Sports in the Sunday News

The sports pages was one of the most popular sections of the Sunday News, right up there with the comic strips. The back page of the main news section on Sunday, like the back page of the Daily News, was devoted to action sports shots and headline coverage of the main sports event of the preceding day. Sports editor Jimmy Powers contributed his take in his column “The Powerhouse.”

The lead backpage photo in the late editions showed Dodger Carl Furillo stealing home in the 12th inning to give Brooklyn a 3-2 win over the Yankees in exhibition play at Ebbets Field.The professional baseball season officially opened that week and baseball was the center of attention in the Sunday News sports coverage. The paper reported that the Dodgers-Yanks game had drawn 27,419 customers. A portion of the gate went to the Jesuit missionaries in the Philippines.. The Giants beat the Indians at Cleveland 9-5. A news item reported that one owner of a club in the Mexican Baseball league had decried the practice of Mexican clubs importing high price US talent, a sore point for US baseball fans as well. In college baseball, City College bested West Point 9-4, NYU defeated Brooklyn College and Fordham scored an overtime victory over Columbia.

Powers column that day was a paean to Teddy Lyons who had been with the White Sox since 1923. Powers hoped he stayed with the team in some capacity.

The racing season at Jamaica was under way and the subject of extensive coverage. Earlier editions of the Sunday News that day featured a backpage shot of the racetrack and the crowd of 47,000. Playing the horses was a big time activity in 1946. The News reported that $424,849 had been fed to the parimutuel machines in the first race, Alamond had won the featured race of the day. The News also gave the results at other tracks across the nation.

This was also the opening of the trout season upstate.