received an award from President Bush.
When I was a child, no one talked when Paul Harvey came on the radio. It was a capital offense. Decade after decade, I would wonder, "Is he stil broadcasting?"
Mrs. Ichabod said, upon hearing the news, "And that's the rest of the story."
Paul Harvey managed to make that simple sentence famous and immediately identified with his work. He was consistently patriotic and upbeat, a quality rare in today's broadcasters.
In the News:
He based himself in Chicago, flew aboard his Lear jet to give corporate speeches and commuted by limo each day from his 27-room home in suburban River Forest, Ill., to his 16th floor studio above a street sign that reads Paul Harvey Drive.
When Harvey was 81 in 2000, his sole employer for all those years, ABC Radio Networks, signed him to a 10-year, $100 million contract. Rivals who had lost in the bidding told him they'd be back in 2010.
Harvey's ability to sell products in advertisements, via spots that read and which flowed seamlessly from his news stories, were legendary. He is considered the greatest radio salesman of all time and sponsors — only one in 15 were accepted — were required to sign on for at least a year.
"I can't look down on the commercial sponsors of these broadcasts," he told CBS in 1988. "Too often they have very, very important messages to put across. Without advertising in this country, my goodness, we'd still be in this country what Russia mostly still is: a nation of bearded cyclists with b.o."
The idea of retirement never occured to either Harvey or his wife, Angel, whom he married in 1940 and who was his producing partner throughout his career.
"I've got an old country boy's philosophy," he told The Chicago Tribune in a 2002 interview. "When the car's running, you don't look inside the carburator. Just keep rolling."
He got his start in radio in high school in Tulsa at age 14 when a speech teacher was so impressed with his voice that she took him to a local radio station, KVOO-AM and told the program director that Harvey belonegd on radio.
He began reading news, making announcements — and sweeping floors — and a year later began getting paid."It is impossible in print to capture the rhythm and flow of his delivery, a series of pauases, dramatic and playful inflections that combine to create somethng like a piece of perfomance art, a verbal telegraph," writer Rock Kogan wrote in his Tribune profile.
"Page Two."
