GreatRidge Station

Amazing how quickly my brain works when it is being dumb.

It’s late at night. I’m surfing about in the online Early Office Museum, trying to wind down from a good evening of teaching. In the process, I ran into the following picture:

So I see the text at the top of the painting at the back of the room: Clearly a web address.

My brain made the following steps:

Oh, look, they have their web address posted. Oh, wait, this was 1910, the didn’t have a web site. Oh, that must have been used for something else, like telegraphy, back then. Oh, you are such an idiot. You should blog about this.

Obviously, a lot of nonsense, punctuated by two rational thoughts there at the end.

Now, I’m sufficiently wound down (and my brain is idle). I’m off to bed. G’night, all.

The passing of Paul Harvey reminded me of the other Great Voice in American Broadcasting: Ken Nordine. For millions of us who grew up during the 1970s, we all know him as the voice-over actor who said “Aah, Taster’s Choice.”

He did more than that, though, and his current program, Word Jazz, is available online and as a podcast.  Nordine is as fine a storyteller as Paul Harvey was, but Nordine is an abstract artist who happens to work in words. If you don’t know his material, you should.

No, I don’t have a wonderful, personal story about my interaction with Paul Harvey. Like so many other Americans, he was a fixture in my life.

I remember listening to him as a child on AM580 in my hometown of La Crosse, Wisconsin, and many years later as an adult (and an old one, at that), in St. Paul, Minnesota. Paul Harvey had a perfect radio voice, with an uncanny ability to see things as they are, and show us life from his point of view. We trusted him because he was trustworthy.

Even when he held an uncommon, unpopular, or unconventional opinion, his ideas were well-thought-out. There was no sloppy thinking for him, nor for his listeners. His daily radio program may have been the most thoughtful fifteen minutes anywhere, not only on radio, but on any American medium.

His words were direct, clear, and full of wisdom, but they were not sound bites. He was a leader in that he knew how to draw his listeners into his world and his life, and he was a master storyteller. For many of us, he changed the way we chose to live our lives because he set before us an ideal. He gave us a vision through the noble lives that he told us about, and ultimately, his own life and career demonstrated excellence across three generations. He bound us together, and reminded us that we were a part of something bigger than ourselves–and he did that every day with his famous greeting: Hello, Americans, I’m Paul Harvey.

And so, we remember Paul Harvey–forever 90. That great voice is silenced. He will be missed.