the pitch ... swung on, there's a drive hit out toward the right field corner. Henrich is going back. He can't get it! It's off the wall for a base hit! Here comes the tying run, and here comes the winning run! ... Friends, they're killin' Lavagetto... his own teammates... they're beatin' him to pieces and it's taking a police escort to get Lavagetto away from the Dodgers! ... Well, I'll be a suck-egg mule!" In 1939, Barber broadcast the first major-league game on television, on experimental NBC station W2XBS. In 1946, he added to his Brooklyn duties a job as sports director of the CBS Radio Network, succeeding Ted Husing and continuing through 1955. There, his greatest contribution was to conceive and host the CBS Football Roundup, which switched listeners back and forth between broadcasts of different regional college games each week. Barber called Dodgers broadcasts over New York radio station WHN (later WMGM) at 1050 on the AM dial, teaming with Al Helfer from 1939 to 1941, followed by Alan Hale in 1942 and Connie Desmond beginning in 1943. When he developed a severe bleeding ulcer in 1948 and had to take a leave of absence from broadcasting for several weeks, Dodgers president Branch Rickey arranged for Ernie Harwell, the announcer for the minor-league Atlanta Crackers, to be sent to Brooklyn as Barber's substitute; in exchange, Cliff Dapper, the catcher for the Dodgers' farm team in Montreal, was permitted to go to Atlanta to serve as the Crackers' new player-manager, thereby effecting the first player-for-announcer "trade" in major league history. Harwell would remain as a third man in the Dodgers' booth with Barber and Desmond through the 1949 season. While running CBS Sports, Barber became the mentor of another redheaded announcer. He recruited the Fordham University graduate Vin Scully for CBS football coverage, and eventually invited him into the Dodgers' broadcast booth to succeed Harwell in 1950 after the latter's departure for the crosstown New York Giants. That same year, the Dodgers began airing regular television broadcasts over WOR-TV, Channel 9 in New York, with the trio of Barber, Desmond, and Scully now alternating play-by-play for the team's games on both radio and TV. Barber was the first person outside the team's board of directors to be told by Branch Rickey that the Dodgers had begun the process of racial desegregation in baseball, which led to signing Jackie