The Dick Gibson Show (2 page)

He spoke until it was time for the next program to go on; then, reluctantly, but with the certainty that they would hear him again this way—he envisaged a magnificent future—he turned his listeners back to the studio.

“This is your host, the inimitable Dick Gibson, signing off for now.” (The name had come to him from the air.)
“Take it away, Markham!”

SOME DEMO’S; FAMOUS FIRSTS:

“Dick Gibson, WLAF, Somerset, Pennsylvania—

“I can tell you this much: I was among the first to hear of Pearl Harbor, to hear of D-Day, to hear FDR died. I knew that Hitler had marched into Russia before the President knew. And Hiroshima—I was one of the first Americans to get the word on that. ‘Keep calm,’ I said on that fabulous night when Orson Welles scared hell out of the country with his invasion from Mars. ‘Stand by please for a bulletin.’ You might have heard me say something like that if you lived in Toledo when Eisenhower suffered the first of his heart attacks. Or Winston-Salem the afternoon we made our move in Korea. Of course you’d have to have had certain principles, been out of lock-step with a number of your kind, had this penchant for the rural and off-brand, distrusted, perhaps, the smooth network voices of the East. Maybe you’re kind to amateurs. Maybe you’re an amateur yourself.

“Not that
I
am. A pro true blue and through and through. As you can tell from all the history I’ve been in on. It was no fluke that I heard before you did of the birth of that new volcano in Yucatan. Four hundred farmers died. I saw
that
come in over the wire. I chose to sit on it, chose—I remember I was spinning Doris Day’s ‘It’s Magic’—to let the music finish. And then I still didn’t say. Chose not only not to say but not even to read it on the late news. I pulled it off the machine and folded it into my pocket and that was that. And if you lived in Pekin, Illinois, in the middle of the summer of 1954 and didn’t take a Chicago or St. Louis paper or keep up with the magazines, you still don’t know, or know only now. Power. The power of the pro.

“No fluke. All the invasions, surrenders and disasters. No fluke I’m in on the revolutions, those put down as well as those pulled off. That I know bad news first and bear it first, absorbing in split seconds my priority knowledge, adjusting to it, living with it minutes before my countrymen. Oh, the newsrooms, those ticking anterooms of history, where I, the messenger, hang out. Or called by a bell or flashing light to the ticker tape. Oh, those New York and Washington sequences, those graduated two-blink, three-blink, four-blink hitherings! Those ding and ding-dong and ding-dong-ding and
bong-bong-bong-bong
beckonings! Who determines those? Now
there’s
a messenger.
There’s
power—the kind I had in Pekin when I fished those four hundred Mexican farmers out of my machine, whisked them away and lit a match to them in my room at the Pekin House, singeing them a second time, unsung singed Mexicans. The Yucatan volcano was a fourflasher. Did you know that the atomic bomb—this is interesting—was only a three-flasher? Or that in the whole history of radio there have been just three five-flashers, and no six-flashers yet at all? They say that the end of the world will be only a six-flasher. Shock’s rare half-dozens. There’s something in that. Please remain calm. Please stand by. Please be easy.

“But maybe you take your assassinations elsewhere. Television, perhaps. Or network radio. Maybe you didn’t catch my six-flasher grief when I let go for once—‘They shot him. In Dallas. Oh, Christ. Some son of a bitch in Dallas shot him.’ I’ll tell you something. Mad and stunned as I was, I knew what I was doing. I threw in ‘son of a bitch.’ I made that part up. Maybe I was anticipating my mention in
Time,
but I threw in ‘son of a bitch’ for the verisimilitude of the passion. You may have been tuned elsewhere, or speeding out of range with the car radio down the highway. But it’s something, I tell you, bearing bad news. It’s something, all right.

“And I’ll tell you another thing. There are times, watching the mountain outside this studio, staring at it for hours while I spin my records, when I seem to see it go up in flames—the whole mountain, the trees go up and the town come down and the fire fighters on fire, a new Pompeii in Pennsylvania, and me, the stringer getting the word out. The sugary coda sweet in my mouth. ‘Dick Gibson—WLAF, Somerset, Pennsylvania.’
That’s
the word.
There’s
my message.

