We are time-traveling back to 1934 to celebrate Baseball in Baltimore! Wait. Baltimore! Hometown of Spiro Agnew, Michael Phelps, and Spankrock. The place where Edgar Allen Poe disembarked a train and then died.
Wait, stop — you don’t get to intro with this cute cultural smattering, "next we’ll visit Cleveland, Dreeeew Carey!"
Cards out, I wanted to have a baseball game presented to an audience and have it be a historical setting. As if we were standing in the venue, time traveling dudes… and ladies. But I didn’t want the insane challenge of a baseball radio broadcast set in a historically accurate saloon. Vintage fans carrying on in historically accurate ways would be an extreme challenge and so I chose the 1934 All Star Game (in a wealthy person bar).
Time travel? Baltimore? Baseball? Did the Orioles even exist at this point?
Ok so there was a minor league Orioles— oh! they had this pitcher Lefty Grove. A Marylander, (minor league) Oriole, Future Hall of Famer… Lefty was traded for an outfield fence in Martinsburg. Lefty Grove was very much a way I could have tied Baltimore to the 1934 All Star Game… if he was in that All Star game. ****. Lefty Grove was an All Star in ’33, ’35, ’36, ’37, ’38, ’39.
I tried to find the 1933 All Star Game broadcast — a game which native son Babe Ruth clobbered a two run shot and Lefty Grove secured the save. That totally would have strengthened my case for presenting the All Star Game in Charm City...And I failed to find it in full.
So… 1934! Baltimore! Look I promise I found us a neat place to listen to the game. Behold, the structurally beautiful Hotel Rennert, one of the city’s early skyline darlings (now a parking lot). It was the place for area titans to smoke cigars and bro it up the super formal way dudes did back then.
Digging into the hotel’s history turned out to be as complicated as I should have anticipated. The Hotel Rennert’s fine dining reputation rested on chefs like Henry Cummings, a formerly enslaved man who moved to Baltimore and became a fixture as chef and caterer. He was an “expert in the preparation of terrapin… and all kinds of rare games in famous old Maryland style.”
I found some Hotel Rennert menus (lunch and dinner) with plans to make a lazy inflationary joke (¢15 lobster?!) until I read on the back: “…From the very inception of the hostelry in 1885 it has employed only colored chefs and colored waiters." And being way out of my depth, I wondered how to digest that. Everything has been silly and light so far. Do I ignore and move on?
So Old Line Plate, a blog of Maryland culinary history, helped shed some light on why a place like Hotel Rennert might advertise its employment practices on the menu. Old Line Plate cites Afro-American’s December 1915 edition: “The French chef has been tried in the south, but, except in a few rare instances, they have failed to satisfy the peculiar demands of the southern epicure or even of the tourist who, coming south, expects dishes peculiarly southern... The demand for capable colored cooks is greater than the supply."
Smithsonian Magazine detailed how American recipes in the 1800s shifted from “puddings, pies, and roasted meats” to include dishes like “pepper pot, okra stew, gumbo, and jambalaya” as African foodways were woven into American cuisine.
Was this about serving better food, or were there broader forces at play? This is 1934—thirteen years before Jackie Robinson. We will only hear the All Stars that were allowed to play (IE: no Willie Wells, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson).
Tom Manning, Ford Bond and Graham McNamee had the call for NBC. McName got his start in radio announcing by walking into a radio station and asking if anyone needed an opera singer.
PS: Baseball is the only bit of athletic escapism I cling to — born of those magical summer nights in the 80s watching Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken slap the **** out of a baseball (Earl Weaver, heads, mount up). Go O's.
Österreich