CHAPTER 31
Gospel
No Sex On The Premises was Ray’s rule, spelled out to every man he hired, even the Rev. Irving James Knox way back in 1927. Ray said: “Keep your hands off the females, I don’t care how you feel, or what suddenly comes over you, or how her hand brushed your lap and her left breast jumped out at you, I don’t want to hear it. No matter how sad and lonely your life is: don’t touch women around here. Keep your hands off them.”
“I’m not sure I care to work for someone who addresses a man of the cloth in those terms,” said the pale Presbyterian, smiling faintly, peering over his wire rims.
“Suit yourself, but if you come to work here, remember: no sex with a WLT employee, or anybody else you meet on the premises. You can jump into the sack with your fans all you like, but keep the fornication out of the station.”
Rev. Knox decided he could join the staff on those terms, but that summer, a few weeks after Frank’s debut, Knox was nabbed in Freddie’s Cafe slipping his hand into the blouse of a girl from the typing pool who was dizzy from three vodka sours. “I’ve been working too hard,” the minister explained. “My nerves are shot. I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Roy Jr. told him to go south and have it. “No sex on the premises, that’s Ray’s rule,” he said.
Rev. Knox wept. He told Roy Jr. that he was troubled by unnatural sexual urges and that he had tried to seduce the girl as a way of proving that he was normal. Roy Jr. wavered. He detested clergymen, but the station needed one, and Knox had the sort of chummy tone that people liked in a spiritual leader. In person he was a pill but on the air he shone as a beacon of manly Christianity, a light on life’s dark paths, and Roy Jr. was loath to have to break in a new man. He gave Knox a dreadful, withering lecture that left the man pale and trembling and his hanky damp with tears. “I don’t need a loose pecker around this place, believe me, and if I catch you trying to grab one of my girls again, I’ll call up the bishop and have him trim your nuts for you. I’ll throw you in the street and call the newspapers.” But he let the man stay, a mistake.
“We are showing weakness. You should’ve kicked his skinny butt across the street,” said Ray. “Now the word is out. Sex is okay, just don’t do it on the desks. We are in for a storm.”
But he agreed with Roy Jr. about the horror of replacing Knox: when you thought about all the clergymen you’d have to interview for the job—days and days of aimless uplifting conversation with flabby men in dowdy clothes, men with big watery eyes and trembling lips and a perpetual look of faint hope on their faces—plus the inevitable Bible-beaters and the whoopers and jumpers—who would you find in the end? At worst, some brilliant demagogue like Pastor Paul Anderson the Lutheran Lothario on WEVE (“A Man Named Paul”), who would draw an immense audience of peabrains and then you could never get rid of him, and at best, you’d find another sad sack like Knox.
But Ray was right about the storm. After Knox was not fired, WLT went through months of heavy erotic activity. John Tippy fell in love with the music librarian, a young pianist named Jeff, and they were said to spend weekends together in Duluth. The staff organist Miss Patrice had a fling with Phil Sax and for a whole week she showed up for the 7 a.m. Organ Prelude with an exhausted, moony look about her, smelling like a cigar. But the busy boy was Wendell Shepherd of The Rise and Shine Show. In his Milton, King Seeds pocket calendar, he drew in twenty-seven shining suns in one month, twenty-seven times with three different women, three very different women. Lottie Unger was a secretary in a pretty tweed suit that Wendell removed and hung up without a wrinkle, and Julia Jackson Butts was a fine young woman with long black hair piled on top of her head, the assistant editor of Dial: The WLT Family Magazine, whose hair Wendell unpiled, and Lacy Lovell was an actress on Up in a Balloon who mistook him for the producer of The Hendersons.
“The staff is acting just like the President,” said Roy Jr. “And I don’t mean Mr. Truman.”
Ray bristled. “I do not run around here jumping secretaries,” he said. “The women with whom I am acquainted are women of attainment—”
“Employees, nonetheless.”
