Bill Stern

Bill Stern (July 1, 1907 – November 19, 1971) was an American actor, sportscaster, and radio personality born in Rochester, New York. He appeared on Broadway in 1942 in the comedy The Sun Field. His career spanned radio, television, and film, and he is credited with announcing the nation's first remote sports broadcast as well as the first televised baseball game.

Stern began his broadcasting career in 1925 at WHAM, a local Rochester radio station, where he called football games. He later enrolled at Pennsylvania Military College, graduating in 1930. NBC brought him on in 1937 to host The Colgate Sports Newsreel and to cover Friday night boxing on radio, making him one of the earliest commentators to call boxing on television as well. On May 17, 1939, he broadcast the second game of a baseball doubleheader between Princeton and Columbia at Columbia's Baker Field, which stands as the first televised sporting event. Later that same year, on September 30, he called the first televised football game.

During his peak years at NBC, Stern engaged in a sustained rivalry with Ted Husing of CBS Radio, competing for broadcast positions, event rights, and their respective roles as network sports directors. His career continued despite a significant physical setback: in 1935, a car accident on his way home from a football game in Texas resulted in the amputation of his left leg just above the knee. According to Sports on New York Radio by David J. Halberstam, Stern's subsequent addiction to painkillers ultimately shortened his tenures at both NBC and ABC.

Stern moved to ABC in 1953, remaining there until 1956. During that period he was a regular panelist on the game show The Name's the Same, where his background in reporting led him to ask factually focused questions. After leaving ABC, he provided sports reports and commentary for the Mutual Broadcasting System through the late 1950s and into the 1960s. He spent the final fifteen years of his life in Rye, New York.

His film work included appearances as himself in The Pride of the Yankees, starring Gary Cooper, and Here Come the Co-Eds, starring Abbott and Costello. He narrated a long-running series of ten-minute short subjects for Columbia Pictures under the title Bill Stern's World of Sports, and he served as sports commentator for News of the Day newsreels. In 1949 he published Bill Stern's Favorite Baseball Stories, in which he argued that Fred Goldsmith, rather than Candy Cummings, invented the curveball. The character Bill Kern in Woody Allen's Radio Days was modeled on Stern's storytelling style, and an overheard Stern radio broadcast figures briefly in Rex Stout's 1951 Nero Wolfe novel Murder by the Book.

Stern was part of the American Sportscasters Association Hall of Fame's inaugural class in 1984, alongside Red Barber, Don Dunphy, Ted Husing, and Graham McNamee. He was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1988 and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.