Alexander Wilfred Dannenbaum, Jr.

'Bink' Dannenbaum, TV, radio pioneer

ALEXANDER W. "Bink" Dannenbaum Jr., a Philadelphia radio and TV pioneer, had a sense of humor that sometimes dipped into the bizarre.
There was the time back in the '30s when he and a friend from Princeton University thought up what became a legendary hoax, the invention of the football team of "Plainfield Teachers College" with its rice-eating Chinese quarterback and the "W" formation in which the ends faced the backfield on offense.
The boys were sitting around one day when they saw an article about the Slippery Rock Teachers College football team. Its scores were listed every Sunday in the New York Times. They were intrigued by the name.
On an impulse, the friend called the New York Times sports desk and said he had a score to report. It was Plainfield Teachers, 21, Regency, 12.
Neither school existed and the pair were somewhat shocked to read the score in the Times that Sunday.
That was the beginning. The hoax escalated from there. Dannenbaum phoned the phony scores to the Philadelphia papers and his friend to the New York papers.
They listed friends as members of the team. News releases described the quarterback, Johnny Chung, who owed his success to the rice he ate during halftime, and the weird "W" formation.
The hoax was finally exposed by Time magazine three weeks after it started, but that only caused the story to escalate. Articles were written about it by Red Smith for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and Franklin P. Adams for the New York Herald Tribune, and others around the country.
Actor Robert Montgomery made a TV special based on the story, and Walter Winchell referred to it on the air for many years.
"He was just a funny guy," said his son, Alexander W. Dannenbaum III. "A lot of people remember him just for his sense of humor."
His father died Saturday at the age of 93. He was living in Boca Raton, Fla.
He was born to Miriam and Alexander W. Dannenbaum Sr. and grew up in Elkins Park. He studied engineering at Princeton, but decided that was not the career he wanted to pursue.
His father was president of Pine Tree Silk Mills in Philadelphia and owned a small 250-watt radio station, WDAS.
His son started in the business selling ads for the station on a commission basis. He got the idea of broadcasting news every hour, a practice eventually picked up by radio stations around the country.
Dannenbaum, whose nickname was "Bink," was a member of the Army Signal Corps during World War II and served for a time in the China-Burma-India Theater. He emerged with the rank of major.
After the war, he married Genevieve Valerie Frances Ryan.
When his father sold WDAS in the 1950s, he took a job as sales manager for WPEN. Six months later, he began his TV career as sales manager of WPTZ, Philco's pioneering television in Philadelphia.
"It was the first commercial television station in the world," he wrote in a Princeton University newsletter in 1993, "and we were off to the races."
The station offered a cooking show and one day when the cook failed to show up, a young disc jockey named Ernie Kovaks took over. He was so funny, the stint launched his comic career.
Westinghouse bought the station and offered Dannenbaum a job as general sales manager for all of its stations, and he moved to Scarsdale, N.Y. He eventually became senior vice president, and retired in 1973.
His wife died in 1965, and in 1973, he married Sally Moss Allman, the mother of three sons.
He spent his retirement years sailing his 40-foot yawl in the waters around Florida and the Caribbean, and visiting Camden, Maine. He received his captain's license from the Coast Guard in Florida, and taught sailing there for a time.
Dannenbaum also is survived by a brother, Paul O. Dannenbaum; his step-children, and six grandchildren.
Services: Memorial service 1:30 p.m. tomorrow in Boca Raton, Fla.
Philadelphia Daily News
Tuesday, January 13, 2004