By Gerry Smith and Phil Rosenthal
Chicago Tribune reporters
11:13 PM CST, February 28, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Paul Harvey, a Chicago radio man whose melodious voice and hearty "Hello, America" were cherished by millions for more than 57 years on national broadcasts that were an entrancing mix of news, storytelling and gently persuasive salesmanship, died Saturday. He was 90.
(Tribune photo by Chris Walker)
Paul Harvey, photographed in the Chicago Tribune photo studio in 2002.
Called "the voice of Middle America" and "the voice of the Silent Majority" by the media for his flag-waving conservatism, Harvey died surrounded by family in a Phoenix hospital, an ABC Radio Networks spokesman said. The cause of death was not immediately available.
"Paul Harvey was the most listened to man in the history of radio," said Bruce DuMont, president of the Museum of Broadcast Communications and host of the nationally syndicated "Beyond the Beltway." "There is no one who will ever come close to him."
Paul Harvey Jr., who after he was struck by a car in 1976 began writing his father's show, "The Rest of the Story," offered condolences, even amid his own loss, to those who loved to listen.
"My father and mother created from thin air what one day became radio and television news. So in the past year, an industry has lost its godparents and today millions have lost a friend," he said in a statement.
The show reached an estimated 24 million listeners on more than 1,200 radio stations nationally and 400 Armed Forces Radio stations around the world.
In Chicago, Harvey was heard on WGN-AM 720, but his local ties ran deeper.
Returning to civilian life after a three-month stint in the Army, Harvey moved to the radio big-time in Chicago.
While broadcasting the news at WENR-AM in Chicago's Merchandise Mart in 1951, Harvey became friends with the building's owner, Joseph P. Kennedy, who helped him get on ABC nationally.
Harvey's 45-minute routine started at 3:30 a.m., when the alarm clock would ring in the family's 22-room home in west suburban River Forest. It never varied: brush teeth, shower, shave, get dressed, eat oatmeal, get into car and drive downtown.
He dressed formally -- in shirt, coat and tie -- as if going to work as the president of a bank."It is all about discipline," Harvey told the Tribune in 2002. "I could go to work in my pajamas, but long ago I got some advice from the man who was the engineer for my friend Billy Graham's radio show. He said that one has to prepare in all ways for the show. If you don't do that in every area, you'll lose your edge."
Harvey rejected numerous offers to move his show to the East Coast so he could "stay in touch with his listeners and the American people," DuMont said.
Paul Harvey after qualifying for his sea plane license in 1951.
His five-minute "The Rest of the Story" broadcasts featured historical vignettes with surprise endings like the story of the 13-year-old boy who receives a cash gift from Franklin Roosevelt and turns out to be Fidel Castro. Or the one about the famous trial lawyer who never finished law school (Clarence Darrow). He'd end each broadcast with his signature: "Paul Harvey. [long pause] Good day!"
Born Paul Harvey Aurandt in Tulsa on Sept. 4, 1918. He and his sister were raised by their mother after their police officer father was killed in the line of duty when Harvey was 3. He dropped his last name for professional reasons in the 1940s.
Harvey developed an early infatuation with the new medium of radio, picking up stations from a homemade cigar-box crystal set.
Beginning as an unpaid gofer at a Tulsa radio station in 1933, Harvey worked his way up the radio ladder.
While working in St. Louis, Harvey met Lynne Cooper, a student-teacher from a socially prominent family who read school news announcements. Instantly smitten with the young woman he nicknamed "Angel," Harvey later asked her to dinner. On the night of their first date, he proposed as they sat in her parked car. They married in June 1940.
"Since the first day of our marriage, we've worked side by side," Harvey told the Tribune. "I think that if we had not worked so closely the marriage would not have survived. There has never been the opportunity for neglect."
Lynne Harvey remained her husband's closest professional collaborator until she died last May.
Harvey's typical broadcast included human interest stories he loved to tell in order to satisfy the public's "hunger for a little niceness."
Stories like the one about the woman in Sheboygan, Wis., who was saved from a knife-wielding assailant: "The rescuer?" Harvey asked rhetorically. "Well, the rescuer is a gutsy woman who just happened to be passing by. And she says if I won't tell her name, it's all right to tell her age. [pause] Eighty."
DuMont said Harvey had a litmus test for all his stories: Would Aunt Betty care about this? He thought about the interest level of his real Aunt Betty to get away from "highfalutin" foreign affairs discussions to discuss "meat and potato" issues like health care, DuMont said.
A Harvey broadcast from the late 1980s included these items:"Spec-tac-u-lar liftoff from Cape Canaveral this morning, into an azure sky," Harvey said, describing a rocket launch. Then it was on to "New York City. Last year. 8,064 people bitten by dogs. 1,587 people bitten [pause] by people."
Paul Harvey travels by air in the 1950's.
Harvey said his trademark pauses were originally developed as a "a lazy broadcaster's way of waiting for the second hand to reach the top of the clock."
Steve Edwards, acting program director at Chicago Public Radio, called them "pauses you could drive a truck through."
"One of the things that radio broadcasters are taught from Day 1 ... is that dead air is a big no-no and it's only after years and years in the field that you realize that silence is your most powerful tool, [and] he did it better than anyone," said Edwards, who remembers listening in the back seat of his parents' station wagon.
Chicago radio legend Steve Dahl remembers working in the same studios when he first came to town in 1978.
"One morning he walked past me and said, 'Good morning, American!' " Dahl recalled. "That made me feel like I'd finally hit the big time. Paul Harvey was the man. He sure made me feel like one."Known for his staunch conservatism -- he called it "political fundamentalism" -- Harvey supported McCarthyism in the 1950s. During the turbulent 1960s, Harvey echoed the sentiments of many older Americans by saying he felt like "a displaced person" in his own country.
