"The Old Scotchman"

Radio's four major networks were beginning to take serious notice last week of a bustling new rival. Sparked by energetic, moonfaced President Gordon McLendon, Liberty Broadcasting System has grown in the past three years from one station in Texas to 240 in 34 states by concentrating on a single specialty: bringing broadcasts of major-league baseball games to the vast audience beyond the reach of stations in the major-league cities.

Sports-minded Gordon McLendon first got the idea for his network during the war, when he found that boys from Arkansas argued just as hotly as Brooklynites about big-league baseball, even though the only games they ever heard were the World Series. After he got out of the Navy he started Dallas' station KLIF, began broadcasting from teletyped play-by-play accounts flashed to him from a Manhattan office. Under fire at first from minor-league owners, McLendon soon convinced them that his broadcasts (and constant plugging of minor-league clubs) were helping to fill local ballparks by whipping up baseball interest. When other stations in Texas and Oklahoma began clamoring to be tied in to his broadcasts, his network got under way.

A crack announcer as well as a fast-stepping businessman, McLendon still depends on teletyped reports, dressing them up with skillful sound effects and a sense of on-the-spot excitement that has given him bigger audiences in some cities than competing "live" broadcasts direct from the press box. Explains McLendon: "I'm not trying to deceive anybody. I'm only trying to give them a colorful broadcast."

Though only 29, McLendon refers to himself as "the old Scotchman" and, on the air, makes himself out to be a contemporary of octogenarian Connie Mack of the Philadelphia Athletics. Admiring fans send him gifts they think appropriate to his years, including a set of false teeth which he uses as a paperweight.

This fall, McLendon expects to add 60 new stations to the network, and to hold his audience with Ted Husing's broadcasts of Army football games. For hours when there are no sports to broadcast, Liberty has already started a musical giveaway show and a series called Great Days in Sport, in which McLendon will re-create such highlights of the past as the Demp-sey-Firpo fight and the spectacular games of Notre Dame's Four Horsemen.

In Los Angeles, another network, scheduled to go into operation in November, was preparing to enter the field. Progressive Broadcasting System hoped to perk up many of the 1,000.slowly expiring small unaffiliated stations of the U.S. with a daily infusion of ten hours of "live" and recorded shows. Hoping for a network of 350 stations (and needing 200 to break even), Progressive promised a familiar formula: soap operas, Hollywood gossip, a homespun philosopher named Cottonseed Clark, and such singers as Mel Torme and Connie Haines.

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