WLT (10 page)

He said he was
not
only interested in that, that he was interested in
her
, that sex was his way of getting to know her, that he admired her as an artist, that he could get the Cowgirls their own radio show, perhaps a Saturday night spot.

“I'm so sick of yodelling, I could spit,” she said. She told him she wanted to be a writer. Her dream was to write plays and movies and stories that would help people understand the principles of theosophy—not the tangled thickets of exegesis that emerged from the disputes and polemics of the recent past but the simple beautiful spirit of the Theosophist Golden Age in Baltimore in the late 18th century, writers such as Carleton Phipps and Jane Delton Phipps, his daughter. The Phippses were able to say great things in a few words that seemed to have a nimbus of their own.

“Jane Phipps was the one who said,
It is always too late for grief
. That is a sentence that I keep coming back to and keep finding something new in. Or
Patience expects joy
. Or
First content, then wisdom
. Or
Fate smiles on the one it fools.
Most people think of theosophy as reams of dusty tomes, and some of it is, but so much of it is so simple and
pure.”

Ray wished he had guessed blue instead of white. Blue might've gotten him a long way. But he couldn't help himself. He told Patsy that maybe he couldn't read a nimbus as fast as some people but he could see talent and intelligence, and he offered her a job as a writer at forty dollars a week. She accepted with pleasure.

Patsy Konopka got a desk in the Women's Bureau, run by Miss Hatch, where two home economists sat and wrote answers to all the questions listeners wrote in, such as how to remove stains from spills on carpets and couches.
Service
. It was Vesta's idea. Patsy sat at a big Royal upright and banged away at scripts, practicing the discipline she had learned from the positivists, who believed in automatic writing, allowing one's innate sense and intelligence free flow and then
trusting what you write
and not editing it. That was the hard part.

She created
Golden Years
(1937), about Elmer and Edna Hubbard, who, dissatisfied with the frenzied pace of life in the big city and the emptiness of material success, move to the little town of Nowthen and open a coffee shop and do big favors with an unseen hand. They also become vegetarians and devotees of sunshine. But behind the counter of The Golden Rule Cafe, they seem like an ordinary old couple, patiently attending to customers, especially the blowhards who park on a stool and squawk all afternoon, and only the listener knows that the Hubbards are multi-millionaires who regularly bestow anonymous gifts through the mail. A squawker would enter and plant himself at a corner table and squawk (“Whatsa matter widdis java here? You people clean yer pot widda grease rag or what? Nobody cares ennamore. That's da problim. Nob'dy cares.”) and then a good person would come in and perch on a stool and bless his lucky stars (“Oh my but life is good! Doggone it! My crop failed and the cow went dry and I need a back operation, but praise the Lord, I'm a lucky guy”), and then maybe you'd get a discouraged good person who sees a world of suffering and wonders why God doesn't do something about it. Then there was a commercial for DeFlore's Florists (“Hi, I'm Betty and I'm a DeFlore florist trained to come up with exactly the right floral gift for that special person you want to please”) and then back to Nowthen, the next day: the bewildered and grateful recipient drops in to tell the Hubbards—“A trip to Florida! And another check to cover the cost of Sheila's teeth! Who in the world could've done this?” And Elmer murmurs, “More coffee?”

It was so good, Patsy came up with another one just like it,
Love's Old Sweet Song
(1938), the story of Folwell Hollister, wealthy New York executive, who moves back to his hometown of Hollister Corner after doctors tell him that he has six months to live. Folwell buys the farm he had always wanted, the old Reddin place, and stocks it with prize Orpington hens and blackface Highland sheep and he cuts kindling and hoes the tomatoes and observes the slow graceful turning of the seasons, and then falls in love with Jane Maxwell, his boyhood sweetheart and the woman he should have wed instead of chasing off East, who is married to Thomas Reddin, a louse. To relieve the pain of “a love that cannot be,” Hollister does good for others in small, anonymous ways. It was hard, week after week, to compose rhapsodies to falling leaves and snowy fields, even for a positivist, so one week Mr. Reddin was killed in a gold-mine explosion and Folwell swiftly married Jane, who called him Folly, and the show took a sharp turn. Jane was quite a looker, even at sixty, and Hollister Corner was a place she'd been wanting to escape since she was eleven, and so the Hollisters purchased a large home in Golden Valley, a stone's throw from Minneapolis, and they founded The Metropolitan National Advertising Agency and became tycoons and only visited the farm on weekends. They travelled to New York twice a year to see the opera and ballet.

“We could go to New York and see the sights and you could be inspired even further,” Ray suggested to Patsy, but when he guessed her color that day (red), he was not even close (white).

Patsy took over
Avis Burnette
and turned her toward Eastern philosophy. “People of other countries have much to teach us,” she told Craig, who was anxious to marry her. “Have you ever heard of Tsu Li who said that some men's absence is good company?” He had not.

