Sunday, March 1, 2009

Paul Harvey ... Good Day

Hello Americans. The legendary radio news broadcaster Paul Harvey passed away this weekend at age 90. I remember Paul Harvey from KMA radio in Southwest Iowa in the 1970s. His broadcasts out of Chicago added some cosmopolitanism to the local weather and farm commodity price reports.

Nowadays Paul Harvey seems to be remembered by many as a conservative radio commentator. He received the Medal of Freedom from George Bush in 2005. Yet, his broadcasts were always upbeat, and if he would occasionally hold something stupid up to ridicule, I don’t remember him ever being political. But he could lay on more with a pause, then any radio person has ever done with the longest rant.

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True Value. That was one longtime sponsor. And he’d be halfway through reading a commercial before you knew it wasn’t another news story. And yet there was something charming about that.

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That would be The Rest of the Story, actually launched as a separate radio program in 1976. These programs would be a long and engaging story, usually involving some famous person whose identify would be revealed at the end.

I remember one about a young Navy lieutenant who performed some act of bravery in an accident at a nuclear power plant. And that young Navy lieutenant was … Jimmy Carter. So I guess Paul Harvey wasn’t so conservative after all. And now you know … the rest of the story.

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