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.”
Lottie’s big eyes watered up at the mention of Mother. Of the three Soderbjergs, Lottie was the one who looked most like their father Mads, with a big head and a lump of a nose and a face like a shovel. It was Mother who she wanted to be like—beautiful, cheerful Mother—but when Lottie looked in a mirror, there was Dad: poor old Daddy.
She blew her nose. He continued: “Radio is all flame and no heat. The minute it’s done, it’s all gone, and believe me that’s a mercy because there isn’t a minute of it you’d ever want to be permanent. It’s a dump.”
He told her he wanted to sell WLT. It had accomplished its purpose and the restaurant was booming and they all had enough money so let somebody else have the headache. The announcers talked too much and never gave you the time of day, the singers were too loud—Dad Benson was all right, down to earth, he got the job done, he didn’t waste your time—but the announcers acted like they were big stars, they sounded moody, they didn’t speak up, they mumbled their words, as if it were enough that they were there, it didn’t matter if they made sense. Announcer. An odd word for a paying job (What do you do? I announce.)—all it was was a donkey who could read words off the paper without knocking over the water glass. Anybody could do the job, but here you had letters from fans saying that this announcer or that was their favorite—like having a favorite elevator operator and admiring him because he stops at the right floor!
Ridiculous.
Why would sensible people sit and listen to a boxful of noise? and when all was said and done, what did you have to show for it? Silence. You could’ve had silence in the first place.
“If your mind is made up, I can’t talk you out of it, I know you well enough to know that,” she said.
He said his mind was made up. “I’m going to go to New York next week and see if I can’t get a good price for it.”
She didn’t know that a radio station could be bought and sold. “What do you sell? The transmitting apparatus?”
“No, the license. The space on the spectrum.”
“But it just goes through the air, doesn’t it?”
Anyway, she agreed that he could sell it if he wanted to, whatever it was you sold.
CHAPTER 5
CBS
Every spring and fall, Ray went to New York aboard the Broadway Limited, either with Vesta or, more often, with an Other Woman. If he was with Vesta, they put up in a dinky room at the Mayflower, and if he was with an O.W., they camped in the Salad Suite at the Waldorf, with a living room as big as a handball court. He went to the city to eat oysters and steak tartare, buy socks and cigars, to dance to hot music and order the best scotch and wash the taste of boiled vegetables out of his mouth and enjoy a vacation from earnestness. The cigars were Cuban, Questo de Floros, and the socks were silk, either yellow or pale green or white, patterned with seahorses. With Vesta along, it was all High Purpose: they made the rounds of bookstores and toured the sacred sites (Cooper Union, the Public Library, the Museum of Natural History). But with an O.W. he reclined in bed in gorgeous yellow pajamas and was waited on by the dear thing as he perused the newspapers and smoked and ate fruit and took shower baths.
About a week after his lunch with Lottie, he entrained east with a lady from Anoka named Gertie Berg, and one evening at 11 p.m., well-rested, well-informed, freshly bathed, a pale glow of nectarines on his tongue, Ray was treating her to a sirloin steak at the
Cafe Angell when he heard the word “radio” twice, and then again. He traced the voice to a young man at a nearby table and stuck out his hand. “Soderbjerg’s the name, radio’s the game, and Minnesota’s where I hang my shingle,” he said.
The young man’s name was William S. Paley, and he peered at Ray’s business card: “Says restaurant here.” He sniffed. “I don’t believe I know you.” He smiled. He blinked.
Ray said: “You’re a busy man and so am I. I won’t waste your time with false modesty. I and my brother, an authority on radiation, are the owners of station W.L.T. operating at seven-hundred-seventy kilocycles, a year old and already the preeminent station in the Upper Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes region. Thanks to the solid layer of Laurentian limestone that underlies Minneapolis, the signal is clearer than any in America and can be received easily from the Alleghenies all the way to the Great Salt Lake,. and from the Mississippi Delta to the beginning of the great Canadian tundra, a region of vast untapped economic potential. With the construction of a one-thousand-foot tower, which we will undertake in the spring, this will be the preeminent radio station in America. All of this information you can verify with one phone call to Secretary Hoover in Washington. This station is now being offered for sale to selected buyers, in which connection we would welcome your interest, but I have taken enough of your time. Good evening.”
