Washington DC Baseball

[GeoPoto]

I think Bucky was thrilled just to be the boy wonder. Johnson and Peckinpaugh were established national stars. The Carry's Ice Cream piece is unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it. Thanks for the show.

A week before the World series, syndicated columnist and future American icon Will Rogers, who ranched about 40 miles from the Johnson family spread in Coffeyville, Kansas, wrote that if Walter Johnson had played for John McGraw's New York Giants all those years, he would have had to be incompetent to have lost even a single game. Johnson, Rogers declared, could be sure that he caried more good wishes than any man, let alone athlete, who'd ever entered any competition in the entire history of America. After a "diligent search" of 150 years, Rogers wrote, Washington had finally found an honest man.

Nonetheless, since Walter Johnson had waited this long for his first World Series, he now had a platform for exposure that the Series could not have provided previously. The world was changing at a pace like never before. The automobile was now affordable to most Americans -- the Ford Model T sold for $260 brand new. The first coast-to-coast airplane flight had taken place in 1923. By now, the radio receiver was commonplace in the average home. This World Series would be broadcast over the airwaves of WRC in Washington, which had opened as the city's first radio station that summer. The previous year the Series had been broadcast in its entirety for the first time by the team of Graham McNamee, who'd given up a professional singing career to become a radio announcer, and Grantland Rice. By the spring of 1925, all the Nats' road games would be broadcast on station WRC.

Two days before the Series began, Walter Johnson and Bucky Harris both spoke into a radio microphone for the first time. The gratitude they expressed to their fans across the country, and their promise of a World Championship victory, were broadcast across the nation over the NBC network. Western Union had strung 75,000 miles of cable to scoreboards in cities across the U.S., and wire services were available in approximately 200 other locations.

Nats fans wait in line for 1924 World Series tickets:

https://www.net54baseball.com/attach...1&d=1678786064