France Laux

During the golden age of radio, France Laux emerged as one of the most visible and respected figures in baseball media, entertaining millions of Americans each year as a network announcer for numerous World Series and All-Star games. Known for his easygoing, straightforward delivery, Laux served as the first permanent baseball voice of St. Louis. He started in 1929 as the lead announcer for the Cardinals and Browns, primarily on KMOX, and gained a national following with CBS and Mutual Broadcasting. Although largely forgotten today, Laux (pronounced “LAWKS”) served as a pioneer in the radio industry during the Depression era and forged a particular legacy in St. Louis, where his work helped set the stage for future broadcasting greats such as Jack Buck, Harry Caray, Mike Shannon, and John Rooney.

James Francis “France” Laux, Jr., was born on December 3, 1897,1 in Guthrie, Oklahoma, the son of Frank and Effie (Blubaugh) Laux.2 The oldest of four boys, Laux attended high school in the small town of Bristow in Creek County, sandwiched between Oklahoma City to the southwest and Tulsa to the northeast.

Census records reveal that Laux’s father – a successful and politically-connected attorney – was a first-generation American with a father either from Luxembourg or Germany and a mother from Ireland.3 According to one account of his early life, Laux’s friends gave him the nickname “France” to distinguish him from his well-known father.

Young France Laux was also “an athlete almost from the time he started to toddle around the house,” earning a total of 16 letters in sports ranging from baseball to football to tennis at Bristow High School.4 After a strong performance on the local semipro baseball circuit in the summer of 1917, Laux garnered some interest from a St. Louis Browns scout but never pursued that path due to American involvement in World War I. He served during the war in England with the U.S. Army Air Force before returning to Oklahoma in 1919.

Over the next several years, Laux remained heavily involved in sports as a semipro athlete, a football halfback for Oklahoma City College, a high school baseball coach for St. Joseph’s in Oklahoma City, and even as a referee. Professionally, Laux also became licensed as an insurance agent.5

It was never Laux’s plan to break into sports broadcasting. Yet, in the autumn of 1927, as the rapid development of commercial radio began to transform daily life in the United States, the 29-year-old Laux found himself behind a microphone in response to an unusual and unexpected chain of events. The story goes something like this: On October 5, 1927, the Tulsa radio station KVOO planned to broadcast Game One of the World Series between the New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates to a local audience in Oklahoma using information relayed from Forbes Field via teletype. As first pitch approached, though, the station’s regular announcer suddenly became unavailable, leaving management with very little time to scramble for a replacement. Given his athletic background in the state of Oklahoma, Laux’s name surfaced as a possible last-minute fill-in for the World Series.6

After station manager Harry Hutchinson failed to reach Laux by phone at his home, he rushed to Bristow and found Laux somewhere near downtown. “He told me what he wanted,” Laux recalled, “and we were off.”7 According to legend, Hutchinson and Laux proceeded to make a 45-mile drive from Bristow to Tulsa in the span of just 50 minutes and arrived at KVOO’s studios about 90 seconds before the start of the broadcast. Despite having no familiarity whatsoever with the ticker system that delivered game results by teletype, Laux plopped himself into the booth and prepared to announce the World Series to thousands of eager listeners across the southwest. Tell the audience the plays, management told Laux. We’re on the air.8

“Broadcasting that series was my first experience on the air,” Laux said later, “and if you don’t think it was a job, try to give a running story of a baseball game from just what the ticker tells you.”9 Drawing on his years of baseball experience, Laux’s instincts took over as he recreated the results of the Yankees’ 5-4 victory over the Pirates. “What transpired over the next three hours,” he said, “was probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”10 Laux parlayed his World Series broadcast performance into an extended gig at KVOO, where he developed a reputation as the “Voice of Oklahoma” calling regional baseball, college football and many other sports.

Two years later, in 1929, Laux pounced on a rare opportunity at KMOX in St. Louis, one of the top radio stations in the country, with broadcasting rights to both the St. Louis Cardinals and St. Louis Browns. With a 50,000-watt signal still heard to this day across much of the continental United States at night, KMOX was a dream job for Laux both professionally and personally. His wife, Pearl Boyer Laux, was a renowned musical performer and singer originally from the St. Louis area – Granite City, Illinois, to be exact. The two had met in Tulsa and married in 1928.11 Without hesitation, Laux accepted KMOX’s initial offer to conduct a 30-day trial and, before long, transitioned into a long-term role as the main radio announcer for Cardinals and Browns games. Meanwhile, Pearl’s musical career also blossomed, as she was able to find opportunities to perform on KMOX. Together, France and Pearl Laux began to build a life in St. Louis, with a home in south St. Louis and two young sons named France, Jr., and Roger.