“People ask how I can sound so sincere on the commercials, as if this were some burning question—
sure, the questions burn, but not the mountains!
—as they’d pry trade secrets from the wrestlers or demand of lawyers how they can defend guilty men. My advice to these folks is relax. Use your grain of salt, everybody. That’s what it’s for. Please remain calm. Stand by please.

“For a long time these demo’s of mine have been the talk of the industry. Well, I’m gutsy, brash, waiting for someone to come along who likes the cut of my jib. My demo’s are jib-designed. Collector’s items they’ll be one day. Because: though hypocrisy can take you far, it can only take you
so
far. When will you station managers realize that? Is there any one of you out there who likes the cut of truth’s jib?

“If you want tricks, I can give them to you. Every last trick I know. I have a friend who does a five-minute slot twelve times on weekends for one of the networks. You’ve heard him. (We say ‘heard,’ not ‘heard of,’ in this business.) Who doesn’t know that voice today? Only the deaf. (We despise deafness. We’d rather hear a friend has gone blind.) He has this sports news and comment show.
(Sports!
He throws like a girl but he has an athletic voice.) Well, we used to work together on WPMT, Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. It’s a resort town, and often there’d be celebrities around from the big hotels, and my friend or I would interview them. One time when I was in the booth before the show I heard the engineer ask for a level. ‘Listen, Mr. Thus-and-Such,’ my friend was saying, ‘my first name’s written down here on this piece of paper. Would you mind very much if you called me by it when we talk?’ Then, on the air, he would hit the star with the guy’s first name, and the star would hit my friend with
his
first name. They could have been the best pals in the world. And you’d be surprised how it worked on the listener’s imagination, what it did for the listener’s idea of my friend to hear him so intimate with big shots. I tell you that I myself—who knew how it was done—forgot sometimes and found myself wondering about my pal’s rich past; I was proud to know such a guy. (But notice how I keep him anonymous here. Not here do I call out that phony’s name. ‘Mr. X’ I call him here, or ‘my friend.’ How do you like that ‘Mr. X’, my friend?)

“So I know the shortcuts and the cheats. I’m not old but I’ve been in the business years. Listen, I’ve jazzed up my fan mail to impress a station manager. There have been times I’ve written myself up to a hundred letters a week. Jesus, I’ll never forget this—in one batch I once made the mistake of asking for pictures, and the station manager had me make them up and pay for them myself. And one time, at KRJK, Benton, Texas—I was Bobby Spark back then—I organized my own fan club, using the name Debbie Simon as a front. I described the club’s activities and made them sound so attractive over the air that before long almost two hundred teen-agers were interested in joining. They wanted to know how they could get in touch with Debbie Simon, and I was really in trouble there for a while. I told them that Debbie had been spending so much time on the fan club that she had been ignoring her schoolwork and her parents had made her drop out of the club until her grades improved. Out of fairness to Debbie all activities of the fan club were suspended, I said, until she could get back into them too. So about a month later some kids wrote in to ask how Debbie was making out in school. For some reason it had become a big thing in Benton, and one day I had to announce that Debbie Simon was sick. Then, the next day, and treating the news just as I would some three- or four-flasher, I waited until I was playing the nation’s number one song—which I was sending out to her in her sickbed— and broke in on it to tell them that Debbie’s mother had called to tell me her daughter had passed away—with my name on her lips. In large part Debbie’s mother blamed herself, I said, for putting too much pressure on her daughter, and making her drop out of the club. Then some sixteen-year-old kid named Stuart Standard called to ask if he could take over the club and continue Debbie’s work now that she was gone. I told him he could, and the kids themselves renamed it ‘The Debbie Simon Memorial Bobby Spark Fan Club.’ Don’t tell
me
there’s anything wrong with today’s teen-agers.

