Leiser, William Frederick 1898-1965

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LEISER, William Frederick 1898-1965

(Bill Leiser)

PERSONAL: Born April 26, 1898, in Madison, KS; died January 16, 1965, in San Francisco, CA; son of Mederick and Mabel (Tocht) Leiser; married Alice Lyle (Billie) Parks (a food editor), August 31, 1930. Education: Stanford University B.S. (political science); Stanford Law School, J.D., 1923.

CAREER: Sportswriter. San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco, CA, sportswriter, 1925-34; San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco, sports editor and columnist, 1934-64; Illustrated Football Annual, Pacific coast correspondent, 1942-53. Also wrote for and edited the Daily Palo Alto (Stanford University); hosted Pigskin Parade, KFRC, San Francisco. Military service: U.S. Army student battalion; served during World War I.

MEMBER: Footbal Writers of America (president, 1947), San Francisco Press Club (former president), Northern California Football Writers Association (former president).

AWARDS, HONORS: Helms Foundation Medal, 1948, for outstanding contributions to sports.

WRITINGS:

Contributor to Best Sports Stories 1935, edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre, E. P. Dutton (New York, NY), 1935; and Best Sports Stories 1946: A Panorama of the 1945 Sports Year, edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre, E. P. Dutton, 1946, and editions subsequently published in 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, and 1961. Author of "As Bill Leiser Sees It" (sports column), San Francisco Chronicle, 1940-64.

SIDELIGHTS: William Frederick "Bill" Leiser was a sportswriter whose forty-year career was spent at newspapers in San Francisco, California. As sports editor, he changed the way sports were covered by the San Francisco Chronicle, and as a columnist, he covered the entire range of sports. He was also well known outside the Bay Area for his solid knowledge of the games and people he covered, as well as for his professionalism and style.

Leiser was born on a Kansas farm to Mederick and Mabel (Tocht) Leiser, and the family moved to Minnesota and Wisconsin before settling in Twin Falls, Idaho. Leiser entered Stanford University but interrupted his education when he joined the U.S. Army at the start of World War I. He was assigned to a student battalion and spent his tour on the West Coast. Leiser returned to Stanford and graduated with a degree in political science. He had a talent for law and debate, but Leiser also found himself attracted to sports. Although not an athlete himself, he led a fund-raising campaign for a new stadium and wrote for and edited the student newspaper. He picked up assignments as a stringer for the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times, often using as a byline his first and middle names, William Frederick. Leiser entered Stanford Law School and earned his J.D., but he never took the bar exam. In spite of six years of preparation for the field of law, he took a part-time position with the San Francisco Examiner. His hours were expanded a year later, and he covered college football and yachting in the Bay Area. The Examiner, a paper in the William Randolph Hearst empire, was successful, in part, because of its sports section. Other sports staffers included football writers Brent Metzler, Abe Kemp, Curly Grieve, and Martin Burke. Because there were five major college football teams in the area, Leiser had plenty of work and often wrote several pieces for one edition, with or without his byline, with some attributed to "W. F. L." Leiser found many stories at St. Mary's, a small Catholic college where Edward "Slip" Madigan aspired to bring his team up to the level of the top squads at Stanford and the University of Southern California. In a 1927 story, Leiser was able to report that little St. Mary's Galloping Gaels did indeed beat Stanford sixteen to nothing. Over the next few years, they accumulated an impressive number of wins over the top teams. For a 1931 win, scoreless for the defeated California, Leiser wrote forty-four column inches.

Leiser married his wife, Alice, a food editor who wrote for the Examiner under the byline "Prudence Penny." He was well regarded on the West Coast and covered the big teams, now including St. Mary's, but his reputation would soon go further as Eastern teams came west to play the California schools. Off season, he covered boating, including the university crew teams and the yearly Perpetual Challenge Cup, a fourteen-mile yachting race that drew entries from around the country as well as from abroad. As in his football reporting, his knowledge of yacht racing enabled him to accurately describe the details of the action in the San Francisco Bay around Alcatraz Island. Leiser helped organize the annual W. R. Hearst Regatta, one of the largest events of its kind on the West Coast.

Leiser was happy to get back to writing about his favorite sport, football, when the season began each year, and in 1933, sports editor Curley Grieve sent him to New York City with the St. Mary's team for their fourth annual game against Fordham, which that year was undefeated and was being mentioned as a Rose Bowl contender. Leiser filed stories along the way on the luxury train that carried the team and its fans east. The Catholic colleges of St. Mary's and Fordham were vying to take over the place of Notre Dame, whose team was expected to fall into decline with the death of coach Knute Rockne. Leiser now was writing on national sports, including speculation as to who would take Rockne's place.

