Anecdotes
Based on what I've read, conditions in the venues varied considerably. Some had loudspeakers, some had earphones tied to megaphones, and some even placed earphones in large bowls to reflect the sound towards the audience. My father remembered listening in the latter manner; he laughed about it, but he said that it worked well enough.
Skeptic though I am, I think I understand why such measures worked adequately. In 1921, most theatres had been built to be used without microphones and amplifiers - a theatre had to have excellent acoustics to function that way. Good acoustics work. You can understand that very well if you ever took a Hicksville High Senior Trip to Washington, stood at the right spot in the U.S. Capitol while a guide spoke very softly to you from a second "right spot," many yards away, and you heard him/her perfectly.
As I indicated earlier, my mother spoke to me about how she listened to the fight. A neighbor deliberately put a radio (she did not recall if it was a crystal radio, but I think it was) on a window sill, so that the neighborhood kids outside could listen. The sidewalk was narrow; some of them sat on the curb, some sat or stood close to the open window. There was not much road traffic, and they were able to hear clearly.
Being kids, they probably had never actually seen a prize fight, but hearing the broadcast was enough to get them excited. Despite the need to be quiet, she and the other girls found themselves cheering, "Come on, Carpentier!" Clearly, the immediacy of the experience was impressive. She did not pause to rhapsodize about the miracle of radio; she just embraced it, and let it pull her by the imagination.
School kids, Maspeth, NY c.1920
On the right is my mother, Agnes Siłakowska;
her siblings Edward and Isabelle are on the left.
Between them are close neighborhood friends
who likely joined them at the window to listen.
I think that my mother never was able to like television in the way that she liked radio. Perhaps that was because it was too captivating; she could not watch it unless she stopped doing the other things she wanted to do. In my very earliest memories, our home is a space that is filled happily by the sound of radio, with my mother going about her housework, listening, always listening. I think that she never tired of being drawn into its world.
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