San Diego (special) -- Carrie Kahn has covered a lot of stories for KPBS Radio and has the Golden Mike awards and other honors to prove it. But the opening of the exhibit June 30 at the Hall of Champions on the 1936 nazi Olympics in Berlin was something quite different for her.

She stood in front of one portion of the exhibit with tears streaming down her face. It pictured the U.S. squad that inaugurated basketball as an Olympic sport in 1936. The caption read: "Seven American Jewish men represented the United States in Berlin. ...Sam Balter, front row, right, reached the gold medal winning U.S. squad from the Hollywood Universal Pictures team. In 1936, the California Jewish Voice urged Balter to act as 'a spokesman for his brother Jews'" by boycotting the games. The newspaper was angry when Balter decided to compete anyway. "I never saw that picture before," Kahn said after wiping away the tears. "Sam Balter was my grandfather." Yes, she had been familiar with the controversy over his deciding to participate in the games; in fact, she and her grandfather had discussed

Carrie Kahn and        Marty Glickman

the matter on several occasions prior to his death late last year.

"He said that he was very proud to be Jewish and he wouldn't have participated in the Olympics or march in front of Hitler if he knew then what he knew later," Kahn recalled. "He said that a lot. He was very proud of his Jewish heritage."

The granddaughter said that at the time of the games, her grandfather was 19, and "they didn't know what Hitler was doing at the time. It was three years before the war. They knew something but they didn't know the extent. He said that he was a young ambitious boy, but later, knowing what he knew, he would have boycotted."

Kahn came to cover a story, not to be part of one, but, then, she wasn't aware that there would be a picture of her grandfather there to trigger such emotion.

She interviewed Marty Glickman, 81, another Jewish athlete who had gone to Berlin -- only he did not have the chance to compete because he and Sam Stoller, who also was Jewish, were lifted before the 4 x 100 relay in favor of Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, who helped the team win another gold medal in that event.

It was the first time that Kahn, 36, had the opportunity to interview one of her grandfather's teammates. 

In relating the story to Kahn of the controversial decision to take him and Stoller out of the games, Glickman also paid tribute to Balter as a friend who had been a great influence on him later in life. After the Olympics, Glickman went into broadcasting in New York City and later for the HBO Cable Network.

Balter similarly had become a sportscaster and people who followed basketball, in particular, would remember him well.

"He broadcasted for the defunct ABA Hollywood Stars, toured with the Harlem Globetrotters and had a falling out with Meadowlark Lemon (of the Globetrotters) but that is not why he stopped," Kahn said. Additionally, "he broadcast for the Cincinnati Reds, and he had the first coast-to-coast live sports program. He did that out of Los Angeles for years, at KABC."

So she followed in her grandfather's footsteps?

"No, not at all," she replied. "I came into this through a very circuitous route. It's funny when I think about it, my grandfather being a broadcaster. He won this Golden Mike Award from the Southern California Radio-Television Association in 1951, and I won one a couple of years ago, and I showed it to him. His is all little and mine is like this (she indicated a statue that would be many inches larger). He was very proud."

As for that 1936 gold medal Olympic basketball game, it was not at all like the high scoring superstar "dream team" contests that we associate with U.S. Olympic basketball today, Kahn said.

Her grandfather stood only 5'10 tall. He told Kahn that it was "a ridiculously low-scoring game. It was very rainy that day and they played in the mud."