George White: Texas League Media Voice
This article was written by Tom Simmons
This article was published in Texas is Baseball Country (SABR 24, 1994)
In the glory days of the Texas League, George W. White was one of its leading media voices.
His column, “The Sport Broadcast,” in the Dallas Morning News was for 20 years an authoritative, no-nonsense commentary in an era when baseball was king. Radio was scanty, and television had not blossomed, though George later was a pioneer in both fields.
He was born in Kansas (also the home state of journalist-playwright Damon Runyon) in 1902 and educated in Peoria, Illinois. Covering high school and amateur sports for the Peoria Journal-Transcript while in high school, White became the nation’s youngest sports editor in 1917 when the rest of Peoria sports staff trooped off to World War I.
In 1922 he became sports editor of the Dallas Dispatch, and in 1928 White began a 21-year career with the Morning News. The baseball Dallas Steers and their legendary feuds with the Fort Worth Cats were his fodder. He wrote accounts of the classic duels between spitballer Snipe Conley of the Steers and southpaw Joe Pate of the Cats.
White also was one of the leading chroniclers of Houston Buff fireballer Dizzy Dean and Rudy York of the Beaumont Exporters. The famed Dixie Series between the TL and Southern Association was one of his favorite sporting events in a journalistic career that spanned seven decades.
The venerable sports editor had a regional impact that went beyond baseball. He was credited with the first extensive coverage of a young Dallas secretary of later Olympic fame, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and was a moving force in the evolution of the (now Mobil) Cotton Bowl to a national status in 1937. He provided play-by-play for the first Dallas live radio account of a sporting event — a 1925 high school football game — as well as the first sports telecast in the area of a 1949 high school football contest.
His friends included the likes of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, John McGraw, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, Rogers Hornsby, and Dizzy Dean. He became the first Metroplex writer to cover the World Series, starting with the 1924 Washington Senators’ win over the New York Giants. White hammered on his trusty portable typewriter at major bowl games, the Kentucky Derby, PGA events, bowling tournaments, and other national events. He was named first president of the Texas Sports Writers Association in the 1930s.
White, pipe clenched in teeth, could grind out columns with the best of them as he headed a staff mostly numbering three persons (including weekenders and part-timers, today’s Morning News sports departments has 60 employees). In 1949 he left the Morning News to become the first sports director of WFAA-TV while simultaneously editing the National Skeet Shooting Association magazine and serving as a Southwest area scout for the NFL’s Cleveland (later Los Angeles) Rams. He helped to build the NSSA membership from 4,000 to 18,000 after becoming executive director of that organization before retiring in 1969 and later died in 1977.