The Dick Gibson Show

by Elkin, Stanley

  Where solid-state has thus far had its greatest effect is in the area of car radio, where, depending upon the time of day, the listenership may sometimes be as high as 84 percent. Try to imagine what conflict there could be in a driver’s mind when, on the one hand, he was pushed along through space at a mile a minute while on the other he was stymied by a cold car radio. He might have traveled as much as a mile, or even further, before bringing in the first clear signal of a broadcast. Was he in time or wasn’t he? For the listener in the car the time lag meant not impatience or hostility, but confusion—an emotion more difficult of placation than even those others, and more dangerous, too, when you consider that this man was “at the controls” of a murderous, powerful machine. With the highway development program what it is today, and with cars every year given greater and greater horsepower, the discrepancy between speed and its tube-radio opposite could only have become greater, and the burden of the programmers—who have to keep all sorts of audiences in mind—heavier. Undoubtedly, highway safety would suffer. Nor do I make a callous joke when I say that it is not the radio man’s first duty to kill off his market. Radio is a business dependent upon revenues from advertising. Advertising is dependent upon sales. Humanitarian considerations aside, when a man dies in a crash you have not lost simply a good customer—and make no mistake; he is a good customer; he’s driving a car, advertised on radio, for which he buys gas, advertised on radio, to or from a home which he has bought with a bank loan, advertised on radio, and furnished with a thousand things, all advertised on radio—but the good customer’s family as well. There is inevitably a period of mourning, and mourning—I don’t care what religion you’re talking about—means one thing and one thing only: abstinence. And abstinence, humanitarian considerations aside, is bad for business. Solid-state does away with all this.

  Yet it is one of the peculiar paradoxes of our age that while reducing the time lag between broadcast and reception has had an unparalleled effect in shaping broadcasting, there has been, collaterally, a development which goes in an opposite direction altogether, and is, as of this moment, the single most important event in the entire history of radio.

  I am speaking, of course, of the so-called tape delay, the small, inexpensive instrument which by utilizing extra gears and blind- alley loopings forces the recording tape through false waystations so that by the time it is played a six-second interval has been created in which the broadcaster can cut or, in more sophisticated models, edit offensive statements before they go out over the air. What this has meant for programming is only now beginning to be realized. Unquestionably, however, its greatest effect has been in the area of the audience- participation principle— specifically the telephone talk show. Without the six-second delay tape, or something very much like it, this kind of programming would be impossible. Most of the American public, of course, is decent and responsible and have no need of instrumentation to monitor them. Nevertheless fail-safe equipment will be a necessary adjunct of the telephone talk landscape as long as we live in a society part of whose vocal instincts, emboldened by the cloak of anonymity, are vicious and disturbed and exhibitionist. It’s inconceivable that a sponsor could continue to support a show which did not have the safety valve provided by a system like tape delay. This despite the fact that advertisers have known—known from the beginning—the incredible attractiveness of audience-participation programming.

  Indeed, the self-entertainment principle has always played a major role in our industry, in local as well as network programming. At its most oblique level it manifested itself in the presence of the studio audience itself, its laughter, its spontaneous and sometimes not-so-spontaneous applause. One of the old- time host’s key phrases, perhaps the single most classic sentence in radio, so deep-seated in our culture and consciousness that whenever it is uttered today it takes on the dimensions of a joke, was “Keep those cards and letters coming in.” What was this if not a direct appeal to the audience-participation instinct? But there is a whole history of shows which flourished entirely on the strength of their dependence upon the audience, an audience which provided not only a presence at the entertainment, but was in fact the entertainment itself. One need only point to the success of the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, whose origins date almost to the beginning of radio. I don’t think I have to remind anyone here tonight that “The Amateur Hour” is still with us in its adapted TV format, or that CBS’s Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour has had the longest continuous run in television.

  But there have been many such programs—everything from “man on the street” shows and quiz programs to good old Mr. Anthony, where people with problems could come to seek help. There was Candid Microphone, and most of you will remember Bride and Groom, where real couples actually got married on the air. Nor should I omit from this list the famous Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club, which when it recently went off the air at Don’s retirement was the longest continuous program in the history of broadcasting, not just in America but in the entire world! There was Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, a hit on radio long before it ever went on television, and there was and still is Art Linkletter’s House Party, the very name of which conveys my theme. Further, the dominance of daytime TV’s popular game shows must seek its origins in radio programs like Art’s. Many of these programs have been responsible for some of the biggest billings in the industry.

