Read A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred for Free Online

postwar influx of women into the workforce during and after the Second World War.
    The first radio broadcast of a major league game was produced by Pittsburgh’s KDKA in 1921 during the Pirates pennant race with the Giants. In Cincinnati, a radio station broadcast the first game of the 1924 season.Radio stations were multiplying rapidly, from 382 in 1922 to 681 in 1927. The number of radios in use in America rose from 60,000 in 1922 to 1.5 million in 1923 to 3 million in 1924 to 16.6 million in 1932. Stations were ravenous for content, and Chicago stations had, in William Wrigley, a businessman with hundreds of hours of content he was eager to supply without charge.
    When Wrigley decided to give away Cubs baseball to Chicago radio stations, the stations decided the price was right.“By mid-1929,” Ehrgott writes, “most major Chicago stations had made Cub home games their staple, effectively eliminating afternoon alternatives from Chicago airwaves seventy-seven afternoons a year.” The fact that the stations were not interested in paying the costs of broadcasting away games indicates that they were more attracted by free content than they were convinced that a large audience was eagerfor baseball. But the audience was growing, and not just in the city.One farmer within range of a Chicago station wrote a thank-you note to the Cubs: “Don’t stop it. I have a radio in the field with me. I plow one turn, sit down for a cool drink out of the jug and listen to the score. It’s grand.”
    The 1920s also saw the birth of ballyhoo and the manufacturing of celebrity. This was a result of the interrelated burgeoning of radio, tabloid journalism, advertising, public relations, and sports superstars like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange, Bill Tilden, and Man o’ War. The age of celebrity was both cause and effect of the most socially transformative technologies of the 1920s: radio and cinema. About radio, William Wrigley was ahead of his time. Most baseball owners saw radio as a threat, fearing that it would cause people to follow the team from the comfort of their couches rather than the grandstands of the home field. Wrigley the chewing-gum marketer saw radio as a way to whet fans’ appetites for a day at the ballpark. His policy about broadcasts was: The more the merrier. At one point, five different stations were carrying home games. One of the play-by-play announcers was a very young Russ Hodges. The career he started in Wrigley Field would have its most memorable moment in New York’s Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951, when he was working for the Giants. Bobby Thomson’s pennant-winning home run—“the shot heard ’round the world”—elicited from him the most famous home-run call in baseball history: “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”
    In 1927, the year Ruth electrified the nation by hitting sixty home runs in American League ballparks, the Cubs became the first National League team to pull more than a million fans into their park. In the 1920s, Americans generally, and Chicagoans especially, had an insatiable appetite for sports.This was dramatized on the city’s lakefront in 1927 when more—many more, according to some reports—than one hundred thousand spectators poured into Soldier Field, then just three years old, for the heavyweight fight between champion Gene Tunney and former champion Jack Dempsey. Not all those at ringside with Al Capone were locals. Among the luminaries who were there to see, or be seen, were Bernard Baruch, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Princess Xenia of Russia, and American royalty in the form of captains of industry.
    Between 1925 and 1929, when many stations were broadcasting Cubs home games, Cubs attendance surged 140 percent. In 1929, the year in which the stock market crashed, fifteen days after the Philadelphia Athletics beat the Cubs in the fifth and final game of the World Series, the Cubs’ home