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Ed
Paulin and the Radios
Written
December 11, 2007
  
Let me play you a sound clip of a local sportscaster from my youth by
the name of Ed Paulin.
 
But let me start by showing you the 25-pound family radio from which
I originally recorded the clip. (Well, not the actual radio,
but one just like it. All the pictures in this article come
from the Internet.)

But before that, I want to tell you about a smaller
radio. One day, its magic inspired in me a feeling of awe.
But first of all, let me show you our very first portable
radio. This one came to us mounted in the dashboard of a 1958
Oldsmobile!
In
the Fifties, battery-powered transistor radios first
became available. These book-sized devices could bring wireless
entertainment to any location, such as the beach.
However,
most families didn't have one yet.
So the Trans-Portable allowed you to take your Oldsmobile's AM radio
with you and listen to it outside the car.
Above
the dial was a handle, pivoted near the radio's knobs. By
pulling down the handle you could slide the radio out of the dash.
Left
behind was a hinged chrome cover plate and the larger knobs that
normally adjusted the tone (right) and front/rear balance (left) of
the car's regular speakers.
The
small volume and tuning knobs went with the Trans-Portable, and it
would switch over to its own internal battery, antenna, and speaker.
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I
would have been in fifth grade when we drove the Olds to a high
school basketball game at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Marion,
Ohio. With a capacity of nearly 4,000, this is the largest
arena in the area. |
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Taking
advantage of the opportunity, we carried the radio to our seats and
listened to WMRN's broadcast while watching the game. At the
time, it was a novel experience.
Although
we were seated behind the basket in the south end zone, our view of
the action was not obstructed. We could see right through the
newfangled glass backboard!
Eventually
thieves discovered how easy it was to yank a Trans-Portable out of
an unattended car. Oldsmobile discontinued it after a couple of years.

So about 1959 we bought an ordinary transistor radio, something like
this one. I recall sitting in the living room one Saturday
morning, holding the radio and listening to WRFD's pregame show for
Ohio State football. The thought struck me: how marvelous
is this? A man is talking 40 miles away. Here I sit at
home, holding in my hand a little plastic box with nothing attached
to it, and the man's voice is coming out of the box! It's just
one of those daily miracles
that should never become so commonplace that we lose our sense of amazement.
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Our family had another battery-powered radio that was far less
portable, a classic Zenith Trans-Oceanic with six short-wave bands.
The
features included a little light bulb that unevenly illuminated the
dial while you held a switch.
Four
red switches functioned as a rudimentary graphic equalizer, cutting
or boosting the audio response in four different frequency ranges. |
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The
AM-only chassis was built around not transistors but tubes,
miniature ones that warmed up to operating temperature in only a
couple of seconds. The radio could be powered by a battery pack
that slid into the lower shelf, increasing the weight of the set to
about 25 pounds. In
the rear view below, the black spool on the right retracted the AC
cord when not in use.
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On
the far left, the silver tube housed the telescoping shortwave
antenna, while the perforated red twin lead led to the
Wave Magnet, an antenna for ordinary domestic broadcasts
that could be removed from its niche atop the cabinet and rotated to
get the best reception. |
As
a Christmas present in 1961, when I was in ninth grade, I received
another piece of electronic gear: a reel-to-reel audio tape
recorder. I immediately looked around for sounds to record, and
I saw the Zenith. Here's part of my first recording.
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2:04 |
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On
various frequencies I could find Morse code, single sideband, ham
radio, foreign languages, and time checks from not only WWV but CHU,
Dominion Observatory, Canada.
There
was one signal I never figured out; I called it an
airplane because it sounded like a piston-engine airliner
at full throttle. Was this loud noise the result of electrical
interference? Well, there were many audio frequencies present,
not just 60 cycles (or 60 Hertz as we would say today). Maybe
it was some type of data transmission.
And
there was always standard AM broadcast radio, which on this December
25th was playing Christmas music, of course. |
  
And that, finally, brings us back to Ed Paulin.
Four
days after Christmas, WMRN returned to the pressbox at the Coliseum
for the championship game of Marion Catholic's four-team holiday tournament.
I
set up the Zenith and my recorder to tape the end of the radio broadcast. |
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3:02 |
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continue reading this page while the audio plays,
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on the Audio Link button and choose
Open
Link in New Tab.
For other audio, click here. |
On
December 29, 1961, I was a freshman at Richwood High School (now
part of the North Union district). The older kids had gone to
the Coliseum to play Radnor (now part of the Buckeye Valley
district), coached by future OHSBCA Hall of Fame inductee Richard Meyer.
As
we join the action with less than 90 seconds left in the game,
Richwood is trailing by 36 points. That's embarrassing.
So is the fact that the Tigers are about to shoot an air ball on a
free throw. |
Ed
Paulin called the game for WMRN-AM, as he did for most of the Marion
station's sports broadcasts. Another announcer, Bob
Miller, soon joined the crew so they could air a second game
on their other station, WMRN-FM.
As
I recall, Ed worked alone, without an analyst. There wasn't room
for one in some of the high school gyms he visited. I became a
student manager for Richwood, and I remember that once at Mt. Gilead
I was sitting on the visitors' bench, which was the front
row of the folding bleachers next to the scorers' table. The
scorer actually sat in the second row of the bleachers, and Ed and
his engineer Joe Peters had installed themselves and their equipment
in that row as well, right behind our bench.
I
also recall a post-season tournament at Delaware Hayes High
School. WMRN broadcast all four games that evening from a table
on the balcony in the end zone. Ed was on the air by himself
for at least six hours. I was impressed by his stamina and by
the fact that he was able to keep the players' names straight.
Let's see, is number 12 Smith? No, now it's
Jones. Smith was number 12 two games ago.
Now,
more than 40 years later, I wondered whether anyone else remembered
Ed. So I Googled his name and the station's call letters, and
what to my wondering eyes should appear but an article in the
Stillwater, Oklahoma, NewsPress. Stillwater is where Ed
is now living in retirement.
According
to the article, Ed started broadcasting as a teenager in 1942 in
Ashland, Kentucky. He was in Marion by 1956 (the year that
16-year-old Jack Nicklaus from Columbus lost a playoff in the Junior
Chamber of Commerce championship in Fargo). He broadcast his
last play-by-play in 1966, the year after I graduated from high school.
Unable
to find a better job without a college diploma, he enrolled at the
University of Kentucky as a 40-year-old freshman. With a
bachelor's degree, he went to Stillwater in 1971 to manage Oklahoma
State's public radio station KOSU. After four years of that he
went into teaching, earned his doctorate, and eventually retired in
1990 as a full professor.
Happy
birthday, Dr. Paulin!
Postscript:
Ed Paulin died on March 1, 2008, at the age of 83.
I
heard from his great-niece in 2021 (see here).
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