Greg Remembers Paul Harvey

A legend in radio broadcasting passed away recently – Paul Harvey. BoomerCafé co-founder Greg Dobbs worked with Harvey at the start of Greg’s career in broadcast news. He was Harvey’s editor, and shares these memories.

Dear Family and Friends,

Unlike my other letters, this one isn’t about a trip. It’s more about an experience. An experience I had a long time ago — forty years, to be exact. But it’s relevant to the death only a little more than a week ago of a man who most of you probably have heard about; in fact some might not only have heard about him, but you probably have actually heard him.

Paul Harvey. For a couple of years, starting in the late 1960s, I was Paul Harvey’s editor. When he died on the 1st of March, I had emails from a couple of friends asking me for a memory or two of Paul, and then my brother Stephen suggested that I write something about my personal experiences with this icon of American broadcasting. I’m on an airplane to Florida right now to anchor a space shuttle launch for HDNet, and I’ve got a couple of hours to kill, so here it comes. If you find this boring … blame Stephen.

Although he was the biggest voice in American radio until Rush Limbaugh came along, Paul was in actuality just an employee. He worked for ABC News, which is where I got my own start in his shadow. My job as his editor in Chicago, where he lived and from which he broadcast most of the time, was mainly to keep him honest: to make sure that from the reams of wire copy through which he pored every day, he accurately reflected the facts of each story he wrote.

Note the words, “He wrote.” People used to ask me if I wrote for Paul Harvey; I always responded that I wrote his pauses (he was famous for those pregnant pauses). But the fact is, for the two newscasts we produced every day — a five-minute show at 7:30 in the morning and the other, a 15-minute newscast at 10:30 — he wrote every word. That may not sound like rocket science but it is a lot of writing, particularly when the quality of the writing, the clarity of the language, the impact of the story, must be high.

His was. One of the things I admired about Paul Harvey’s communication skills was his ability to take some macro-concept and boil it down to each microcosm, which means each of us. For example, if he were telling the story of the latest figures for the Gross Domestic Product, he wouldn’t say, “The Commerce Department says it’s one trillion dollars.” No, he’d more likely say something like, “According to the latest figures from the Commerce Department, each of us last year, every man, woman, and child in this nation produced four thousand dollars worth of goods.”

An even better example is one of the famous tales told about Paul Harvey’s unique and resourceful approach to broadcast journalism. There was a story about a guy who tried to fly with a gizmo he built. Paul’s piece went something like this: “Joe Smith of Someplace USA thought if he built big wings out of stiff fabric and strapped them to his body and jumped from a cliff, he could fly. Joe Smith was 42.” Who needs more?!

My days with Paul Harvey were of course pre-internet and pre-computer. What this means is, everything was pounded out on a typewriter. You older readers will remember carbon paper (you older readers will remember a typewriter!); Paul would put two sheets of newsprint together with carbon paper in between, then write a couple of lines, then pull the sheets out from the typewriter carriage and remove the carbon paper and sort the written pages into two piles — one for him, one for me. So if the story read, “An airplane crashed today in Pittsburgh. At least 40 people died,” those would be the words typed out on the page.

The thing is, maybe new facts would come in, or maybe he’d just decide to add something he already knew, but if he wanted to add a new line to the story — maybe something like, “The pilot survived and investigators already are talking to him in the hospital” — rather than retype the whole story on a new set of carbons so it would all be on one page, he’d insert two new sheets with carbon in between and type out the new line about the pilot who survived, in effect adding a second page to the story. The result by show time? The story could end up being only six or seven sentences long, but typed on four or five different pages, then sorted in the right order to be delivered in its proper sequence on the air.

My job was to read through that, and already having thoroughly read every word on the wires that Paul might just have quickly scanned, to correct the errors he sometimes made. We had eight wire machines in the office spitting out paper faster than you could read it, so we both had a lot of words to go through to get it right.

Once the show was written and it was air time, Paul went into the studio and sat before a very big table surface, laying out his script in about a dozen different piles that would permit him to deliver his items in the most entertaining, rather than the most logical, order; since he was a master at judging not just how something looked on the printed page but how it sounded to the listener’s ear, sometimes he’d mix things up midway through the broadcast….which brings me back to his piles.

While Paul was on the air, my job was to diligently watch the wires and if there was a breaking story that was either new or somehow affected what Paul already had written, I had to write it up (yes, I did get to write a few things like that, in the style he’d have used) and rush it into his studio and put it right in front of his face, usually to take precedence over any other pile still before him.

That all went well until one day when a huge story broke (although I no longer remember what), and in my haste to get my new page in front of Paul, my hand accidentally swept several piles off the table and onto the floor. For any other broadcaster that would have been a disaster. But not for Paul Harvey. Between the odd and random order of stories he chose, and the pregnant pauses for which he was so well known, the audience never knew the difference. He kept reading, I knelt and found coherent pages and handed them up to him, and then he kept reading, and then I kept handing him more. That newscast was as good as any other.

Here’s another story which isn’t really about Paul Harvey but it happened on his watch and might have been the closest my career ever came to ending before it really got started: it’s about the near-death of Apollo 13 and the three astronauts on board. We both knew that an announcement was imminent that would tell us whether Apollo 13 would survive, and it was due to come during the last few minutes of our 15-minute show. So Paul simply stressed to me the importance of getting that announcement in his hands and on the air— even if it came so late that I literally had to rip it off the printer so he could read it as written by the wire service— before he ended the broadcast with his signature “Good Day.” And as we expected, the alarm bells on our wire machines all started going off just minutes before Paul would sign off. So I stood in front of the most urgent wire machine and watched as the keys quickly typed out something like this: “The Apollo 13 capsule, with astronauts “A,” “B,” and “C” aboard, will not be able to reenter the earth’s atmosphere and instead will burn up on reentry, killing the three men onboard…” At which point, with the second hand ticking away, I came as close as I could possibly be to ripping it off and just running it in to him, when some little cautionary bell went off in my head and said, “Wait for a few more words.” Thank goodness I did, because the next few words were something like, “IF such-and-such happens…” It didn’t.

