I don’t know about the rest of the nation, but here in Central
time we could get Paul Harvey’s News and Comment in the morning
and again at noon, most likely on some crackly AM country music
station. If I were out of town or on the road, I would surf the
AM dial hoping to find a hint of that unmistakable
voice: The Voice. Like a true news junkie, I needed
my Paul Harvey fix.
Paul Harvey, born Paul Harvey Aurandt in Tulsa on Sept. 4, 1918,
had a voice like a cannon at Gettysburg, like Teddy Roosevelt
charging up San Juan Hill or General Anthony Clement
McAuliffe answering the German surrender ultimatum with the
expletive “Nuts!” His distinctive baritone was soothing and
comforting, the optimistic, can-do voice of Middle America, the
voice of hope decades before Barack Obama knew the meaning of the
word.
Listening to Paul Harvey, who died Saturday at age 90, was like
eavesdropping on radio in its golden age, which wasn’t just
radio’s golden age, of course, but America’s. Like many of his
listeners, Paul Harvey did it all: wrote his own copy, read his
own commercials, even invented his own vocabulary (Reaganomics,
skyjacker, guesstimate, to name a few of his neologisms). When it
came to selecting news copy Paul Harvey applied what he called
his “Aunt Betty” test. Aunt Betty was an old fashioned Missouri
housewife (his sister-in-law, actually), and no story too
complicated or dull for Aunt Betty made it onto the newscast.
A Paul Harvey newscast was in startling contrast to the network
or public radio news. From the opening salvo of “Hello Americans!
Paul Harvey…Stand by for News!” — the absence of
any theme music or bells and whistles let you know you were in
for 15 minutes of honest, man-to-man talk. Paul Harvey gave it to
you straight, but without the doom and gloom that hung over other
conventional newscasts. In the midst of recession, national
tragedy, or malaise, Paul Harvey showed you the silver lining
amid the dark clouds and raised America’s collective spirit —
not like a preacher (though he was descended from five
generations of Baptist preachers), but as America’s most trusted
news source.
What a contrast to the negative nabobs of negativism further down
the dial. If you had to pin down Paul Harvey, he probably leaned
more to the right of center than to the left, but only because he
believed in core conservative values like self-reliance,
religious faith, the free market, and the industry and ingenuity
of the American people. But while Paul Harvey loved to preface
stories with “There is good news today…” Paul Harvey News and
Comment was not a vacuous “Good News” newscast. There was a fine
line between locating the good in the news and being willfully
naïve. With an audience of 22 million dedicated listeners, Paul
Harvey was anything but naïve.
IN THE TWENTY or so years I listened to Paul Harvey I do not ever
recall hearing him say a negative word about any celebrity or
government official — which was one reason you came away from a
Paul Harvey broadcast feeling better about yourself and your
country. And perhaps a hankering to run out and buy a new vacuum
cleaner. Certainly being one of the most trusted and respected
journalists of your day helps when you are trying to peddle your
sponsors’ wares.
As popular as his newscasts were, equally beloved was a segment
called “The Rest of the Story.” I remember crawling in from
college football practice at 5:30 p.m. — this was the early
1980s — and collapsing on a locker room bench while over the
loudspeaker came The Voice halfway through his evening broadcast,
which wasn’t news at all, but a feature story where some famous
person’s identity was revealed in a surprise, twist
ending. It might be the
story how one man single-handedly brought Philadelphia back
from the dead following the Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793
(George Washington), or the misanthrope who wished to drown the
human race (Mark Twain).
Talk about a surreal scene: fifty exhausted college football
players from all across the country lying all over a locker room
floor in silence waiting for Paul Harvey to reveal the identity
of today’s subject. “And now you
know…the rest of the story…Paul Harvey…Good
Day!” Only then would we hit the showers.
His few Eastern establishment critics — and I do mean few —
would probably have called Paul Harvey a second-rate newsman, an
anti-intellectual populist, and a snakeskin salesman who peddled
not only vacuum cleaners, but false hope and optimism while
ignoring the real challenges America faced. But it doesn’t matter
what they say, because they only talk to themselves.
The Voice spoke to all of us.