“For the most part, though, I’m above tricks. Instead, I pour myself into these demo’s. (But demonstration records are expensive. I pay for the sessions myself, and press up to a hundred at a time. Something had better happen soon, no kidding. Networks and affiliates please note.) What programs these would make! Honeys! I could change America. But what do you need me for to do that, hey you big shots? You do it yourself every thirteen weeks. There are always stars. We breathe in the sky, for God’s sake. (Give
me
a crack at the yahoos one time.
I’ll
make their tabletalk for them,
I’ll
be their household word, my taste as high or low as anyone’s in the industry.) But don’t contact me unless you’ve really got something to offer. You’ve got to put me on a clear channel station and give me a show of my own. The last demo got me this job at WLAF, and here I am doing another demo. Oh yes, big deal—NBC invited me to take their Page exam.
Forget
it. (See? See how vulgar?) Look, forget the part about doing my own show. I’m willing to start further down if the station’s important enough. I’ll do continuity for you, commercials. I won’t even insist on a talent fee. Consider my voice. Listen: ‘This is WPTA, Hometown, America. Now back to the Baton Twirling Contest.’ How do you like that? The voice is young, strong as an ox, flawless, no hoarseness, no crack, educated but not what you could call cultured—four years at the state university, say, or three years in the army as an ROTC lieutenant. I’ve been blessed, you guys, with my God-given gift of a voice, my voice that’s been thirty-one years old for the past decade and won’t be thirty-two for another ten years. And where did I grow to manhood? I
defy
you to say. Regionless my placeless vowels, my sourceless consonants. Twangless and drawl-less and nasal-less. And my name: Dick Gibson. (Though thus far I’ve used it only a few times on the air; I’m still saving it.) Dick Gibson of Nowhere, of Thin Air and the United States of America sky.

“I’ll tell you how I came by my interest in radio. It’s an interesting story. I’m not just another of your star-struck kids turned artist and sissy from childhood’s isolation. You could say, I suppose, that it’s actually in my blood. My father was in the point-to-point dot-dash news and private-message market back in the late teens and early twenties during the fabulous wireless/cable wars. He was a personal friend of Dr. Frank Conrad in East Pittsburgh, where KDKA started. My earliest memory is of being with Dad and a bunch of other men crowded around a receiving set to hear the Harding-Cox election returns. November 2, 1920. I was an infant, but I remember everything about it.

“‘Listen to this, son,’ my father said, ‘and remember all your life that you heard the birth of modern radio.’ And I have. I was so impressed that I have.

“‘Gentlemen,’ Dr. Conrad said, ‘this day wireless has come of age.’ There were tears in the old man’s eyes. He must have suffered plenty to make his dream come true.

“‘It’s grand, Dr. Conrad,’ my father said. ‘Let me say that I feel privileged to participate in this historic moment. Congratulations, Doctor.’

“‘Thank you,’ the great visionary said, ‘but any thanks there are must be shared with others, with those workers in the vineyards who are no longer with us, men without whose contributions this great moment would have been achieved—oh yes, it would have come anyway; sometime it would have come; there is no withstanding the siege of destiny; it would have been achieved, but delayed, the world made to wait. I mean men like Edinburgh University’s James Clark Maxwell, who was the first to encounter ether waves as long ago as 1867; forgotten men like Hertz and the naïve Righi who gave us the phrase “magic blue sparks”; men like Onesti and Lodge and the Russian Popoff. To say nothing of the giants—the Marconis and De Forests and Lieutenant Sarnoff.’

“‘And Dr. Conrad,’ my father said.

“‘Thank …’ Dr. Conrad began sweetly. But perhaps something caught in his throat at this moment, or it may be that he was too tired after his heroic efforts to bring this night to pass; or even, simply, that by one of fate’s tragic twists and ironies Dr. Conrad had voted for Cox—whatever it was he couldn’t finish, and the rest of us, the men with him and my father with me in his arms, feeling the old man should be by himself just then, tiptoed softly from the room. I remember as if it were yesterday.

“There you have it. I am marked, historically attached to radio. Thank you for your time.
Dick Gibson, WLAF, Somerset, Pennsylvania.
”

In the first years following his departure from the station in Butte, Montana, he did not again have occasion to use the name. For three months, with WMAR in Marshall, Maine, he was Ellery Loyola. Then, for an even briefer season with KCGN, Butler, Kansas, he was Marshall Maine. He replaced an announcer who had been hired by KCMO, Kansas City, to MC a program of dance music originating in the Buhler Hotel there, but the hotel burned down—the program was on the air at the time and the announcer had been instrumental in guiding the dancers to safety—and the man was given his old job back, and Dick became Bud Kanz of KWYL, 1450 on your dial, Hodge, Iowa. By the fall of that same year he had become I. O. Quill, WWD, La Crosse, Wisconsin. He worked for the La Crosse station for a little over a year; then in the next two years he had jobs with five more radio stations.