The Dick Gibson Show (4 page)

So he continued, for a while anyway, as an itinerant, a circuit rider, his colleagues still those same graduates of the radio schools, actual fairies many of them, but fairies of a lower order: penniless, pained fellows who strove for taste and a sense of the finer as they strove to stretch their range and improve their diction.

SOME DEMO’S; FURTHER FAMOUS FIRSTS:

“Dick Gibson, KWGG, Conrad, California. This next number is ‘Dick’s Demo,’ Demonstration Record number twenty-seven, and goes out to all the guys ’n’ gals in the industry who hire and fire. This is a take. Take! I am calling you—ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh.

“I tell you about the time I worked the newsroom at KROP, Roper, Nebraska? The apprenticeship was on me and I wasn’t Dick Gibson yet. I was Marshall Maine, KROP, The Voice of Wheat. Some place that was. The ad I answered in
Broadcasting
said it reached listeners in three states. And so it did. We saturated two counties in northeast Nebraska, and leaped across the Missouri River to the Dell Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Whoever happened to be tuned in along a small rough stretch of Route 33 in western Iowa could also catch us.

“But let me tell you about those two counties. Sylvia Credenza County and Louis Credenza, Senior County. The whole area consisted of eight enormous farms owned by these eight brothers. The Credenza brothers: Louis III, Jim, Felix, Poke, Charley, George, Bill and Lee. That part of the state had been gerrymandered long before, and every two years each county sent a brother to the statehouse in Lincoln. They took turns. I was there during the reign of Charley and Bill.

“The station was a family hobby, sort of a Credenza hookup. Like a party line. They built it in 1935 when reception was still bad in the area and they had nothing else to listen to. Later, when Sioux City, about sixty miles off, put up KSUX, a 5000-watter, reception improved, but the boys had gotten so used to having their own station that they decided to continue it. The funny thing is, none of the brothers enjoyed speaking on the radio themselves. They became self-conscious and would cough and sputter and stammer helplessly whenever, during those biennial political campaigns they put on for each other—brother ran against brother, though only two brothers were nominated from each county and, for all I know, only Credenzas were registered to vote—one of them had to make a speech. So, though they listened constantly to their own station—they had radios mounted on all their tractors and each barn—they never performed on it except during one of those queer campaigns. (I was around during one of them. Lee was running against Jim in Sylvia Credenza County, and Felix was up against George in Louis Credenza, Senior County. It was something, hearing those speeches, each Credenza urging his three constituent Credenza brothers—one the incumbent— to get out and vote. It didn’t make any difference, they said, who they voted for. The important thing was that they exercise their ballot.)

“A staff ran the station for them from the beginning. When I was there there were two engineers, two transmitter men and two announcers. We all spelled each other and took turns sleeping in the same bunk beds out at the transmitter shack.

“Surprisingly, we did almost as many commercials as a normal station. With their two votes in the Nebraska legislature, the Credenzas carried a lot of weight with important firms around the state and could always pressure a little business out of them. They even prided themselves on the good job they did for their clients, though almost no one but Credenzas could ever have been listening. One time, when I was really into something and neglected to do a commercial exactly when it was scheduled, I received an angry call from Louis III.

“‘Hey you—Marshall Maine. What do you think you’re doing down there? The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Lincoln paid money to have that commercial done at 3:15. That don’t mean 3:14 or 3:16 or 3:18 or 3:20. Three-fifteen means 3:15. They picked that time because that’s when folks get thirsty and want something cool to swallow. They want their message said right then. You understand me? You think the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Lincoln wants its message jammed up against the Mutual of Omaha message at 3:23?’

“When people are thinking of their deaths, I thought, when they’re thinking of loss of limb, their houses on fire, liability, personal injury. ‘No sir,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I was into something.’

“‘Well, you look to your knitting, sonny, or you’ll be fast out on your ass of something else.’

“‘Yes, sir,’ I said, for the truth is, I liked working there. The apprenticeship was on me, as I say, and I was getting valuable experience.

“‘Call me Lou. You last long enough around here I might be your representative. I expect it’ll be me over old Poke in a landslide. In America it don’t do to say sir to the man that’s your representative.’

“We followed FCC regulations to the letter, and functioned exactly as any station would, with all the ordinary station’s customary programming, though with the sense I had of the station and its listeners, the programs seemed experimental to me, as any public activity would seem strange performed in private. I had this notion of command performance and, because of this, a fear of my audience which was unfamiliar to me.

