I can't remember the first time I heard him on the air. I know it was a long time ago. He'd been a radio presence since I was soiling my diapers, and I'm not a young guy.
But last Saturday, I got word that Paul Harvey died at the age of 90. My first thought was, another real journalist left us. There are just not that many left.
I'll rephrase something here, about his longevity. Paul Harvey had been at the microphone since the 1930s, when radio and newspapers were the only media game in town. Despite battling throat problems in his later years and working a reduced schedule, he hadn't lost much of anything even as he approached his 90s. And in a society that introduces all these new technologies while paying zero respect to history, Paul Harvey stayed on the air all that time, kept himself from obsolescence, and kept a following.
It wasn't until my Arizona period that I started paying more attention to Paul Harvey. That was when I worked as a freelance writer for the Bullhead City Bee. The Bee was a small, crusadsing weekly newspaper with an all-star cast. That's where I really got to know one Richard Kaffenberger, who was in exile after being the first city manager in Bullhead City to get fired. As manager, Richard served at the pleasure of the City Council, and the council's pleasure was to carve on him with sharp objects and attach electrodes to his privates. Or something. Richard was biding his time, doing a little writing, and running a talk show out of Needles, Calif.
Anyway, one of my assignments with the Bee was to put together the weekly crime report, which was something any good journalist would call "pennance." The job consisted of sifting through the police department dispatch logs, and writing a short paragraph on each item , and compiling it into something readable. The readers love those crime reports, but they are a pain to assemble. What made things even more tedious was that those phone logs also included officers calling in to say they won't be to work on time. (For the trivia-minded, that's where we got our word "copulate." Or something.) It was a boring assignment, the equivalent of being in the seventh level of Hell, though it was an assignment where I had a lot of latitude.
I was pretty selective on what went into the weekly crime report. Anything involving an arrest, any reported burglaries and assaults, any felonies went in. Plus, I threw in all the strange police calls -- things on the order of someone being attacked by killer monarch butterflies, for example.
It turns out my editor would pick out some of my better oddities and call them in to Paul Harvey's show. I understand a few of these were read on the air, too. So, if you were a Paul Harvey listener around 1992 and remember hearing of some bizarre crimes from northern Arizona, you now know who first dug up the reports.
I always liked Paul Harvey. Although electronic (radio & TV) types are just not considered in the same camp as print journalists, Paul was a true wordsmith. He crafted his words with care, just like an old-style print guy. His "Rest Of The Story" feature, which began in the mid-1970s at the sugtgestion of his son, was a great vehicle for this skill. He was a master of building his story, with all the pauses and re-re-repeats for dramatic tension. And of course, with my own taste for what some people would call "useless information," how could I not love the rest of the story?
Of course, when someone like a Paul Harvey dies, there are plenty of tributes and perhaps his character is magnified considerably. Even if a guy was a drunken lout who regularly beat his kids with a switch made from barbed wire, you're just not going to talk about that in the days after he dies. But from what I understand, Paul Harvey was a good guy. A caring guy.
His wife Angel died less than a year ago, and they were together for more than 60 years. It says a lot about a person when he leaves this earth so soon after a spouse. For some reason I keep thinking of Johnny Cash here. His wife, June Carter Cash, died in 2003, and Johnny followed her within months. OK, theirs was sometimes-stormy relationship (and life with Johnny wasn't always easy), but you can bet his life was a lot less sweet without June around.
And without Paul Harvey around, radio is not going to be as interesting.
But last Saturday, I got word that Paul Harvey died at the age of 90. My first thought was, another real journalist left us. There are just not that many left.
I'll rephrase something here, about his longevity. Paul Harvey had been at the microphone since the 1930s, when radio and newspapers were the only media game in town. Despite battling throat problems in his later years and working a reduced schedule, he hadn't lost much of anything even as he approached his 90s. And in a society that introduces all these new technologies while paying zero respect to history, Paul Harvey stayed on the air all that time, kept himself from obsolescence, and kept a following.
It wasn't until my Arizona period that I started paying more attention to Paul Harvey. That was when I worked as a freelance writer for the Bullhead City Bee. The Bee was a small, crusadsing weekly newspaper with an all-star cast. That's where I really got to know one Richard Kaffenberger, who was in exile after being the first city manager in Bullhead City to get fired. As manager, Richard served at the pleasure of the City Council, and the council's pleasure was to carve on him with sharp objects and attach electrodes to his privates. Or something. Richard was biding his time, doing a little writing, and running a talk show out of Needles, Calif.
Anyway, one of my assignments with the Bee was to put together the weekly crime report, which was something any good journalist would call "pennance." The job consisted of sifting through the police department dispatch logs, and writing a short paragraph on each item , and compiling it into something readable. The readers love those crime reports, but they are a pain to assemble. What made things even more tedious was that those phone logs also included officers calling in to say they won't be to work on time. (For the trivia-minded, that's where we got our word "copulate." Or something.) It was a boring assignment, the equivalent of being in the seventh level of Hell, though it was an assignment where I had a lot of latitude.
I was pretty selective on what went into the weekly crime report. Anything involving an arrest, any reported burglaries and assaults, any felonies went in. Plus, I threw in all the strange police calls -- things on the order of someone being attacked by killer monarch butterflies, for example.
It turns out my editor would pick out some of my better oddities and call them in to Paul Harvey's show. I understand a few of these were read on the air, too. So, if you were a Paul Harvey listener around 1992 and remember hearing of some bizarre crimes from northern Arizona, you now know who first dug up the reports.
I always liked Paul Harvey. Although electronic (radio & TV) types are just not considered in the same camp as print journalists, Paul was a true wordsmith. He crafted his words with care, just like an old-style print guy. His "Rest Of The Story" feature, which began in the mid-1970s at the sugtgestion of his son, was a great vehicle for this skill. He was a master of building his story, with all the pauses and re-re-repeats for dramatic tension. And of course, with my own taste for what some people would call "useless information," how could I not love the rest of the story?
Of course, when someone like a Paul Harvey dies, there are plenty of tributes and perhaps his character is magnified considerably. Even if a guy was a drunken lout who regularly beat his kids with a switch made from barbed wire, you're just not going to talk about that in the days after he dies. But from what I understand, Paul Harvey was a good guy. A caring guy.
His wife Angel died less than a year ago, and they were together for more than 60 years. It says a lot about a person when he leaves this earth so soon after a spouse. For some reason I keep thinking of Johnny Cash here. His wife, June Carter Cash, died in 2003, and Johnny followed her within months. OK, theirs was sometimes-stormy relationship (and life with Johnny wasn't always easy), but you can bet his life was a lot less sweet without June around.
And without Paul Harvey around, radio is not going to be as interesting.
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