“Hello, Americans. Stand by for news.”
When I was in my twenties in graduate school at the University of Georgia in Athens, Paul Harvey came to town one night. Barb and I spent a lot of time studying back then and didn’t go out much, but that night we scurried from the ugly wine-colored trailer in which we lived at the edge of a cemetery all the way across town to hear him.
That was in the late 1960s, and our politics then were about as far from Paul Harvey’s as they could have been. You may remember Harvey, who died a couple of weeks ago on February 28, as the voice of Middle America, a radio commentator who in his early days was a supporter of McCarthyism, a pro-war enthusiast, an anti-hippie and a flag-waving anti-intellectual. He was indeed the pioneer in conservative radio, his expressive voice commanding the noontime airways long before Rush Limbaugh came on the scene.
Paul Harvey in those days was wildly popular—a Gallup poll named him the second most admired American in 1969. Around that time he had about 24 million listeners every day. But he was probably not somebody you would have expected to be well received by your liberal friends and professors.
But well received at Georgia he was. The audience to hear him was large and enthusiastic, and I doubt that many of them were any more in line with his ultra-conservative politics than Barb and I were. We were all there because Paul Harvey was a kind of legend, was fun to listen to, was likeable and interesting, and was, well, Paul Harvey.
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The man was always a lot more than his political philosophy (which did, by the way, become a lot less black and white as he aged). He was a storyteller extraordinaire, a master of the English language, an expert with idioms and rich metaphors and wonderful words. He had a way of putting a spin on stories that made it impossible for a listener to change the dial.
The vignettes he so winningly told on the air often ended with a sharp turn, like his story of the would-be artist who turns out to be Hitler or the teenage boy who received cash from FDR and ends up being Fidel Castro.
And has anyone else ever had so distinctive a style?—that halting, staccato delivery with emphasis in what might have seemed like all the wrong places. He was also a master of the pause—the looooong pause. And the man had a million-dollar voice as well.
Paul Harvey’s 15-minutes of midday airtime came to us out of Chicago, but Harvey came to us like someone with his roots in Oklahoma, which is exactly where his roots were. He was born there, and he never lost the touch of small-town America. He was a consistent supporter of cops (his policeman father had been killed in the line of duty in Tulsa), of soldiers and veterans, and of conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. However, when his friend Nixon extended the Viet Nam War in 1970, Harvey told him on air that he was wrong.
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I’m going to miss Paul Harvey. There are certain people I’m awfully glad I had a chance to see in person in this life—and he’s one of them. All these years later, I remember well that night Barb and I went to hear him speak in Athens. I don’t usually wait around to talk to a speaker after a lecture, but I waited for him. I had already started writing a bit then, and I told him after his speech that he was one of the best storytellers I’d ever heard, and that I wanted to be a storyteller of sorts, too, only in print someday.
And Paul Harvey took the time to give a long-haired, bearded, hippyish college student a bit of advice. “Two things,” he said, in that so-familiar telegraph style of speech. “I have always found it … useful … to have an appreciation for things that are odd and unexpected …and things that are ordinary and true.”
I’ve remembered that, and I’ve used it. I’m going to miss Paul Harvey.
