Curt Gowdy

Curtis Edward Gowdy (July 31, 1919 – February 20, 2006) was an American sportscaster. He called Boston Red Sox games on radio and TV for 15 years, and then covered many nationally televised sporting events, primarily for NBC Sports and ABC Sports in the 1960s and 1970s. He coined the nickname "The Granddaddy of Them All" for the Rose Bowl Game, taking the moniker from Cheyenne Frontier Days in his native Wyoming.

The son of Ruth and Edward "Jack" Gowdy (Curt's father was a manager and dispatcher for the Union Pacific railroad ), Curtis Edward (Curt) Gowdy was born in Green River, Wyoming, and moved to Cheyenne at age six. As a high school basketball player in the 1930s, he led the state in scoring. He also showed an early interest in journalism, serving as sports editor of his high school newspaper. He enrolled at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, where he was a 5 ft 9 in (175 cm) starter on the basketball team and played varsity tennis, lettering three years in both sports for the Cowboys. He was also a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.^{[citation needed]}

After graduating in 1942 with a degree in business statistics, he entered the army, where he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant. Gowdy planned to become a fighter pilot, but a ruptured disk in his spine from a previous sports injury cut short his military service in the Air Force, leading to a medical discharge in 1943. Gowdy would continue to suffer from persistent back problems for many years.

In November 1943, recovering from back surgery, Gowdy made his broadcasting debut in Cheyenne calling a "six-man" high school football game from atop a wooden grocery crate in subzero weather, with about 15 people in attendance. He found he had a knack for broadcasting, and worked at the small KFBC radio station and at the Wyoming Eagle newspaper as a sportswriter (and later sports editor). After several years in Cheyenne, he accepted an offer from CBS's KOMA radio in Oklahoma City in September 1945. He was hired primarily to broadcast OU college football (then coached by new-hire Bud Wilkinson) and OSU college basketball games (then coached by Hank Iba). In 1947–1948, in addition to calling football and basketball on KOMA, Gowdy was also broadcasting the baseball games of the Texas League Oklahoma City Indians, on station KOCY. When Gowdy announced in early 1949 that he was leaving Oklahoma to work in New York, his replacement was fellow Oklahoma City sportscaster Bob Murphy.

Gowdy's distinctive play-by-play style during his broadcasts of minor league baseball, college football, and college basketball in Oklahoma City earned him a national audition and then an opportunity with the New York Yankees in 1949, working with (and learning from) Mel Allen for two seasons.^{[citation needed]}

In June 1949, Curt married Geraldine "Jerre" Dawkins. She had a bachelor's degree in education from Central State College, and was studying for a master's degree in Radio Speech at the University of Oklahoma when they became engaged. Curt and Jerre had three children: Cheryl Ann Gowdy, Curtis Edward Gowdy Jr. (who worked as a sports producer for ABC and SNY), and Trevor Gowdy. Curt's nickname was affectionately The Cowboy.

Gowdy began his Major League Baseball broadcasting career working as the No. 2 announcer to Mel Allen for Yankees games on radio and television in 1949–50. There, he succeeded Russ Hodges, who departed to become the New York Giants' lead announcer when the Yankees and Giants decided to broadcast a full slate of 154 games, instead of sharing the same radio network and announcers for the 77 home games of each team that had been broadcast (no away games of either team were broadcast). Two years later, the Red Sox and the Boston Braves followed a similar path, with each team opting for its own networks and announcers to allow each team to broadcast their full schedules, home and away. Jim Britt, who had called home games of both teams, decided to stay with the Braves, opening the top spot on the Red Sox broadcast team.

In April 1951 at the age of 31, Gowdy began his tenure as the lead announcer for the Red Sox. For the next 15 years, he called the exploits of generally mediocre Red Sox teams on WHDH radio and on three Boston TV stations: WBZ-TV, WHDH-TV, and WNAC-TV (WBZ and WNAC split the Red Sox TV schedule from 1948 through 1955; WBZ alone carried the Red Sox from 1955 through 1957; and WHDH took over in 1958). During that time, Gowdy partnered with two future baseball broadcasting legends: Bob Murphy and Ned Martin. Chronic back pain caused Gowdy to miss the entire 1957 season. He also did nightly sports reports on WHDH radio when his schedule permitted. Gowdy was also the narrator of several Red Sox highlight films during his tenure in Boston which described the season in depth along with its key moments; this would lead to him eventually narrating World Series highlight films during his time with NBC (1968–1974, '77).^{[citation needed]}