WLT (8 page)

There was
Avis Burnette,
recommending good books to the ladies of town and fending off the men, and there was
Sunnyvale
, starring the dour young Dale Snelling as an auto mechanic named Al and various women as his wife Esther, including his real wife Faith (Jo on
Friendly Neighbor
, a real looker). Every day, Al handled a different problem, a tough clutch job or faulty plugs, and the dialogue was mostly Al talking to himself. In addition to the car problem, each owner had some personal problem that Al had to deal with: Doc Winters drank too much, and Lulu Strand couldn't get along with her mother, and Rufus Zeeveld lost his temper, and so, as Al bent over the engine block, he'd offer a word of advice. “When angry, count to ten,” he said. “When very angry, go fishing.” And the car started right up, and Rufus gulped and said, “Thanks, Al,” and Al said, “The advice is for free, Ruf. But that fuel pump is going to cost you.” That was it. Theme and out.

Sunnyvale
and
Friendly Neighbor
were the shows Ray cited to Vesta when she told him WLT needed a program of great ideas, called
Philosophers Forum
. “More people have heard more great ideas on
Friendly Neighbor
than in all the philosophy courses taught at the University. It's a fact!” he said. “People have been helped by that show! There isn't a word said on that show that isn't in some way educational!”

“Yes, there is,” she said. “The commercials.” She despised them. Commercials were aimed at women, to tie them down in the hopeless quest for better bread and cleaner kitchens, to distract them from their real work, which was to change the world. She wouldn't allow a commercial near any of her shows.

“How about a bank or an insurance company? something dignified?” asked Ray. “Your philanthropy is burning a hole in my pocket.”

She said, “If you put a commercial on those shows, then I'm leaving.”

Well, it was a thought, he thought.

The non-commercial nature of those shows was, to her mind, a measure of their worth.
Classroom of the Air
and
Current Events
were an alternative; their job was to challenge and inform, so if listeners complained about them, that was fine with Vesta. She wasn't there to please everybody, she was there to do the right thing—spend a week on the subject of municipal charter reform, devote a couple hours to “Challenge and Change in New Zealand,” give
Poetry Corner
over for a look at unjustly neglected poets of England. If someone complained that charter reform was almost as tedious as real estate law, and that New Zealand was a nation in which nothing of importance had happened since the invention of the sheep, and as for unjustly neglected English poets, well, sheer oblivion would be too good for most of them—the more complaints, the more Vesta felt she was doing her job. Programs of quality will
always
draw fire from Philistines, and if she got a postcard that said, “You can take your Current Events and sit on it and spin,” it brightened her day. At least she had challenged that person and given his tiny squalid mind a few rays of information. Otherwise, why would he be so upset? Why—if not because she had helped change him and change is painful?

She told Ray, “Why couldn't we teach
Spanish?
It's a beautiful language! We could sign up students and send out lesson books and they could listen during dinner—people could use their mealtimes to
learn
, instead of just feeding their faces.”

She stood, poised, waiting for a rebuttal so she could pounce on it and whip it to death. The way to fight her was to throw her off-balance with statistics, but Ray couldn't think of any about Spanish.

“People don't
want
to learn Spanish during dinnertime,” he murmured.

“Ha! People don't know what they want until you offer them a choice! If all you give them is pap and pablum, then that's all they'll want. Whatever happened to the ideals you professed when I married you?”

She wheeled and marched to the door and as she went, she said, “This discussion is not ended.”

Out she went and in came Roy, with an idea that radio transmission might be useful in assisting plant growth, particularly flowers, and would he care to invest in a radio agronomy research project at the University?

“Sure,” said Ray. “Might as well do some good in the world.”

T
he fifth anniversary of WLT passed, and the sixth and seventh. The stock market crashed but it didn't fall on radio. Radio was golden. Roy bought a 400-acre farm in Clay County, near Moorhead, where Dad Soderbjerg had spent a miserable three years as a farmhand, and Roy turned his mind toward the invention of a more perfect plow. He was gone for months at a time. When Roy showed up in Minneapolis, Ray bitched about radio. He complained to his lady friends. He harangued Dad Benson. Radio was a gold mine, and it was a plague. Over thousands of years, man had won a measure of privacy, graduating from tent to hut to a home with a lock, and now, with the purchase of a radio, man could return to cave-dwelling days when you were easy prey to every bore in the tribe, every toothless jojo who wanted to deposit his life story all over you. Ray tried not to listen to radio. And then he would forget and tune in and listen, and get miserable again. He fired off memos to Roy Jr.

