Early Life and Career
Allen was born Melvin Allen Israel in Birmingham, Alabama. (Biographer Stephen Borelli noted that he added the second middle name Avrom after his deceased grandfather.) The future sportscaster first studied law, but a boyhood love for baseball led him to become first a sports columnist and then a radio announcer. He attended the University of Alabama, where he was a member of the Kappa Nu Fraternity as an undergraduate and then went on to earn a law degree.
During his time at Alabama, Israel served as the public address announcer for Alabama home football games. In 1933, when the station manager or sports director of Birmingham's radio station WBRC asked Alabama coach Frank Thomas to recommend a new play-by-play announcer, he suggested the 20-year-old Israel. His first broadcast was Alabama's home opener that year, against Tulane.
Soon after graduating from Alabama University law school in 1937, Allen took a train to New York City for a week's vacation. As it turned out, that one week stretched out to 60 years; he settled in New York and lived in the New York metropolitan area (first in New York City, then southwestern Connecticut) for the rest of his life.
While on that week's vacation, he auditioned for a staff announcer's position at the CBS Radio Network. CBS executives already knew of Allen; the network's top sportscaster, Ted Husing, had heard many of his Crimson Tide broadcasts. He was hired at $45 a week. He often did non-sports announcing such as for big band remotes, or "emceeing" game shows such as Truth or Consequences, serving as an understudy for both sportscaster Husing and newscaster Bob Trout.
In his first year at CBS, he announced the crash of the Hindenburg when the station cut away from singer Kate Smith's show. He first became a national celebrity when he ad libbed for a half-hour during the rain-delayed Vanderbilt Cup from an airplane.
In 1939, he was the announcer for the Warner Brothers & Vitaphone film musical short-subject, On the Air, with Leith Stevens and the Saturday Night Swing Club.
Read more about this topic: Mel Allen
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“I have always had something to live besides a personal life. And I suspected very early that to live merely in an experience of, in an expression of, in a positive delight in the human cliches could be no business of mine.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)
“I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly you find—at the age of fifty, say—that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about.... It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.”
—Agatha Christie (1891–1976)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)