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Our American Stories

Before Hollywood, Young Ronald Reagan Worked as a Sports Broadcaster

Our American Stories

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6817 Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2026

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this episode of Our American Stories, before he became president of the United States, Ronald Reagan was a young radio announcer in Des Moines, Iowa, calling sports for WHO Radio during the golden age of broadcasting. Armed with little more than a microphone and his imagination, Reagan recreated baseball games from telegraph reports, covered football and track events, and learned how to captivate an audience through storytelling.

In his own words, Reagan reflects on the early days of radio, how he got his start at WHO, and the broadcasting career that helped shape one of the most recognizable communicators in American political history.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This is an IHeart podcast.

0:02.6

Guaranteed Human.

0:14.1

And we return to our American stories.

0:17.5

Up next a story from our great affiliate News Radio 1040 WHO in Des Moines, Iowa.

0:24.1

For WHO's 50th anniversary celebration in 1974, a famous alumnus of the station was present,

0:31.8

the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan. His career started there as a broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs. Let's take a listen.

0:41.6

Now, it's hard to make a younger generation in this space age comprehend the whole that radio

0:46.0

had on the American people. Nothing has ever been known that quite matched it for impact

0:51.9

and for the grip that it had on the people.

1:00.7

Even that great movie Colossus Hollywood with the motion pictures that were family entertainments for so many years,

1:04.7

how do you explain to young people today that radio was so fascinating that the great motion picture theaters of the day used to have to advertise that you could come to the movies

1:11.2

and not miss Amos and Andy because they'd interrupt the show. The lights would go up and the

1:16.4

screen would go dark and a man would come out and turn on the knob of a radio set sitting

1:21.1

on the stage and for 30 minutes you'd sit and listen to a radio show and then the movie

1:24.8

would start in again. The miracle of sounds of the outside world,

1:30.1

the magic world of entertainment, with an infinite variety, was brought into the living rooms

1:35.0

of even the most remote cabins. But more than radio was responsible for this. There was something

1:41.3

else that the theater couldn't match, even though it's tried down through the centuries.

1:46.1

Good theater requires stimulating the imagination of the people. And this, with drama, with music, with words, radio, had to produce everything, the image from the mind of the audience. The voices and the sounds became images in the mind.

2:04.2

There was no way to recreate the pictures.

2:07.3

For example, you could not on television or in movies,

2:11.6

make a funny week after week running gag

...

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