 | ||||||
|
| Austin articles | IP address lookup | Texas license plate lookup | email scrambler | web design | slingblade sounds | cedar fever |
 Like many youngsters growing up in America in the 1960s, my childhood heroes were men of action and mighty deeds. My personal pantheon of demi-gods included James Bond, Napoleon Solo, Doc Savage, Superman and Spider-Man among many others. Fictional characters all. But now at the age of 53 I find that I measure my heroes by an entirely different yardstick. Yes, the exploits of those pulp heroes still have the power to thrill and stir the blood but it's the mortal men I now admire the most. These are men who made a difference in my life by their work, words and deeds. Among those still with us I count Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, Andy Griffith, Don Rickles and Stan Lee as exemplars of my heroic ideal for many and various reasons. And among those who have gone on ahead, comic book artist Jack Kirby, Rodney Dangerfield, Don Knotts, Johnny Carson and Forrest J. Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters magazine, will forever hold a place in my heart. But now there is one more name to add to the list of my dearly departed heroes: Paul Harvey. I cannot recall a specific time and place when I first heard that distinctive, unmistakable and oh-so-golden voice coming out of a radio speaker. I know only that I was very young and that the man on the radio had to have been very old. I remember that my father would occasionally listen to him and that surely must have been my first exposure to the man who would become a broadcasting legend. Our parents (and to some extent our grandparents) grew up listening to the radio for entertainment and information and thus, the medium played an immense part in their daily lives. The daily programs, the music, the newscasts, the "fireside chats" of FDR are all things of a distant era. But our parents became used to hearing certain voices that made them laugh and cry and that told them of good news and bad. Paul Harvey was one of those voices. Paul Harvey's career in broadcasting spanned seven decades and his voice was heard daily by millions of Americans on both his noontime "Paul Harvey News and Comment" broadcast and his ever popular "The Rest of the Story." Let me repeat that. Paul Harvey was on the air in one form or another for the better part of seventy years. Seventy years! You can rest assured that we will never see such a feat equaled in any of our lifetimes. My first real regular exposure to Paul Harvey occurred on construction sites where I worked as a teenager and young man during my high school and college summers. We would break for lunch and one of the older workmen would tune his radio to the broadcast and we would sit and eat and listen. We might chuckle at some news item but we did not talk until after the show was over. One man in particular, a painter named Dee Scott, was a huge fan of the Harvey broadcast. Every day at noon Mr. Scott (everyone called him that) and I would climb into the two front seats of his painter's van and listen to Paul Harvey. Mr. Scott would from time to time get mad at Harvey and talk back to him. These outbursts usually occurred after Harvey had gone on at length about him and Angel and "Young Paul" and their visits to their Ozark hideaway, "Reveille Ranch". "Oh, who the hell cares," Mr. Scott would bark at the radio. But he never turned it off or changed the station. He wouldn't have missed Paul Harvey for the world and because of his devotion to the show, I never missed it either. Looking back, "Paul Harvey News" is my personal soundtrack of those long gone summers when I learned to sit still for a few minutes and listen and be changed by what I heard. What did I hear? I heard a welcoming voice greet me as a fellow American. The voice told me who he was and then asked me to get ready for what followed: "Hello Americans, this is Paul Harvey, stand by for news!" With just ten words (arguably among the ten most famous words in broadcasting history) millions of people were alerted to the fact that something special was about to take place. And it was special because the name of the show was "Paul Harvey News and Comment." Harvey didn't just read and report the news, he commented upon it in a mostly but not always subtle way. And the news we heard was far more than just the daily headlines. That stuff we could get anywhere. For years, Paul Harvey would arise at 3:30 every morning, drive to his studio in "the pre-dawn darkness" and begin pouring over numerous newspapers and newswires for stories, items and tidbits you wouldn't find anywhere else. I'm sure he had a staff that helped him compile the information but Paul Harvey wrote the copy himself and wrote it in a way that only he could deliver. His staccato delivery, his pauses, his occasional mispronunciation of words, all added to the spell that he cast on each broadcast. All great communicators make their audiences feel like the speaker is talking directly to them as individuals and Paul Harvey excelled at this. His personal touch extended to the commercials that he did himself for a variety of sponsors. Harvey always maintained that he would not accept sponsorship from any company whose products he personally wouldn't endorse or use. This meant that every commercial message had the ring of authenticity. Yes, Paul Harvey was selling us things but they were things he believed in and used. Sponsors over the years included Kava ("The old fashioned word for coffee was java, the new fashioned word is Kava!), Amway, Buick, Walgreen's, Wal-Mart, General Steel, Lifelock and High Health. It says something about a program when the sponsors are as memorable as everything else. One of Paul Harvey's greatest gifts was his unbridled optimism and belief that the best days of our country were still ahead of us. While he loved to look back in warm remembrance from time to time, Harvey always had both eyes fixed strongly on the future. The past was what it was, today was a blessing, but tomorrow, why, tomorrow was going to be even better than we could imagine. Paul Harvey has no more tomorrows but he left us with a thousand glittering yesterdays and the rock solid conviction that our collective tomorrows will indeed be grand and glorious. I know. Paul Harvey told me so. The obituaries, remembrances and memorials that will be written about Paul Harvey in the days and weeks ahead will almost all work in the phrase "the rest of the story" as a closure to the man's life and career. It's not a bad epithet as those things go, if perhaps a bit of an obvious one. I like to think that perhaps the more fitting expression is "page two." Because after all, the story of Paul Harvey is far from over. It has merely moved onto the next page, the page where legends live. In Orson Welles's immortal 1941 film masterpiece "Citizen Kane" the last words spoken by Charles Foster Kane at the beginning of the film are "Rosebud." Breathes there a soul touched by the life of Paul Harvey that doesn't know in his or her heart that Paul's last words were....... 
|
return to article index
