Today's Tidbit... The Way It Was With Oklahoma Football Broadcasts

While researching yesterday's Tidbit about Bennie Owen, the longtime Oklahoma football, basketball, and baseball coach, I stumbled across a 1937 image identifying Oklahoma football's first radio play-by-play announcer.

Our radio man grew up in Kansas City and Houston. The editor of his high school newspaper, he enrolled at Texas as a less-than-enthusiastic student, lasting a year or two while working at the student newspaper and the Houston Post, eventually leaving school to do radio work. That took him back to Kansas City in 1936, where he worked for radio station KCMO doing, among other things, play-by-play accounts of games based on brief descriptions received via telegraph. (Ronald Reagan famously performed the same function for an Iowa radio station earlier that decade.)

In 1937, our intrepid reporter joined the United Press syndicate and was hired by Oklahoma City station KCY as Oklahoma football’s first radio play-by-play announcer. That reporter/announcer was Walter Cronkite.

Walter Cronkite interviewed an Oklahoma player and coach Tom Stidham in 1937 (Sooner Sports).

One of Cronkite's job requirements was to move to Norman for the football season to get the inside scoop on the team and conduct mid-week interviews and feature stories. Of course, the feature broadcasts on Saturday afternoons allowed Oklahomans to monitor Sooner games from their homes for the first time.