They were the ESPN of their era

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from April 3, 2013. Most of Jack’s stories about his youth involvement with the newspaper had to do with his time as a carrier. (He claimed he was the best carrier around.) But this story looks at a different aspect at the beginning of his long newspaper career.

Okay, so maybe we were paid with something more than Cokes.

But not much more.

The combination of the flood of basketball on television and that late winter snowfall got me thinking about the old days of high school sectional basketball in Indiana. You know, those days that provoke comments about how it always snows at sectional time.

Hard as it is for folks now to realize, the high school basketball sectional was an all-consuming event in those days. The gyms were packed. Emotions ran high. It was all more than a little crazy.

One of my buddies from high school once wrote a satiric short story entitled “The Ticket.” The premise was that getting a sectional ticket during an exciting season was like searching for the Holy Grail.

And in those days before media saturation of our lives, if you couldn’t get a ticket you were almost desperate to know who won or at least what the score was.

Enter, then, The Commercial Review scoreboard phone bank. (I just made up that name. In those days, it was essentially anonymous.)

In the 1950s and 1960s, the county’s only radio station, WPGW, had what was called a “sunrise to sunset” license from the Federal Communications Commission. That was fine for the day games, but the station had trouble when it came to broadcasting the night contests.

So someone — I sense my father’s fingerprints on this — decided that the daily newspaper should provide a scoreboard update service for its readers.

Today, in the world of Twitter and everything else, this seems unbelievably quaint.

But it worked. And, at the time, it was the best thing available.

The newspaper already had a sportswriter and photographer at the sectional. So it wasn’t asking all that much for them to phone the score in to the paper.

And the public was invited to call the paper regularly for updates.

And call they did.

Folks at home, with no radio after dark and no cable TV, were essentially cut off. Fans would wait until it seemed enough time had passed, then they’d call the paper to try to find out the score.

It seems to me that scores were updated at half-time and when a game was over. But it might have been on the quarter during a close contest.

Inevitably as a PK (that’s Publisher’s Kid in this case) I was drafted to work the phones at the office. So was my younger sister Louise. We’d then talk a couple of friends into helping out. Louise’s friend Jenny Peterson pitched in more than once.

Over the course of a night, we’d answer hundreds of phone calls, amusing ourselves at times by answering in different accents or voices.

My recollection was that our only pay was free access to the Coke machine, but Louise and Jenny both think we were paid something more.

Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been much.

But look at it this way: We were the ESPN of our era.

And, besides, the Cokes were cold and they were free.

You can’t beat that.