Radio Icon Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey, star network radio newscaster for decades, died Saturday, February 28, 2009, at 90. He was on the air within the past year; he was heard nationally for nearly 58 years, since 1951.

I met him six years later (1957).

It was during my year at the School of Journalism, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO. Every Spring, the Journalism School would sponsor “J-Week”, when classes were suspended in favor of students listening to a score or more of journalism professionals, experts in the field, pros who had “made” it. It was a terrific week.

One of my classes that spring was in radio news. I was an “intern” for the early morning newscasts on Radio Station KFRU. This was the same station I worked for each night from 6:00 to 11:00 p.m. It wasn’t fun getting up early but it helped me get through Journalism School in one year.

Among the guest speakers for J-Week was Paul Harvey.

I was told I would assist him in his preparation of his morning newscasts on ABC Radio coast-to-coast. I was told to be there (at the downtown newspaper newsroom from which the newscasts were aired) at 5:00 a.m., a bit tough for somebody who worked till 11:00 p.m. No way he was going to be there at 5:00 a.m., but I was a student. What could I say ??

I got there about 4:55 a.m. and Paul Harvey was waiting for me.

He was about 38 years old at the time, but like most “elders”, to a young guy he seemed like 60. As you might expect, he was all business. He wanted me to sort the copy from the news services, and all I had to do was watch him work. He had gobs of blank newsprint paper. He wrote his copy on this stuff.

To me, the irony was to see how this radio newscasting star prepared his copy. Every story was on a separate sheet of paper. Some of the stories were hardly more than one line long, but I realized this was the “style” his listeners easily tuned to.

He also wanted me to locate all the “kickers” I could find. Wire services often lumped kickers into a single dispatch. A kicker was a funny news story.

He would close his newscasts with a kicker. He always led it off ….. “For what it’s worth”…… Sometimes he would call it “our ‘for what it’s worth’ department”.

Knowing how unfunny the kickers were that morning, I thought he would start hollering at me for not finding at least one good kicker.

I soon got a liberal education in radio journalism, Paul Harvey Style. Paul Harvey took one of the unfunny stories and made it funny. And he always could get away with it, with that two-second pause after he uttered the punch line: “Paul Harvey…………… Good Day!!!”

I was so pleased and frankly honored that I had been selected to be his intern that morning.

His appearance in Columbia climaxed with his speech at the noon luncheon that day. He was one of the J-Week star pros.

Paul Harvey gave a great speech. He was already considered “conservative” and for some at the already liberally-tinged J-School, he was off his rocker. And because he was perceived as somewhat of a comic and cynic on his radio broadcasts, he surprised. He presented a clear description of the waste in government (yes, they even had it way back then) and the various hypocrisies in the news of the day. His audience discovered a conservative is not a whacko.

When he finished, he got a standing ovation.

Dean Earl English then came back to the microphone to thank Paul Harvey, and he brought down the luncheon when he said, rather sheepishly: “There were some of us who weren’t sure about inviting Mr. Harvey, but I must say, after listening to him today, I don’t know how we could have thought anything like that.”

Paul Harvey. Good Day!!!!