spoke from the heart, to the heart. His daily broadcasts from
the heartland gave Americans a honest friend's outlook on the day's
events.
Paul Harvey disdained pretention. He was based from Chicago
until satellite technology made it possibile to broadcast from
his ranch. He did not like the media centers of New York and
Los Angeles. One audition in New York early in his career was
enough for him. Asked to do a 'cold read" (no practice)
he asked one of the other applicants how to pronounce a
particular name. He was told wrong, an obvious attempt to
poison his big chance. "If this is New York," he thought,"I
want no part of it." Same for Los Angeles, He was what he was: a boy from Oklahoma most st home far from the crowd.
I don't know that we can really compare him to anyone out there today. Everyone, it seems, has an agenda. To enjoy Limbaugh or Olbermann, or Liddy or Dr. Laura, listeners need a particular attitude... a slant, if you choose to call it that.
No such requirement needed for Paul Harvey. a boy from Oklahoma City whose father was a police officer. On Paul's fourth Christmas Eve, his father didn't make it home, having died while thwarting a robbery. Some who suffer such a loss choose to use it as license to live as they will, without regard to others.
Paul chose the high road.
He was everyman, friendly uncle to all, generous in his praise, and direct in his critique. He was an unabashed patriot, but not afraid to call out the commander-in-chief. When the Vietnam War escalated into Cambodia, he used his microphone to proclaim to Richard Nixon, "Mr. President, you are wrong." He was without frills, a guy from Middle America telling his listeners what was happening around the world, and why they should care.
In tribute, arguably his most popular piece, the story of the man and the birds.
Unable to trace its proper parentage, I have designated this as my Christmas Story of the Man and the Birds.
You know, THE Christmas Story, the God born a man in a manger and all that escapes some moderns, mostly, I think, because they seek complex answers to their questions and this one is so utterly simple. So for the cynics and the skeptics and the unconvinced I submit a modern parable.
Now the man to whom I'm going to introduce you was not a scrooge, he was a kind, decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn't believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmastime. It just didn't make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn't swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man.
"I'm truly sorry to distress you," he told his wife, "but I'm not going with you to church this Christmas Eve." He said he'd feel like a hypocrite. That he'd much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service.
Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound. Then another, and then another. Sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window.
But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They'd been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window. Well, he couldn't let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it.
Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow.
He tried catching them. He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. Instead, the scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn. And then, he realized, that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me. That I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him.
"If only I could be a bird," he thought to himself, "and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand."
At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells - Adeste Fidelis - listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow.
His historical feature, "The Rest of the Story" told listeners ironic tales designed to set up a suprising closing twist. Did you know about the bum found drunk and dying in a Bowery flophouse with only 37 cents in his pockets (Stephen Foster)? Or the popular hairdresser, top of his class, who chucked it all for a shot at acting (Danny DeVito.) We did, if we listened to Paul. And we'll miss him.
Then again, screw him, he's dead. Let's go look for crocodiles.
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