“Please stand by,” he said again. “One moment please. Please stand by one moment. Stand please. Please, one moment. Please stand one moment.” Meanwhile he reached for the control knob on the mounted speaker, found it, and turned the volume all the way down.
Air time was expensive, a queer, infinite vacuum that might be filled with a whisper but always had to be fed with sound. Unthinkingly and forgetting the engineer who waited at the studio, he began to discharge his voice into the vacuum. “A little technical difficulty, pardners. This is your announcer, Tex Ellery, assuring you that it’s only some trouble with the ol’ transcription. We’ll set it all to rights in a minute, folks, and that’s a promise. You can bet your boots it is. Meanwhile this is your master of ceremonies, Ted Elson”—it was a slip of the tongue but he liked the sound and repeated it— “Ted Elson out at the transmitter shack just outside beautiful Butte, Montana, promising all his radio friends that something very special’s coming up, something they wouldn’t want to miss. So stand by and don’t touch that dial or you’ll be making a mistake. Ma’am, Mom, call the ranch hands in, they’ll want to hear this too. Sure as shootin’ they will. One moment puhleeze!”
He expected to hear the music when the engineer put it on at the station, but he had forgotten that he had turned down the speaker. He figured the man could not find anything suitable and continued to speak, perhaps above the music the engineer may already have put on the turntable. He was no longer nervous and began to enjoy himself, excited by his efficiency and the sense he had of successfully handling an emergency.
“Ted Elmer here, folks. We’re just about ready. Meanwhile I thought you’d like to hear this joke.” He told them the joke; remembering another story, he told that, and then a third joke and a fourth. He was easy now, elated by the deep-breath risks he took, delighted by the sound of his voice, those swaggered drafts of lung-strut, chug-alugging the vacuum itself. Disregarding voice level, he laughed loudly at the punch lines, getting a generous sense of helping his cause and clearing his sinuses, blowing those seats of the crabbed and ordinary skyhigh. As he spoke he fidgeted with the looseleaf notebook he still held, absent-mindedly tearing pages from it and dropping them to the floor as he would the pages of a script.
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.