Another American icon dead:
Paul Harvey, the news commentator and talk-radio pioneer whose staccato style made him one of the nation’s most familiar voices, died Saturday in Arizona, according to ABC Radio Networks. He was 90.
My memory of Paul Harvey is listening to him every day in the car on the rides to and from school. I feel old.
Downpuppy
Sad. Hard to believe he was only 90.
forked tongue
I remember him on the schoolbound car radio too. Thing is, that voice of his made me feel old then.
James Gary
…and that’s the rest of the story. Good day!
South of I-10
John, I had the same thought. Paul Harvey was always on in the morning when my Dad took me and my brother to school. You could pretty much gauge whether or not we were on time by where Paul Harvey was in his commentary.
Xecklothxayyquou Gilchrist
Add me to the listened-to-Harvey-on-the-way-to-school-and-feel-old roster.
RIP, Paul.
bago
James Brown is dead.
bago
An alternative viewpoint.
AhabTRuler
Paul Harvey: the sound of your terminally un-hip parents radio selection.
Bago: Now those make me feel old.
Louise
Paul Harvey was the voice of road trips for me, before the era of iPod, that is. Local stations broadcasting along the highways, especially on AM, always had Paul Harvey.
Rottenchester
I remember walking home from school to have lunch (very small town) and listening to the news and Paul Harvey while we were eating.
Paul Harvey – – – Good Day
aimai
I don’t know whether I feel really old, or really east coast, but I had no idea who paul harvey was until a few years ago during the Mel Gibson media-thon surrounding the Passion of the Christ. A story began circulating about how Mel himself had figured in a Paul Harvey story . The story was such a pathetic piece of drivel that it was debunked quickly but it served for a as a piece of the overall right wing propaganda surrounding that film. I got it via the internet from my christianist sister in law as a kind of explanation for why (she thought) "the left" hated Gibson. Because he was christ like, had risen from a bed of suffering to greatness, and because the Paul Harvey like format inclined her to believe it was true.
aimai
aimai
kid bitzer
yeah, aimai speaks for me.
i’m guessing there’s a big divide between paul harvey listeners and those who didn’t, which will line up fairly well with rural/urban, inland/coastal, and a bunch of other familiar socioeconomic markers.
hell, this is probably true for most a.m. radio. i never even used that function on my car radios.
wvng
And I remember him from way back in the 70s, during my summer job for a landscaper/lawn services "company." Every day at noon, we would button everything up, sit in the van, eat our sandwiches and drink lemonade, and listen to Harvey.
I put company in quotes, because it was just the owner and me. The owner was a fine man named Hector McLean. He was among the first Americans taken prisoner by the Japanese during WWII, and survived the entire war in their hellish prisoner camps. After the war, he traveled aimlessly around the country for a while, trying to get his head on straight. then he moved to Costa Rica and opened a jungle restaurant that he ran for many years.
Then he came back to America and opened his lawn care business. Wonderful man. Held no grudges – the only thing he hated was fences.
gbear
OT but cheery and cute. Kitty Hip Hop. You will LOL.
(apologies if someone’s already posted it)
Phoenix Woman
@Rottenchester:
Rottenchester! How are things in Olmsted County?
AhabTRuler
@kid bitzer: Eh, I was a city kid. I think the split falls along those who listened to AM and those that didn’t. My Mom, again the terminally un-hip one, listened to talk radio before it became one gigantic poop hole, thus I was subjected to Paul Harvey often.
woody
Paul Harvey, dead?
Breaks my witto heart.
The inspiration for Rush, and so MANY others, gone?
Gee.
AhabTRuler
Cut, but there ain’t nothing hip about it. Reminds me of this.
bago
@gbear: nom nom nom!
LosGatosCA
Page 2
Johnny B
I remember listening to Paul Harvey in my Dad’s car, but I don’t have quite as fond a memory of him as others.
My most vivid memory of one of his radio addresses occurred in 1988 while my Dad drove me to work. At the time, Jesse Jackson was running for President and his campaign slogan was "Run, Jesse, Run," which his team made into a bumper sticker. I remember how anxious my Republican parents were with his campaign despite the fact that he had no chance of winning the nomination.
Harvey encapsulated my parents anxiety when he told the story about a guy who, like my parents, didn’t like Jackson or his campaign. He explained how this guy went out and bought the Jackson bumper sticker and put it on the front of his car. Then, with amusement in his voice, he ended: "And that’s the rest of the story."
Although I was a Republican at the time and did not support Jackson, I still remember how disturbed I was that my father found that funny.
gbear
When I was in my late teens, I worked at a commercial rose-growing greenhouse. Paul Harvey was always on in the workroom so I have fond memories of his show because the workroom was such a pleasant and fun place. That feels like an eternity ago, and Harvey sounded like a voice from the past even then.
