“‘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.
That he moved about so often in those early years was no proof of his restlessness; rather, it was his way of learning the business. He was your true apprentice — eager, willing, a boy who would chip in for any chore — but all the while he kept a careful accounting and worked with a special sense of his own destiny that converted the difficult into the necessary and created in himself metaphorical notions of money in the bank and bread cast upon the waters — a priggish, squirrelly sense of provision. Even his rooms in those days, those below-stairs cubicles in the homes of widows for whom he shoveled snow and stoked furnaces whose heat never seemed to reach his room, and which were all he could afford on the fifteen- and twenty-dollar-a-week salaries he made, or his rooms in the towns’ single hotels, near the railroad stations, bargained for, a rate granted not simply in deference to his extended stay but in recognition of some built-in inferiority, the bed always in a vulnerable position, the room itself in a vulnerable position, over a boiler perhaps, or machinery, or behind the thin wall of the common washroom, or too far from it, or his window just behind the vertical of the hotel’s blazing electric sign — there was a room in Kansas where owing to some obscure fire law the bulb in the high ceiling could never be turned off — even these rooms left him (despite the indifferent luke warmth that came from ancient, prototypical radiators) with an impression not of poverty or straitened circumstance, so much as of guaranteeing his life later, discomfit comforting, assuring him of his mythic turn, patience not just a virtue but a concomitant of future fame, hard times every success’s a priori grist.
The American Dream, he thought, the historic path of all younger sons, unheired and unprovided. The old-time test of princes. “One two three testing,” he had said into countless microphones on hundreds of cold winter mornings, sleep still in his eyes, he and the engineer the only ones at the station, and he there first, his key to the place not a privilege but a burden. “One two three testing.” And even as he spoke the announcer’s ritual words, he suspected the deeper ritual that lay beneath them, confident that a test was indeed being conducted, his entire young manhood one. There were so many jobs—then; later he had different reasons — because he insisted on these tests. He built a reputation as a utility man, an all-rounder, and he was never really sure that this didn’t harm rather than help him because he was, for many of the 500- and 1000-watt stations for which he worked, a luxury, primed for emergency and special events which rarely, in those uneventful places he served his apprenticeship, occurred. But so set was he on sacrifice, so convinced in his bones of some necessary pay-as-you-go principle, that even an absolute knowledge that his special talents worked against his career would not have altered him. He continued to work in whatever he could of the unusual and by consistently putting himself in the way of opportunity, managed to do everything, discovering in the infinite resources of his voice, in the disparate uses to which it could be put, the various alter egos of human sound.
He was forced by radio to seem always to speak from the frontiers of commitment, always to say his piece as if his piece were all. Emphasis disappeared, for everything, the merest community-service announcement of a church supper and the most thunderous news bulletin, received ultimately the same treatment. With the necessity it imposed to be always talking, singing, selling, to be always speaking at the top of its voice, radio itself became a vessel for collateral truths. He had come to think of the sounds radio made as occurring on a line, picturing speech as a series of evenly sequenced, perfectly matched knots on a string, chatter raised by the complicated equipment to the level of prophecy. Pressured by the collateral quality of the noises he made, it would have been easy to have turned against the noises themselves. Others did. Most announcers he knew were men with an astonishing facility for disengaging themselves from their copy. Many actually made it a point to have their faces laugh while their voices continued to speak seriously. They horsed around — and those who had been in the business longest horsed around the most. He had noted — in New York City he took the same Radio City tour that everyone else did — that even the network people loved to clown, to shock their studio audiences with their studied superiority to the material, creating an anecdote for them to take back to Duluth, giving them all they could of the insider’s contemptuously lowered guard.
He eschewed their wiseguy character and scorned to duplicate their vicious winks for a deft professional reason of his own. He felt these acrobatics, these defections of the face, took away — however minutely — from the effectiveness of one’s delivery, that even such muscular stunts as a mere wink pulled, too, at the vocal chords, puppeteered them. He could hear this. Monitoring his radio in the signal-fortified nights, omnisciently tuning in America, transporting himself with just his fingers five hundred miles north or a thousand east, these lapses were as clear to him as lisps, and he could see in his mind the smug double-dealing of a hundred announcers through their voices in the dark, as if he sat in the control booths watching them. The faculty for belief in the things he was required to say was no greater in him than in the biggest star or the oldest studio hack on the most important network station in America, but he used sincerity to body-build his voice. It would no sooner occur to him to insist on his personality when he was on the air (with the others, he knew, it was a last ditch shriek of their integrity, an effort to write off their disgust) than it would occur to an actor on a stage to answer for himself instead of for the character he played. So, striving for conviction, he became something of a boomer, a hearty herald. (Briefly he was Harold Hearty, WLU, Waverly, Georgia.)
For a time — and he never completely rid himself of this habit — he carried over into his outside life the tones he used on radio, sometimes actually frightening people with his larger-than-life salutations: “Good morning there, Mrs. Cubbins! Lou George, WBSF, Kingdom City, Mo., here to see about the room you advertised!” Or embarrassing them with the breathy intimacy of his ten-to-midnight “Music for Lovers”: “Haie there, Miss. Bud Kanz. I’ve got a three o’clock appointment. The doc said he’d — sqaeeeeeze me in.”