The Dick Gibson Show
Stanley Elkin
Contents
Part I
1
2
3
4
Part II
Part III
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
A Biography of Stanley Elkin
To
Jack Eigen: WMAQ
Jerry Williams: WBZ
Long John Nebel: WNBC
Joe Gearing: WJAS
Bill Barker: KOA
Ira Blue: KFRC
Jean Shepherd: WOR
Barry Gray: WMCA
Jack McKinney: WCAU
Joan Elkin: WIFE
I would like to thank the Rockefeller Foundation
for its generous financial assistance
while I was writing this novel.
Part I
* * *
1
VITA; DICK’S LOG:
When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. And he could get Omaha, could get Detroit, could get Memphis; New Orleans he could get. And once—it was not a particularly clear or cold night; for that matter it may even have rained earlier—he got Seattle, Washington. He listened almost until sign-off, hoping that the staff announcer would say something about the wattage put out by the station. Then, after the midnight news but before the amen of the sermonette, the station faded irrecoverably. He’d learned never to fool with the dial, that it did no good when a signal waned to reclaim it with some careful, surgical twist a half-dozen kilocycles to the right or left. It was best to wait through the babble and static for the return of the electronic tide. Often it would come, renewed for its hiatus, its cosmic romp and drift, strongly present again after its mysterious trip to the universe. This time it didn’t.
He did not hear that particular station again until he was a part-time staff announcer in Butte, Montana, a kid who in those days—it was his first job—liked to doll up his speech and introduce into its already bygone mid-Atlantic base—Tex Ellery he called himself—some heroic man’s man drawl, a quality of bright bandanna, checked wool shirt and sheepskin coat—a crackling, youthful noise, courteous and ma’aming, but cautious and deceptively slow in another, knowing register: last to draw, first to shoot. He had not yet learned the good announcer’s trick of distance, his way with a mile, the sense he gave of the alien, of the Southerner come north, the Northerner dropped south, sliding subtly into regionalism only during the commercial, not presuming to presume to direct, but doing all commanding and urging and wheedling in a sort of moral blackface, deferentially one of them only when the chips were down and money passed.
He heard the station again in Butte, Montana. He was sitting miles out, in the transmitter shack where he sometimes doubled as engineer. He had just done his sleepy duty to the dials he did not really understand, uncertainly monitored the audio frequencies and seen to their many-trillioned amplification. (He did not read the figures themselves, merely the dangerous red margins of the curving dial faces, looking out for the insufficiencies implicit in the needles’ steep ascent, the surfeits of their fearful plunges at the other end, alarmed only for their throes, engaged by extremes and compensating by reactions, reining in and pouring it on by turns.) It was a quiet night in an early stormless spring, the stars distinct, the sun spotless. The needles floated easily in their white calm, and he listened to the radio he had brought with him. The other, a speaker permanently tuned to the Butte station, softly played a transcription of dance music. Rotely he turned the dial of his radio, a little bored, too familiar with what he could expect to bring in here, when suddenly, and as clearly as if it were a local station, he heard the old Seattle call letters and remembered at once the evening he had first heard them in bed. Strangely, though he was thousands of miles closer to Seattle than he had been when he had first heard its signal all those years before, the city seemed just as distant, the intervening planes of time undiminished, all imagination’s vast, seamless landscapes still between. Excitedly he entered the station’s call letters and wave length in the logbook he kept. He listened for the announcer’s name and entered that, together with a brief description of the nature of the program. The log, a ringed, black leather looseleaf notebook, was thick with the entries he had made over the years. Arranged alphabetically according to their call letters, the designations seemed more like words to him than sounds or names, the harsh, often vowelless “K” calls and softer “W” calls and “C” for Canada calls and stations in Mexico beginning with “X” like the difficult names of Aztec gods.
When he had made his entry he was momentarily distracted by the low sounds coming out of the speaker mounted above his desk. The music was still playing, but he thought he detected a shift, a sudden soprano sharpness in the mix. He looked nervously at the dials but saw that all the needles still treaded easily in the safe middle depths of their dial faces. He turned up the volume on the speaker and listened. He had a sensitive ear, for the sound of radio some sort of unmusical perfect pitch, and he was certain that the tone quality had changed. Yet the dials, consulted again, registered nothing wrong; as blandly steady as some Greenwich constant, they signified an almost textbook energy. He turned off his radio and tilted his head judiciously toward the sounds that came from the speaker. He looked at the telephone that connected him on a direct line to his station, certain it would ring. Checking the dials a third time—the sound had thickened now, exactly, it occurred to him, like the signal of a station just before it fades—he decided that the trouble must be in the transcription itself.
He picked up the phone. The studio engineer was already on it. “What’s going on?” the man asked.
“It’s got to be in the transcription. The dials show I’m putting out everything I’m receiving. Get Markham to make an announcement.”
“Markham’s out,” the engineer told him. “The transcription was supposed to run for a half hour. I’m the only one here.”
“Well, put on something else. It sounds awful.”
“I know. Look, use the standby mike. I’ll cut you in from the shack. Open your mike in thirty seconds. I’ll have to duck out to the music library and get something. Can you talk for a few minutes?”
“I’ll say something.”
He replaced the receiver and rushed to the microphone. It was an ancient thing from the earliest days of broadcasting, an enormous iron web used now only for emergencies, calming alarm at alarm’s source with messages of contingency deflected and the handled untoward. It shattered the sudden or extended silences with the hearty good cheer and sweet reason of all backstage coping, by that fact creating a sense of the real silence held off, engaged elsewhere: nothing to worry about while the auxiliary microphone still burned and the staff still lived. The bulletins of reassurance—PLEASE STAND BY; ONE MOMENT PLEASE!—showing that emergency could still be courteous, disaster graceful-spirited. He had first heard them as a child, thrilling to their lesson that help was available. When the film tore or the lines went down there were always calm men to give these signals. In a way, it was what had attracted him to radio: the steady steady-as-she-goes pep talk of trouble shooters who routinized the extraordinary.
He counted to ten and opened his microphone. He heard the needle arm tear across the surface of the transcription, leaving the mounted speaker not dead but crepitant, the mike still open at the station broadcasting the void itself now, amplifying the bristling snap and hiss of the universe. “Please stand by,” he announced. But he had forgotten to turn down the speaker and heard his voice bounce back at him, enormous and delayed by a fraction of a fraction of a second. He became confused. “One moment pl
ease,” he begged, and again the two voices—the one in his mouth that all his life he would stand behind, his sound but always sent away, forever sacrificed, and the one booming from the speaker—seemed to collide fiercely in midair. It was a phenomenon he had experienced at the studio whenever someone had carelessly left open the door to the engineer’s booth, and he knew it could combust in a sudden piercing feedback. But something about the shack’s isolation, the idea of his ricocheting voice, its far-flung ventriloquous roundtrip, was exciting to him. Although he still expected momentarily to ignite a shriek as the two voices sparked each other, he began to speak.
“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.
“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.
The Dick Gibson Show Page 1