“Yet even granting our ordinary format of music, news, and public service, there was something special about our programs. The Credenzas wanted their tastes catered to. ‘A station has to meet the needs of its audience,’ Felix Credenza often reminded me. So for Jim, the musical Credenza, we did ‘The John Philip Sousa Hour’ from eleven to midnight. For Felix and his wife, childless Credenzas who liked to pretend there were kids around the house, we did a children’s program with fairy tales and Frank Luther recordings. The most popular program, however, the one that pleased all the Credenzas, was a public service show called ‘Know Your County!’ It was about—I quote from the introduction—‘the living legend of Sylvia Credenza and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties.’ What it really was, was the history of the Credenza family done in fifteen-minute dramas, the Credenzas themselves putting together the scripts from their memory of family gossip. The program had been on since the station’s founding, and everything that had ever happened to the Credenzas had already been aired several times. When they came to the end of the cycle—each one, like the verses in ‘This is the house that Jack built,’ slightly longer than the last because of the additional increment of history—they simply started all over again. It was the way congregations read the Bible.

“Most of the programs I was involved with dealt with the family’s founders—Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior—and related how they were sweethearts in the old country but couldn’t marry because Louis was scheduled to be called up for military service. There were shows about the plots and payoffs that got him smuggled to America, Louis Senior’s wanderings in the New World, the letters they exchanged once he was settled in Nebraska, Louis’s dreams, Sylvia’s misgivings about making the trip, the bad time she had in steerage, her missing her train in Chicago. This last was a milestone in the legend, a sort of Ems telegram approach to history, just that destiny-ridden. For Louis, it seems, had missed
his
train in Omaha. He had intended to surprise Sylvia by meeting her in Union Station and riding back to Nebraska with her, and if the two lovers hadn’t
both
missed their trains they would have missed each other, presumably forever. The mutual layover somehow permitted their reunion for all time.

“And what a program
that
was—the reunion. KROP montages. Excerpts from Louis’s letters about his dreams. Solemn, forlorn blasts of exodus ship’s whistles become Chicago’s cheery choo-choo chugs. Then Louis’s ‘Hello, Sylvia.’ And Sylvia’s ‘It’s you, Lou.’ It was all down there. I tell you, I embraced myth then—all myth, everybody’s, anybody’s. To this day I’m a sucker for all primal episode: Bruce Wayne losing his parents and vowing vengeance; Tonto teaming up with the Lone Ranger; Clark Kent chipped out of Kryptonite—whatever.

“Who played Sylvia? Who played Sylvia if there were only the two male announcers? Some Mrs. Credenza, you think? Not at all. Ego like the Credenzas’ wouldn’t have permitted it. They insisted on themselves being out of it, insisted on the high privilege of others doing it for them, their words in other people’s mouths, themselves cozy by their receivers, hearing their own legend. An Indian lady. A squaw did. A chief’s old wife. Squaws were brought in for all the female Credenza parts. Credenza legend was the single Dell Reservation industry. The counties had been theirs; the Credenzas had been their enemies, were still their enemies. They loved their grudge, I guess, and thrived—anyone in the studio could see it—on the Credenzas’ side of the story, bland with omission, the blandness and good will the givens of the Indians’ patient rage. At air time, the old squaw’s voice was waverless with Sylvia’s youth; it could have been under a spell. It
was
under one. How else could she, who had never heard it, get the precise mix of old country accent and young English? And how did I, who had never heard it either,
know
it was precise? Better, how did she manage the hyperbole? I mean the exact input of glory and meaning with which she iced those pale speeches and which the Credenzas licked up at face value? Why, she
was
an Indian. She had come up on the settlers’ wagons, infiltrated Fort Credenza, outwoodsed them, I tell you, crept up on their Credenza souls and last-laughed them to death in some red way the Credenzas never understood or even suspected.

“But I’m getting ahead of myself. My major effort at KROP, what I thought at the time was the most valuable thing I did there experiencewise, grist-for-the-millwise (do you see what I was like back then? how ingenuous my concerns? I had an apprentice’s heart; I wanted to learn everything, do everything, conscientiously preparing myself with some self-made, from-the-ground-up vision of the world, assuming the
quid pro quo
and just dessert as if they were laws in nature) was the news programming. I had done news before only as a rip-and- reader, pulling the sheets off the teletype seconds before they were scheduled to be read, doing them cold. (And deriving thereby a certain false and snotty confidence, a sort of pride in what I took to be my professionalism. I didn’t see that this was the cynic’s way, the wiseguy’s way.)