Ray stared him down. “Life is not always reasonable, or even logical,” he said. “There are exceptions and anomalies. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. I am extremely fond of a number of women who work for me. True. I wouldn’t dream of lying to you about that. And yet I do not permit the men who work for me to run around here like animals. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly. ”
And now, on a warm October morning, there was a boxful of allegations about Knox himself that Roy Jr. had found locked up in Sloan’s old file drawer (under “Knox: Testimony in re Patrimony: SAVE”) that pointed unmistakably toward debauchery on a scale that would shame a goat.
“Frank! The man is crazed. He’s besotted with lust. Look at this! Letters in his own hand, written to schoolgirls! Offers of private swimming lessons! Invitations to travel! Invitations to pose for photographs! Hikes in the woods! Rendezvouses in the library stacks! Romps in the hay! Fondue parties! Listen to this: ‘My darling dearest Marjery, Yes, I do love you, deeply and absolutely, and it has taken me months to get up the courage to say so, and now, with a trembling hand and a heart full of profound feeling, I am asking you to—’ Outrageous! The man seduced Little Becky! Look at this—” And he tossed Frank a packet of letters, from Marjery to the minister, whom she addressed as “Nervy Irvy” and “Snuggums” and “My Little Lemon Drop” and who, evidently, she accompanied to ministerial conferences in Seattle and Cleveland, in the role of his niece.
“Well,” said Frank, “she’s a grownup person. I suppose she knew what she was doing.”
“So did he. He knew he was cutting his nuts around here.” Roy Jr. picked up the phone. “Damn. And now I gotta go find another one.”
“How about Reverand Odom?” said Frank.
“Who’s he?”
“He works here. Harold Odom. He’s a janitor. But he’s also a Lutheran minister. He’s a very sensible person.”
“Odom. I know him. He’s the guy who’s in love with Patsy Konopka. How come he gave up the ministry? Is he some kind of nut?”
Frank sat down and leaned across the desk. “No. Not a nut. Just a very practical person. He had a church in North Dakota and he thought he wasn’t doing any good, he was only being a minister. So he asked himself, What job can I find where I know I’ll do some good? and he came up with janitor. But he’d make a great radio minister. You should try him out.”
Frank stopped—he was trembling. He had never tried to tell Roy Jr. what to do before, and it felt as if he had walked up to the edge of a chasm.
“If he did a radio show every day, could he still continue as a janitor?”
Frank said he thought Mr. Odom would insist on retaining his janitorship.
“Good. So you tell him. Monday through Fridays, the ‘Scripture Nuggets’ segment of The Rise and Shine Show, and the five-minute meditation at ten-fifteen, and Sunday morning, the chapel at six a.m. and vespers at ten-thirty. Right? Good. Now I just have to fire Snuggums and then deal with Wendell Shepherd and his hormones.”
Frank found Reverend Odom wet-mopping the lobby and when he told him about Roy Jr.’s offer, the man’s eyes filled with tears. He put his arms around Frank and squeezed him so tight his back cracked. “I knew something good was going to happen to me today,” he said.
And the next morning, he was on the air. He read from Ephesians on Rise and Shine—the Shepherd Boys were glad to see him, they knew him from way back, Elmer Shepherd said—and a few hours later the old minister did a nice meditation about leaving our burdens with the Lord. Roy Jr., on his way to lunch with Ray, gave Frank a thumbs-up and said, “Good man.” And Ray said, “Frank, you’re the first smart person I’ve met who hardly says anything. Come and have lunch with us.”
Come and have lunch with us. What sweet music to his ears! He had raised up Reverend Odom—lifted him up from his mop and pail and put him on the Mountain of Radio—just like Dad Benson, who lifted up his brother and his friends. Dad had once said, “It takes genius to elevate the ordinary, a very ordinary genius,” and that’s exactly what I am, Frank thought, an ordinary genius. He had unlocked the secret of radio. The sport of the ordinary! Brilliant men like Reed Seymour couldn’t figure this out for the life of them! Reed was ashamed of radio. Vesta was ashamed of it. Reed wanted to do something worthy with his life, like write books. He had part of a manuscript in his desk drawer. Frank had read it. Very intense, very poetic. And very hard going. Vesta wanted to bring in the treasures of the world and display them on the air, like opening a museum and showing postcards of the Venus de Milo. No, radio was a cinch if you kept reaching down and grabbing up handfuls of the ordinary. Keep your feet on the ground.
