Palmer, at forty-eight, symbolized the country’s familiar syncopation of mainstream media, and in a broader sense, life as it had always been. He was racing’s press box bard, a Kentucky native with a master’s degree who had taught college English before switching to journalism. He brought wit and literacy to all of his endeavors—books on breeding and racing, columns in the Blood-Horse, and his beat work and “Views of the Turf.” column in the New York Herald Tribune. He was also heard by millions on CBS radio’s national broadcasts of major races.
“Joe was one of the great writers of our era, a tremendous composer of English,” said John Derr, who worked as an announcer, producer, and executive for CBS radio and TV for more than a quarter century beginning shortly after World War II. “Clem McCarthy had been our race-caller and Joe came in and did a wonderful job. He did the radio broadcast of a number of Native Dancer’s races [as a two-year-old in 1952], and people fell in love with the horse, with the way Joe described him in such endearing terms.”
Newspapers and radio were long established as the country’s fundamental conduits of images, information, and opinion, the channels through which racing—or any popular endeavor—was presented to most of the public. Palmer was at the forefront, a respected pro who was brilliant on deadline and generous in spirit. He worked with binoculars and a flask of bourbon in front of him and rows of admiring colleagues behind him, and no one was better at bringing to life the horses and horse people the public couldn’t see.
Then he went to the Kentucky Derby in 1952, and suddenly, his kingdom was being threatened. The usual 100,000 spectators filled Churchill Downs and watched Eddie Arcaro’s winning ride on Hill Gail, but a TV audience estimated at 10 million also watched on CBS. Palmer worked the radio broadcast and wrote a story in the Herald Tribune, but for the first time, his words and images merely supported what many in the public had seen for themselves.
He was dead before the year was over, just as racing, encouraged by the popular Derby telecast, stood at the threshold of a new era. It was about to be seen consistently for the first time by the vast audiences rushing to TV, which had emerged from radio’s shadow since World War II and become a powerful force, expanding in size and influence as rapidly as any instrument in history. The Dancer, championed as a two-year-old in the trusted organs of Palmer’s heyday—newspapers, radio, newsreels, and weekly magazines—would now be followed unlike any great horse before him: with a TV signal beaming a live view of his brilliance into millions of homes.
Such staggering fame had seemed unthinkable in 1939 when the National Broadcasting Company sent out its inaugural TV signal to four hundred “receiving sets” in New York, the nation’s TV audience. Early programmers were drawn to sports because most of the sets were in bars; within five months in 1939, NBC broadcast the first televised sports event, a Princeton-Columbia baseball game, and the first televised boxing match, tennis match, pro football game, and major league baseball game. The NFL game featured a kicker for the Brook-
lyn Dodgers named Ralph Kercheval. With millions of radio listeners still entranced by programs such as Amos ’n’ Andy and Fibber McGee and Molly, and early TV pictures ranging anywhere from murky to indecipherable, it was hard to imagine TV making a dent in radio’s grip on the broadcast market.
“We watched TV in bars,” recalled Clem Florio, a New York-area boxer and horseplayer in the 1940s, “and also, the stores that sold appliances always had TV going. The wrestling matches. They would drone on and on, and people would be out on the street, packed around the store window, looking in. That was TV. You’d go, ‘This is coming from Madison Square Garden and we’re in Ozone Park. How’d they do that?’ We’d watch it and then read about it the next day. It was a miracle. We’d first heard about it at the World’s Fair in 1939. They had an exhibit. Then they started showing the wrestling matches. They’d hold on to each other for hours, the most boring stuff in the world. They finally got smart and livened it up with guys gouging each other and fighting with the referee and stuff. They were trying to sell the product—the TV sets, not the wrestling.”
Production of sets was halted during World War II, and only seven thousand were in use in 1946. But then mass-produced sets with long-lasting cathode-ray tubes began selling more briskly after the war. “It all started to pick up after the war,” Florio recalled. “That was the first time we saw the [boxing] fights. I did some exhibition boxing for TV, got paid two hundred a fight to box two rounds with a guy in my stable. I was white and dark-haired, and the other guy had to be blond, or black. They had to have contrast. It was going out as an exhibit. They were trying to figure out how to broadcast it, going through a learning process. They would ask you to stay on one side of the ring, or close to this or that spot. They were trying to figure out the angles.”
