Posted by chicagomedia.org on March 01, 2009 at 18:50:41:
In Reply to: Radio legend Paul Harvey dead at 90 posted by chicagomedia.org on March 01, 2009 at 14:12:32:
Paul Harvey remembered
With news that the great Paul Harvey has died, here's a reprint of my Sept. 4 column last year on the occasion of his 90th birthday...
Good happy birthday to Paul Harvey
Chicago radio icon keeps on 'keeping on'
Paul Harvey Aurandt--known to his legions of devoted "News and Comment" and "The Rest of the Story" listeners on more than 600 U.S. radio stations as simply Paul Harvey--had his first "good day" on Sept. 4, 1918, two years before this nation's first licensed commercial radio station hit the air.
The newly minted nonagenarian has been delivering his own unique take on news in his own unique style based out of Chicago for 57 years now. Although his workload has beed reduced of late because of health issues and the death earlier this year of longtime wife/partner Lynne "Angel" Harvey, he remains a considerable national presence.
Locally, he can be heard on Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co.-owned WGN-AM 720.
Born in Tulsa, Okla., Harvey worked his way through Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Michigan before arriving here in Chicago in the mid-1940s. He has been headquartered here ever since, arguing it gives him a better sense of the nation's heartland and its heart than he could possibly enjoy on either coast, East or West.
"Chicago is some of everything," Harvey once said in the Tribune. "It is a cultural mecca, it is a polyglot population. It is a dynamic center of commerce. ... If we had to select a city as representative of the United States of America, if we had to name a city as the melting pot, there is no place like this one."
The Tribune's Jon Anderson, in a profile 20 years ago, compared Harvey's program to "getting a phone call from an eccentric, chortling, demanding uncle," noting "Harvey banged and crashed through verbiage like John Wayne hacking through a sea of neck-high grass."
A rocket launch: "Spec-tact-u-lar liftoff from Cape Canaveral this morning, into an azure sky."
The interesting, obscure statistic: "New York City. Last year. 8,064 people bitten by dogs. 1,587 people bitten . . . by people."
And, as Anderson related, the what-a-world kicker: "Fashionwise, oh-my-goodness, Paris designers showing things for men for next spring . . . include silky suits and trousers and flashy shirts . . . and designer Jean Paul Gauthier has caused a fuss by including in his display a few skirts . . . for men!"
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who, for a time, was a regular fill-in for Harvey once told me that Harvey's program was one of the models and inspirations for his current "Countdown" show, with its eclectic mix of the important and merely interesting, serious and funny, perspective and punch.
More inspiring still is the fact that here Harvey is, a decade shy of a century, still plugging away.
"I'm going to retire the day I find something more fun than what I'm doing now," Harvey told the Tribune in 1990. "I play golf so poorly that I can't imagine doing that, so I imagine Paul Harvey is going to keep on keeping on."
And he has.
Happy 90th, sir. Good day.
(Phil Rosenthal, Chicago Tribune)