The rest of the story…
Many of us remember listening to the mesmerizing voice of Paul Harvey while we were rolling down the highway across this country in the 1970s and 1980s. While looking for a good review of Harvey’s book Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor, I found the link below. I hope others will enjoy the trip down memory lane and remember how freedom felt when there really were journalists with integrity and a passion for truth such as Harvey. Perhaps, there were even a few politicians left with a bit of character not yet pledged to lobbyists for campaign dollars from corporate clients. Well, at least there was Paul Harvey, who was a natural storyteller with a uniquely powerful voice that informed a nation and earned our trust.
The excerpts below are taken from the Oklahoma Historical Society website linked below.
He was born Paul Harvey Aurandt to Anna Dagmar Christiansen and Harry Harrison Aurandt on September 4, 1918, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Harry Aurandt, secretary to the Tulsa police commissioner and purchasing agent for the Tulsa Police and Fire Departments, was killed by criminals encountered while he and a police detective were hunting. Anna Aurandt raised Paul Harvey and his sister alone. Harvey married Lynne Cooper on June 4, 1940; they have one son, Paul Aurandt, Jr.
I included the following paragraph just to let everyone know there really is a Kalamazoo, Michigan and Paul Harvey was part of that story, too.
From 1941 to 1943 Harvey worked as program director at WKZO radio in Kalamazoo, Michigan, while also serving as the Office of War Information’s news director for Michigan and Indiana. In 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps, but he received a medical discharge in 1944. He moved to Chicago, Illinois, shortened his name to Paul Harvey, and began doing daily news commentaries on local station WENR radio. Soon, his broadcasts were topping the ratings in the greater Chicago area.
As a news analyst, author, and columnist, Paul Harvey won recognition as “one of the best-known and most influential personalities in the history of American radio” and the last of the wartime generation of radio commentators. “Paul Harvey News & Comments” and “The Rest of the Story” aired daily on sixteen hundred radio stations worldwide and had more than eighteen million listeners weekly.
For more about Paul Harvey and his amazing life and career, visit his entry at the Oklahoma Historical Society website
https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=HA044&l=
Every day, no matter where you were, you could listen to Paul Harvey if you had the time, or could make it. Waiting in line, or passing the time somewhere, you could mention something you heard on Paul Harvey, and a pleasant conversation with someone was likely to follow. A real conversation, not just two people talking past each other. There is nothing like his shows today, nor (I don’t think” would they be encouraged or allowed.
The 2 and 3 hour political guys on the radio today are an entirely different sort of broadcast. Not better or worse but very much more cynical, skeptical, not as sweet. So is all of whats left of the old US.
RIP Paul Harvey. You are missed.
Link https://tinyurl.com/ybh9z9ja
Paul Harvey BYU Commencement Speech
This popped up while I was looking for other Paul Harvey classics to post…
“Every lesson of history tells us the greater risk lies in appeasement”. RONALD REGAN
My fave Paul Harvey is this:
Journalists with integrity are being rooted out by the communist as quickly as they can. The push for communism is full bore now.
It is true…
https://archive.org/details/PaulHarveyBYUCommencementSpeech1970
And on the dates Nov 3, 2020 and Jan 5 and 6, 2021, American freedoms died.