron Danny Hogan, Marvin J. Clark and Frank Reitman — all Americans — approached Magnus. They, too, considered the I’m Alone the fastest boat afloat. As affiliates of the Big Seven, they wanted to buy it.

Putting together a fund of $20,000, the three asked Magnus to sell. After some dickering, the three paid $18,000 for the vessel and sent it south. Without the protection Magnus and his Coast Guard informant could provide, the I’m Alone was no longer bulletproof and its apprehension inevitable.

With the new information in hand, Canada backed off claims for damages for the boat’s owner. In the end, the United States paid $50,666 dollars in damages.

For more on the I’m Alone, visit here and here. This story was updated in 2022.

8 comments 3.2K views

Maine’s Mildred Gillars Wanted Fame and She Got It in WWII

Mildred Gillars paid a price for the fame she craved so desperately. She became one of the most hated women in America for her radio propaganda broadcasts on behalf of Germany during World War II.

Mildred Gillars, “Axis Sally,” seated on cot, smoking cigarette, in U.S. Counter Intelligence Headquarters, Berlin, Germany in 1946 (Library of Congress)

Gillars’ childhood started out inauspiciously. She was born in Portland, Maine, in 1900 to Vincent Sisk, a railroad man, and his wife Mae. Both had Canadian roots. But after seven tumultuous years together — Vincent suffered from alcoholism — her parents divorced.

Through friends, Mae met her second husband, Robert Gillars, a dentist. Robert applied for a license to practice in Maine, but couldn’t get one. The family then moved through the Midwest and Canada, returning to Maine when Mildred turned 16. Finally they left for good for Ohio.

By the time she reached adulthood, she had taken on a stepfather’s name — becoming Mildred Gillars — and developed a powerful appetite for fame. She got it.

Mildred Gillars, Actress

Mildred Gillars briefly attended Ohio Wesleyan College, but there the acting bug bit her. So she made her way to New York. In the city, she won small roles in stage plays and in vaudeville shows, but could not get a big break.

In 1928, in a bid to ignite her career, she pulled a stunt. Pretending to be a woman abandoned by her child’s father, she placed an ad in the Camden, N.J., newspaper looking for him. The ad and the news coverage it generated eventually blew up when it was exposed as a publicity plot for a movie about fatherless children.

The fame did little to help Mildred’s career, and in 1929 she traveled to France and on to Algiers, popular destinations for young Americans looking for adventure. She made her way by modeling and teaching English.

In 1933, Mae — whose second husband had turned out to be as big an alcoholic as the first — wrote and told Mildred she would be visiting Hungary, and she invited her daughter to join her.

For the next six years, the two lived in Hungary and later Berlin, Mildred always close to the theater and filmmaking scene. She earned her living, though, as a translator, English teacher and personal assistant.

War Breaks Out

By 1939, however, Hitler’s rule in Germany was growing increasingly autocratic and openly anti-Semitic. Meanwhile, Germany’s war machine was gearing up for all-out conflict. The U.S. State Department was urging U.S. citizens to return home.

Mae returned to the states, but she could not persuade Mildred to join her. In 1940, the war underway, Mildred took a job with the German state radio division, Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, which was then broadcasting on AM frequencies and short-wave.

At Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, Mildred was reunited with her former college professor at Hunter College, Otto Koischwitz. Mildred had several affairs with married men during her life, and she and Koischwitz had had an affair in her New York days. They rekindled their romance in Germany.

With his position as a leader in Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, Koischwitz encouraged Mildred to use her talents on behalf of the Third Reich, as a propaganda broadcaster.

In 1943, Mildred took to the airwaves as “Midge at the mic,” broadcasting English-language shows aimed at Americans. U.S. soldiers nicknamed her “Axis Sally,” a moniker that would stick with her forever.

For close to three years, Mildred Gillars broadcast shows aimed at undermining American morale. Sometimes she would make direct appeals to soldiers to give up the fight. Other times she would suggest they were risking life and limb while the “4-Fs” back home were taking their jobs and their women. Most famously, she would visit U.S. soldiers in hospitals and POW camps to record them giving greetings to their families back home, assuring family and friends of their safety. She would intersperse their recordings with subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at U.S. military prospects.

Listener Bait

The updates from the soldiers were “listener bait,” and the real message was what Mildred Gillars wrapped around those updates about U.S. servicemen. Some examples of her messaging:

“Mothers and dads in America, you’ve no idea what hell your boys have been through. And to thank, they’ve got Franklin D. Roosevelt who promised you American mothers that no American boy would be sacrificed on foreign battlefields. I only wish you could get a little glimpse of the conflict going on in Normandy. Well, Roosevelt asked you to do it for him and you did. Wait until some of these human wrecks get back home once again. You won’t be able to recognize some of them. Believe me, I’ve seen them. Well, this is Midge signing off . . . Good night, America!”

