For more than a quarter-century, Mel Allen owned the most recognizable voice in America. Filmgoers listened to his MovieTone newsreel narrations while a national radio audience was soothed by his smooth introductions to numerous programs. But most of all, baseball fans followed his calls of the New York Yankees, his signature “How about that!” signifying a clutch hit or outstanding defensive play. Allen, who died June 16, 1996, received numerous accolades for his work, including the Ford Frick Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame and induction into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1980.
With such a storied career, it’s difficult to fathom why his employers, the Yankees and NBC, unceremoniously dumped Allen in 1964 when the team was sold to a new ownership.
In his new biography The Voice: Mel Allen’s Untold Story (The Lyons Press), Curt Smith, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Rochester and author of several books on baseball broadcasting, explains the backstory of startling rumors that led to Allen’s dismissal.
Melvin Allen Israel was brought up in an Orthodox home near Birmingham, Ala., where his Russian immigrant parents, Julius and Anna , ran a dry-goods store. “Mom clasped good works, prayer, and belief that God guides life,” Smith writes. When Allen decided to change his name — as Jews frequently did in those less-enlightened times — his father “blew a cork, then softened…. Less than his folks, being Jewish was only one part of his makeup. Mel was really the ultimate achievement-driven man — more American than ethnic.”
Growing up under such circumstances was not easy, Smith said in a telephone interview, but “it gave Allen a sense of values about right and wrong that remained with him throughout his life.”
“I think the ritual of Judaism, the Judaic canon, was important to him, perhaps not as important as to his parents. Given the facts of his growing up, achievement was not simply his ladder, but his way out, to go beyond the discrimination of youth to achieve in later life.”
Allen was “an institution, the most marquee voice in the country,” Smith said. “Yet he went from the most recognized voice in the country to a non-person.”
No official grounds were ever given for his dismissal. Among the “explanations” Smith offered: The Yankees and NBC brass thought that Allen was an alcoholic or a heroin or cocaine addict, that he had had a series of mini-strokes, and that he was a homosexual. One Yankee official at the time simply said, “We see no reason to embarrass Mel .”
“What does that mean?” asked Smith, who said that Allen told him years later, “When people are left to believe the worst, they will.”
Smith, who ranks Allen as the second
-best baseball announcer of all-time (behind Red Barber), said that the announcer “was the best ever at his peak. Nobody could do with his skills what [he] did doing baseball: the lexicon, the stunning grammar. No prepositions were left at the end of a sentence, no participles were left dangling, no infinitives were split.” But after listening to more than 100 hours of tapes, Smith agreed with the critics: By the time of his firing, “the Voice” had lost his chops. “He would repeat himself, he would misstate facts, he would let silent air prevail for 25-30 seconds, something that you would never abide from Allen a decade earlier.”
In The Voice, Smith offers his own thoughts as to the reason behind Allen ’s downfall.
At 51, said Smith, the legendary announcer was feeling the effects of his demanding profession, which the author does not attribute simply to burnout. Allen engaged the services of Dr. Max Jacobson , a “physician to the stars” whose clients included Eddie Fisher, Truman Capote, and John F. Kennedy. His specialty was prescribing amphetamines, which were legal at the time.
Given all the facts, Smith said that he believes that Jacobson “misprescribed,” and that Allen never understood where the problem lay. “The kind of damage done is cumulative, and even when you stop taking [it] you never quite regain your former skill, and he never did.”
Allen was essentially, if tacitly, blacklisted for more than a decade, until he made a remarkable comeback with This Week in Baseball, a syndicated TV program that features game highlights and player profiles.
Allen, said Smith, “was as color blind and devoid of any bias or prejudice or animus as any human being I’ve ever known.” He would get an occasional anti-Semitic letter, but “he always reacted in such an extraordinarily intellectual and high-class way that I think he shamed the bigot.”
The author called Allen “was one of the finest people I’ve ever met in any field. I have a six-year-old boy, and if he’s half the person Mel was, I would be one happy dad.”
A version of this story appeared in New Jersey Jewish News, May 24, 2007.
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Other baseball titles by Curt Smith include:
- Voices of Summer: Ranking Baseball’s 101 All-Time Best Announcers (Carroll & Graf)
- What Baseball Means to Me: A Celebration of Our National Pastime
(Warner Books) - Storied Stadiums: Baseball’s History Through Its Ballparks (Carroll & Graf)
- America’s Dizzy Dean (Chalice Press)
- Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park (Masters Press)
- The Storytellers: From Mel Allen to Bob Costas : Sixty Years of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth (Macmillan Publishing Company)
is available on Amazon.com,
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