808: The Rest of the Story
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A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. For over 30 years, five days a week, there was this thing on the radio called the rest of the story, just three and a half, four minutes long, around all over the country. Paul Harvey was the announcer. He did two other daily broadcasts, and if you ever heard them, you will never forget them. The way he wrote, the way he sounded. Hello Americans, this is Paul Harvey. Stand by for news. My first job in Chicago for making stories from PR at my windows at the NPR Chicago Bureau booked out of a section of East Wacker Drive that was called Paul Harvey Drive, which I loved, thinking that somewhere not far from where I was sitting. Paul Harvey had been up since 3.30 in the morning, pounding out his scripts on electric typewriter. At his height, he was on over 1,200 radio stations, which, by the way, has more stations than NPR has, just a massive audience, 24 million. His daily show, Paul Harvey News in Comment, was the day's news delivered like brisk radio poetry with some folks of humor or some conservative opinion. But he showed the rest of the story, is what I want to talk about today. Typical episode just jumps into the action. Now was the winner of Ted's Discontent. You can see the frustration, even the anger in his face, and in his gate as he stalked down Madison Avenue that busery morning. He had thought himself, hoped himself, a book author, a poet. But the great publishers of New York, New York had repeatedly demonstrated the error of his ways. I have to say, listening to Paul Harvey makes me feel like I need to go back to radio school. He just has this incredibly musical sense of timing of when to pause, when to take the pitch of his voice up and down, which he would do like a singer climbing up and down the scales. Listen to the way he performs the next few sentences is just one long sentence, including the dialogue. A volume of verse, oh no, no, no, no, verse was not selling these days anyhow, Ted's particular volume was simply too different from others in its category, and worse is still it was too fantastic. Who sounds like that? Sorry, that had said, 27 times, 27 respected publishing houses had perused, Ted's imagined masterpiece and rejected it, and not all of them politely. Ted, and we're in this lesson, decided it's going to go home and had a plan for his manuscript. And he was going to vent his aggravation by burning that document, a bonfire of the inanities. A nice tip of the hat there to the title of Ta-moof novel, or possibly to 15th century church history. Then Ted runs to do a guy he knew from school, Michael Kintock, there in Madison Avenue. And Michael mites him up to his office. Well, Mike's new office, the establishment by which he hadn't been hired only three hours earlier, was Ben Guard Press, a publisher, and more significant a publisher, Ted had somehow overlooked. And you have guessed the rest, Ted did get published.
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