Paley gave Ray a cigar. He said he was forming a radio network, to be called either the Columbia or the Princeton Broadcasting System. “Columbia would be my recommendation,” said Ray. “Princeton sounds effeminate. You won’t regret it if you go with Columbia.” Paley thanked him and lit Ray’s cigar. Ray thought it tasted like damp cornstalk.
Three weeks later, the Columbia Broadcasting System sent a man named Stanford McAfee out from New York. He wore two-toned shoes and a mustard-colored suit and plopped down and grabbed Ray’s elbow and after twenty minutes of idle chatter about Victor Herbert and the dirigible and other things Ray didn’t give a fig about, leaned across the table and told Ray that WLT ought to become a CBS affiliate.
To become the owner of a CBS-affiliated station, McAfee suggested, was the greatest thing that could happen to a man. “CBS is the greatest broadcast entity in America, and CBS artists have earned top favor in every city in the land,” he said. “We are moving forward every day, signing people of the caliber of Smith Ballew, Lannie Ross, Louella Parsons, Marjorie O’Blennis, and Mary Margaret McBride.”
“We have excellent singers and comedians right here in the Midwest,” Ray said, disgusted. He wanted to sell, not join. “This is a mecca of talent here. No need to tie ourselves to some outfit in New York.”
McAfee smiled as if correcting a child. “Hnnn. Local talent of local interest is all well and good, but the public demands the best, you know, and the best is not here, believe me, it’s in New York. The stars of Broadway and the great recording artists—that’s what the public seeks in radio! the allure of bright lights! the glamor and elegance and sophistication of the metropolis—that’s what folks out here in the small towns want.”
“Minneapolis? A small town? You must be joking. I know what people around here want, Mr. Manatee, and it’s not a lot of lazy, overpaid, overaged New York prima donnas, no thank you. All those two-hundred-pound chanteusies and those matinee idols with the dyed hair—no sir, we don’t need ’em. We’ve got something better here, we’ve got spunk and talent and the old get up and go. No, sir. You picked the wrong man for your particular sell, mister. I don’t go for that brand of ballyhoo. I’m what you might call a small-town kind of guy.” And Ray reached over and snapped on the radio.
He was hoping to get Miss Patrice, First Lady of the Keyboard, and a rippling rendition of “Liebestraum,” but he was ten minutes too late. It was the Jubilee and none other than the Norsk Nightingale singing, “Ven vas da last time yew saw Inga?”
The New York man smiled. “Sounds like my butcher,” he said.
“For your information, it’s an old Dutchman who was wounded in the World War,” said Ray. “Mustard gas. He was terribly disfigured while crossing no-man’s-land to rescue a chaplain of another faith and so he sings with a mask. I suppose he’s not a great singer but we’re a loyal people here in the Midwest, Manitowoc. We don’t knock a doughboy just because he’s no Caruso.”
“Hnnn. Well, here’s the card. Contact me by tomorrow evening if you change your mind.”
“Here’s your hat and what’s your hurry,” said Ray.
It was the “Hnnn” that burned Ray’s bacon. Waiting for the man to arrive, Ray had hoped, wildly, that CBS was going to offer him a price, he would propose twice that, and they’d settle somewhere around $60,000, money he would have been thrilled to accept and invest in a fish hatchery in Aitkin. Soderberg’s would drop hamburgers from the menu and feature walleye and lake trout, “Choose Your Own from Our Tank.” But the “Hnnn” was so supercilious, so smug, so indubitably East Coast, Ray had no choice.
He was going to have to stay in radio for sure. By George, he was going to show the arrogant little bastard how hay is made. “You wanted to get my back up, okay, it’s up,” thought Ray. The man was a lowdown, lamebrain, sharp-eyed, three-piece, high-hat, hot-shit, numero-uno New Yorker. You leave the country in the hands of these people and it won’t be worth living in. That was what William Jennings Bryan said and he was right, boys. The same afternoon, Ray borrowed $20,000 to boost WLT’s power from five-hundred to fifty-thousand watts, and he told Roy Jr. that WLT needed some new shows and to pay people to do them, and then he did what he had told Roy they would never ever do—he said to Roy Jr., “Let’s go ahead and sell commercials. For six weeks. On a trial basis.”
