Mel Allen - Early Life and Career

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.