Joe Tucker, Steelers 'forgotten' announcer,
By Lee Chottiner
Executive Editor, Pittsburgh Chronicle

For 30-plus years, Joe Tucker was the play-by-play announcer for the Pittsburgh Steelers - even before they were called the Pittsburgh Steelers.
His days in the broadcast booth started in 1936 when NFL teams were frequently named after their baseball counterparts (the Steelers started out as the Pittsburgh Pirates). Back then, he called each play as it came over a Teletype, trying to make it sound as realistic as possible.

He soon graduated to live radio and finally - in the 1960s - to television.

In all that time, he called several winning teams for the Steelers, especially during the Bobby Lane era, but never a championship team.

He didn't seem to mind, though, according to his son, Murray Tucker.

"If he did, he never let on," Murray said. "He was always like, 'Go Steelers!' And he enjoyed his retirement. It wasn't matter of being upset."

Win or lose, the story of Tucker, who died in 1986, is also the story of broadcasting in its earliest days in Pittsburgh; it's a spotlight on Jewish life here in the mid-20th century as well as the rise of the first Pittsburgh Steelers play-by-play man.

And it's a story that's finally told, in Tucker's own words, in the book "Screamer: The Forgotten Voice of Pittsburgh Steelers."

(Tucker got the nickname Screamer after calling a 1941 game between the Steelers and Brooklyn at Ebbets Field, raising his voice to be heard over the din of the fans.)

Murray, who adapted his father's notes for the book, got the idea for the title from a trivia question on the Steelers Web site: What team has had only two play-by-play announcers for 40 years? "The answer provided was Jack Flemming and Bill Hargrove (sic) for the Steelers," Murray wrote in the foreword to his book. "But the question should have been: What team has had only three play-by-play announcers for its entire history?"

The answer to that question would have included Tucker, the son of Russian Jews who settled in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan at the turn of the 20th century. As a young man, Tucker, anxious to leave the Canadian prairie, made more than one attempt to immigrate to America, where he finally settled with family in Pittsburgh.

What followed was a series of career ups and downs that started him on his life in broadcasting. He went on to call baseball games for the Pirates at Forbes Field, hockey games for the old Pittsburgh Hornets at the Duquesne Garden, and boxing bouts. Along the way, he interviewed some of the heroes in American sports, including Heavyweight Champion Joe Lewis.

He also became fast friends with giants in Pittsburgh broadcasting such as Bob Prince and Myron Cope.

He knew them, but he was hardly like them. Tucker spent his free time reading the works of Plato, Aristotle and Kierkegaard (not exactly required reading for a microphone jockey), and unlike Cope and Prince, he was not so colorful on the air.

"He was very much a stick-to-the-game guy; describe it, give the scores," Murray said. "He really didn't come through as a personality as some of the other announcers did."

And yet Cope, who was not interviewed for this story, told Murray his father did have one patented line on the air: Whenever a running back carried the pigskin for hard-earned yardage, he would bellow: "powers his way up the middle!"

He said that quite a bit, son Murray said, given that football - at least the way the Steelers played it - was very much a running game back then.

Tucker, wrote two books during his lifetime. He always intended to write a history of his broadcast days, but died before he had the chance. Murray, a retired professor of economics who today lives in Steamboat Springs, Col., finished the job for his father using notes Tucker made years after the facts.

"He had a daily journal, but I could never read it," Murray said. "It was just very short notes, [and] his handwriting was hard to read. But that wasn't the source material; the source material were notes taken from memory and probably taken from these daily journals he had."

A long-time resident of Pittsburgh, Tucker married Frances Schlesinger, whom he met on a double date. The couple had two sons: Murray and Robert Tucker (a former district magistrate) and one daughter, Lynne .

Older Pittsburghers may remember Tucker's broadcasts, but even if young Steelers fans have never heard of him, there's something they can do about it.

A two-minute cut of the last broadcast his father made in 1981 while visiting Cope and Jack Flemming in the Steelers broadcasting booth ("Steelers Screamer Returns 1981") is available on YouTube. So, you too can hear "powers up the middle!"