The sheer trashiness of radio! the tedium and garbage and fruity pomposity and Mr. Hennesy's maundering about the Emerald Isle in that warbly voice (“O sweet Mary, me proud beauty—lying there in the green hills of heaven, dear Galway!”), the false bonhomie of fatheads like Leo (“Hey, have we got a barn-burner for you tonight, folks, and here's a little girl you're gonna love—”), the pompous balloon-like baritone of Phil Sax drifting moon-like through the news, the fake warmth of radio stars.
Evenin
',
folks, and welcome to The Best Is Yet to Be and I just want to say how much it means to us to know that you're there.
Bullshit. But that's what radio was all about!
False friendship
. That was radio in a nutshell. Announcers laying on the charm to sell you hair tonic.

“Why can't we have a little more humor around here?” he told Roy Jr. “Is there a law against jokes?”

And an hour later: “I want shows that are useful shows, not just a poof of glamor, shows that leave you with something.”

Then: “Why does everything have to sound so
earnest?
What's wrong with a little piss and vinegar?”

Radio had destroyed the world of his youth, beautiful Minnesota hail to thee—who cared about that now with radio coming in from everywhere? No local pride, no hometown heroes except crooners and comedians and all-around numbskulls. Radio gave so much power to advertising and now advertising was everything. The businesses that poured money into radio got rich and the ones that didn't went nowhere,
it was as simple as that.
All those wonderful little dairies and meat markets on the North Side were gone, Ehrenreich's and Mahovlich's and Kaetterhenry's, and all their business went to the big boys, all because a cheery voice on radio could sell more wieners than quality could, so now the Scottish Rite was run by big shots and blowhards, the solid element was fading, the old fellows who told stories about their adventures in the North Woods in logging days and how they shipped out on an ore boat when they were seventeen and went to Brazil, the guys who had
lived
were fading away, gone broke, replaced by the big shirts created by advertising. Simple as that. Al's Breakfast was a hole in the wall when it was opened by Al, a Swedish novelist who emigrated in 1921 and never got the hang of English but could scramble eggs and make pancakes, then it boomed when Al bought time on
The Hubba Hooley Show
and every night after the
Ten O'Clock News
, drowsy listeners heard the Hooligans sing:

And six months later, the Cafe moved to a building half a block long, with turrets and stained-glass windows, packed day and night. It was bigger than Soderberg's Court, which was packed with radio folks and throngs of fans. “Time to move,” said Ray. “We'll drop the restaurant. I'm sick of hamburger grease. Let Al sell burgers, and we'll sell Al.”

Driving north of Minneapolis, cruising the back roads through the orchards and truck farms along the Mississippi, Roy found a potato farm for sale in Brooklyn Park, and took a sixty-day option and worked up a blueprint and made a small perfect scale model out of balsa wood, with sponge trees and a glass pond and an American flag on a pin and a blue paper-maché river splashing over the rapids. On a hill above the pond, reflected in it, stood the WLT building (“The Air Castle of the North”), a Gothic pile with a bell tower, patterned after the Chatfield College chapel, set in a park of perfectly conical pines surrounded by a hundred tiny white houses.
Radio Acres
. They'd borrow the money and build the station, wait a few years for land values to rise, then build the houses and sell them —at wonderful prices, thanks to the magic of radio.
Radio Acres
. The stars would have homes there, and for $6000, anybody could become their neighbor. Who wouldn't pay a little extra to be a neighbor of the Benson Family or Bud and Bessie? Five hundred homes, at $6000, yielding $2000 pure profit apiece, would make them rich men.

“Would make us paupers for life, and our children,” said Ray. “We'd be sitting in doorways on Skid Row in our old overcoats, and people'd drive by and say,
Look
.
It's the Soderbjergs. They started with a restaurant and went into radio and then they tried to clean up in real estate.
Old men sleeping on broken glass. No, sir. No thank you.”

“Think about it. Take your time. It's a good idea.”

“If that's a good idea, then I'm a full-blooded Chippewa Indian.” They argued for a few days, and then Roy's attention wavered—that was his way—the flame flickered and he drifted along to something else—the windmill, the lithograph, the ball-float toilet. Perfecting the arm-action ball-type reciprocating flexer. The search for the y-joint grouter. He drifted back to his workshop.

The “Air Castle of the North” was wrapped in tissue paper and packed away in a box, and one day Ray shot billiards at the Athletic Club with John S. Pillsbury's brother-in-law Bud. “If you're looking for quarters, Jack's got two floors to rent in his hotel,” he said. And that night, Ray signed a ten-year lease on the second and third floors of the Hotel Ogden on 12th and LaSalle, across the street from the MacPhail School of Music. It was a narrow, six-story, two-toned building, tan on the bottom floors and the top floor, red brick in the middle, like a Soderberg sandwich. He spread the papers in front of Roy, as if showing a winning hand. “Right close to the source of supply. Tuba players, trombonists, violins, you name it. Singers by the hundred. We can audition them in July when the windows are open. You want a park with a pond? Loring Park is a stone's throw away. They even have horseshoe pits. The Auditorium is walking distance, and the Physicians & Surgeons Building. The Foshay Tower is right there.”