The conductor hollered “Board!” Up went the stepstool and the Builder steamed away and across the Stone Bridge over the Mississippi, the cheery glow of the parlor car disappearing behind the NSP power plant. Frank drove the big Buick back, walked the dog, watered the lawn, closed the windows. Two weeks later, Ray returned. Bing had been in Tahiti, but never mind, Erie had been wonderful and Ray was feeling pink again. They had gone to Radio City Music Hall and seen Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny and Fred Allen, Frances Langford and Don Ameche, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, Gene Austin, the Boswell Sisters, and Jesse Crawford at the Mighty White Wurlitzer, in a four-hour broadcast with not a minute of slack, not a single song or gag or line that didn’t belong there, a glittering all-star revue.
“Radio,” Ray declared, “it’s here to stay, and we’re going to stick with it.”
The love of a beautiful woman seemed to be a real picker-upper. “New York is the ticket,” he told Frank. “Terrible place to live. People lie to you. Perfectly nice people. They lie all the time. You buy a suit and the salesman promises it by tomorrow morning. Two days later you call him up and he pretends to be upset, says the tailor got the chalk marks mixed up, it’ll be here Tuesday. Finally on Friday you start to get steamed, but now he’s blaming it on a missing button, and Monday, he says Wednesday. Wednesday, it’s Friday. Finally, you walk in and threaten to kill him with a screwdriver. You screech and rave until the spit is dripping off your chin. And you see, this is what he expected! He listens and when you’re finally done screeching, in comes Sam with the pants. You have to yell at people to get things done. Terrible place to live. But my gosh, a good hotel, and a Broadway show and dinner and breakfast at noon in bed reading the newspaper. That’s the life, Frank.”
A few days after Ray returned, Frank became a hero. It was a Monday, and WLT went off the air. The transmitter shuddered and the air went dead about midway through the Jubilee during an Evelyn Pie commercial.
I don’t care if the meat is pale,
If the soup is thin and the jokes are stale,
If the gravy’s lumpy and the spuds are dry,
You can make it up to me with an—
And nothing happened for awhile. Bells didn’t ring and lights didn’t flash.
Reed Seymour, sitting in the Green Room, resting his eyes with a copy of Peek, reached up and switched the wall monitor from Program to On-Air and heard silence. He switched back to Program. He didn’t want to be the one who brings in the bad news. What with Eleanor Grantham (Babs, on The Hills of Home) throwing him over for an engineer—the ultimate disgrace for any announcer—Reed had been through a lot and the thought of calling up an engineer and saying, “Something’s wrong, Chuck,” was too much. Let the engineers handle it. That’s what they got paid for, the big dorks.
The engineer, Chuck, sat engrossed in the Jubilee, listening to Leo’s joke about the man who wants to buy a new car for his girlfriend and the salesman asks, “Chevrolet?” and he says, “Well, we’ll see once we get the car,” which made Chuck chortle and wheeze and grab onto the console for support. He did not turn and look at the transmitter dial behind him, so he wasn’t aware that the needle lay flat and that the WLT audience was now limited to him and a few other people on the premises.
The young man who sat in the transmitter shack at the foot of the WLT tower in Columbia Heights and read the meters was Ray’s neighbor’s boy, Wallace Tripp, and this quiet and tedious job suited him well, except that he was afraid to give bad news too. He was the only child of older parents who cared for him so well that Wallace could not bear the company of other children, who were all stupid, nor was he suited for the rough and tumble world of the office. The transmitter shack, clean and dry, furnished with a desk and a cot, on a hill behind a barbed-wire fence with “Danger: High Voltage” signs posted everywhere, was exactly right for him. He loved to be at the transmitter. He needed no days off. Work and recreation were one to Wallace. The monastic life appealed to his sense of mission. He was a baseball fan and an astrologer and kept elaborate zodiac statistics on the American Association, team and individual statistics, and could tell anyone, if anyone had been interested, how the Millers compared to the Toledo Mudhens, for example, in Batting Average (Full Moon), and had theories about which signs to favor in which situations, e.g., to steal with a Leo with a Libra at bat, to walk a Gemini if the next batter is a Cancer. When Wallace looked up and saw the transmitter meters lying as flat as beached fish, he figured it must be a mistake. The transmitter must be on. So he made up readings to indicate that it was on and wrote those in the log book. He didn’t want to be the cause of trouble. He didn’t want Ray to get mad and throw him out on the streets.