In 1948, NBC hired Milton Berle to host the TV version of a popular radio show, The Texaco Star Theater. A rubber-faced comedian weaned on vaudeville shtick, Berle was an instant hit with TV audiences able to see his slapstick, sight gags, and mild vulgarities. He made the cover of Time and Newsweek in 1949, and as his popularity soared, so, almost directly, did that of the nascent medium. Friends met in homes with TV to watch Berle’s show, then went out and bought their own sets. An industry formed around the CBS, NBC, ABC, and DuMont networks, which organized schedules and developed programming.
Radio had controlled 81 percent of the broadcast audience when Berle first appeared, but it lost half of its listeners within two years. Movie attendance dropped 70 percent. Television was taking over. Ten million American homes had sets by 1951. The total had surpassed 17 million when Arcaro crossed the finish line on Hill Gail on the first Saturday of May 1952.
It was mostly an urban phenomenon at first: almost half of the 1.1 million TV sets in use in 1949 were in New York City, with most of the rest in other major cities. Small towns and rural communities were left out, unable to pick up signals from urban transmitting stations. But with movie theaters and minor-league baseball circuits closing in droves as city dwellers opted to be entertained in their living rooms, all barriers limiting TV’s growth were bound to fall. The last obstacle was cleared with the laying of a signal-carrying coaxial cable stretching from coast to coast, completed in 1951. Now small towns and rural communities could have TV, too.
The first coast-to-coast national TV broadcast was on September 14, 1951, when millions watched President Harry Truman address the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco. A month later, I Love Lucy premiered on CBS, starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as a young couple in New York. Critics were dubious at first, but the half-hour comedy soon had a weekly audience of more than 7 million viewers. On April 7, 1952, an episode of Lucy became the first American show seen in more than 10 million homes.
Television was rapidly replacing radio as the modern version of the village storyteller. For a majority of the public, there simply was no comparison between listening to a program or major event and actually seeing it. “Television brought the outside world into the home in a way that had never existed before,” recalled Leonard Koppett, a Herald Tribune sportswriter in the early 1950s. “People in the twenties had been completely knocked out by the phenomenon of radio, and that was just a voice box. They still got most of their information from newspapers, and few of them actually saw anything they read about. Everyone knew about Man O’ War, but who had seen him run? Then along came TV, and no matter how scratchy the picture was, the connection experience was astounding. People went, ‘Hey, this event is happening right now, it’s important, and I’m looking at it I don’t know how this is happening, but it’s fantastic.’ ”
Observing the public’s fascination with the visual medium, Herald Tribune critic John Crosby presciently wrote that “the revolution in the entertainment world is only dimly understood [now].” For that matter, the revolution in basic human perceptions was only dimly understood. “Before TV, the printed word was the way you learned something,” Koppett said. “When TV ca
me along, it became the printed word in combination with a visual image. It was a wholly different internalizing process.”
Berle’s popularity was the first example of TV’s ability to bond onair personalities with individuals in a sweeping audience. The awesome power of that connection was soon demonstrated in other ways. After Senator Kefauver and his anticrime panel grilled mobsters on live TV in 1951, the obscure Kefauver became a presidential candidate in 1952. Coverage of that year’s political conventions drew vast audiences and turned news anchors such as CBS’s Walter Cronkite into household names. In September 1952, when it was reported that wealthy California businessmen were giving money to Republican vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon to help cover his personal expenses, Nixon went on national TV—on a Tuesday night, after Berle’s show—and tried to clear his name in front of millions of viewers.
