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"On brisk, clear October afternoons on Main Street in front of The Salt Lake Tribune in downtown Salt Lake City, if you listen hard, you can hear the echo. Really. It might be faint at first, and it helps some to squinch your eyes closed. But you can hear it, if you want to. It isn't actually the sound of traffic, not the motorized kind, but the murmur of voices, lots of voices. Mostly male, but some female and the occasional youngster."
That was the description of a one-time technological miracle that brought the World Series to downtown Salt Lake City before radio broadcast the games, and television existed only in the imagination of a few geniuses.
It was written by the late Tribune writer and historian Hal Schindler for the paper's feature section in 1994. It recalled the magic of "Old Ironsides," which debuted on Main Street in 1915 and showed, in its innovative way, the World Series between Philadelphia and Boston, when Babe Ruth was a pitcher for the Red Sox.
Crowds would gather on the sidewalk across the street from the old Tribune building to follow every pitch, out, base hit and stolen base throughout the course of the game.
Now, with Philadelphia once again in the World Series 94 years later, folks can watch the World Series on their iPhones while walking down the street. But in 1915, and for 35 years after that, they saw the game by watching a green and white board attached to the front of
Old Ironsides was the brainchild of J.F. Fitzpatrick, a Tribune executive who later would become publisher.
It was an electronic board, much like a giant pinball machine, wrote Schindler, "with flashing lights tracing the play of the actual game thousands of miles away."
Before radio, The Tribune sports staff would operate Old Ironsides by activating the lights through electronic wheels on the board. The sports writers would get the action of the game over the teletype machine, then relay it to another staffer who would broadcast the action over a loud speaker to the crowd below.
The ball would be a white light the crowd could see hurling from the pitcher's mound to home plate. A hit would send the white light flashing into the field of play and the base runner would be depicted by red light bulbs flashing as he ran around the base paths.
"In 1928, Old Ironsides was modernized in a big way," wrote Schindler. "The Tribune negotiated a contract with the fledgling NBC radio network for rights to hook up a public-address system to the board and tie it in with an on-the-scene, play-by-play description. Old Ironsides was a huge success, and watching the October classic in front of the newspaper became as much a tradition as lighting the community Christmas tree."
