Max Boot
speaker
527 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Max Boot’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And he, you know, he told his fraternity brothers at tiny Eureka College that within a few years, he would be making something like $5,000 a year, which at that time, that was a lot of money.
That's like saying, I'm going to make $250,000 a year today.
And he had no job prospects, no real qualifications to do anything.
And yet he set out on this path where, you know, he had dreamed of becoming a movie actor.
He was very active in the drama society in both high school and college.
But he looked around the Midwest, didn't see a lot of movie studios.
But what he saw were a lot of radio stations.
And radio was the hot new technology in the 1930s, kind of like podcasts or something today.
And so he decided, okay, well, I don't know how to get to Hollywood, but I know how to find a radio station.
So he just went around.
with his very meager resume looking for a job and eventually wound up at a very small radio station in Iowa and started doing sportscasting and all sorts of other broadcasting duties and gradually made a name for himself
in the Midwest and got, you know, moved over to a larger radio station in Des Moines and became known as Dutch Reagan, the voice of the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox.
And so he started, even by the mid-1930s, when the country was still in the midst of this incredible depression, he was already having tremendous success, far more than anybody could have imagined for this kid from this very hard luck background.
Yeah, I mean, his tryout was basically, you know, he had to recreate in his mind
a game which he had seen or he imagined, and he was able to do this so vividly that he convinced the radio station owner that he was seeing it in person.
And then, you know, the way that they did play-by-play in those days, I think strikes anybody today as being pretty weird because he would not actually go to the games.
He would be sitting in a studio hundreds of miles away
from the baseball stadium, and he would be reading a telegraphic account of what was going on, you know, really terse, basically saying, you know, so-and-so struck out, so-and-so reached first base, whatever.
And then he would be creating this word picture for his listeners as if he were actually there, pretending that he was, you know, sitting in the ballpark watching the action.
So again, it required, I mean, two things that it required, which he had
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