1936 · KHJ, Los Angeles

At the Ringside

A station air check of a fight, kept by accident

Live sport was the thing radio did best and preserved worst. A fight, a ball game, a race — all of it went out once and vanished, because a network had no reason to cut a disc of something already over. What survives is almost entirely accidental: a station that happened to be recording, a collector who happened to keep it. This is one of those accidents, and it is why the sport shelf here is short and the honest thing is to say so. The World Series broadcasts we hold sit in A Century on the Air rather than here.

1 broadcast · 1 year held · Yankee Stadium, New York

Station air check, KHJ Los Angeles, 18 August 1936. One recording. Held by the Internet Archive.