CHAPTER 25
Hero
He did everything. He washed coffee cups and emptied ashtrays and gave his opinion when it was asked for. “What do you think of her?” Roy Jr. asked, after Faith Snelling left his office, upset that Dale was off Sunnyvale, hinting that her days on Friendly Neighbor might be numbered. “She’s Jo,” said Frank. “And Jo is what makes the show go. You couldn’t do it without her.” And so Roy Jr. smoothed things over with her.
When the annual “Little Becky Souvenir Scrapbook” came out, full of inspirational poems and songs and a dozen photos of a golden-haired child with unremitting smile (not Marjery Moore) in various lifelike poses (Little Becky Wakes Up, Little Becky’s Breakfast, Enjoying A Chat With School Chums, Little Becky Spells The Word Correctly, Little Becky And Miss Judy, Home For A Nourishing Lunch, Little Becky And Dad Say Grace Together, Climbing A Tree, Practicing The Piano), Frank had to address hundreds of them and mail them out. More than 40,000 copies were sold or given away. The child drew about a hundred letters a week, several of which were written by Frank, who made sure that Marjery saw them. “You disgust me, you little wretch, and I wish you’d get the hell off the air and leave performing to people with talent,” began one. They didn’t bother Marjery at all. She thought of them as the work of some creep with a hair up his ass.
He arrived at the office at seven-thirty, made coffee, wiped the excess polish off the executive desks, and sharpened six pencils each for Ray and Roy Jr. Ray liked a fresh pencil, liked to smell the shaved wood and lead. When Ray arrived, Frank helped him off with his coat. “Thanks, Stan,” said Ray. Frank. “Of course. Frank.” Then he got their mail from the mailroom, where the girls were barely awake at eight. He had to rummage through the sacks and yank the Soderbjergs’ letters and run them upstairs: the day didn’t start for Roy Jr. until he had opened a letter. Then Frank waited for Roy to call him from Moorhead.
Roy was an early riser and by eight he had saved up a large load of conversation. Frank got to hear everything; he was new, he hadn’t heard it before. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking,” Roy’d start out. “Radio seems to me to be fading. What do you think?” Frank said he didn’t think so. Roy continued: “I used to listen to the Barn Dance when I lived in St. Paul, and then one night I quit listening to it. It was still on, and I could hear it, but I was listening to next door. A couple lived there who fought a lot, and in warm weather, they left their windows open, and I sat and listened.
“They’d fight over money—he was a carpenter, a journeyman, and she worked at The Emporium—or they’d fight about sex. They’d start slow and then get to yelling and running from room to room and then she’d smash something and then it got very quiet. She cried and he comforted her and in a few minutes, you’d hear that bed thumping the wall. It must’ve been on loose rollers. They’d go at it for fifteen, twenty minutes. Ka-bam, ka-bam, ka-bam. And then they lay and talked and smoked.
“In broad daylight, this was a couple you wouldn’t look at twice, but secretly, they were fascinating. She’d say, after they’d had sex, ‘I can’t figure us out.’ And he’d promise that everything’d be better. And then they remembered how they met. It was at her dad’s drainpipe warehouse, and she came in after school and around a corner and came face to face with a man’s crotch. It was his. He was standing on a stool, measuring a doorpost. She was going to ask her old man for money to go to Europe and suddenly there was a fly and a bundle inside it. She looked up and he held up the measuring tape. Three and a half feet. And she didn’t go to Europe.
“I thought to myself: this is what should be on radio.” He meant it.
“Hank, the future of broadcasting is eavesdropping. We could use hypnotism. Ordinary people could be actors of the subconscious. Their dreams and all the night thoughts people think—put it on radio. Of course, it’d be obscene and against the law, but, you wouldn’t try to change the law, just change radio. Put out a signal so a person needs a decoding machine to receive it. Put it beyond the law. Radio’s fading fast, Hank.”
Frank.