Sports also boomed in the early TV days. Boxing was a perfect fit, with dramatic, action-packed bouts taking place in tight, camerafriendly confines. The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, a weekly series of Friday night bouts, drew large audiences after debuting in 1948 on NBC, and soon as many as six boxing programs were on every week, featuring Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore, and numerous lesser lights who became well known strictly because of TV. Boxing had a brief fling as the nation’s sports obsession. Harness racing soared in 1949 and 1950 when NBC aired a show from New York’s Roosevelt Raceway several nights a week. Bowling shows were also popular, leading to the opening of hundreds of new bowling alleys across the country. “The ability of TV to determine the popularity of sports was instantly evident,” Koppett said.
Major league baseball and college and pro football were also programming mainstays, but they experienced notable drops in attendance at televised games. Sales of tickets for televised boxing cards also fell sharply. Suddenly, sports decision-makers were dubious about the marriage of TV and sports. Was the exposure gained from televising an event worth the apparent damage inflicted on ticket sales?
Opinion was divided. Tim Mara, owner of pro football’s New York Giants, said, “There isn’t the slightest doubt that TV murders you.” Branch Rickey, baseball’s famed builder of pennant-winners, wrote an essay titled “TV Can Kill Baseball.” Grantland Rice labeled TV “a raging storm spear-headed by a wrecking cyclone.” On the other side, more farsighted leaders such as Ned Irish, vice president of New York’s Madison Square Garden, correctly sensed that exposing a sport to TV’s vast audience was worth any short-term loss in revenue.
Alfred Vanderbilt agreed with Irish, becoming an immediate and outspoken advocate of the new medium. “He embraced TV,” Clyde Roche recalled. “He thought the best thing to happen for racing was to build a big public audience for the sport at the highest level. He liked traditional things, but he also was very open to new ideas. It was a conflict in his personality.”
His daughter Heidi recalled, “Dad was a proponent of TV. We watched it all the time. It was really important to the way he was with us. There was a set in the living room and another upstairs in the bedroom. We watched the cowboy shows and Howdy Doody with Dad. I’d sit on his lap when he watched the news in the morning. We watched Omnibus and Kukla, Fran and Ollie. And we always watched the races, of course.”
Vanderbilt advanced the marriage of racing and TV in several ways. When his friend CBS president Bill Paley was looking for an announcer for a broadcast of the 1947 Belmont, Vanderbilt volunteered. He coolly handled forty minutes of interviews and chitchat before ex-
plaining to viewers that he had to go “because I have a horse in the next race.” John Crosby reviewed him favorably. “When you were on TV,” Alfred Vanderbilt III said, “all of your friends saw you and they’d call you up and say, ‘Hey, Alfred, I saw you on TV.’ What a great novelty. He was still young enough to enjoy it.”
Sam Renick, a jockey who had ridden for Vanderbilt, became racing’s first identifiable TV analyst after Vanderbilt suggested that, with his talkative nature, he was suited to broadcasting. When Pimlico needed a sponsor to get on the air in the late forties, Vanderbilt reeled in help from his late father-in-law’s company, Bromo-Seltzer. “He understood very quickly what TV was about, how powerful it was, and that it was a way to show people how exciting racing was,” Alfred Vanderbilt III said.
Despite Vanderbilt’s position, racing proceeded cautiously in TV’s early years, tiptoeing through the tracks of the learning curve set by other sports. Most track operators remained skeptical, refusing to show their feature races to afternoon audiences. “You can’t sell a product and give it away at the same time,” insisted Bill Corum, a former New York sportswriter who became president of Churchill Downs.
“The track owners and operators believed if we put the races on, people would stay home. We couldn’t convince them otherwise,” said Tommy Roberts, a longtime TV racing broadcaster and executive. “The only ones who saw the possibilities at the time were Vanderbilt and old Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons. Fitz said, ‘This is the greatest thing, what a window into our world. People can see the fine clothes and celebrities and horses and color.’ He was right. But the rest of the racing fraternity couldn’t see it.”
There were other problems as well. Even though racing’s popularity was soaring, the Kefauver investigation into organized crime was a fresh memory, and many sponsors were reluctant to have their names and products associated with any endeavor involving gambling. “We couldn’t give racing away, to be honest,” CBS’s John Derr said. “Couldn’t give away golf or tennis, either. Wrestling was no problem. Boxing was no problem. But we couldn’t find anyone to sponsor racing even when Bing Crosby was involved.”