From 1929 until the mid-1940s, Laux grew into prominence as the first true play-by-play voice for the Cardinals and Browns, using KMOX’s booming signal to bring St. Louis baseball to wide swaths of the Midwest, South and beyond. The two franchises in St. Louis were polar opposites during the period in which Laux announced for KMOX and other affiliates. The Cardinals contended almost annually for the World Series, while the Browns suffered through 12 straight losing seasons between 1930 and 1941. Yet, with his down-to-earth style and a hint of a southern drawl from his Oklahoma roots, Laux prided himself on calling games “as simple and clear as possible” and earned a reputation as someone with deep, almost unparalleled knowledge of the game.12 Bob Broeg, the longtime sportswriter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, told author Curt Smith that “players and managers liked him, and he was impartial to the bone.” However, while Laux excelled at live play-by-play of home games at Sportsman’s Park, Broeg said his recreations of road games using the ticker system could sometimes be “deadly dull.”13  

A member of the Lost Generation who knew nothing of radio until adulthood, Laux did not offer much in the way of flash. Still, given the times, his steady approach brought a sense of stability and consistency to St. Louis radio listeners during the darkest days of the Depression and the tense years leading into World War II. In addition to his duties with the Cardinals and Browns, Laux also served as a commentator for numerous other local sports—including University of Missouri football—and became widely known during these years as the “Voice of St. Louis” across the region. “As a master of factual, objective reporting, Laux is without a peer,” a local columnist in nearby St. Charles, Missouri, once wrote. “His formula for successful sports announcing—accuracy, simplicity, clarity, fairness and alertness—have never been improved upon, and are not likely to be. His knack of enabling radio listeners to see sporting events through his own eyes, visualizing themselves as actual participants and tingling with excitement as sports dramas are unfolded, is another Laux endowment.”14

On a national stage, Laux’s profile grew in large part thanks to KMOX’s affiliation with CBS Radio. In 1930, for example, Laux’s “dream came true” when he helped CBS with coverage of the 1930 World Series between the Cardinals and Philadelphia Athletics.15 In 1933, CBS then selected Laux as a member of the main network announcing crew for the World Series featuring the New York Giants and Washington Senators. “A group of new game reporters has come into the spotlight,” wrote the New York Daily News in the middle of the series. “Fred Hoey, Roger Baker, Gunnar Wiig and France Laux are (not) exactly unknowns. They all have followers in their own sections of the country. But they are newcomers to the national air stage… and have done as well, and, sometimes better, than the old guard of topnotch announcers.”16 Other reviews from Laux’s early World Series calls were less generous, such as one from Paul Damai of the Hammond Times in Indiana, who criticized Laux for “fumbling” too much.17

CBS, on the other hand, clearly liked Laux’s work. In all, he worked six straight World Series from 1933 to 1938 and eight straight All-Star Games on CBS and Mutual from 1934 to 1941. Laux counted the 1934 All-Star Game among the top highlights of his radio career, having watched Carl Hubbell strike out five Hall of Famers in a row at the Polo Grounds that day. “That was the finest exhibition of pitching I ever witness(ed) and it was all better because Hubbell was just like me—just an old boy from Oklahoma,” Laux said.18 During his prime in January 1938, The Sporting News dubbed Laux “radio’s outstanding baseball announcer” and handed him a trophy with the inscription as follows: “Presented to France Laux, Columbia and KMOX sports announcer, by The Sporting News in recognition of his outstanding service to both radio and baseball through many years since joining KMOX in 1929 and of the distinction of being chosen oftener than any other announcer to report World’s Series and All-Star games.”19

Laux’s last national All-Star broadcast for CBS, in July 1941, came just months before the attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the U.S. into World War II. After broadcasting Cardinals and Browns games on another affiliate, KXOK, from 1941 to 1943, Laux’s opportunities soon began to diminish at the local level. Regrettably, he did not broadcast baseball during the 1944 season when the Cardinals and Browns met in the improbable “Streetcar Series” or “Trolley Series,” a World Series played entirely at Sportsman’s Park.

