The Paul Harvey Story

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, the story of a truly iconic name in American broadcasting, in a personal hero of mine, and we’re talking about Paul Harvey. Here to tell the story is Stephen Mansfield, author of Paul Harvey’s America. Now, let’s get into it. As Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story.”

The breadth of the history that he interacted with is one of the pillars of greatness of Paul Harvey’s life. He’s born in 1918; that’s the year World War I ended. He doesn’t die until 2009 at the age of 90. Think about the fact that he was on the air almost every day from 1945 until the end of his life. He would have talked about—and this was a major part of his rise—would have talked about the returning GIs and their need to get jobs. He would have talked about the rise of communism and the Whittaker Chambers case. During the Vietnam era, he would have commented daily on the My Lai Massacre, on the Vietnam War, on every presidential campaign. He was on the air and gave beautiful monologues around the time of the Kennedy assassination, with riots, with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, and certainly with Watergate. He was commenting every day, comforting the country, chastising the evildoers. Every single day for almost 70 years of American history and a time of great change and up people, Paul Harvey is commenting on everything from technology to politics, to trends, to religious themes. And again, think about this: every single day. This was just what people looked Paul Harvey to do. And, you know, he was opinionated, just like the old man sitting in the town square giving his opinions and whittling and smoking his pipe. You know, he wasn’t big on hippies. He was a conservative, so he used language like “hippies” and “long hairs” and “beatniks,” what have you. But people looked to him for that. He really was. Many people said “the soul of America” on the air. But you have to understand his roots in order to understand the impact he was attempting to have upon the American people. Paul Harvey’s upbringing is really a typical small-town America, even though he lived in Tulsa, which we now think of as a bigger, prosperous city, but at that time still had dirt streets, and Oklahoma had only been a state about a decade. He lived close to the earth. There were Native Americans walking the streets of Tulsa. As Paul Harvey grew up, he lived in a rural farm, oil-petroleum world that was about grit and about your muscle, and about your immediate life. And he listened to the older ones as they talked about the things of life, and it was love and marriage and what’s being served for dinner, and, you know, when mother died, and all those kinds of good rural, almost Southern-type stories. And he found all of them to be of significance. They reflected character, they reflected values, they reflected nobility. They reflected the tragedies and the sadnesses of life. He didn’t find meaning only in what the queen was doing that day. And Paul Harvey was a man deeply affected by the Christian faith, grew up in it, stayed in all of his life. One of the things he was known for, which was very unusual in his time, is that he often quoted scripture. Now, he didn’t do it in a preachy way. He didn’t do it heading towards an offering or after a hymn. But he did it in such a way as to apply Christian truth and the nobility of the King James Bible to our society. And it didn’t sound weird, it didn’t sound hackneyed, it didn’t sound like an overreach when he did it. So he was a man of faith. He spoke about his faith. He spoke about praying for people openly, and talked about churches like they were just part of life at a time when, especially when you hit the Sixties, we’re in a counterculture here, we’re in a decline of Christian influence. To some degree, the Christian faith’s being attacked. He didn’t buy into it. But he was born on September 4, 1918. Again, that was the year that World War I ended. In fact, Armistice Day was just another month or two after he was born that year. His father was a policeman, his mother was a homemaker. Good people: literate, deeply moral, committed to church. So he would have lived in the home of a law enforcement officer. He would have lived in the home of people who talked about the world around the table. But there was a tragedy that occurred early in Paul’s life that really, I think, shaped everything he did afterwards. Exactly a week before Christmas in 1921, his father, a policeman, after finishing his day of service, went rabbit hunting with a friend lately. Later in the evening, it was cold. As they were coming back from the hunt, they saw a car pulled off to the side of a country road. They assumed it was in trouble, that it had broken down, that somebody was in need on that cold Tulsa night, and so these two men pulled over to see what was needed. As soon as they pulled up even with the car, they saw that there were four men in it. The windows came down and shotguns came out of the windows. These were criminals. These were men who had just been robbing people, and those shotguns fired into Officer Aurandt’s car—that was Paul Harvey’s original last name, Aurandt—and Paul Harvey’s father was mortally wounded. He didn’t die for another 48 hours, but he did die, and of pretty ghastly wounds. Well, Paul was only three, but he, without question, was, of course, impacted by this death, the grief that filled the house. This was at a time when the community would have pulled together, not just because Paul’s father was a policeman, but also because he was so respected in his part of Tulsa. So Paul Harvey grew up with this legendary father murdered by the side of the road a week before Christmas. And one of the reasons, I think, he was able to get in touch with the dark side—the pain, the tragedy of life—is that he spent Christmases, and especially that first Christmas when he was three, with an empty house, so to speak, a father missing, a mother in tears. Everything in his youth was diminished by the tragic and needless, cruel murder of his father.

And you’re listening to Stephen Mansfield tell one heck of a story, and what a story he’s telling. Seventy years: there’s a kind of voice and soul of America. One man, one typewriter, one microphone, speaking into just about every triumphant tragedy in our nation’s history in the 20th century, or at least most of it. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, filled with personal tragedy as you just heard, here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, and we do it all from the heart of the South: Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows will always be free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. Consider making a tax-deductible donation. Go to OurAmericanStories.com. Give a little, give a lot. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and this story of broadcast legend Paul Harvey. When we last left off, Paul Harvey’s father, a police officer in Tulsa, had been shot and killed a week before Christmas, when Harvey was three years old. Let’s continue with this story. Here again is Stephen Mansfield.

So he began working at KOO first, just as an unpaid 14-year-old janitor, and in time he began to learn the lore. They began to let him read commercials and do the news from time to time, just emulating what he’d already heard. But he was beginning to rise; he was beginning to use his gifts. They even let him write a few stories about some things that he knew a bit more about than the other the reporters. And so by being willing to serve, being willing to work hard, being willing to work after hours late into the night.

America’s preachers tell me that there is no sermon which is looked forward to with less enthusiasm than a sermon about sin. Well, that’s probably true if we’re talking about a secular sermon on the subject of hard work. There is no gospel less popular than the gospel of hard work. The pregnant skyline of America was set in place one brick at a time. Now, that represents a lot of calluses, America. The Beautiful is not an accomplished fact guaranteed to remain intact. God shed His grace on thee, to be sure, but this was wasteland. When God had it to Himself, He handed man a hoe and said, “Do you want another Eden? All right, earn it.”

I personally have always taken that as a great inspiration story, because sometimes, I know—certainly in my life—I might not have been willing at the age of 14 or 15 just to simply serve in a business or around a culture that I would want to learn. But I think Paul Harvey had a sense that if he got in there and he worked and he listened and he learned and he stayed alert, tha