WASHINGTON – Paul Harvey was always there for America.
Through wars, recessions, riots, assassinations and cultural upheaval.
But the most-listened-to voice in the history of broadcasting said his final "good day" March 1 of this year – at a time when many Americans might think they need his reassurance most.
Not to worry. Beginning tomorrow, Paul Harvey's wit and wisdom will be back in the form of a new biography by Paul Batura. And Americans will have a chance to learn more than they ever could about the legendary radio icon when he was alive.
It's called, appropriately, "Good Day! The Paul Harvey Story."
"Today, Americans are troubled," explains Batura. "They're worried. They're completely stressed out and void of perspective. They're burdened by the economic times and of a man in the White House who has kicked capitalism to the curb in place of socialism. Americans need to read about the life of Paul Harvey to regain perspective and recalibrate. Even in his death, Paul's life has a message for today's conservatives. He was born poor, worked hard and got rich. The story of Paul Harvey is the story of America."
Batura has some ideas about what his subject would say if he were still here:
- "In times like these, it's important to remember there have always been times like these."
- "The only people who get hurt on a roller coaster are the ones who jump off."
- "Like Mark Twain reportedly said about the music of Richard Wagner, 'It's not nearly as bad as it sounds.'"
- "Be careful … when a government is mocked by its own citizens, that laughter is often the death rattle with which empires die."
- "It's OK to be worried – that means there is still hope! Let's just worry about the right and important things."
- "In the history of the world, God often chooses the simple ones to confound the wise."
But the book is much more than fond reminiscences of an extraordinary life.
"Mr. Harvey's life was rich, long and layered, full of several mysteries that even to this day, are still somewhat unexplained," Batura told WND. "My research dusted off many interesting facts. As a police official, his father was caught up in the middle of one of America's deadliest race riots in 1921 Tulsa. That same father was murdered in cold-blood by a bunch of desperados six months later. My research also turned up the fact that he and his beloved Angel were secretly married and that the long-standing controversy regarding his expulsion from the Army in 1943 has never really been fully explained. He missed covering the bombing of Pearl Harbor live by two days. He was fired in 1941 and told he didn't have a voice for news – that he sounded silly and that nobody would ever take him seriously. His arrest in 1951 for hopping over a fence at the Argonne Lab in Illinois, in search of a scoop, has also been long overlooked. The media have also long misreported his position on Vietnam. He didn't switch from hawk to dove. His argument from the very beginning was that we were letting politicians in D.C. fight the war instead of the generals on the ground."
Even for the most inveterate Paul Harvey fan, there are indeed surprises here – and a character study that often reads like a compelling novel.
Harvey died at the age of 90 at a hospital near his winter home in Phoenix. At the time, Batura was already long at work on his definitive book.
Harvey's death came nine months after that of his wife, Lynne Cooper Harvey, whom he often called "Angel" on air, and who was also his business partner and the first producer ever inducted in the Radio Hall of Fame. She died in May 2008 at age 92.
"My father and mother created from thin air what one day became radio and television news," Paul Harvey Jr. said after his father's death. "So, in the past year, an industry has lost its godparents. And today millions have lost a friend."
Paul Harvey's life really was a Horatio Alger story. He began as a teenager cleaning up at a local radio station. He went on to have his broadcasts carried by 1,350 commercial radio stations, as well as 400 stations of the Armed Forces Radio Service.
Harvey was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, in November 2005.
After a stint at radio station KFBI in Abilene, Kan., he moved to KXOK in St. Louis and then Chicago, where he became the city's most popular newscaster.
He also settled down with Cooper, whom he had met the year before. Harvey said he invited her to dinner, proposed to her after a few minutes of conversation and from that moment on called her Angel.
In 1951, "Paul Harvey News" went national with broadcasts stretching coast-to-coast and reaching millions of listeners each night – broadcasting six days a week for more than half a century.
"He was my inspiration – more than anyone else in the media," said Joseph Farah, founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND. "It was his news judgment, more than anything else, that captured my imagination from the time I was a child. It was sheer genius. One of the greatest treats of my life was the day Paul Harvey, without coaxing, endorsed my book, 'Taking America Back,' on his broadcast."
Harvey's gift for drawing in listeners and making them see what he did was an art form.
He explained it simply: "As a boy, I fell in love with words and ran away from home and joined the radio. And it really was something."
"You trust me to paint pictures on the mirror of your mind," he said, "and I will let you feel such agony and ecstasy ... as you would never be able to feel by looking at it."
Read Paul Harvey's most popular essay on WND – "If I were the devil…"
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