Of course back then we were making the transition from brassy AM-top 40 radio to the first anything-goes FM rock stations (before they became braindead meatheaded classic rock stations (KQRS, I’m lookin’ at you)).
DecidedFenceSitter
I never listened to him on the radio, instead, my introduction would be a teacher in high school, who once a week would read a story from one of his books.
I can’t speak to the accuracy, but at the age that it was given to me, it provided me the thought that in my little still developing mind that there are multiple angles to look at everything, that there’s a story behind every tale that explains why it happened – and that to understand it, you have to seek out that story.
As I look at myself now, under grad degrees in English and Political Science; an MBA in Project Management (focused around organizational behavior and transformation) and Information Security (A guy has to get paid somehow), I’ve seen that my life’s education has been in the pursuit of getting the whole of the story.
Which in some small part is thanks to him.
D-Chance.
RIP, Paul Harveh…………. gooDEH!
The Grand Panjandrum
He has a good run. Condolences to his family.
Hyperion
I listened to Paul Harvey when I was reading a lot of Heinlein. I think they shared an outlook. When I was 15, I thought they had cool ideas. Now I don’t.
bago
Not condolences. Salutations. Dude achieved what he meant to, and more. Ideology aside, you have to respect someone that persevered.
The Other Steve
That’s really not fair. KQRS hasn’t changed it’s format in 30 years. So you can’t accuse them of changing. :-)
My memory of Paul Harvey is similar… back in the 70’s and 80’s I used to hear him on the local ABC radio.
The thing is, and maybe my memory is poor… but I didn’t remember him being so political. Then I heard him about 5 years or so ago, and he was really whacked out pro-Bush. Sounded like an old man shouting "Get off my lawn you damn kids!"
Am I wrong?
PaulW
My dad’s favorite radio commentator. He was conservative but not partisan (or as horrifically partisan as Rush and his ilk). So now my dad is stuck with Rush. Gee, God, thanks.
I can’t find a clip of the Simpsons episode that had Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story focusing on "that boy who nobody liked grew up to be… Roy Cohn!" That was always worth a giggle.
gbear
LOL, but all they ever play now is the most totally obvious stuff from their ‘glory’ days. I remember listening to KQ in the greenhouse as they were playing ‘Iron Man’ by Black Sabbath. About 4 minutes into it, the DJ flips the turntable speed up to 45 for the rest of the song. I didn’t see god (that only happens at 78 rpm) but I laughed.
Chuck
I grew up listening to him too … actually my father tuned him in on road trips, and I listened along.
Turns out that the rest of the story was a load of hooey more often than not, but he sure could spin a good yarn. And I’d take his saccharine fantasy conservatism any day over Rush.
maya
My prayer in church today: Dear God, Please, please, please don’t let the rest of right wing wadio live as long as Harvey. What, You say? Even Satan doesn’t want them?
Have another doughnut, Rush, Sean, Michael, Michele.
Who’s running Harvey’s show now? Dave Ross – and the American Jewish something or other for Israel. Harvey would be so proud.
DRD 1812
That’s not fair. Harvey was a knee-jerk conservative, but never displayed the vicious bigotry of the blowhards who followed him. You didn’t have to agree with him but could still enjoy his quaint but pleasant storytelling. Although in his later years he did sound a lot like Brick Oven Bill.
malraux
@The Other Steve:
I think this is an artifact of not noticing the dogwhistle politics instead of them being hidden. Look at comment 21 for a good example.
The Moar You Know
Only 90? Hard to believe he was that young.
Straight-up racist motherfucker who believed that everyone had their station in life, and a black man’s place was shoeshine boy. I’m sure Obama’s election is what killed him.
The Moar You Know
Where did you buy this spam filter, Cole, at a garage sale?
Ned R.
@DRD 1812:
"…and that counterintuitive explanation of the French Revolution’s impact on small businesses was named…Marx!"
magisterludi
I remember hearing Harvey on the car radio. There was something very reassuring in his voice, though I couldn’t recall a thing he ever said but his signature tags.
Later years I would hear him occasionally on wingnut radio. Definitely not the Harvey of my youthful memory.
Scott
I’m a former radio pro. In fact, I was a news guy, back in the day. I hated Harvey’s guts. All the stuff I tried to do right — particularly getting the facts straight and keeping my biases buttoned up — he just ignored.
The guy broadcast age-old urban legends as if they were real news. He parroted blatant lies that served his purpose. I remember his commentaries being blatantly anti-foreigner, anti-immigrant, and profoundly racist.
And yes, without Paul Harvey, you wouldn’t have Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage. He taught all of them how to do what they do. He’s ultimately one of the fathers of today’s media landscape.
Not mourning. Not one bit.
Dr. Loveless
@woody:
Enh. Rush et al. owe more to Joe Pyne, and he’s been dead for decades.