“At KROP I became a real newsman for the first time. I still had to depend heavily upon the wire services, but just as the Credenzas were interested in Credenza history, so were they interested in Credenza current events. When I saw a brother and asked ‘What’s new?’ it was as a reporter I asked, and I was required to make a good deal of his answer. ‘Flash: Louis Credenza III announced today that the new car he purchased three weeks ago has gone back to the dealer for its one-thousand-mile checkup. “The defective cigarette lighter that came with the car will be replaced for nothing,” Mr. Credenza said. This is in accordance with his 20,000-mile guarantee covering parts and labor. … Elsewhere in the news, George Credenza, wife of the candidate for state representative from Louis Credenza, Senior County, spoke long distance last night to her sister in Worcester, Massachusetts, Mrs. Lloyd Brossbar, the former Dorothy Kiddons of Rapid City, South Dakota. Mrs. Brossbar is said to have told Mrs. Credenza that the children are well and send their love to their aunt and uncle. KROP has also learned that they thanked them for the chemistry set … The 8
P.M.
Worcester temperature was sixty-two degrees.’

“It was at KROP that I got to do my first remote, calling in my news over the telephone when I was sent to Lincoln to cover Charley Credenza’s maiden speech in the legislature. It was, I recall, a filibuster. No particular issue was at stake, no great principle; Charley just didn’t want to give up the floor. They finally had to vote cloture on him—the first time in Nebraska history. I was there. Marshall Maine was there.

“But do you know what the Credenzas liked best? Better even than self-reflexive history or on-the-spot coverage? Human interest. Folksy coda. I scoured the wire services and newspapers to feed their need for anecdote, their love of contretemps and feeling for that long line of the pratfallen—stick-up men who pulled their heists in front of police stations on plainclothesmen, double-parked judges who appeared before themselves on traffic raps, candidates for mayor out- polled by their wives. And when, as it sometimes happened, the news was all hard that day, I made up stories. ‘And that would be all the news if it weren’t for the fellow in the Pacific Northwest whose wife filed for divorce today; her first, his fifth. This time, however, Leonard Class of Seattle, Washington, may have some difficulty meeting his alimony payments, for Leonard lost his job as well as his wife. The city fathers are just a little upset with Leonard’s marital difficulties and have voted to remove him from his position as Director of Seattle’s Bureau of Matrimonial Counseling.’

“‘You have a nose for news,’ Poke Credenza himself told me after one of these stories. And so I had—a flair for all the trivial lessons of come-uppance, an intuition into the Credenza conscience itself. I fueled their condescension with an endless parade of housewives who won national bake-offs with ready-mixes and firechiefs whose homes burned down. The human comedy, the lofty laugh, a bit of patronage, and no harm done.”

Ultimately he went too far, betrayed by the dark side of his professionalism that came to light in northeast Nebraska.

These were heydays. There was Uncle Don and his “That ought to hold the little bastards.” Coast to coast, it seemed, in the primest time of that prime time, there were open keys, unthrown switches, bloopers, stoopnagelisms—but diffusing accident, there was form, order, a national sense of the institutional. There was
Allen’s Alley, The National Barn Dance, Manhattan Merry-Go-Round, Lux Presents Hollywood, Town Meeting of the Air.
And not even partisan, a wider community than mere
fan
—though these were the days of the signed glossy, of the fifty- cent “family album” of stars—something constituent almost, franchised. One knew that all America was tuned in. You can see the photographs in the encyclopedia. The family in its cozy parlor. (It is always wintertime in these photographs.) Father in his business clothes, Sis in wools, Mother with a bit of knitting in her lap, the floorlamp behind her right shoulder, the shade slanting the light forthrightly where her book would be if she were reading. The son is stretched out on the floor, belly to carpet, doing his homework. The gothic radio, like a wooden bell, on a table in the corner. They smile or are concerned or absorbed or wistful, as though they hear a song common to each—an anthem perhaps of some country where they had all once lived. The caption explains that this American family, like so many millions of others, is enjoying the jokes of a popular network comedian, or engrossed in the news that will be tomorrow’s headlines, or engaged by one of the many fine dramas that may be heard on the radio. And you know that it’s no fake, no mere posturing for the photographer, and indeed if you look close you can see that the dial in the radio glows.