“And you know what could save radio, Frank? If you put a microphone in my brother’s jacket pocket. My brother dogs around town like nobody’s business. But maybe you know that. My brother could save radio single-handed. Not that he would ever use his hand, of course.”
Frank did know that. He drove Ray one day to the Great Northern Depot to entrain him for New York and there was Erie Monroe, a young actress on The Hills of Home, a little green suitcase in hand. The old man beamed as he took her hand and kissed it. He turned to Frank. “Tell Vesta I took an extra berth for the Great Books,” he said.
Erie took Ray’s arm and Frank carried their bags down the stairs and up the platform alongside the Empire Builder to the Pullmans up front. “By the way, I am going to talk to a buyer and try to sell the station,” said Ray, stopping to catch his breath. “Bing Crosby. That’s between you and me. I’ve decided to sell. I’m not getting any younger. That’s what my brother says.” Erie squeezed Ray’s arm and smooched him on the side of his head.
“My brother is up in Moorhead pondering the imponderable. And I am going to go to New York and screw the inscrutable.” He squeezed Erie back. “Bye, kid.”
The conductor hollered “Board!” Up went the stepstool and the Builder steamed away and across the Stone Bridge over the Mississippi, the cheery glow of the parlor car disappearing behind the NSP power plant. Frank drove the big Buick back, walked the dog, watered the lawn, closed the windows. Two weeks later, Ray returned. Bing had been in Tahiti, but never mind, Erie had been wonderful and Ray was feeling pink again. They had gone to Radio City Music Hall and seen Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny and Fred Allen, Frances Langford and Don Ameche, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, Gene Austin, the Boswell Sisters, and Jesse Crawford at the Mighty White Wurlitzer, in a four-hour broadcast with not a minute of slack, not a single song or gag or line that didn’t belong there, a glittering all-star revue.
“Radio,” Ray declared, “it’s here to stay, and we’re going to stick with it.”
The love of a beautiful woman seemed to be a real picker-upper. “New York is the ticket,” he told Frank. “Terrible place to live. People lie to you. Perfectly nice people. They lie all the time. You buy a suit and the salesman promises it by tomorrow morning. Two days later you call him up and he pretends to be upset, says the tailor got the chalk marks mixed up, it’ll be here Tuesday. Finally on Friday you start to get steamed, but now he’s blaming it on a missing button, and Monday, he says Wednesday. Wednesday, it’s Friday. Finally, you walk in and threaten to kill him with a screwdriver. You screech and rave until the spit is dripping off your chin. And you see, this is what he expected! He listens and when you’re finally done screeching, in comes Sam with the pants. You have to yell at people to get things done. Terrible place to live. But my gosh, a good hotel, and a Broadway show and dinner and breakfast at noon in bed reading the newspaper. That’s the life, Frank.”
A few days after Ray returned, Frank became a hero. It was a Monday, and WLT went off the air. The transmitter shuddered and the air went dead about midway through the Jubilee during an Evelyn Pie commercial.
I don’t care if the meat is pale,
If the soup is thin and the jokes are stale,
If the gravy’s lumpy and the spuds are dry,
You can make it up to me with an—
And nothing happened for awhile. Bells didn’t ring and lights didn’t flash.
Reed Seymour, sitting in the Green Room, resting his eyes with a copy of Peek, reached up and switched the wall monitor from Program to On-Air and heard silence. He switched back to Program. He didn’t want to be the one who brings in the bad news. What with Eleanor Grantham (Babs, on The Hills of Home) throwing him over for an engineer—the ultimate disgrace for any announcer—Reed had been through a lot and the thought of calling up an engineer and saying, “Something’s wrong, Chuck,” was too much. Let the engineers handle it. That’s what they got paid for, the big dorks.
The engineer, Chuck, sat engrossed in the Jubilee, listening to Leo’s joke about the man who wants to buy a new car for his girlfriend and the salesman asks, “Chevrolet?” and he says, “Well, we’ll see once we get the car,” which made Chuck chortle and wheeze and grab onto the console for support. He did not turn and look at the transmitter dial behind him, so he wasn’t aware that the needle lay flat and that the WLT audience was now limited to him and a few other people on the premises.
