Red Mottlow later in his life. In 1959, he filled in on one of WGN’s last Western Union ticker baseball broadcasts.
By George Castle – CBM Historian on January 30, 2017
The Chicago Baseball Museum is presenting a series of five podcasts commemorating the 57-year relationship between WGN Radio and the Cubs that is ending this season.
The vintage segment presented here originally aired on WGN on Saturday afternoon, Sept. 5, 1959. On days when the Cubs were off or playing at night on the road, the station aired other games re-created by Western Union ticker. On Sept. 5, all the regular station sports announcers were not available for the broadcast. WGN writer-producer Red Mottlow, who had re-created Triple-A games in Minneapolis only a few years earlier, was tapped to fill in.
Mottlow, a Chicago native and graduate of Marshall High School, handled a Reds-Braves game. Later on, in the mid-1960s, he became the first Chicago radio sportscaster to carry a tape recorder into the locker room and eventually co-hosted the Diamond Gems baseball show. On a Diamond Gems in 1998, Mottlow recalled how he handled the ticker re-creation in the studio. That segment, along with a half-inning of his play-by-play, is featured here.
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