“It’s a disgrace to the American public that they don’t wake up to the fact of what Franklin D. Roosevelt is doing to the gentiles or your country and my country . . . This is a Jewish war and I refuse to participate in it and insist on fighting against it.”

Mildred Gillars mugshot

At the end of the war, Mildred tried to melt back into German society and struggled, with the rest of the country, to move past the trauma of the war. But she knew the U.S. military was still looking for her. In 1946, Mildred Gillars was placed under arrest.

Guilty

In 1949, Mildred was brought to trial in the United States. Armed with transcripts of her broadcasts and eyewitness accounts of soldiers she had interviewed, prosecutors initially charged her with 10 counts of aiding the enemy.

Mildred fought back. She was forced to sign a loyalty oath to Germany out of fear of imprisonment or even death, she said. She claimed Otto Koischwitz held such influence over her that she was virtually hypnotized and helpless to resist when doing her broadcasts.

In the end, the jury found Mildred guilty on just one count of treason – involving a radio play that dramatized an American invasion of Germany, resulting in huge losses. The purpose was to undermine U.S. confidence in the D-Day mission.

Prison

Mildred appealed, claiming freedom of speech protected her, but the appeals court ruled against her. The result was a 10- to 30-year prison sentence for Axis Sally.

Mildred Gillars would spend 13 years in prison in West Virginia before she won parole. She passed up her first chance at parole, apparently unprepared to face the public. When she was finally released in 1961, camera crews awaited her at the prison gate, asking for her thoughts and plans as she made ready to leave with her half-sister.

For once, however, the sultry voice that floated over the airwaves for countless hours during the war had been quieted.

“After 15 years, you don’t feel like having much to say,” she politely explained.

Mildred Gillars would return to Ohio, earn her degree from Ohio Wesleyan and spend some time teaching before finally shutting herself away in a convent, where she died in 1988.

This story was updated in 2022.

1 comment 2.5K views

Remembering Martin Bergen, From Beaneaters Star to Murder-Suicide

In the summer of 1934, three very different lives converged in North Brookfield, Mass.: song-and-dance man George M. Cohan; Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack; and Martin Bergen, a Boston Beaneater who murdered his family and killed himself 34 years previously.

George M. Cohan takes an at-bat as Connie Mack catches, July 10, 1934. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

North Brookfield

All three had grown up in or near North Brookfield. Cohan, born in 1878, spent summers in North Brookfield at his grandmother’s house when he wasn’t traveling on the vaudeville circuit with his family. He loved the town. His musical Fifty Miles From Boston was inspired by North Brookfield and includes the song Harrigan.

In 1934, Cohan told a reporter, “I’ve knocked around everywhere, but there’s no place like North Brookfield.”

Geoge M. Cohan on Broadway

Cornelius McGillicuddy, better known as Connie Mack, was born Dec. 22, 1862 in East Brookfield, Mass., to a large Irish family. He quit school at 16 to work in a shoe factory and help support his family. He played baseball, or what was then called town ball, any chance he could get.

In 1886 he began his 10-year career as a light-hitting catcher in the National League. Then he went on to manage, and become part owner, of the Philadelphia Athletics for 50 seasons. He won, lost and managed more games than anyone in baseball history, and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937.

Martin Bergen

Martin Bergen. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

Martin Bergen was also a catcher, and some said he was the best defensive catcher ever to play the game. He was born on a farm in 1871 in North Brookfield.

From 1896 to 1899, he played for the Boston Beaneaters (later the Braves), growing increasingly erratic. Sometimes he would disappear for days. Once he suddenly slapped a teammate without provocation. He claimed people were trying to poison him and he began to walk sideways so he could detect his potential assassins.

His teammates mistook his behavior for alcoholism, but Martin Bergen suffered from mental illness.

When his three-year-old son died in the summer of 1899, Martin Bergen complained his teammates kept reminding him of his son’s death. Some of the Beaneaters, on the other hand, said they wouldn’t play the next year if he were still on the team.

Boston Beaneaters in 1897

On Jan. 19, 1900, Martin took an axe and bludgeoned to death his wife and two small children. He then slashed his own throat so savagely his head was nearly severed. Doctors concluded he had schizophrenia and possibly manic depression.

Cohan and Mack knew Martin Bergen. Mack had played baseball with him. Mack and Cohan had become friends, and in 1934 they helped collect enough money to establish a granite monument to Martin Bergen at his gravesite in St. Joseph Cemetery.

Connie Mack Day

The Brookfield Chamber of Commerce planned July 10, 1934 as a special day to dedicate the monument. George M. Cohan agreed to play master of ceremonies. He asked Connie Mack if his Philadelphia Athletics, on pace for a losing season, would play a top town team, the Armortreds.

Ironically, the day to honor Martin Bergen became Connie Mack Day. The town bedecked itself in patriotic bunting and American flags. The 181^st Infantry Band serenaded a crowd of 6,000 with tunes. NBC broadcast the game, with Cohan doing the play-by-play when he wasn’t umpiring or sitting next to Connie Mack, eating hot dogs or signing autographs.

