Mary Lou Glauser was married to an MU student in the mid-1940s. While expecting their first child, Glauser was unable to work outside the home. She found company in listening to St. Louis Cardinal baseball games on the radio. KBIA's Scout Hudson takes us back to Glauser's era in this audio collage.
This piece is part of Reverberations, a series from KBIA that uncovers the wealth of historical information housed within the State Historical Society of Missouri's archives and its Haskell Monroe oral history collection from the 1990s.
This episode of Reverberations features the voice of:
- Mary Lou Glauser
Reverberations is a grant-funded, collaborative project from KBIA, the Missouri School of Journalism, and The School of Visual Studies, with support from Missouri Humanities. Special thanks to the State Historical Society of Missouri (SHSMO) for partnering with this project to digitize and explore the Haskell Monroe Oral History Collection.
Transcription of this episode is as follows:
Sound of radio flickering
Sound of baseball organ vamping
Baseball announcer Harry Caray: “Bracheem eyes the batter ...”
Mary Lou Glauser: “Harry “the Cat” Bracheem! Oh goodness ...”
HC: “Higgins is forced out ... “
Mary Lou Glauser: “Because I could tell you every batting average of the St. Louis Cardinals ... all of their names ...”
HC: “The highest honor has gone to the St. Louis Cardinals ...”
Mary Lou Glauser: “Harry Carey, he was wonderful”
HC: “Hello everybody, this is Harry Carey ...”
Mary Lou Glauser: “He would get so excited, that you felt you were at the game with him”
HC: “It may be ... a home run...”
Cheers
Mary Lou Glauser: “He made it probably more exciting than it is because my husband thinks baseball is a very slow game.”
Sound of baseball organ
Mary Lou Glauser: “I love it.”
Crowd chatter
Mary Lou Glauser: “I didn’t go to work, I tried once or twice. But in 1945, in Columbia, the pregnant wife of a student couldn’t get a job very easily.”
Excerpt from 'The Honeymooners': “I’m getting a job no matter what you say ...”
Mary Lou Glauser: “Being pregnant, and being at home, most of the time I would listen to the radio quite a bit”
Sound of Baby Talk ad: “When hubby says ..”
MG: “Because my husband doesn’t care for baseball and we had so many other things, and children to be taken care of ...”
'Meet Me in St. Louis' plays
MG: “Probably the best game was when we took the children into St. Louis for a little vacation....”
Trevor Harris: That was producer Scout Hudson. The audio you heard was from archival tape of St. Louis Cardinal’s Broadcasters, mid-century radio advertisements, Judy Garland, Nancy Bea Hefley's organ, and an interview with Marian Glauser from the Haskell Monroe Oral History collection. Hudson's work is part of 'Reverberations', a project produced using sound from State Historical Society of Missouri's Haskell Monroe Oral History Collection. For more Reverberations, go to kbia-dot-org. I'm Trevor Harris, KBIA News.
Outside sources:
"I Get Ideas" by organist Nancy Bea Hefley from YouTube.
1964 St. Louis Cardinals broadcast with Harry Caray and Jack Buck from Youtube.
