Saturday Career

A young Philadelphia lawyer named Robert Allman was well on his way last week to making a hobby into a successful career. With his sixth sportcast over Station KYW, Bob Allman was getting 100 fan letters a week and nibbles from would-be sponsors. His 15-minute program is much like dozens of other sport roundups all over the U.S. He gives a brief resume of the week's highlights and the day's scores, follows up with an "editorial" on some topic of the day (the Durocher case, Jackie Robinson, etc.) and an interview with a visiting athlete. There is one notable difference: Sportcaster Allman is blind.

At 28, busy, balding Allman nimbly gets around Philadelphia by himself, manages to juggle three jobs and an avocation. "I work," he says, "at law during the day, insurance at night, radio on Saturdays, and blondes any time." He is doing all right in all his pursuits. Blinded in an accident at four, Bob nevertheless got a Phi Beta Kappa key at the University of Pennsylvania, became a national intercollegiate wrestling star (captain of the Penn team, three times second-place Eastern medalist).

Saturdays, with the help of Robert Paul, an old Penn crony who sometimes acts as his Seeing Eye at sports events, Bob mulls over the week's sport pages. Then he talks to local athletes over the telephone. Paul copies out the studio script on a typewriter while Allman punches out his own script on a Braille slate, a gadget that resembles a cribbage board.

On the air, Bob reads his script rapidly and casually with his fingertips, ad-libs with the evening's guest. When Paul taps him three times on the shoulder, he knows he has three minutes to go ; two taps mean two minutes, one tap the windup.

He cannot foresee the day when he'll be doing play-by-play sportcasts, "until they invent teletype in Braille," but he frankly hopes that his program will interest the networks. His chief worry: that a sudden shower at a game will ruin the perforated dots of his notes, leave him speechless at broadcast time.

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