Connie Mack, 1911

After the Athletics lost 9-5, Connie Mack spoke to the crowd:

I cannot begin to tell you the pleasure it has given me to come back to North Brookfield today. It was 51 years ago on the Fourth of July that I played my last ball game on this common … And I lost that one too. I don’t know if I have set foot on this field since.

Mack had returned to North Brookfield 34 years earlier to attend Martin Bergen’s funeral. Only two others had joined him for the sad ceremony: his brother Bill Bergen and his teammate Billy Hamilton.

The inscription on the monument read, “In memory of Martin Bergen, 1871–1900. Member of the Boston National League Club. Erected in appreciation of his contribution to American’s national game.”

With thanks to Connie Mack: A Life in Baseball By Ted Davis. This story about Martin Bergen was updated in 2022.

4 comments 2.8K views

‘Havlicek Stole the Ball!’: The Greatest Broadcast Moment Ever in Basketball

To the New England sports fan, the phrase ‘Havlicek stole the ball!’ is as profound and as personal as ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ is to Irish Democrats.

Johnny Most high above courtside.

‘Havlicek stole the ball!’ was the most famous radio call in basketball history. The lore about it is as much about the colorful radio announcer Johnny Most as it is about the Boston Celtics’ all-time high scorer, John Havlicek.

Most was the radio voice of the Celtics during the team’s golden era, from 1953 to 1990. Many fans would watch the game on television with the sound turned down and Johnny Most turned up.

High Above Courtside

Johnny Most was born on June 15, 1923 in New York City and named after his grandfather, Johann Most, an anarchist newspaper editor. After Most served with distinction as an aerial gunner in World War II, he went into broadcasting.

He established himself high above courtside in the old Boston Garden, back in the day when fans could run into players on the way to their seats. He called games in a voice that sounded like a cheese grater. His explanation: he gargled with Saniflush.

Newspaper reporters who sat beneath Most had to dodge his long cigarette ashes that fluttered down through the floorboards. He once dropped a cigarette into his lap and set his pants on fire while on the air.

Havlicek Stole The Ball

He was a notorious homer who — according to one referee — could cause a riot at High Mass. To Most, the game was a morality play in which his beloved Celtics were the good guys and the opposing players were thugs and cheats.

He didn’t like Lakers star Wilt Chamberlain one little bit. In 1969, the Lakers were favored to win the NBA championship. When the Celtics arrived at the Lakers’ Forum for the final game, they found thousands of victory balloons tied to the ceiling, the USC Trojan Marching band on the sidelines and cases of champagne stacked outside the Lakers’ locker room. During the game, Chamberlain famously left the court with a knee injury, but wanted back in when his replacement started producing. The Celtics won that game, and the championship. Most was not gracious:

We busted their balloons! The USC Band is packing their instruments and all the champagne has suddenly gone flat. And then there’s poor Wilt, who probably is icing his boo-boo right now while picking up a crying towel.

Johnny Most was also a poet who published a volume of poetry called Feelings: Private Thoughts and Poems.

‘Havlicek Stole the Ball’

John Havlicek

It was on April 15, 1965 that Havlicek stole the ball, during the closing seconds of Game 7 against the Philadelphia 76ers in the 1965 Eastern Conference Finals. The Celtics’ lead had melted away to one point. Philadelphia had the ball out of bounds and a good chance to win. Philadelphia guard Hal Greer tossed the ball to Chet Walker, but Havlicek tipped the ball to Celtic Sam Jones in one of the greatest NBA plays ever.

From his perch high above courtside, Most screamed over the WHDH airwaves:

Greer is putting the ball in play. He gets it out deep and Havlicek steals it! Over to Sam Jones! Havlicek stole the ball! It’s all over. It’s all over! Johnny Havlicek is being mobbed by the fans!

The Celtics won, 110-109, and delirious fans carried Havlicek off the court. The Celtics went on to win their seventh consecutive championship.

Johnny Most, Bernard Cardinal Law and Mayor Ray Flynn celebrating the Celtics’ championship at City Hall in 1984.

Later in his career Most was notorious for nicknaming opposing players. Magic Johnson was ‘Crybaby,’ Isiah Thomas was ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ and Washington Bullets players Rick Mahorn and Jeff Ruland were interchangeably ‘McFilthy’ and ‘McNasty.’ Most especially hated Detroit Pistons player Bill Laimbeer, a ‘dirty rotten player’ he nicknamed ‘Big Baby.’ (Watch Most trash the opposing teams here.)

He retired in 1990 due to failing health. Johnny Most died on Jan. 4, 1993, in Hyannis, Mass. John Havlicek died on April 25, 2019, having suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

This story was updated in 2023. Photo of Most in 1984 courtesy By City of Boston Archives from West Roxbury, United States CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65419210

11 comments 5.6K views

Newer Posts

Older Posts