She created
The Hills of Home
and
The Best Is Yet to Be
(1942), further variations on the theme of weary-striver-finds-contentment-in-simplicity, and she even took over
Friendly Neighbor
when Dad Benson hit a dry spell and was unable to write Jo's lines. “Don't know what a woman' d say in that situation,” he said, and for a few days poor Faith Snelling found blanks on her script:

Patsy created
Arthur Fox
,
Detective and Another World
and
The Lazy W Gang
and many more, writing a hundred pages a day, automatically, without trying to make it shine. It just came out. One of the Phippses had said that the way to get something done is to do it, and that helped, and so did the old positivist idea that “Nothing comes from nothing,” which Patsy interpreted to mean that you should take what you can wherever it's available, a story from the newspaper, from novels, from other radio shows, but her main stimulus was time. The approach of a deadline inspired her. The clock ticked, and she wrote, and the big hand crept toward airtime, and the pages came faster and faster. She believed in the power of threes, based on an old theosophist concept of virtue as triangular, and always looked for threes in a story, trios of characters, trilateral story lines, beginning-middle-end, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, quest-defeat-redemption. She believed in the morning, as her father had taught her (“Some work in the morning may neatly be done that all the day after may hardly be won”), and rose early and went straight to work at her typewriter. She believed that friends steal away months and families steal years, so she stayed single and she kept friends at bay by working day and night. She moved into the Antwerp Apartments, next door to the Ogden. She left the Women's Bureau when she found that references to household spills were creeping into the scripts—Forrest dropping his glass of cranberry juice when Jane tells him that perhaps Thomas may have survived the mine explosion after all, and Babs dropping her platter of Tuna Ting A Ling and prune whip when General Mills announces that he and Fritz have brought home a pet elk on
The Hills of Home.
Babs wept for the waste of good food and the elk gobbled the fallen casserole right up. “A little disgusting, the sound of elk's lunch,” Ray told her. “Couldn't Babs have cleaned it up?” She explained to Ray that she didn't want the women in her scripts on their knees scrubbing floors. “You should meet my wife,” he said.

F
riendly Neighbor
with Dad Benson, the Ole Lunchtime Philosopher, came on the air at noon, and in a good many towns around the Midwest, the noon whistle was blown a couple of minutes early to give people time to get their radios warmed up. The announcer said, “WLT, seven-seventy, The Air Castle of the North, from studios at the Hotel Ogden, Minneapolis” and the WLT chimes struck twelve, the organ played “Whispering Hope,” and the announcer said, “And now we take you down the road a ways to the home of Dad Benson, his daughter Jo, and her husband Frank, for a visit with the Friendly Neighbor, brought to you by Milton, King Seeds, the best friend your garden ever had. As we join them today, the family is sitting around the kitchen table, where Jo is fixing lunch. . .” and wherever you were back then, everything stopped.

Dad Benson ran a feed store in Elmville and he was like a real person who sat down next to you, he just talked and said the things you had always thought yourself. The show might start with Jo saying, “I don't know why I can't make this egg salad as good as what I used to,” and Dad saying, “Oh, your egg salad is the best in town and you know it,” and Frank saying, “Sure looks like we might get some snow tonight,” and then Dad would remember the big blizzard of '09 and how dangerous it was, you couldn't see two feet in front of your face, and how it taught everybody to keep a weather eye out and use the sense that God gave geese and take care of each other. Dad preached a pretty simple philosophy: the Golden Rule mostly, with plain common sense tossed in. Smile and you'll feel better. East or west, home is best. There's no summer without winter. What can't be cured must be endured. Hunger makes the beans taste better. We must work in the heat or starve in the cold. Nobody is born smart. Do your best and leave the rest.

When she took over writing the show, Patsy made the Bensons a little less perfect, to make it more interesting for herself. Jo and Frank started bickering over money—Jo sent off for some youth-giving face cream made from bee hormones and ground antlers, and Frank hit the ceiling. “Three dollars! Three
dollars ?”
Frank was liable to drop work at any time and take the
Christina Marie
out fishing for walleyes, though he always came back empty-handed—“ Three hours!” cried Jo. “Three
hours !
”—and Dad was a terrible sucker for a hard-luck story. “So who'd you give away money to today?” Jo'd ask. “Well, you know Mrs. Chubb has been down with the neuralgia,” he'd murmur, and of course the listeners knew Mrs. Chubb from way back, she hadn't had a well day in her life and wouldn't have one if she could help it.

Patsy made Dad into a ladies' man. A man who appreciated women, whose voice softened when he spoke of women and their troubles and their bravery and goodness. It was sad that he was alone in the world. Mom Benson had been struck by a car two years before and lay in the old-folks home with a coma, and Dad could not bring himself to cut loose. When Jo told him he should take Miss Judy the schoolteacher to the Volunteer Firemen's Ball, he said no. She said, “Dad, it's time you started thinking about your own happiness,” but Dad said, “I'm married to Mom, Jo. I married her in summer sunshine and I won't leave her in the dead of winter. What if she suddenly woke up and found me with another woman? I couldn't bear to cause her more pain.”

“You could invite Miss Judy for lunch,” Frank pointed out, but Dad explained, sadly, “There's no sense starting what you can't finish,” and you could hear his frustration, but there was no way around it and the subject was closed. He was a wise and good and lonely man.