The Rest of the Story

Many decades ago when I was a church-and-Sunday-school goer, my father would drop my sisters and me off in front of the First Presbyterian Church, and then he would return an hour or so later to retrieve his flock. Looking back, I think it was a way for my parents to get the brood out of the house and have some time alone, but that's beside the point: we dressed up and sat in our seats and sang songs just as we were told to.

In addition to wishing I were outside when I wasn't, I remember the ride home in one or another Ford station wagons, listening to the radio from the backseat, listening to Paul Harvey and his bits and pieces of news. I used to like how he read his stories, and his tag-line of "And now you know the rest of the story." This was AM radio, mind you, the band of frequencies that held WGN for the Chicago Cubs, and WCFL and WLS for music; and this was many years before I discovered FM radio and its anything-but-Top 40 format of repetition.

Radio would play a small part in my life in college when I talked my way into a news-writing internship at a station in Sacramento, where I learned to write quickly and succinctly though not necessarily well. Talk radio has certainly come a long way since Paul Harvey--it seems to be much more coarse and loud, less thoughtful, but I am more prone to tune into NPR anyway regardless that there is no small amount of pontification there. Even this habit, though, has weakened along with the worldwide economy--why listen every day to bad news, is what I ask. When I was in college and working many nights at a pizza parlor, I would drive home at night and listen to some guy named Rush Limbaugh, a highly successful self-promoted type of guy who has, unfortunately, come to believe that he is a sort of republican messiah. I once worked in a place where Limbaugh's show was played through the warehouse loudspeakers every day, and that was a test of patience if nothing else. The man does bloviate quite well, and there is no denying his disciples of ditto-heads.

I have not listened to Paul Harvey for many years, but I am neverthless saddened to read that he died--read it in a newspaper, if you remember what that is. Oddly enough, I wonder if he now has the true "rest of the story."