Bob Greene is a master, and writer who’s style influenced my early days. He’s done a number of tributes over the years, but none have been better than the one he just offered to Paul Harvey who passed away Saturday at the age of 90:
I’ve never been one to attend the performances of symphony orchestras, but off and on, for more than 35 years, I gave myself the gift of something even better:
I would go and sit with Paul Harvey as he broadcast his radio show.
It was music; it was thrilling. I met him in the early 1970s, when I was a young newspaper reporter in Chicago, and that’s when he allowed me, for the first time, to sit silently in his studio as he did his work. Over the years, whenever I felt a need for a Paul Harvey fix, he was always welcoming, and we came to know each other well. I would sit there wordlessly and observe absolute excellence.
He would invariably be wearing a smock when I arrived — he had been working since well before the sun came up, and the smock would cover his shirt and tie. It was the kind of smock a jeweler might wear, or a watchmaker — it was crisply pressed, the uniform of an expert craftsman. I never asked him why he wore it, but I suspect that was the reason — pride in craftsmanship.
He would be at the typewriter, honing his script. He was famed for his voice, but the writing itself was so beautiful — his respect for words, his understanding of the potency of economy, his instinct for removing the superfluous. The world heard him speak, but the world never saw him write, and I think he honored both aspects of his skill equally.
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And then the signal from the booth, and. . .“Hello, Americans! This is Paul Harvey! Stand by. . . for news!”
And he would look down at those words that had come out of his typewriter minutes before — some of them underlined to remind him to punch them hard — and they became something grander than ink on paper, they became the song, the Paul Harvey symphony. He would allow me to sit right with him in the little room — he never made me watch from behind the glass — and there were moments, when his phrases, his word choices, were so perfect — flawlessly written, flawlessly delivered — that I just wanted to stand up and cheer.
But of course I never did any such thing — in Paul Harvey’s studio, if you felt a tickle in your throat you would begin to panic, because you knew that if you so much as coughed it would go out over the air into cities and towns all across the continent — so there were never any cheers. The impulse was always there, though — when he would drop one of those famous Paul Harvey pauses into the middle of a sentence, letting it linger, proving once again the power of pure silence, the tease of anticipation, you just wanted to applaud for his mastery of his life’s work.
He probably wouldn’t have thought of himself this way, but he was the ultimate singer-songwriter. He wrote the lyrics. And then he went onto his stage and performed them. The cadences that came out of his fingertips at the typewriter were designed to be translated by one voice — his voice — and he did it every working day for more than half a century: did it so well that he became a part of the very atmosphere, an element of the American air.
Read the whole thing to get the “rest of the story” about an American legend. Good day!