  I am not here tonight to stir up nostalgic memories or to enunciate glorious names from the putative Golden Age of Radio, however. Suffice it to say that industry executives and advertisers have always been aware of the rich possibilities of participation programming. The development of magnetic tape—and before that of wire—led naturally to news interviews, press conferences and the like, the whole “voices in the news” syndrome being still another instance of audience participation. With McLuhan and his celebrated “global village” concept we get only the articulation of a principle which the industry has understood instinctively—that the listener needs to become a communicant. The elaborate production radio of the thirties and forties—your “Big Broadcasts,” et cetera—were never the natural function of radio, but arose merely as substitute, pro tern arrangements, groping and expensive, a settling for less by shoveling on more. And isn’t it a fact that in the so-called Golden Age of Radio your biggest shows—Amos ’n’ ‘Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, Henry Aldrich, Jack Benny, and every single soap opera that was ever on the radio—by attempting to portray the ordinary lives of ordinary people with whom listeners could identify, was making an effort to get around the audience-participation principle? Is it too far-fetched to suggest that Allen’s Alley was the comic prototype of today’s telephone talk program?

  I think we ought not to proceed—in a deeper sense this is not a digression—without first acknowledging that we in radio owe much to a great engineer with a great idea. Probably, shamefully, most of us do not even know his name—I know I didn’t—despite the fact that many of us here tonight owe our professional lives to him. I refer, of course, to Brandon Sline, the developer of the tape delay. When I knew I was to address you I cast about in my mind for a suitable topic. When I looked around me at the not inconsiderable achievements of radio in our own age, I naturally came in the course of my deliberations to consider the tape delay, and determined to have on the dais with me the man chiefly responsible for it. It wasn’t easy tracking him down; indeed, it took considerable research just to discover his name. Thus our debts go often unpaid because we are simply unaware of them. Working in his own spare time in his own home on a means of providing the broadcaster with what he thought of as a margin for error, this man, unaffiliated with any network, a staff engineer—I had almost said an ordinary staff engineer—at WSNO, Rutledge, Vermont, invented a simple device which has become a contribution more sweeping and more telling than any since Marconi’s. Yes, since Marconi’s. For with just this device and the ordinary house telephone, he has made every home in America its own potential broadcasting st
ation, and every American his own potential star. I’m going to ask him to stand. Brandon? That’s right. That’s right. Applaud him you well may. Brandon Sline, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Brandon. You know, ladies and gentlemen, as we were all applauding Brandon it occurred to me that he, the tinkerer engineer, though a professional, working on his equipment in his own workshop as he did, encompasses the best principles of amateurism, and that it is fitting indeed that his device gives voice to amateurs.

  It isn’t for me so much as for psychologists to explain the public’s urge to communicate directly. Be that as it may, the instinct seems to be the deepest one in entertainment; I don’t think I need point out to you that “ham” radio existed before commercial radio. At the same time that this urge is basic, however, it is also dangerous. Just as an agency like the FCC must regulate and oversee our industry, so must there be machinery to regulate and oversee the public when it is given its voice. It would be instructive, but depressing, I’m afraid, to play for you some of the excisions that have been recorded and preserved from even a single program. You would think we lived in Pandora’s box. A friend of mine who works one of these shows has said that if he had a dollar for each time he has had to black out the word “kike” or “nigger” or some even less fragrant obscenity, he wouldn’t have to work again for the rest of his life. He claims to have heard more filth than any member of the vice squad in the wickedest streets of New York City. It seems a pity that a minority should have it in its power to distress and frustrate the good listener for even the few seconds of silence that follows an unacceptable remark. Have we developed solid-state and instant-on only to have our radios go dead on us in the middle of what is often the most interesting part of a conversation? Aren’t we likely to re- create the same psychological blocks we have been at such great pains to propitiate?

  It is for this reason that we are currently working on a tape delay that does all that present tape delays do but then accelerates the tape so that the next decent conversation may be heard immediately—creating, in effect, if not in fact, an apparently seamless conversation. We’re close to a breakthrough on this one. And when it occurs we will truly have pulled time’s teeth at last. Indeed, as the entire industry now gears itself to the telephone talk show, the fabulous “two-way radio” concept seems a fullfilment of what radio has always promised—a means of open discourse, of people-to-people priorities. Of course there is always room for improvement. One area that must be explored is the area of sound itself. If two-way radio is to take its rightful place on the American air something must be done to soften the sibilant “tunnel effect” of telephone sound and bring it closer to studio standards. We’re working on that too. In the meanwhile, so much has already been accomplished that I think we may say with as much accuracy as pride that only now is the real Golden Age of Radio upon us. …

  2

  The Golden Age is upon me. Heavy. I think it really is Pandora’s box. “Dick Gibson, WBOX, and all I know is what you tell me.” (I live in a box.)