My family listened to a lot of AM talk radio, so I had the listening-to-Paul-Harvey-on-the-way-to-school experience too (and I grew up in L.A.) at 13 I found him folksy and funny; at 16 I found him crotchety and sad, in a durn-smoochers-get-off-my-property sort of way. This is the frst time I’ve thought of him in years, actually.
Polish the Guillotines
I’ve listened to Paul Harvey for decades — not as a fan, but just cuz he was on. His news slant was far too right for my tastes, especially after I learned about his role in being J. Edgar Hoover’s public mouthpiece during the McCarthy period.
Still, I enjoyed "The Rest of the Story" and always tried to guess the outcomes.
PH, Jr. scares me though. A couple of months ago, during his morning news cast, he referred to "the Golden Calf of science."
Crap like that may be why KGO bumped him over to their right-wing sister station KSFO.
KRK
I only remember Harvey from my ’70s & ’80s childhood as well, but not from being driven to/from school — I had to take the bus or WALK…up hill…both ways…in the rain….
Where was I? Oh yeah, Paul Harvey was definitely someone you only listened to because your parents controlled the radio dial. (Just like Saturday evenings belonged to Lawrence Welk because mom would break your hand if you tried to change the channel on the TV.) The only story I remember from all those years ago was one about Adlai Stevenson wherein it was revealed that he had accidentally shot and killed someone as a kid.
Mike
From when I was small up until a year or so ago KGO, which has always been the highest-rates news/talk radio station in San Francisco, carried him. For many years I listened to the "Rest of the story" feature because it was fun to try to figure out who the subject was before Harvey gave his name at the end; I think that’s where I learned that James Garfield had been a mathematician.
liberal
Sounds like a thug to me.
gnomedad
@liberal:
Wow. I think an excerpt is in order for those who don’t follow the link:
woody
There’s one paradigmatic story about Harvey that I frequently repeated in Journalism classes I usta teach:
when he was just out of the war, trying to break in in chicago, he told a story that the Naval Weapons Center on the lake Front was so poorly guarded that the "commies" were effectively coming and going at will.
So he set out to break in.
And got caught at the fence.
And never retracted the story.
Paulo Harvey was the Reader’s Digest of radio…I detested his smug, self-righteousness.
mobius1507
I remember his daily boosting of the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980’s… he promoted the "moral equivalent of the founding fathers" of Ronald Reagan.
Harvey was also a big booster of Joe McCarthy in the ’50’s and Richard Nixon in the ’60’s and ’70’s.
He was also instrumental in the mythologizing of Ronald Reagan.
Danton
I was driving through a blizzard and crossing Pennsylvania in the mountains back in the ’70s and I switched on the radio on my VW bug only to hear Harvey say, "Page 3… Good news for dwarves!"
I immediately changed channels.
Ninerdave
@The Moar You Know:
lawlz
Ninerdave
Move to the SF Bay area. Radio is garbage out here. Seriously. Every time I flip through the music stations, I hear the same 5 songs. It’s ridiculous.
The only thing worth listening to is KGO (AM), PBS, or your iPod
malraux
@Scott:
Any time I ever listened to him, my snopes meter always went off. Half his stories had the feel of those emails about crazy lawsuits showing the need for tort reform, and while he wouldn’t always link the story to the meta-point, by spreading that sort of non-factual garbage, he certainly enabled right wing ideas. Rush et al are just more open about their desires.
malraux
stupid double post.
cyntax
@Ninerdave:
For jazz, I’d say KCSM is one of the best anywhere. And KSFS has some good programs/DJs, depending on what you like.
But overall, the commercial radio is unredeemingly awful, which given the eclectic music scene here is a head-scratcher. Well, until you factor in the homogenizing effect of big corporate networks that is.
Don K
My dad had a job that entailed about an hour’s work in the office in the morning, and the rest of the day he would drive around the county visiting farmers. When I was about 10-13 (mid-60’s, so yes I am dating myself), I would go to work with him a few times each summer. I believe PH was on the radio at noon in Philly, and every time we’d listen to him just before it was time to find someplace to stop for lunch (Dad knew every diner and lunch counter in the county, so it was never much of a drive). Funny how for most of the people here, their memories of PH go along with memories of their fathers.
Now, bonus points for anyone else who remembers Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club. That was a pretty cheesy (even at 10 I thought it was really bad) variety hour originating in Chicago on weekday mornings that played on the same station in Philly as Paul Harvey.
Glocksman
Meh….
at one time I liked Paul Harvey.
That was before I was old enough to realize that he was a dishonest fuck who seamlessly weaved product pitches into his show while portraying the ‘pitch’ as news.
If I want to hear a long sales pitch disguised as programming, I’ll tune into 3 AM infomercials.
