WLT (5 page)

By June, the broadcast schedule reached six hours daily, and by November, they were up to twelve, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mornings were
Organ Reflections
with Patrice Duval Paulsen,
The Rise and Shine Show
with Buddy and Bob and The Lonesome Ramblers,
Dad Benson's Almanac, Elsie and Johnny, Adventures in Homemaking, Current Events
with Vesta (who returned in the afternoon with
The Poetry Corner
),
Morning Musicale, Scripture Nuggets
with the buttery voice of the Rev. Irving James Knox (“May the good Lord hold you in His loving hands and keep you until we meet again—and remember: keep looking up, friends!”),
The Classroom of the Air,
and
Let's Sing!
with the Hamburg Quartet,

And
Today's Good Citizen,
and
Your Health and Hygiene
with Dr. Dan Jensen discussing measles or back pain or blood in the urine, followed by
In Memoriam
(“As we make our earthly journey, / Let us take some time each day / To remember friends and neighbors / Who have helped along the way”), and the
Jubilee
and Leo and his dreadful jokes and all the amateur acts, Miss Stephanie and Her All-Boy Autoharp Band and Lance and Marilyn, the Sweethearts of Song, and The Jolly Chums and Little Kathryn and Her Court of Canaries and Ray's Uncle Albert reciting “Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands,” and one day they even had a dog named Freckles singing “Indian Love Call.” And there was
Avis Burnette, Small Town Librarian
, an actual
show
with
actors
, starring Marcia Rowles as the ever-patient Avis, the woman who sacrifices her own happiness in the service of others.

Radio leaped the miles and came to every home with a bounty of cheerful information—what a boon! said Roy —radio was the remedy for isolation, which was the curse of the farmer. Now he had a friendly neighbor to sit down with at any hour of the day and tell him interesting things. Roy set up a farm bureau, and sign-on crept forward to 6 a.m. and then 5 for
The Farm Hour
, and he plumped for a late sign-off, but Ray opposed broadcasting at night. And even after he gave in and WLT stayed on the air until 8:30 and then 10 p.m., he was dead set against a Saturday night barn-dance show. Saturday night was a family's one night together and radio shouldn't go barging in and spoil it.

“All week long, we used to look forward to this,” he told Leo. “My dad came home from the ice plant and played pick-up-sticks with us kids while Mother made spaghetti and meatballs. We did the dishes together and sang all the Norwegian hymns we knew, all three of them, and then we lay around the living room and Mother and Dad told us stories. He was caught in a blizzard once and would've died but he heard a bull bellow and he headed that way and walked headfirst into a haystack and crawled in and survived the night. That was our favorite story. It used to scare the bejabbers out of me. Then Mother played the piano. She played songs that could make you bawl your eyes out, like
Backward, turn backward, 0 Time in thy flight, make me a child again just for tonight
, which made me weep even though I was a child. Then we started the round of baths. I was the oldest and I went last, so I'd sit and read
Horatio Hornblower
or
David Copperfield
or
Robinson Crusoe.
Best night of the week. Why should we ruin this by putting some show on the air that makes people sit around like morons at the state asylum?”

“You chase every skirt in town and now you stand here and talk about the sanctity of the family?” cried Roy.

Ray held up his hand. “Every sinner has high ideals,” he said. “Just because you can't reach the summit doesn't mean you can't see it.”

But there was always a way around Ray, and Leo talked him into it.

Leo said, “Think of the people who are far away from their families on Saturday night, people who are lonely, people who need a little laughter, a little companionship. Our radio family will be their family. No, it's not like having your loved ones close, but it's better than looking at the wallpaper.”

Ray agreed to a nighttime show on one condition, that WLT would sign off for five minutes to give families a chance to turn off their radios. Five minutes of precious silence, then the chimes and—“WLT now resumes its broadcast day, transmitting at 770 kilocycles from studios in Minneapolis. The correct local time is 7:05 p.m.” Then the band would strike up the
Old WLT Barn Dance
theme song:

“I hope people aren't actually listening to this,” said Ray, meaning the Pillsburys. He hated polkas. Accordions depressed him. Uncle Lester pounding out a rollicking polka and crying “Hoo! hoo! hoo!” was all Ray needed to feel down in the dumps all day.

Every day, Ray posted himself by Soderberg's front door under the arch of plaster lilies, decked out in a natty blue suit with a polka-dot bow tie, checking the patrons filing in the big oak doors. Not the captains of industry he had hoped for, but a crowd of honyockers and wahoos and lady shoppers and old galoots with an afternoon to kill. Soderberg's had reopened as a hamburger restaurant, thanks to the tremendous effect of the Lettuce & Tomato station on sales: five hundred were sold daily, Roy invented a Rotary Fryer and Grete and Ingrid slapped the patties on the wheel, the grease floated in the air, the kitchen stank. Radio! A dazzling success! But so dreadful!