After the war ended, Laux returned to the local airwaves as a commentator and host during the middle part of the decade. In 1948, he officially rejoined the Browns’ home and road broadcasts for affiliate WIL alongside Dizzy Dean. “Look who’s back!” boasted one newspaper advertisement at the start of the 1948 season. “Dizzy Dean with France Laux!”20

However, Laux’s unassuming style no longer resonated the same way in the post-war era. After the Browns left for Baltimore at the conclusion of the 1953 season, Laux’s association with St. Louis baseball all but ended. From the Cardinals’ standpoint, Bob Broeg said franchise owner Sam Breadon drifted away from Laux in favor of more colorful radio commentators “who could do the most to promote his team,” such as Harry Caray, who followed Laux as the next icon spreading the gospel of Cardinal baseball on the team’s vast radio network. “The truth was that when France had the field to himself, he could just be himself… just tell the facts, and he could do that well. But when he had to entertain—jazz up the re-creations or be flashy like his competitors—he couldn’t do it,” Broeg said. “People said he was too old-timey.”21

In his later years, Laux remained in the St. Louis area for the rest of his life and continued to pop up on KMOX’s airwaves, such as when he conducted an interview with Stan Musial after the final game of his career in 1963. Mostly, though, Laux redirected his energy into another sport—bowling—including taking ownership of a bowling house and growing increasingly involved in the American Bowling Congress.

After 47 years of marriage, Laux’s wife, Pearl, died in 1976. Laux himself died a few years later, on November 16, 1978, at the age of 80. By the time of his death, Laux’s prominence in baseball broadcasting had long faded, with television having replaced radio as the nation’s dominant medium. Even so, “baseball people knew who Laux was,” said Jack Buck, who also followed in Laux’s footsteps as a Hall of Fame Cardinals broadcaster for KMOX.22 Even if few remember now, France Laux was undoubtedly a titan of baseball broadcasting back when radio was king, especially in St. Louis, where he will always have a place in the city’s history as the very first voice associated with baseball and the Cardinals.

Acknowledgments

This biography was reviewed by Warren Corbett and Rory Costello and fact-checked by Don Zminda.

Photo credit: France Laux, The Sporting News, July 5, 1934.

Sources

In addition to the endnotes below, the author utilized stlmediahistory.org.  

Notes

1 James Francis Laux, Principal United States, Veterans Administration Master Index, 1917-1940, FamilySearch.org.

2 Principal United States 1910 Census, Oklahoma, FamilySearch.org.

3 1910 and 1920 Census, Oklahoma, FamilySearch.org.

4 “How Fate Plunged France Laux into a Career as a Broadcaster,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, December 20, 1931: 9.

5 “How Fate Plunged France Laux into a Career as a Broadcaster.”

6 “One of Baseball’s Most Widely Known Announcers,” Jefferson City Post-Tribune, January 27, 1937: Section 2, 3.

7 “How Fate Plunged France Laux into a Career as a Broadcaster.”

8 “One of Baseball’s Most Widely Known Announcers.”

9 “How Fate Plunged France Laux into a Career as a Broadcaster.”

10 “France Laux,” National Baseball Hall of Fame, https://baseballhall.org/discover/awards/ford-c-frick/2016-candidates/laux-france.

11 J Francis Laux, Groom, Oklahoma, County Marriages, 1890-1995, FamilySearch.org.

12 “The Ladies’ Favorite Baseball Announcer,” The Salem Post, May 2, 1929: 1.

13 Curt Smith, Voices of the Game: The Acclaimed Chronicle of Baseball Radio and Television Broadcasting — from 1921 to the Present, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 97.

14 Glenn Goellner, “Veteran of World War I and an Athlete Since He Could Toddle, KMOX’s France Laux Ranks Among Nation’s Leading Sports Announcers,” St. Charles Banner-News, February 15, 1945: 4.

15 “How Fate Plunged France Laux into a Career as a Broadcaster.”

16 Ben Gross, “Listening In,” New York Daily News: 64.

17 Paul Damai, “Radio Short Circuits,” The Hammond Times, October 6, 1934: 5.

18 “France Laux Dies at 80; ‘Pioneer Baseball Voice,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 17, 1978: 6D.

19 “113 Stations Join in Salute to Laux of St. Louis, Columbia Air Ace of Game,” Sporting News, January 27, 1938: 6.

20 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 23, 1948: 32.

21 Smith, Voices of the Game: 97-98.

22 “France Laux,” National Baseball Hall of Fame, https://baseballhall.org/discover/awards/ford-c-frick/2016-candidates/laux-france.