Though there were frequent mentions of Soderberg’s Court on the air, Ray and Roy had felt that out-and-out selling on the radio would offend people. Radio was sacred, mysterious, and people talked about it in hushed tones
(“Got WJZ in Newark and KDKA in Pittsburgh last night, clear as anything, and last week I got WSM in Nashville,” you’d hear men murmur on the streetcar), and ministers preached on its enormous potential for good, its power to bridge great distances and reach great multitudes and promote mutual understanding and world peace. Newspapers printed editorials about “The Responsibility of Radio” and urged the new industry to follow a path of sober adherence to solemn duty. To use such a gift and a godsend to peddle soap—would people stand for it?
Vesta would not, not for a minute—she said, “Introduce paid advertising into broadcasting and you will carry us down a road from which we will never return.” She advised the high path, but then she always had. She was a Methodist, the daughter of a minister who kept a box of discussion topics at the dinner table. The box was passed around before the food, and you took a card, and when it came your turn, you were supposed to sit and expound on, say, the Role of Women or the Prospects of Amity among Nations. Vesta took to radio like it was her church. After her debut, reading William Cullen Bryant, and then her success with The Poetry Corner (Vesta held to the If-I-can-help-but-one-person-out-there standard of success, a standard that leaves little room for failure), there was no stopping her. She took charge of Current Events, which leaned heavily on The New Republic and other gasbag magazines, and The Classroom of the Air, where University instructors she knew from Chautauqua gave lectures about The World and How I Would Save It If Only People Would Listen. Vesta thought WLT should stand for World Leadership Today. “If you introduce advertising,” she said, “it will send a message to the audience that WLT is not to be trusted or believed.”
Roy said, “Introduce advertising, and we’ll be selling jars of Cholera Balm and liver pads and Sagwa Resurrection Tonic made from healing herbs and elm bark and sacred buffalo tallow. But we won’t be able to get out of town like the medicine show does. We’ll have to sit and be sued for every hair restorer that doesn’t, every cake of soap that won’t cure dandruff, every jar of Wizard Oil that doesn’t cure rheumatism, dyspepsia, constipation, and sexual neur
asthenia.”
But advertisers were waiting, hat in hand, to get into the temple. People approached Ray at the Minneapolis Club, inquiring about sponsoring a show. One day, Mr. Pillsbury spoke to him. Not one of the flour-mill Pillsburys but a second cousin named Paul Pillsbury who was in the pie business. He told Ray that many of the other Pillsburys got their ideas from him, that he was the forward thinker in the family, and that if Evelyn Pies (named for his wife) came to WLT and did well, then Pillsbury’s Best XXXX would not be far behind.
At last! A Pillsbury! Ray accepted his check on the spot, and that week Let’s Sing became The Evelyn Pie Hour—You can serve soup that spills in our laps
And sirloin steak like old skate straps
With sawdust sauce on a sautéed shirt-—
You can make it up to me with an Evelyn dessert.
And once the dam broke, the river poured in. There was a deluge of money.
Almicus Whole Bran Flakes and Hot Bran Beverage picked up Organ Reflections, and The Rise and Shine Show briefly became The Blue Ribbon Shoe Polish Show and then The North Star Tooth Powder Program. Adventures in Home-making was picked up by Crystal Bottled Water (“When neighbors drop in . . . nothing shows you care more than a big cold glass of Crystal Spring Water”), and Elsie and Johnny were sponsored by Hummel Hardware and The Noontime Jubilee became The Green Giant Pea Shelling Party and then The Wheaties Jamboree and then The Bisquick Whoopee and finally The Wadena Beanfeed Jubilee sponsored by Wadena Canned Beans and Cabbage, with The Corn-shuckers Quartet to sing:Everybody’s here and gussied up,
Yup!
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