The 1933 game in New York was a turning point in Leiser's career. He met major national writers, including Ted Husing, Bill Corum, and Sid Mercer. The Examiner issue that contained Leiser's coverage of the game also featured a column by Damon Runyon, who wrote for the Universal News Service. Although one of the most prominent college ball writers, Runyon's column paled in comparison to Leiser's, with its contemporary, accurate yet colorful West-Coast style. This increased exposure led to an offer Leiser accepted: to become sports editor for the rival San Francisco Chronicle for the section that had, since the 1920s, been printed on green paper and dubbed the "Sporting Green."

The Chronicle was privately owned by M. H. de Young, and since 1921 its sports editor had been Harry B. Smith, who was most noted for his coverage of boxing. The other major sports writers were Ed Hughes, Art Rosenbaum, and Will Stevens, all of whom, according to Rosenbaum, felt the writing of their editor was substandard. The executive editor of the paper was Paul C. Smith, who brought in Leiser in an attempt to reverse the sports section's poor performance, a move that was unpopular with Harry Smith. According to Rosenbaum, Leiser took over the sports department from the first, but out of respect for Smith he listed both their names as editors until 1940. Another of Leiser's decisions was that stories about the criminal or sordid activities of sports figures would be relegated to the city news section rather than the sports section, a policy that endured until the late 1940s.

Leiser gained national attention with a story he wrote in 1934 about Pat O'Dea, an Australian who had been a phenomenal kicker at the University of Wisconsin from 1896 to 1899. To escape from the limelight, O'Dea had dropped out of sight and was believed to have died during World War I. Leiser followed up on leads as to O'Dea's whereabouts for nearly twenty years before he found him working for a California lumber company under the name of "Charles J. Mitchell." The story was selected for inclusion in E. P. Dutton's annual of best sports stories, the first of the seven times Leiser would be so honored.

The Chronicle sports section saw changes in writing style and layout under Leiser's supervision. Instead of long, detailed pieces, the newspaper turned to more modern, review-style reporting. Leiser had been an original organizer of the San Francisco-Oakland Newspaper Guild when he was with the Examiner, and he continued union activities while at the Chronicle, including his chairmanship of the pension fund committee. He hosted a half-hour radio program, Pigskin Parade, on San Francisco's KFRC and appeared on national radio network shows. Leiser added new names to the sports section with local and syndicated columns, including those by nationally recognized sports writers Grantland Rice and John Lardner. He included more artwork and used wire stories from the Associated Press and United Press International to round out coverage of other sports, including boxing, golf, baseball, and tennis.

In his own column, "As Bill Leiser Sees It," he wrote about a variety of sports and sports figures, such as tennis great Helen Jacobs of Berkeley, champion race horse, Seabiscuit, and Jack Dempsey, when the former heavyweight boxing champ went on an exhibition tour in which he fought wrestlers. When the United States entered World War II, Leiser covered the teams of the military branches. In 1942 he was chosen to fill the spot of West Coast correspondent for the Illustrated Football Annual, a position he held until that publication went out of business in 1953.

Following the war San Francisco saw its first professional franchise when the 49'ers came to the city in 1946. Leiser was involved from the earliest days of the new All-American Football Conference (AAFC). After the 1949 season, the 49'ers and several other AAFC teams merged with the National Football League, and in 1950 the Chicago Bears also moved to San Francisco. By the early 1950s the Chronicle had undergone a number of changes. Scott Newhall was the executive editor, and the entire paper was now relying more on syndicated columnists than on local writers. Leiser's sports section featured equal amounts of local and national wire service stories, and he was increasing coverage of major league baseball. It was also during this period that Leiser's health began to deteriorate, and he increasingly relied on others in the department to help with routine work. He continued to write his columns and often used them to promote fund-raising efforts for amateur teams, including the Olympic teams, and college and high school games. When it was announced in August of 1957 that the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers were moving to California, Leiser wrote that "the move, once it actually becomes official, will be the most tremendous ever made in organized professional sports."

Leiser was honored many times during his career. As Raymond Schmidt noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, he "had always been a newspaperman capable of looking into the future of sport and discussing the shape of the games to come, a trait that continued until his final days. Typical examples can be found in an April 1958 column, when he forecast the eventual movement of other major league baseball and football teams to new home cities; a May 1952 piece when he wrote that the strongest of football colleges could make fortunes by selling their television rights as they pleased; or his column of 29 March 1964, in which he advocated the U.S. use of professional athletes in the Olympic games, even as he attacked what he believed to be the hypocrisy of the so-called amateur athletics as practiced by American colleges."

Leiser's last coverage of a college football game, between Stanford and California, appeared in the Chronicle on November 22, 1964. His last column appeared on Christmas, 1964. He died at the age of sixtysix in Mill Valley, California, and on the day of his funeral, the Cable Car Clothiers Association printed a tribute to Leiser in the Examiner, called "The Legacy of Bill Leiser." As quoted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, it read, in part: "Bill Leiser had a touch of Ernie Pyle in him. … He could tell your story and mine. … He could tug at your heart with his perception. … He told the real San Francisco story as few men could." Leiser is buried in the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California.