BTW, Bose makes overpriced junk. :p
The Moar You Know
Legendary broadcaster and armchair historian Paul Harvey was existentially canceled today. Condolences and a rather large bouquet will be sent, in appreciation for his vast support, from snopes.com.
jerry 101
Good riddance to the racist old coot.
His kid is carrying on his legacy, poisoning the airwaves.
He didn’t invent radio hate. Father Coughlin was a thousand times worse, and far less genial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Coughlin
Screamin' Demon
I listened to Paul Harvey every weekday in July and August in the early- and mid-1980s, from the air conditioned-cabbed comfort of a John Deere 6622 hillside combine while harvesting hard red winter wheat and steptoe barley on my family’s 7,500-acre dryland ranch in eastern Washington. Don’t remember anything of note the man said, besides, "I’m Paul Harvey…stand by for news!", "page two" (and three and four), and "Paul Harvey….good day!"
If he was the inspiration for Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck, I never noticed it. But then, I wasn’t a perpetually-outraged liberal then. I was pretty much apolitical in my early twenties.
Glocksman
@Screamin’ Demon:
I was 14 when I picked up on how he’d seamlessly weave ads into his monologue.
Perhaps I’m just idealistic, but I expect a ‘bright line’ separating advertisements from content in the programming I listen to.
Harvey crossed that line early and often.
Because of that, I quit trusting the asshole.
I’m almost 42 now.
And Bose still is a product marketed to suckers and fools. :)
Glocksman
Forgot to add that Limbaugh does the same thing WRT weaving ads into his monologue.
I was listening to him last October and he managed to work a spiel for Lifelock into a rant against Obama’s ‘secret police’..aka..civilian service corps.
That kind of advertising is offensive to me no matter who does it.
Fuck Paul Harvey and fuck Rush Limbaugh.
YellowJournalism
Hearing that Paul Harvery died just makes me miss my grandmother, who’s been dead for eight years. My experience with Paul Harvey is mostly connected to my memories of sitting in the backseat of grandma’s car, munching on snacks and reading the tabloids from her Bingo bag while we waited for my mom who was in the grocery store. (Mom didn’t drive.) Grandma listened to the local country station, and at certain times during the day they would break from music just for the weather update and Paul Harvery.
It was in college, though, that I learned what type of a "journalist" he was. I did a big research project on urban legends in the media, and most of it focused on Harvery and how he wove them into his program. (Became a big fan of snopes.com around that time, too.) The guy was a piece of work: the human equivalent of the chain letter.
The class a year ahead of my graduating class in high school spent their entire class gift budget on this Bose radio that was supposed to be installed in our school gym. I got involved in student government the next year, when I found out that this "state of the art" sound system was simply a Bose radio that the student government advisor kept in her classroom because there was no way it would work as a sound system for a high school gym. She made sure we did our research on the class gift that year.
I wonder if she took the Bose with her when she moved to California…
YellowJournalism
Listening to Limbaugh promote the Hollywood 24 Hour Liquid Diet was a riot to me, though, when I had to listen to him at my afterschool job.
AhabTRuler
When did the meaning of this phrase become "worthless piece of TV marketed shit?"
Glocksman
@YellowJournalism:
I remember hearing him on WROZ-AM locally during the late 1970’s in my Mom’s 1978 Chevy Monza after she got off work.
I have some very pleasant childhood memories associated with hearing him on the radio.
However that didn’t prevent my cynical teenage self from recognizing him as a fucking shill.
One story he did that still stands out is when he ‘reported’ that US consumers were getting a huge bargain when we bought new cars.
It was a ‘bargain’ because the price of each individual part added up to several times the MSRP of the car, and it was just amazing that we could buy cars so cheaply.
Never mind the huge markups WRT actual costs versus selling price for auto parts compared to the entire car.
Vegas Taxi Driver Dot Com
Paul Harvey was a favorite of mine when I was growing up. He was a one of a kind, and he will be missed.
Maus
Thank god a few others have the same feelings, I was starting to feel crazy.
I liked his voice and he was entertaining, but it was at best glurge and I wasn’t fond of his views or ability to tell the truth.
Tim Richardson
I’m sad for the loss of Paul Harvey but I am even more saddened by the total lack of respect for life and the lack of tolerance. We need to learn to disagree respectfully. Intolerance will end ONLY when we can agree to disagree respectfully.
brantl
I have always found Paul Harvey to be a sanctimonious, condescending, puffed-up gasbag.
mobius1507
I always wondered if the guy was on the CIA payroll. His shtick often seemed like "conservative" psy-ops to me…. aimed at the chronically under-informed American majority.
Sean
Harvey apparently got a little more laid back in his latter years.
Neatly dovetailing with the comment about SF Bay Area radio, KPIG is a wonderful exception in the ocean of shitty music stations around here, and one morning they played that bit just after my alarm woke me up. I was convulsed with laughter, and when it ended I jumped out of bed and raced to my computer to Google "paul harvey bong."