November 18, 2009
Jimmy Powers picks up “The Grantland Rice Story” again this week in this Thesaurus syndicated series from circa 1956.
Program 7 in the series, “The Story of Big Bill Tilden” focuses on the world of tennis. Included in the show is an interview with player Vinnie Richards, who had an outstanding career in the sport in the 20s and 30s.
Our mp3 was transferred from original RCA Thesaurus 12″ vinyl transcription, matrix number F7-MR-5064-1.
October 28, 2009
Jimmy Powers continues narrating the life story of sports writer Grantland Rice this week. Episode GRS-6 is titled “Great Athletes - Past and Present” and we hear thoughts from Grantland Rice about the great “iron men” of sports and how they’ve become “specialists” in recent years.
The show was transferred from original RCA Thesaurus 12″ transcription, matrix number F7-MR-5074-1A.
October 23, 2009
Jimmy Powers returns narrating “The Grantland Rice Story” in this program syndicated by RCA Thesaurus in the mid 1950s.
Program GRS-5 is titled “The Dempsey-Tunny Fights” and features and interview with Jack Dempsey, reflecting on his years in boxing and Grantland Rice.
The program was transferred from original RCA Thesaurus 12″ transcription, matrix number F7-MR-5060-1A.
October 15, 2009
This week’s installment of the “Grantland Rice Story” has host Jimmy Powers relating Rice’s stories about boxing in program GRS-4 in the series, “Jack Dempsey, the Man from Maumee Bay”.
The show was transferred from original RCA Thesaurus 12″ transcription, matrix number F7-MR-5059-1.
Next week, we hear the inside scoop on the famous Dempsey-Tunney fights.
October 8, 2009
This week’s episode of “The Grantland Rice Story”, a Thesaurus syndicated series from the mid-1950s, pays a visit to the race track. It’s an interesting show - horse racing seemed to be much more prominent in the sports pages, but we don’t hear about it nowadays except for the bigger contests like the Kentucky Derby.
In program GRS-3, “Big Red - Man o’ War”, sportscaster Jimmy Powers narrates Grantland Rice’s stories about great horses and great races from Rice’s long career as a sports reporter. The show features an interview with jockey Earl “The Handy Guy” Sandy who was a friend of Grantland Rice, reminiscing about his own career in horse racing.
The show was transferred from original RCA Thesaurus 12″ transcription, matrix number F7-MR-5054-1C.
Next week, Jimmy Powers tells us Grantland Rice’s stories about boxer Jack Dempsey.
October 2, 2009
Jimmy Powers continues narrating the Thesaurus syndicated series, “The Grantland Rice Story”, based on the memoirs of the famous sportswriter and syndicated in the mid-1950s. In program 2 of the series, “The Big Fellow, Babe Ruth”, Rice shares stories and memories of the legendary baseball player.
The show was transferred from original RCA Thesaurus vinyl 12″ transcription, matrix number F7-MR-5049-1. The program appears to be previously uncirculated.
Next week’s show looks at horse racing. Guests start showing up to share their own stories about Rice and the personalities he covered in his reporting in program 7 of the series.
September 25, 2009
Since it looks like “Grantland Rice Story” and “American Family Robinson” were fairly close in the poll, I’ll be running episodes of both series each week in the blog.
I hope you like “The Grantland Rice Story” because it’s going to be a long haul - I have all 52 episodes of the series. It might remind you a bit of “The Passing Parade”, with its simple setup of a narrator guiding us through interesting personal and professional stories of the famous and not-so-famous.
The program was syndicated by Thesaurus, a division of RCA that initially produced music library discs for stations then later expanded into syndicated programming. “The Grantland Rice Story” was one of eight series released for syndication the first week of May, 1955 by Thesaurus during their 20th anniversary (you can see a “Billboard” magazine article about the release here). My particular set came from a station in the southwest that started broadcasting the program weekly on September 17, 1955, noting the date of each broadcast inside the album box cover.
Hosted by Jimmy Powers, the show focuses on the life of the “Dean of the Sportswriters”, Grantland Rice, and was based on Rice’s autobiography, “The Tumult and the Shouting”. Powers reads from the autobiography and, on some shows, major sports and newspaper figures drop by to comment on the story or offer memories of Rice, who knew just about every major sports figure during his long career that extended from the 1920s until his death a few months before this series was recorded. Powers was a well-known sports writer in his own right, serving as the sports editor of the “Daily News”. He was also the announcer for NBC’s Friday night fights all through the 1950s.
Program GRS-1 is titled “Beginning at the Beginning”, where Jimmy tells us about the series and reads from sections of Granny Rice’s autobiography on his early life and the start of his newspaper career.
The show was transferred from an original RCA Thesaurus 12″ vinyl transcription, matrix number F7-MR-5048-1. The matrix numbers used on the discs, beginning with “F” and “G” indicate the program was recorded and mastered in 1955 and 1956.
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