CHAPTER 7
The Hotel Ogden,
The 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.
Tell Sheridan to speak up. I can’t understand a word she says. Is she sick or what? There’s no reason to whisper. She is supposed to be heard, for heaven’s sake, this is radio, not eurythmics.
 
Today Dad commented that Jo’s crocuses aren’t blooming. Yesterday it was hyacinths. Be consistent. Have somebody keep notes on these things so you don’t contradict yourself.
 
This morning I woke up at 6 a.m. and heard somebody talking about fishing. He talked for ten minutes and nothing he said was of any interest whatsoever. He had two or three fellows in the studio who sat and guffawed though it was not humorous. Don’t let these people do that sort of thing. I am not paying for that and I won’t put up with it.
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.
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“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?”
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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:
I’ll pick you up in a taxi, honey.
Try to be ready ’bout half past eight.
Now honey don’t be late,
We’re going to go to Al’s and have some breakfast.
Our romance bloomed at late-night dances;
It’s time our love saw the light of day.
You’ll see how sweet I am
Over scrambled eggs and ham.
We’ll be true pals at Al’s Breakfast Cafe.
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.”
“You can’t go off and sign a lease without talking to me about it,” said Roy. “I’m your partner.”
“We discussed it last week. You talked about buying a potato farm, you made a little toy town out of balsa wood, you wanted to build a church. It was crazy talk. Somebody has to take care of business here. So I took care of it. Nice building, the Ogden. Fireproof. And I found a buyer for the restaurant. He takes over on Tuesday.”
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And that was that. Roy was deeply wounded, of course, but then he often was. He retreated to Moorhead and didn’t come back until spring. A cartage company hauled WLT out of the Court in one truckload and Roy Jr. wired up the studios and a control room in rooms 215, 217, and 219 of the Ogden, and they were in business. Ray hired a woman named Ethel Glen to manage the place. She was six feet tall, a bookkeeper, and she could play the piano and the marimba, which might come in handy. Ethel brought in The Bergen Brothers, Carpenters, and they tore out walls and installed a waiting room, two big studios, a practice room, dressing rooms, a Green Room. Fresh pine, fresh paint, new carpets, and the waiting room was lined with seven rose-petal wing chairs and sofas and walnut side tables with tall brass lamps with lavender linen shades and a bookcase with leatherbound sets of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, the Brontes. Upstairs, on the third floor, six offices, including two big ones for Roy and Ray, adjoining, identical, except Ray’s looked toward Nicollet Avenue and the Foshay and City Hall, and Roy’s looked at MacPhail and he got to hear the sopranos. Ray’s was six feet shorter, due to the stairwell being on his side.
“You take the big one,” he told Roy. “You’re the brains of the outfit, you need more room to pace up and down and think up your great ideas.”
Roy didn’t notice, until years later, that Ray had an extra office for himself, a bedroom actually, up the stairs, on the fourth floor. Ray told Miss Glen it was for naps, and she almost believed him until she noticed one day that when Alma Melting arrived for The Excelsior Bakery Show, the elevator was coming down, not up.
He couldn’t help himself. There was Alma and there was a lady from the paper and for awhile there was a Nordic goddess from the Ice Follies who was willing to hang up her skates if he wanted to marry her. No thanks. A schoolteacher lady who brought her class in for a tour and wound up sending them home unaccompanied on the streetcar and she ended up in room 434 with Ray.
“I somehow knew she was going to go to bed with me the moment I looked in her eyes,” said Ray over lunch the next day. “Of course I’ve been wrong sometimes in the past, and here she was with thirty twelve-year-old kids, but still, I had a notion. On the tour, I kept touching her on the back, on the shoulder, and she didn’t jump, and then we posed for a photograph and she put her arm around me and pulled me closer and turned toward me so that her breast was halfway into my shirt pocket. That was when I asked her to dinner. She said yes with only a moment’s hesitation. We had wine at dinner and the wine made her frisky. I told her that we might never meet again, that tonight was our night, and that I would like to make it beautiful for her, and we got right on the elevator. She was so lovely. She stood on a chair and I undressed her in full light and I believe nobody had ever looked at her before. She was voluptuous in that Swedish way, those mild eyes and that pale golden hair, and breasts like ripe pears.”
Dad Benson, sitting at the coffeeshop counter, held a spoonful of split-pea soup in midair. The voice sounded just like Ray’s.
“She smelled of chalk dust and laundry starch, like all those teachers, but she smelled a lot better when I got the clothes off her, and then when we’d worked up a little sweat, she smelled the best of all,” Ray said. “There is nothing smells so sweet as a sweaty woman, especially if some of the sweat on her is your own.”
The third-floor quarters spread to include the fourth, and Ray’s bedroom moved to the sixth, the top floor. On the third floor were the executive offices, Accounting, Continuity, and Sales. Ray had hired another Sons of Knute brother, Art Finn, to run Sales, and Art kept hiring new men every month, sales were so good, phenomenal in fact. Art said, “Ray, we’ve got so many people on the waiting list, we could start charging them rent.” Accounting started as a man named Loran Groner, and the next time Ray stuck his head in, three men in green eyeshades looked up, blinking, from the balance sheets.
On the second floor, the two studios became four, behind a double-door marked ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE , and beyond was another, marked Keep This Door Closed At All Times. Ray avoided the circus in the studios, but once, lost, looking for Roy Jr., Ray blundered into the Green Room and there were the Dakota Gypsy Yodellers tuning up for the Jubilee and arguing about who was in key. Leo was trying to keep them from socking each other.
“Please settle this somewhere else,” said Leo.
“Well, there’s no point telling me that,” said a Yodeller. “Go talk to him. He’s the one who’s mad. He’s mad because he can’t tune his damn mandolin. I’m not mad. Anytime he wants to apologize to me, I’d be more than happy to hear it.”
Elsie and Johnny stood to the side unstrapping their big blonde Bueno Vox piano accordions, a big red-headed bruiser and her forlorn husband—she had had him on a strict potato diet and he lost sixty pounds (because he didn’t like potatoes) and his skin hung on him like waxed bags. “You keep jumping the beat,” she muttered. She rolled her eyes: he was a lousy musician but she was married to him so what could she do? A scraggly guitar player sat noodling, a burning cigarette tucked under the strings, looked up at Ray, and said, “Clint?” Ray knew of no Clint at WLT. Out in the hall, the Norsk Nightingale was huddled with his Norsky Orchestra over a bottle of Rock’n Rye, and Sister Nell and Brother Reuben slouched by in full hillbilly regalia, sunflower bonnet and bib overalls and all—Why do they bother? it’s only radio—and script girls, engineers, the children of sponsors, the cleaning ladies, and The Shepherd Boys Quartet. He could tell they were gospel singers by their deadly cologne and their fatuous smiles. “Morning, Mr. Soderberg,” said Wendell —or was it Elmer? or Rudy? He almost genuflected as Ray hurried past, looking for the exit. That was the problem with paying your employees so little—the dreadful bootlicking and brown-nosing, the ingratiating smiles, the cringing and groveling.
“Where The Door Is Always Open,” the motto of WLT, appeared on the elevator doors, with the smiling face tipping the hat, and the point was not lost on the employees: no matter what, you were always welcome to leave.
The tenth anniversary came, April, 1936, and when Roy Jr. proposed a celebration, Ray said, “Celebrate what?” He didn’t intend to hobnob with the help and pat their backs and make a speech about how wonderful it all was, because it wasn’t. So Roy Jr. bought a big chocolate cake and set it out in the Green Room, and by noon it was all eaten.