WLT

The next morning, in the Tribune’s “Radio Log” column: “WLT 770 kilocycles. 12:00 Sign-On & Piano Prelude 12:15 Radio Program 1:00 WLT Noontime Jubilee 1:30 Postlude & Sign-Off”—the schedule had gone from forty-five minutes to ninety minutes in just twenty-four hours! The 12:15 program was Vesta reading “Intimations of Immortality” and “Thanatopsis,” and the 1:00 was Leo and the Tuxedoans and Miss Corinne. Ray did not give another talk. He had said everything he had to say the day before.

That morning, four persons approached him and expressed an interest in sharing their talents via radio, including two more of his pals from the Sons of Knute lodge—a realtor and former Grand Oya named Walter “Dad” Benson and his brother Wilmer, who did impressions of people and barnyard imitations. He did a cow, a horse, a cat, a dog, a cowboy, a Jewish man, a colored man and an airplane for Ray. “Okay, it sounds good, we’ll find a spot for you,” said Ray, the voices were so realistic. The next day, more than thirty people dropped by and asked for the Radio Manager. Some of them held song sheets and seemed prepared to sing. Ray pointed them to Roy Jr. and said, “He handles the singers, the young guy in the white jacket with the fountain pens in his pocket. See him.” So they put the arm on Roy Jr. “To whom should I talk about getting on the radio?” they asked him. “He’s the boss,” he said, pointing to Ray, but Ray had grabbed his hat and ducked out.

He told Leo, “I heard a ladies’ quartet yesterday who sounded like the night the orphanage burned down. How do you tell somebody they can’t sing?” Leo said, “You say that you’ll call them in a few days and then don’t.” But what if they think you only forgot to call, and they call to remind you? A person wants to admire persistence, but who has time to listen to it?

The fourth day, it was clear that Minneapolis was wild about radio. The whole town had heard that Soderberg’s was the place to go to “get on the air.” Every day, a line began to form at 9 a.m. for the Noontime Jubilee and its popular “Meet Your Neighbors” feature, where Leo LaValley would come through the ferns with the big carbon-ribbon microphone in hand, hop down off the stage, and stroll from table to table, putting the mike down for folks to speak into. It was a real innovation—the voice of an ordinary person, such as the listener, carried to countless unseen homes as if he or she were the Governor! Miraculous! Whole families waited in line outside Soderberg’s for hours who had journeyed from distant towns, having alerted neighbors and friends to listen to their broadcast. People offered to pay money for the privilege.

To speak through the air on the radio! It was so wonderful—and so awful. Many a man who had rehearsed the golden words in his mind found himself tongue-tied at the crucial moment, and sat down in shame and wept bitterly and had to be comforted. Many a man who had thought to tell a joke chucked it at the last moment in favor of a religious or patriotic sentiment befitting the occasion. (“This is Albert M. of Waseca. Hello. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. My dear listener, if I can only persuade you of the truth of this verse, then I will have accomplished a great deal. Thank you very much.”) Some people stood up and requested prayers for their mother who had been ill and who was listening at home. Respect for the flag was expressed, and the need for vigilance, the superiority of Minnesota cheese and butter, the beauty of her lakes and rivers, the belief in democracy, the hope for a better future through scientific methods of agriculture. Bracing their hand on a chair, they spoke of hardship and its lessons—the value of good friends and a close family—you learn these things when times are hard. Spoken on the radio, carried to distant places instantly, these truths seemed even more permanent, like the light of the sun.

Even the WLT regulars considered the idea of broadcasting pretty amazing. They could not quite believe it. They never got used to it. To think that their voices were heard by thousands all over Minnesota! Leo LaValley would tell his wife Leola in the evening about a particularly good joke he had told on the radio that day, “You should have heard it!”

One day, unable to bear the mystery, he backed away from the microphone as he was telling the story about Ole Torvaldson’s horse. Ole got drunk as a skunk one night and his friends turned the saddle backwards on his faithful horse Henrik and Ole climbed on board and rode away home to Lena and burst in the door, weeping—Leo edged toward the door to the linen closet as he told the joke, the microphone in hand, and he cracked open the door just as he came to the punchline—Ole said, “They cut Henrik’s head off but I stuck my finger in his windpipe and he ran faster than ever”—and recognized his own voice on Roy Jr.’s receiver inside, and cried, “I have heard it!” Sensing that the home audience might not grasp the meaning of his remark, he quickly added, “I am on the radio!” Ray was not tuned in for the windpipe joke. He was on Whitefish Lake, with Mavis Feezer, fishing, splashing water on her long brown legs.

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,

It’s the one, it’s the one,
it’s the one with the fun in the bun.
When you eat a Hamburg, you always clamor
for just another doggone one.

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?”

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:

Hello, hello. It’s time for the show.
We’re all dressed up and raring to go.
Hello to our friends and our neighbors out there,
Won’t you come in and pull up a chair?
Don’t bother to change to your good shirt and pants,
We’re only the Old Barn Dance.

Howdy, friends and neighbors, from the Old WLT Barn Dance here at our old stomping grounds, with some of the home folks here to sing and play your favorite tunes for you—starting off with a bang as we bring up Uncle Lester and his old squeezebox to play you the Yes She Does Polka!

“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.

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.”

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.

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!