Racing’s TV exposure was limited to occasional local broadcasts through the early fifties. The first TV show ever aired in Baltimore was the opening of Pimlico’s fall meeting in 1947, with newspapermen calling the races and models putting on a fashion show on the clubhouse roof to keep viewers tuned in between races. Two races a day were broadcast through the meeting, but the impact was minimal with the city’s TV audience limited to four hundred or five hundred sets in bars. In 1948, CBS televised the Belmont and Preakness live in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and NBC broadcast races from local tracks several times a week in New York, with Clem McCarthy and Fred Caposella calling them.
“Citation ran at Garden State Park one time, and CBS sent Ted Husing down to do the race on TV,” Tommy Roberts recalled. “Ted was a legendary radio announcer, but he had never called a horse race. The producer said, ‘Look, Citation will go to the front and all you have to do is look for those silks and say, “He’s in front, Citation is in front… he’s still in front.”’ That race was shown only on local TV in Philadelphia.”
When racing’s attendance continued to soar in these early years, unlike the attendance for sports seen more often on TV, Corum and other racing officials were hailed for their prudent handling of the TV “raging storm.” Racing was booming, with Joe Palmer and his colleagues—newspaper columnists such as Red Smith and Rice, and radio race-callers such as Bryan Field and McCarthy—telling the stories, painting the images, and creating the legends. As had been the case for decades, the general public’s only chance to eyeball top horses came in the brief newsreels shown in movie theaters before the feature.
“Movietone newsreels were where you got images of events,” recalled Tim Capps, the racing executive and author. “They showed the races a lot. The newsreels were how my father learned what Whirlaway and Count Fleet looked like. That was the only way people saw racing. If you didn’t grow up in an area with a track, you didn’t see a horse race unless you saw the Movietone newsreels. Then TV came along and transformed the world of people who watched sports.”
Indeed, TV was growing so quickly and becoming so prevalent that it was impossible to resist. Many racetrack operators were less worried than they admitted in public, believing they could handle more TV exposure without experiencing a precipitous drop in attendance because, as Red Smith wrote, “
until someone builds a set with a built-in mutuel window, every new fan created by TV will eventually show up at the track.”
After refraining from allowing any broadcast of the Kentucky Derby through 1948, fearful of harming attendance, Churchill Downs allowed a delayed local broadcast in 1949. The next year, Field called the race into a CBS microphone, took a film of the race to the airport, and boarded a private plane for Dayton, Ohio, the city nearest Louisville with coaxial cable. (Louisville didn’t get it until 1951.) The plane was equipped with a special device for developing film, and that night, four hours after the race, CBS viewers saw a tape of Middleground’s victory. DuMont used the same complicated process to show racing from Hialeah that year; the first six races at the South Florida track were filmed in the afternoon, and the films were flown to New York and broadcast that night.
The first live national telecast of a race came on November 16, 1951, months after the job of laying the coaxial cable from coast to coast had been completed. CBS televised the Pimlico Special from Baltimore, with Dave Woods, Vanderbilt’s longtime racing publicist, calling the race and urging viewers to participate in a Red Cross blood drive for U.S. soldiers fighting in Korea. The size of the viewing audience for the twenty-five-minute sponsor-free broadcast wasn’t estimated, but the obscure $15,000 race, won by a colt named Bryan G., was surely seen by more eyes than any previous race in American history.
Months later, Churchill Downs reluctantly consented to the live national broadcast of the 1952 Derby. Corum predicted the show would command the “largest TV audience ever to view an on-the-spot event,” but, ever dubious, he was careful to mute his enthusiasm in announcing the one-year deal he described as “experimental.” Said Corum, “We’re going to study the effect on the size of the crowd, betting and such before committing ourselves to any future contracts.”
CBS went all out. Judson Bailey, the executive director of CBS-
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