Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/78634
A P P R E C I A T I O N BROADCAST NEWS Bergstein called some of the biggest Penn State sporting events of the 1950s and '60s, including Drazenovich's victory in the 1950 NCAA heavyweight boxing championship. Pioneering broadcaster Mickey Bergstein helped Penn State conquer the airwaves THE RIGHT CALL N o Penn State alum was nicer or friendlier to me than Mickey Bergstein, from the day I first met him as a freshman in 1955 un- til the last time I saw him a couple of years ago at a men's basketball game. Mickey, who passed away in Febru- ary after a long illness, was another of those historic figures in Penn State sports who was hardly known by the younger generation of Nittany Lion fans. Before Steve Jones and Fran L O U P R A T O | B L U E W H I T E Fisher, Mickey was the voice of Penn State sports, starting in the late 1940s and continuing into the '60s. Newspapers and magazines dominat- ed the media in that era, and radio was the prime electronic competitor. Tele- vision, which hardly existed before World War II, would start to come into its own in the '50s. But even into the '60s, few Penn State football games W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M C O N T R I B U T O R were televised, and the radio broad- casts were the only way for fans to fol- low the live game action. The first Penn State football game to be broadcast on radio was actually the 1923 Rose Bowl, but it could only be heard in Southern California. The next broadcast wasn't until 1927, and for the next 19 years a varying number of games were aired each sea- son, with different announcers calling the action. From 1946 onward, all the games were on the radio but often with a different play-by-play man. This is when Mickey became involved with the broadcast, working for WMAJ, then the only station in State College. Shortly after graduating in 1943, Mickey became a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. He was part of the regiment that famously raised the flag at Iwo Jima and was badly wound- A P R I L 1 1 , 2 0 1 2 33 Photo courtesy of Paterno-Pattee Library Archives