More Lateral than Literal

The crisp, compelling voice said: "This is Bill Stern wishing you all a good, good night . . ." With that sign-off last week, dark, dapper Bill Stern ended the sooth program on his .Sport newsreel (Fri. 10:30 p.m., NBC) and rounded out ten years for the same sponsor, Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Co. Since few sports-comment programs ever get on a national network, and even fewer last, Stern's decade on the air is unequaled in radio's short history.

Over the years his devoted listeners have heard amazing stories, described by Stern as "profiles and portraits for posterity." During the war he told them how

Partisan Primo Camera, after killing dozens of Germans, was executed by the Nazis. Last fall, hale & hearty, non-Partisan Camera broadcast over Stern's show. Another time they heard that Abraham Lincoln's dying words, breathed to Colonel Abner Doubleday, inspired him to invent baseball, and that Thomas A. Edison's deafness came about after he was beaned in a ball game by Pitcher Jesse James.

These and similar whoppers, punctuated by dramatic organ chords, have raised eyebrows and blood pressure among sport-writers. The late Lloyd Lewis blasted the Lincoln story in a sports page editorial in the Chicago Daily News; the New York Herald Tribune's Red Smith devoted a column to Stern fancies. Some editors, like the New York World-Telegram's Joe Williams, feel that Sports Newsreel is a misnomer. To Stern, the point is scarcely worth arguing. "It isn't a sports show, it's entertainment for the same kind of people who listen to Jack Benny," he says, then adds defensively: "If there's a story that I know to be factual, I'll say so--but that's seldom the case."

His critics complain that Stern's casualness about facts sometimes carries over into his straight announcing chores. At one Notre Dame football game Stern announced that a player named Zilly was off on an 80-yard run. As the ball carrier passed the five-yard line, Stern discovered that the incipient hero was actually named Sitko. With scarcely a fractional pause, Stern cried: "Zilly's just thrown a lateral to Sitko!" Sportcaster Ted Husing was still brooding about this when Stern, before starting his current racetrack telecasts from Belmont Park, asked him for pointers. "I can't help you, Bill," said Husing. "There's no way to lateral a horse."

Stern's annual income of around $150,-ooo comes largely from his Colgate stipend of $2,500 weekly and his salary as sports director of NBC. It is pieced out by his M-G-M newsreel work, magazine articles and sports shorts for Columbia Pictures. But he feels that the era of great announcers is at an end. "We used to be the public's eyes; now television is," said Stern. "The TV audience just wants a few words from us ... I'm going to try hard to fit into TV, but I'm sure I'll talk too much."

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