So WLT was off the air for a whole afternoon and evening. The switchboard lit up and the operators, Janice and Jo Ellen, took careful note of the many complaints and put them into a complaint basket, six hundred remarks from listeners that WLT was gone, which a messenger boy picked up a few hours later and carried downstairs to the Program Department, where a secretary began typing a letter of acknowledgement: “Thank you for your interest in our broadcasting service, recently expressed, and please know that we consider all comments from listeners and weigh them seriously in making our program decisions. . . .”
Roy Jr. called from his dentist’s, where the nurse had mentioned something about WLT having been struck by a blast of lightning. “What’s wrong?” he asked, a little loopy from the laughing gas. “Wrong?” asked Gene the Chief Engineer. So it was up to Frank to discover the problem when he returned from lunch. “We’re off the air,” he told Gene.
He and Gene drove out to Columbia Heights. Gene got lost on the way and then it took them awhile to breach Wallace’s security system. Gene lobbed stones from the street onto the roof of the shack, but Wallace thought it was only some boys, and if he didn’t do anything they’d go away. Finally, Frank climbed the fence, scaled the barbed wire, opened the gate, let Gene in, and Gene found the tube that had blown.
A couple hours later, back at the station, Frank asked Gene how long before he could get the station back on. Gene wasn’t sure. He was waiting to hear about a part he had ordered. “When did you order it?” asked Frank.
“Sent Chuck out with it an hour ago.”
“Sent him where?”
“To mail the letter.”
“A letter to whom?”
“The distributor in Chicago.”
Frank told him to find a distributor in Minneapolis and to get a part right away. “Okay,” said Gene, “but it’s your fault if Roy Jr. gets mad. He gets mad and goes around here silent for weeks and don’t look at a person. So when the shit hits the fan, that’s your ass, mister.”
So Frank became the whiz kid with his finger in the dike. Roy Jr. said, “Thanks.” “It was nothing,” said Frank. Roy Jr. asked Gene what the problem was with the distributor.
“I knew you were going to get mad. I just knew it,” said Gene.
“Please, Gene. Let’s not screw around when the signal’s down.”
“Sure. Right. I won’t. But I want you to know why I did what I did. I knew you were gonna blame me. That’s what makes it so hard to work here. I never know what you want. I never know if you’re mad or what.” Gene put his face in his hands and sobbed. Frank had never heard an engineer cry before. It was a hard rattly sort of weeping, more like gnashing, or the grinding of a gearbox when the clutch won’t engage.
CHAPTER 26
Maria
When Roy, who was spending the summer in Moorhead, needed a trigger tube, an ignitron, a triode, and a damper, and wrote to Gene, the letter wound up with Frank, and Frank went and found the stuff and mailed it, which led to correspondence. Roy was beavering away in his workshop on the farm, working on something he called a Resonance Radio, which would let a listener hear the broadcast voice as resonantly as his own, to give listening the same sensation as speaking. The Radio was constructed as a chair with big padded speakers mounted in the back and t
he headrest and in the arms, conducting sound directly through the torso. “This will be to your ordinary tabletop receiver what the airplane was to the North Coast Limited, and we will be ready for mass production in the spring, soon as we iron out the kinks,” Roy wrote on a postcard. But before it was perfected, he lost interest and moved on. He experimented with egg yolks as sound insulation and invented a microphone that could be thrown, to give a listener the sensation of flight. He wandered briefly into the realm of dual microphones —coming within inches of becoming The Father of Stereo—but gave it up. “Music is too complicated to be reproduced,” he concluded. “Too many different sounds: brass, reed, bowing, plucking, banging, strumming. Radio can no more reproduce music than a man can get pregnant.” He invented a radio jacket with speakers sewn in front and back, but it was too bulky for comfort and the underarm speakers jammed into your ribs and a loud selection made your head hurt.
Discouraged, he locked up, left home, roamed around Europe until November, 1948. He mailed disconsolate postcards from Vienna and Venice and Paris and London, lamenting the waste of his talents—“Wherever I look, I see things that I could have done. If only I had had the discipline. I’m one of those men who goes out to shop and comes home without his pants. Oh well. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, and the world be drowned in a sea of pride.” He went to Glomfjord and found Søren Blak and was crushed to discover that the Plato of Radio, angered by poor reception, had hurled his Atwater-Kent into the fjord and now owned a Victrola and was an adherent of Patti Page. Søren felt that “The Tennessee Waltz” summed up life’s essence.
