Graham McNamee (1888–1942) was the most recognized
voice of the Roaring Twenties, remembered for a play by
play presence that evoked the excitement and spontaneity
of the moment that set a standard of announcing excellence
in infant radio.
Graham McNamee was the only child born to Annie
Liebold and John Bernard McNamee in Washington,
D.C., where his father worked as legal adviser to the Interior Department. When he was six, the family moved to
St. Paul, Minnesota, where McNamee’s father became
counsel for the Northern Pacific Railroad. The youth’s
father wanted him to be a lawyer, his mother, a pianist and
singer at local churches, pushed him into voice lessons.
Graham was awkward socially and turned his nervous
energy to baseball, football, basketball, and semi-pro
hockey. After high school, he drifted into jobs as railroad clerk and door-to-door salesman for the Armor Meat
Packing Company.
When McNamee’s father died in 1912, he moved with his
mother to Weehawken, New Jersey, so McNamee could pursue voice training and a singing career in nearby New York.
It was a struggle. McNamee found New York “overcrowded
with ambitious singers” (McNamee 1926, 13). McNamee
took and gave singing lessons and sang as a soloist in area
churches before moving to New York, where he led a precarious life singing in light and grand opera. The highpoint
came when the baritone debuted as a concert singer at New
York’s Aeolian Hall on November 22, 1920.
By the summer of 1923 McNamee, who had married
soprano Josephine Garrett on May 3, 1921, walked into the
American Telephone and Telegraph office on lower Broadway, hoping to audition for a singing role on the radio.
WEAF was then one of five hundred radio stations serving barely one million receiving sets nationwide. It had
broadcast the 1922 Chicago–Princeton game from Stagg
Field and boasted an experimental network that extended to
Boston, Washington, and Providence. McNamee was hired
as a part-time singer and staff announcer, “coaching and
rehearsing artists,” and charged with “the handling of temperamental singers” (McNamee 1926, 37). He was “more
shaky than the fighters” (38) when broadcasting Harry
Greb’s fifteen-round defeat of Johnny Wilson for the middleweight crown on the evening of August 31, 1923, but fan
letters thought otherwise. McNamee solidified his growing
reputation six weeks later in calling three mammoth Babe
Ruth home runs that vaulted the New York Yankees to their
first World Series championship against the arch rival New
York Giants.
McNamee “got quite a thrill” (McNamee 1926, 44) in
reporting big sporting events, an enthusiasm quickly communicated to listeners in a freely flowing style that searched
for the hidden detail that made the moment. There was little
advertising in early radio, allowing McNamee long periods
of improvisation. Although he would go on to broadcast to
millions he imagined his listeners individually, seeking to
make each feel “that he or she is there with me in the press
stand” (McNamee 1926, 52–53) seeing and feeling what
McNamee was experiencing. Sports writer Heywood Broun
spoke for many when he said McNamee was unsurpassed
in giving listeners a vivid sense of movement and emotion.
McNamee had raised announcing, he thought, to “the kingdom of art” (McNamee 1926, vii).
McNamee broadcast from the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 1924 and reported the return
of Charles Lindbergh to the United States in 1927. But he
was best known and is most remembered for his sports
broadcasting. Annual gatherings of the Kentucky Derby,
Indianapolis 500, and Rose Bowl were incomplete without
McNamee’s call of the contest. Few could forget McNamee’s
reporting on Ruth’s called shot home run at Wrigley Field
against the Chicago Cubs on October 1, 1932. But what he
saw as the greatest moment in sports history had come in the
same city five years before. An estimated worldwide audience of one hundred million was listening in on September
22, 1927, when McNamee, reporting for the newly created
National Broadcasting Company, called the heavyweight
championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. In the middle of the seventh round with Dempsey, the
fan favorite behind in points, the audience heard McNamee
suddenly say, “Dempsey comes back with a hard right to
Tunney’s face. Ohhh. Dempsey comes on with a right. He’s
got Tunney against the ropes. There’s another right landing
on the champion’s jaw. There’s another right and Tunney is
down. Tunney is down.” Ten men were so overcome with
listening excitement they dropped dead of heart attacks.
They did not live to discover that Tunney survived the “long
count” when Dempsey didn’t go to a neutral corner and that
Tunney won the fight.
Such was the power of Graham McNamee’s voice on
the public imagination. The rise of commercial radio in
the thirties with its proliferation of stations would tighten
formats by creating schedules that diminished McNamee’s
impact. Two years after his divorce in February 1932, he
married Ann Lee Sims. By this time he was widely recognized as an important force in the development of early
radio and for generations that followed the prototype sports
broadcaster.
Further Reading
Banning, William Peck. Commercial Broadcasting Pioneer: The
WEAF Experiment, 1922–1926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1946.
Barber, Red. The Broadcasters. New York: Dial Press, 1970.
Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1942.
Douglas, George H. The Early Days of Radio Broadcasting. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland Publishing, 1987.
Evensen, Bruce J. When Dempsey Fought Tunney: Heroes,
Hokum, and Storytelling in the Jazz Age. Knoxville: University pf Tennessee Press, 1996.
McNamee, Graham. You’re on the Air. New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1926.
New York Times, May 10, 1942.
National Broadcasting Company Papers. State Historical Society
of Wisconsin, Madison.
Towers, Wayne M. “World Series Coverage in New York City in
the 1920’s.” Journalism Monographs 73 (1981).
Bruce J. Evensen