The young man who sat in the transmitter shack at the foot of the WLT tower in Columbia Heights and read the meters was Ray’s neighbor’s boy, Wallace Tripp, and this quiet and tedious job suited him well, except that he was afraid to give bad news too. He was the only child of older parents who cared for him so well that Wallace could not bear the company of other children, who were all stupid, nor was he suited for the rough and tumble world of the office. The transmitter shack, clean and dry, furnished with a desk and a cot, on a hill behind a barbed-wire fence with “Danger: High Voltage” signs posted everywhere, was exactly right for him. He loved to be at the transmitter. He needed no days off. Work and recreation were one to Wallace. The monastic life appealed to his sense of mission. He was a baseball fan and an astrologer and kept elaborate zodiac statistics on the American Association, team and individual statistics, and could tell anyone, if anyone had been interested, how the Millers compared to the Toledo Mudhens, for example, in Batting Average (Full Moon), and had theories about which signs to favor in which situations, e.g., to steal with a Leo with a Libra at bat, to walk a Gemini if the next batter is a Cancer. When Wallace looked up and saw the transmitter meters lying as flat as beached fish, he figured it must be a mistake. The transmitter must be on. So he made up readings to indicate that it was on and wrote those in the log book. He didn’t want to be the cause of trouble. He didn’t want Ray to get mad and throw him out on the streets.
So WLT was off the air for a whole afternoon and evening. The switchboard lit up and the operators, Janice and Jo Ellen, took careful note of the many complaints and put them into a complaint basket, six hundred remarks from listeners that WLT was gone, which a messenger boy picked up a few hours later and carried downstairs to the Program Department, where a secretary began typing a letter of acknowledgement: “Thank you for your interest in our broadcasting service, recently expressed, and please know that we consider all comments from listeners and weigh them seriously in making our program decisions. . . .”
Roy Jr. called from his dentist’s, where the nurse had mentioned something about WLT having been struck by a blast of lightning. “What’s wrong?” he asked, a little loopy from the laughing gas. “Wrong?” asked Gene the Chief Engineer. So it was up to Frank to discover the problem when he returned from lunch. “We’re off the air,” he told Gene.
He and Gene drove out to Columbia Heights. Gene got lost on the way and then it took them awhile to breach Wallace’s security system. Gene lobbed stones from the street onto the roof of the shack, but Wallace thought it was only some boys, and if he didn’t do anything they’d go away. Finally, Frank climbed the fence, scaled the barbed wire, opened the gate, let Gene in, and Gene found the tube that had blown.
A couple hours later, back at the station, Frank asked Gene how long before he could get the station back on. Gene wasn’t sure. He was waiting to hear about a part he had ordered. “When did you order it?” asked Frank.
“Sent Chuck out with it an hour ago.”
“Sent him where?”
“To mail the letter.”
“A letter to whom?”
“The distributor in Chicago.”
Frank told him to find a distributor in Minneapolis and to get a part right away. “Okay,” said Gene, “but it’s your fault if Roy Jr. gets mad. He gets mad and goes around here silent for weeks and don’t look at a person. So when the shit hits the fan, that’s your ass, mister.”
So Frank became the whiz kid with his finger in the dike. Roy Jr. said, “Thanks.” “It was nothing,” said Frank. Roy Jr. asked Gene what the problem was with the distributor.
“I knew you were going to get mad. I just knew it,” said Gene.
“Please, Gene. Let’s not screw around when the signal’s down.”
“Sure. Right. I won’t. But I want you to know why I did what I did. I knew you were gonna blame me. That’s what makes it so hard to work here. I never know what you want. I never know if you’re mad or what.” Gene put his face in his hands and sobbed. Frank had never heard an engineer cry before. It was a hard rattly sort of weeping, more like gnashing, or the grinding of a gearbox when the clutch won’t engage.