Paul Harvey... Good Night

Radio lost one of its biggest legends this past weekend when Paul Harvey passed away.

One of my college journalism professors urged us to listen to Harvey and hear what great radio storytelling sounded like. Above all, Harvey was more storyteller than commentator, delivering every item with that trademark cadence and drama, all those pregnant pauses and repeated phrases. He left you hanging on every word, and you wanted to hear more. Harvey never needed to tease anything after the commercials.

My earliest memory of him on the radio is during the late 1970's. I sat in the back seat of the family car, on vacation, somewhere in Kansas, captive to whatever station Dad found on the radio in an age before the Walkman or iPod.

"Why do the pigeons come home?" Harvey boomed through the speakers. "Scientists still aren't sure. But they've found a piece of matter in the brain. It is small... and magnetic."

I was too young to know if it was radio satire or radio news. Dad cracked the occasional laugh. Years later in my second producing job, I'd pick him up on the drive in to work. I caught his weekend edition a few times while ambling about in Texas. He never had a slow news day. And because Paul Harvey was Paul Harvey, you always knew where he stood. "Nothing encourages lawlessness... and discourages lawmen... as when the law is laughed at," I remember him saying about an armed robbery in the Midwest that had gone unpunished due to a legal technicality.

All radio talk show hosts on air today are somehow influenced by Paul Harvey. If they didn't learn from his style or his conservative leanings, their bosses learned from his ability to make a syndicated current-events show immensely profitable. Harvey never took callers or hosted guests in the studio. News was the star, but nobody delivered it with his kind of passion. His fill-ins like Doug Limerick and Gil Gross (I haven't ever heard Fred Thompson or even Paul Harvey, Jr.) have done their best to stay true to Harvey's format and ear for the unique, but replacing him is impossible. I'd rather listen to archive tapes of his broadcasts from the 1970's and 80's, when he was at his peak, and remember America the way he saw it, when every day was a "GOOOOOOOD DAY!"