“Only yew know how much I have lost,” he told Roy.
Then, in his tiny cabin on the S.S. Jostrup steaming for New York, Roy hit on the idea of building a radio big enough for the listener to sit in.
“The power of radio is its intimacy and closeness to the listener. This is why the phonograph record on radio is such a disaster. Costwise, it made sense, but it removes the listener so far from the music, the music is lifeless. Too many steps in between: the recording, the pressing, the transmission, the reception—the music is translated five times before John Q. Radio hears it: six, if you include his eardrum. It’s straight out of Rube Goldberg! All the life of the music is dissipated in transporting it! Like a gasoline-tank truck made of lead. Like a picture of a picture of the Mona Lisa’s reflection in a mud puddle. That’s what playing a record on the air is like! The Radio Capsule will give the reality of sound!”
He spent the winter constructing it and in March he brought it down to Minneapolis in a potato truck. The Capsule was five feet high, six feet wide, and eight feet deep, resembled a deep-sea bathysphere, and you entered it through a hatch on the top, backwards, grasping the two steel handgrips and lowering yourself into the seat which lay at a 45-degree angle. It was dark inside, except for the dial overhead, and with the sound on, the contraption seemed to shrink skin-tight around you. The sound came from all directions. It bored right through a person. Most people who tried the Capsule found that, after one minute, they wanted to get out. It needed a little more room, and a little less volume.
Two Capsules were built, one more than the world seemed to require, and Roy moved on. He went on to cornsilk, which should be good for something, he reasoned, and if not for shirts, then rope, or parachutes, and by the time he had failed with cornsilk, he had already moved on in his mind to circularity. He woke up one morning and looked at his alarm clock. The circle! Of course! Why hadn’t he done more with that? All the work he’d done with lines and rays and angles, he’d completely overlooked the realm of sphericity and curvature and rotundity, of circularity and convolution. He peered into his cereal bowl and he studied the toilet as it flushed and he walked around and around the yard thinking about the Circle. And then he took the afternoon off and went bowling. When he came home, though his thumb ached, he sat down and wrote a note to Frank. “Despite my crazy family, I have had a wonderful life. How lucky I am! Tonight I want to get back to the problem of resonation.” That was the great thing about Roy. He never was able to concentrate long enough to become bitter. He kept moving. He forgot well.
Sloan heaped more and more work on Frank, which he was glad to get, and Sloan was glad to free up more of his time for the mail room and attend to the problems of lonely young women in the big city, particularly a girl named Annette, whom he was teaching how to give back-rubs. Sloan had a sore back. But as he devoted himself to her, he failed to notice that Frank was now doing his entire job for him, and doing it quite well, and a few weeks later, Roy Jr. called Sloan in and fired him just as his rear end touched the seat.
Not long ago, he had been Employee of the Year and won a bronze statuette of Winged Victory inscribed “For Meritorious Service” and “Through Truth, We Prosper” and now he was de-horsed, eating dirt. He found Frank in the hall, waiting for lunch, and punched him in the nose. “To hell with you, you little opportunist,” he said. He marched out the door and around the corner to the Red Eye Lounge, where the usual cloud of barflies, including most of the News Department, sat in the corner working on vodka slings. “To hell with it,” Sloan said, tossing down a Bombaroo and chasing it with a Banshee. “Roy Sodajerk, Jr., is a liar, a tax cheat, a thief from his own family, a raging idiot, a bully, a fraud, and a buggerer of young men. He doesn’t have a brain in his head. He is a greedy rapacious degenerate piece of trash and I am going to squash him like a bug. He will rue this day for years to come! I’ll tell the world all about him and his vicious ways.” Frank heard all this from a darkened doorway—Roy Jr. had sent him over, nose bleeding, with Sloan’s last paycheck—and he thought to himself, Don’t stay in radio too long. Keep your eyes open. Something else will turn up.