But in 1970, Harvey shocked many of his listeners with his most famous broadcast. In the wake of Richard Nixon's expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, Harvey said: "Mr. President, I love you. But you're wrong."
Harvey heard plenty of criticism and praise and assessment, but preferred to stay away from the whole issue.
"What makes Paul Harvey tick? That question is better asked of the listeners," he told the Tribune. "If I thought too much about it, it might be self-defeating."
Harvey, who also read his own commercials on air, has been credited with coining words like "guesstimate," "trendency" and "snoopervision."
While he made his living with words, retirement wasn't in his vocabulary. In 2000, at age 82, he signed a reported $100 million contract that would have kept him on the air for 10 more years.
Simply put, Harvey preferred a life "sitting at that typewriter painting pictures" -- and then reading those "pictures" over the air.
As he once said, "I'm just a professional parade watcher who can't wait to get to the curbside."
Dennis McLellan of the Los Angeles Times and Tribune reporters Mary Owen, Rick Kogan and Trevor Jensen contributed to this report.
Paul Harvey: An appraisal of his career by the Tribune's Phil Rosenthal
By Phil Rosenthal
Chicago Tribune media columnist
March 2, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Paul Harvey's career—his whole life, really—was packed with the sort of surprises, superlatives, bold statements and seemingly small details that, woven together, also made up a great Paul Harvey broadcast.
In this Nov. 16, 1988 file photo, radio commentator Paul Harvey and his wife, Lynn, hold a street sign bearing his name in Chicago. A one-block stretch of East Wacker Dr. is changed to Paul Harvey Dr. in honor of the well-known broadcaster. ABC Radio Network says broadcasting pioneer Paul Harvey has died at the age of 90. Network spokesman Louis Adams says Harvey died Saturday Feb. 28, 2009 at his winter home in Phoenix, surrounded by family. (AP)All that would be missing would be the distinctively halting pauses of Harvey's delivery, and that's because there was no one steadier or more consistent for decades, right up until the last few years, when the inescapable indignities of age began to catch up with arguably the most popular radio commentator of all time.
You know the rest of the story.
Harvey, whose weekday newscasts and commentaries aired nationally for 58 years, died Saturday in Arizona. He was 90, two years older than commercial radio in this country, and no one had a better, longer run. Station owners may well find it easier to replace their mothers than Harvey.
In spirit, he is reunited with his Angel, as he nicknamed his beloved wife of nearly 68 years and longtime producer, Lynne. She preceded him in death less than a year ago and, between his ailments and hers, he had been off the air quite a bit in the last two years, causing his legion of loyal listeners and affiliates to fray.
Still, Harvey's Chicago-based radio newscasts and commentaries were airing nationally on around 600 stations at the time of his death, including Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co.'s WGN-AM 720.
That put him in a league with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, perhaps even ahead, even as it marked a tremendous drop-off from the 1,200 or so U.S. outlets that once carried "The Rest of the Story" and his other programs. Estimates pegged his daily audience at 24 million.
In truth, it's hard to know when his peak truly was because Harvey was so popular and so pervasive for so long.
The consolidation of the radio business and success of fellow conservatives in syndicated radio hurt him to a degree, not because they crowded out his viewpoint or his dramatic flair for telling tales, but because carving out time for Harvey's broadcasts would require a station to delay or cut into the syndicated fare, which could be both tricky and awkward. It was easier when more stations aired their own local programs.
Back when Harvey was on roughly 12 percent of the nation's radio stations in the 1960s and '70s, you would have been hard-pressed to find a dot on the map where a local station didn't air him. Sometimes he would air on both AM and FM in a town, sometimes on rock and country stations that had aired him when they had other formats and didn't want to let go for risk of alienating his listeners and boosting a rival.
Harvey in his own way was the world's most successful pre-Internet blogger, plucking a series of stories from any and all available sources and putting his own spin and storytelling style on them, putting them in his own voice and unique cadence.
Then-U.S. President George W. Bush (R) awards his Presidential Medal of Freedom to long-term radio commentator Paul Harvey as fellow awardees, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan (L) and actor Andy Griffith (2nd L) look on at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington in this November 9, 2005 file photo (Reuters)One thing that distinguished Harvey from many of his peers, beyond his unmatched reach and popularity, is he had no problem peppering his copy with ads, reading commercial copy and moving product. But part of his appeal to listeners was that he wasn't a traditional newsman, and this only made him more valuable to his bosses.
A 2007 National Public Radio report said Harvey was responsible for as much as 60 percent of the revenue of Citadel Broadcasting's ABC Radio Networks, which syndicated him. Asked by analysts a couple months later, Farid Suleman, Citadel's chairman and chief executive, called Harvey "a great part of our business" but "not significant anymore to the company in terms of overall profitability."
Shrewd industry observers will tell you that's only because the 10-year, $100 million contract Harvey scored in 2000 essentially gave him around 90 cents of every dollar his show made, which still wasn't that bad a deal for Citadel.
The day before Harvey's death, the New York Stock Exchange announced it would be delisting Citadel, whose stock price had fallen below a quarter, meaning its shares will be traded over-the-counter. It is further diminished without Harvey.
All of radio is.
philrosenthal@tribune.com
In Memoriam
Paul Harvey, Good Night
By Christopher Orlet on 3.2.09 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
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 by a new vacuum cleaner. Certainly being one of the most trusted and respected journalists of your day helps when you 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.
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