As I said, except for the late breaking items, I really never did write a word for Paul’s daily newscasts, but eventually he trusted me enough to allow me write some of the early versions of his popular feature called “The Rest of the Story” (which he owned, not ABC). It was an interesting challenge because it had to sound like his voice, which meant I’d have to write in his simple and staccato style. Anyone who ever heard Paul on the radio knows what I mean by “staccato,” but here’s what I mean by “simple.” If someone was killed in an auto accident, he would never write, “The accident took the life of Jane Doe….” which is how you’ll often hear it from other professional broadcasters. No, he would write it the simple way: “The accident killed Jane Doe….” which is how we’d say it in real life. To the degree that I learned to write well enough to make a living at it (quell your laughter), I credit much of it to Paul Harvey, and my obligation to copy his style.

And here’s something else that serves as a tribute to this man who taught me a lot. I was just a rookie when I went to work as his editor, fresh out of graduate school. He already was influential and important and popular and famous, and he didn’t need a kid in his twenties telling him what, let alone how, to write. But he let me anyway. He usually had some commentary in his 15-minute newscast (which was in fact part of the durable name of his show, “Paul Harvey News & Comment”), and eventually, he’d ask my opinion of what he’d written. I was afraid at first to be blunt (I mean, the guy not only was a major broadcast voice but he was as old as my own father), but he inferred that and told me not to worry, to tell him what I thought. So I did. Sometimes he’d hear me out, then gently explain that he respected my point of view but didn’t agree — Paul was an old-fashioned conservative and I sure wasn’t — but sometimes, to this man’s enormous credit, he’d listen to what I thought, and actually change what he wrote.

The best example? A simple one, and not at all political. There were two different stories on the wires one day. One story said, the height of miniskirts was going up (meaning, skirts were getting shorter). The other said, the rate of rapes was going up. The stories weren’t connected, but Paul decided they must be and wrote a commentary that really dealt with a growing sense of decadence in our country but ended up attributing the rise in the rape rate to the rise in the height of the miniskirt. I didn’t even have to lay out a line of logic to him; I just told him I thought that was absurd. He kind of laughed, said I was probably right, and changed it.

That flexibility also applied to grammar. As good as he was, his grammar had gotten sloppy. For instance, reporting a death. If someone was 90 years old and passed away, he might say “She died at 90.” I started telling him, “90 is not a place where people die. They might die at home, or at the hospital, but they don’t die at 90.” Instead, I’d tell him, “You should say something like, “She died. She was 90.” Likewise, his language was riddled with split infinitives (“He was already going to the racetrack” splits the verb “was going;” the grammatically correct version would be “He already was going to the racetrack,” or, “Already he was going to the racetrack.”). Once he gave me leeway to feel confident in our relationship, I started pointing it out to him.

Sure enough, he began to change his ways. He used to tell me how grateful he was to have a young whippersnapper like me to take him back to proper English … until one day when he came into the office with his script and sat down and said he was going back to his old ways. Why? Because while proper grammar was proper grammar, it wasn’t how people actually talked! Who knew that better than him? (Mind you, this is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black. I just looked back at what I’ve written and found this sinful split infinitive: “…. but you probably have actually heard him.”) And even that last line is grammatically incorrect; it should be, “Who knew that better than he?” But for the grace of Paul go I.

My fondest memory of Paul Harvey’s combination of an open mind and his brilliant use of language is from the day he turned on Richard Nixon. It was some time into the Watergate scandal, when the president who Paul had admired so much was still trying to hold on and, as we now know, not being honest with the American people on what he knew about Watergate. Paul began a commentary with these words: “Mr. Nixon, I love you … but you’re wrong.” If that didn’t say it all, nothing did.

Paul himself “died at 90.” And until his wife preceded him and he fell ill more often than he stayed healthy, Paul still kept the rigorous schedule he’d always kept. If I didn’t get to the office in Chicago by 4:30 in the morning, he’d beat me there. The difference is, when my “shift” was over, I’d go home. On the other hand, one or two days a week he’d finish the second newscast, then leave the office and go to the airport and fly somewhere else in the country — St. Louis, Cleveland, Nashville, Denver, Oklahoma City — to make a dinner-hour speech before some large group, then he’d get back on a plane and fly home and be at his desk the next morning at 4:30.

One day, when Paul looked particularly tired but had his coat and hat on and was carrying the briefcase he took on his travels, which was different than the one he brought in when he wasn’t going away, I asked him why he did it. It couldn’t be for the money; he already was the best paid broadcaster in radio. And it wasn’t for the frequent flyer miles; they didn’t have those back then. His answer was something like this: “When you walk into a banquet hall full of people who rise and applaud when you’re introduced, it’s hard to give that up.” He was, among other things, honest.

When Rush Limbaugh dies, there will be those who weep, but other Americans will at least silently think if not publicly declare, “Good riddance.” Not so for Paul Harvey. He had a way of reaching across divides. Not every day, not on every story. But he was a good guy who respected what other people thought and did a sensational job, without being insulting or myopic, of letting us know what he thought.

He helped shape what you hear today. The good parts.

Greg

Tags: Greg Dobbs, Paul Harvey

Category: Baby Boomer Culture, Baby Boomers, Greg Dobbs