What turned up that spring was an actress from Milwaukee. Maria Antonio had black black hair and milk white skin and deep dark eyes, and looked like Donna LaDonna, the Girl of Studio B, must have looked in her bloom. Maria had been hired to play Corinne Archer on Love’s Old Sweet Song, Forrest Hollister’s first love’s daughter who brings the lonely millionaire the news that Lally pines for him in Palm Springs. Then she became Doc Winegar’s niece Dotty on The Best Is Yet to Be, the one who comes in from Chicago and breaks Bud’s heart:DOTTY: Frankly, we’re not right for each other. Your speech embarrasses me. You talk funny, Bud.
BUD: But I’ve always talked like this.
DOTTY: I know. But I’m returning to Chicago in the fall. You’d never fit in there.
BUD: But I love you. Dotty, you’re the sun, the moon, and the stars to me.
DOTTY: I know. I’m sorry, Bud.
Frank met her in the hallway one morning at nine o’clock. He was bounding up the back stairs two steps at a time with Roy Jr.’s mail, and saw her on the third floor, landing, sitting on the concrete floor next to a bucket. “Don’t mind me,” she whimpered, “I’m only dying.” He asked if he could help, and she said, “No. Please go. I have never thrown up with anyone except members of my immediate family.” He asked what was wrong. She said, “I don’t think I’m pregnant,” and then looked up and grinned, to show it was a joke. The smile seemed to jar her insides, and she leaned her head over the pail and vomited three times. He put his hand on her shoulder, to show that he wasn’t disgusted and that he supported her in this difficult moment. She cleared her throat and spat, phthoo. “That’s the first time I’ve thrown up since I was six years old,” she said thoughtfully.
Then she looked up. “Why, you’re Frank White!” she said. “I know about you. You’re the one who slugged Little Becky.” She stood up. “Well done.” Frank picked up the pail. “I’ll take care of this,” he said. “I hope you’re feeling better. There’s a couch in the Women’s Bureau if you’d like—”
“Bye,” she said. He studied her as she went through the door and down the hall. How perfectly she walked. A green plaid skirt.
For days, he kept running into her. He had worked at WLT for six months and never laid eyes on her and now every day, two
or three times a day, there she was, black hair, big smile, and all.
They went to lunch at the Pot Pie. He learned that she was twenty and had had many boyfriends. How many? Lots. She said, “I like older men. They can sit and talk about themselves without demanding that you show complete interest. How old are you?” Frank told her, “Twenty.” She seemed to recognize this as a lie, and to be touched by it. She put her hand on his knee. “That’s nice,” she said. His knee began to swell. He walked with a limp the rest of the afternoon.
He learned that she lived in two rooms upstairs in an old lady’s house on Willow Street, by Loring Park, and that the old lady was deaf as a stone. “We used to dance up there at two in the morning.”
“Who’s we?”
“I used to have a roommate, named Jean.”
“Gene?”
“Yes. Jean. She was my best friend for months but she smoked like a chimney. I tried hiding her cigarettes and it threw her into such a panic, she ripped her best jacket looking through the pockets. She smoked enough for two people, so I asked her to cut out my share, and she moved out in a huff. I tell you. You get no gratitude for trying to be a good influence on people.”
The next day, he brought her a pot of weak tea with sugar and lemons before the show, and she had him massage her neck muscles to relax her. That afternoon, he was in the Green Room, reading a story in the paper about Milton Berle, when she sat down beside him. He said, “Did you know that more people see Milton Berle’s television program in one night than have seen Hamlet in the past three-hundred-and-fifty years?” She said, “Who’s your favorite movie star?”
“Katharine Hepburn.” It was the correct answer, he could tell from Maria’s face. “Me too,” she said. “Katharine Hepburn is just exactly like how I remember my older sister when I was little. Tall and leggy and striding along and not letting anyone put one past her. When she got married, I came home from her wedding dance and bawled half the night. We shared a bedroom for all those years. I wore all her old clothes. I used her perfume. I tried to talk like her. At night we’d lie in bed and talk about how we’d go to Chicago someday and share an apartment and have jobs and go to swank nightclubs and meet men. That’s where my imagination stopped: meeting men. I couldn’t imagine who they’d be or why we’d want them. She married a sweet guy. They moved to Cincinatti and had two kids and then that was it for her. She gave up being interested in things. She became dull. I suppose he must’ve liked her that way. I think dullness is evil, I really do. I’m afraid of Minneapolis. I don’t want to be like them.” And then, as if she had said too much, she stood up, said goodbye, and strode out the door.
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