When his Sons of Knute congratulated him on WLT, Ray grimaced and shook his head. She was a bitch. Call it Norwegian negativity, but, boys, it was a dubious invention. He had been alarmed by it from the very beginning. He slowly came to despise it. Radio was too successful to be killed. But how awful!

The sheer bulk of it! After a year they had broadcast more words than Shakespeare ever wrote, most of it small talk, chatter, rat droppings. Radio personalities nattering about their pets, their vacations, their children. Dreadful. The thought that normal healthy people didn't have better things to do than sit idly absorbing it all—the daily doings of Avis and her cheery friends and Little Corinne warbling “My North Dakota Home” and LaWella's recipes for oatmeal cookies, the cowboy bands, the Norsky Orchestra, Grandpa Sam telling the story of Squeaky the Squirrel, and Vesta droning on earnestly, plowing through Louisa May Alcott—it was
eminently
dreadful, he thought—
I hope to high heaven people don't listen to all this!

Radio invaded the home and distracted the family with its chatter and its gabble. It only made sense as a service for the elderly, the sick, the crippled, the shut-ins, the feeble-minded. That was why Ray told Leo to be careful to avoid references to people
going
somewhere—e.g. “Dress warmly when you go to work tomorrow . . .”—it would make the bedridden feel bad.

But the audience grew and grew, and it wasn't all cripples—persons apparently sound of mind and body sat enthralled by this trash.

Every day brought more people hoping to audition, a long snaky line of mouse-faced women in cloches and pimply men in shabby dinner jackets clutching retouched photographs of themselves, clippings from hometown papers, letters from their friends. A man in a
cape
, for crying out loud. There were dialect comedians, elocutionists, yodellers, mandolin bands, church sopranos, novelty trombonists, gospel-singing families, people who did train imitations on the harmonica, eephers, Autoharpists, a regular Pandora's box of talent, everybody and his cousin trying to worm their way onto the airwaves. They stood shuffling in the vestibule and around the cashier's cage, they lurked in the back hall between the kitchen and the scullery, they waited patiently, silently, ready to burst into great terrible grins at the approach of Management. A man even accosted Ray in the men's room. “I'd be glad to help around the place—wash dishes, peel potatoes,” he said softly, “if you could get my girl on the radio. She sings. She's fourteen. She's waiting in the car.” Pleadingly, he put his hand on Ray's shoulder as Ray took a leak—Ray jumped two inches.

The ambition to get on the radio puzzled Ray, who thought of performers as children, idiots, idiots who happen to enjoy being watched, and then he had an alarming thought. If all these people wanted to get on the radio, chances were that one of them was a nut. Somewhere in this mob of talent was some screwball who wanted to ruin him by getting on WLT and doing something so repulsive and vile as to make his name Mud in thousands of homes, including the Pillsburys'. Someone who'd burst into a joke about humping a sheep, or launch into the one about the young man from Antietam who loved horse turds so well he could eat 'em. Or the beautiful girl from the Keys who said to her lover, “Oh, please! It will heighten my bliss if you do more with this and pay less attention to these.”

So, as WLT approached the end of its first year, he decided to sell it.

He told Roy, “So the restaurant is making money. Fine. But if I could sell the sonofabitch radio station, I'd do it tomorrow.”

“Sell it to me and Roy Jr.”

“Don't want to sell it to somebody in the family.”

“Why not? We'll buy you out,” said Roy.

“Don't,” said Ray. “If I sold it to you, I'd worry about it more than if I ran it myself.”

Ray owned a forty-percent interest, same as Roy, and their sister Lottie owned twenty percent, and she and Roy weren't speaking to each other, so Ray was sure he had her proxy. She had told Roy her great dream of pursuing a singing career on the radio, a good medium for a girl in a wheelchair. He rolled his eyes and snorted. “Forget it, Lottie. You couldn't carry a tune in a gunny sack. Don't waste your life.” Communications between them had broken off at that point.

Ray invited her to lunch. He drove her downtown to the Young-Quinlan Tea Room, her favorite spot, and wheeled her up in the elevator and there at the table was a big vase of tulips, her favorite. “Oh Ray, you are my shining knight!” she cried, and bit back the tears. During dessert, he told her he didn't care for radio anymore. “It's trashy business. It brings down our family name to be associated with it. I'm just glad Mother never knew.”