  I used the phones as early as ’53. Before there was even amplification equipment, let alone tape delay. Repeating laboriously, like a translator at the UN, everything the caller said, and not just words but inflections too, mimicking the voice as well as I was able, and not just the voice but the accent, and not just the words and the inflections and the voice and the accent, but also the passion, the irritation and complaint and sulking triumph, listening so closely and working so hard that my head hurt and when it was my turn to answer I couldn’t shake the caller’s style and borrowed his vocabulary and traded on his posture so that he thought I was baiting him and grew angry, and then I had to mimic that and that made him angrier which raised the ante of my imitation once more until at the end we were shouting at each other and one of us finally had to hang up. And still so involved after the call was finished that when I took the next call the first caller’s style sometimes continued to prevail, intruding itself into what I repeated of the new conversation, fading only as I began gradually to catch the new caller’s emphasis—a round robin of personality. Dick Gibson, KOPY. Dick Gibson, KAT.

  Then, when technology at last caught up with us innovators and pioneers, going to the phones again, at last empowered to be myself. But something else changed, though at first I couldn’t identify it. When I understood, it was very odd. I had something in my hands again. In Hartford I’d been empty-handed. The phone was like the scripts I used to hold during my apprenticeship.

  It seemed right to be burdened. It seemed appropriate that a man on the radio should be connected and not permitted that merely conceptual and apparent connection—his voice—like a beast in Whipsnade, seemingly loose. Fetters give me. Let there be heavy equipment; attach me by cords, electronic leashes, to my microphonic stakes.

  (Alternatively, how would it be if I could roam free, speak in deserts as in auditoriums, ad lib while swimming, mumble on mountains, ask strangers for the time of day in the streets and have my sounds picked up in Texas or Timbuktu? Build me of crystal, Lord. I would be Jesus Crystal. In Excels is Diode.)

  He was already forty years old when he was asked to resign from the station in Hartford. A playback of the tapes satisfactorily demonstrated to the managers that he had not initiated any of the foul language; he had merely been unable to control it. Probably he would have resigned anyway, for that night had shown him how tired he was of all spurious controversy, as well as of his own unconscious baiting of his guests. Besides, he had fallen in love with Carmella, Pepper Steep’s sister.

  He took her with him to Pittsburgh in the spring of 1959, two months after he had been asked to resign. It was Carmella herself who decided they could not be married. Strangely, it was on religious grounds that she turned him down. She had asked him what he was.

  “Me? I don’t know. I’ll be what you are.”

  “I’m nothing.”

  “Then there’s no problem. Neither am I.”

  “Then there’s a problem. I want my life to be regularized. I was born a Gentile. That was the name of our little sect in California when I was a girl—the Gentile Church. It was the only one in America. As the elders died off and people moved away there was no one left to carry on the traditions. The Mosque was abandoned.”

  “The Mosque?”

  “Jesus was a Jew. The Jews were Arabs. Arabs worship in mosques. Pepper and I went back a few years ago. I thought of staying on, but the firehouse isn’t there any more.”

  “The firehouse?”

  “The Mosque was in the firehouse. Anyway, I’ve been nothing since. I could be a Catholic if my husband was one, or a Jew, or anything at all. I want to be something.”

  “Look, I was born a Methodist. You could be a Methodist.”

  “What do Methodists do? I couldn’t be Methodist if it went against my conscience as a Gentile.”

  “Well, I don’t know what they do. I don’t remember. Maybe we could take instruction.”

  “Can they smoke?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I’ve been trying to give up smoking.”

  “Well, there’s nothing in the religion that says they have to smoke … I know—Baptists aren’t supposed to smoke. We could be Baptists.”

  “Would you promise to be a good Baptist?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I don’t believe you. Besides, it all seems so artificial. I’d much prefer just to stay with you and wait until I fall in love with someone who’s already something.”

  And that became their arrangement.

  The normal and ordinary and the public were her passions, not instinctively so much as self-consciously. For example, she loved to prepare long lists of electric kitchen appliances, such hardware being to her what jewels and furs were to other women. Dick often found her doodles on telephone pads where she had drawn, with some skill, electric carving knives, blenders, toasters—all the latest products from GE. She would have made a superb interior decorator of a very special sort. Museums coul
d profitably have come to her to furnish typical rooms of the mid-century middle class in the best of popular taste. She watched what everyone else was watching on television. Her opinions were almost always consistent with the samplings revealed in polls. When they weren’t she would steep herself in the arguments of the majority until there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between its position and her own.

  It was very odd. He knew that one day she would cheat on him. Not because of money or love or youth or power or sensuality; one day her heart would be captured by someone so respectable, someone so responsible and normal, that he would even have to be told that Carmella had “set her cap for him.” (That the fellow would have to be told in the first place was certain, for he would be a passive man, flattered and frightened by her and not believing his luck. It was almost as certain that the news would have to be broken to him in just such phrases, the only style that would not kill him.) So someday her prince would come, and he could be almost anyone—though there were some things he could not be. He could be married but not Catholic, he could be Catholic but not married; Carmella would not begin her new life by being damned out of her old one. She was already thirty-four, which set additional imperatives, not for herself, for in a way she was selfless; for example, she had no ordinary greeds, did not require riches or excitement, and had no urge to prolong her youth as such.