An American Life Page 7

  I had become a Democrat, by birth, I suppose, and a few months after my twenty-first birthday, I cast my first vote for Roosevelt and the full Democratic ticket. And, like Jack—and millions of other Americans—I soon idolized FDR. He’d entered the White House facing a national emergency as grim as any the country has ever faced and, acting quickly, he had implemented a plan of action to deal with the crisis.

  During his Fireside Chats, his strong, gentle, confident voice resonated across the nation with an eloquence that brought comfort and resilience to a nation caught up in a storm and reassured us that we could lick any problem. I will never forget him for that.

  With his alphabet soup of federal agencies, FDR in many ways set in motion the forces that later sought to create big government and bring a form of veiled socialism to America. But I think that many people forget Roosevelt ran for president on a platform dedicated to reducing waste and fat in government. He called for cutting federal spending by twenty-five percent, eliminating useless boards and commissions and returning to states and communities powers that had been wrongfully seized by the federal government. If he had not been distracted by war, I think he would have resisted the relentless expansion of the federal government that followed him. One of his sons, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., often told me that his father had said many times his welfare and relief programs during the Depression were meant only as emergency, stopgap measures to cope with a crisis, not the seeds of what others later tried to turn into a permanent welfare state. Government giveaway programs, FDR said, “destroy the human spirit,” and he was right. As smart as he was, though, I suspect even FDR didn’t realize that once you created a bureaucracy, it took on a life of its own. It was almost impossible to close down a bureaucracy once it had been created.

  After FDR’s election, Jack, as one of the few Democrats in town, was appointed to implement some of the new federal relief programs in Dixon. It removed him from the ranks of the unemployed and also gave me my first opportunity to watch government in action.

  8

  AS ADMINISTRATOR of federal relief programs, Jack shared a small office in Dixon with the County Supervisor of Poor. Every week, people who had lost their jobs came to the office to pick up sacks of flour, potatoes, and other food and pieces of scrip they could exchange for groceries at stores in town.

  Occasionally, I dropped into the office to wait for Jack before we walked home together. I was shocked to see the fathers of many of my schoolmates waiting in line for handouts—men I had known most of my life, who had had jobs I’d thought were as permanent as the city itself.

  Jack knew that accepting handouts was tough on the dignity of the men and came up with a plan to help them recover some of it. He began leaving home early in the morning and making rounds of the county, asking if anyone had odd jobs available, then, if they did, persuaded the people to let him find somebody to do the work. The next week when the men came in for their handouts, Jack offered the work he’d found to those who’d been out of work the longest.

  I’ll never forget the faces of these men when Jack told them their turn had come up for a job: They brightened like a burst of neon, and when they left Dad’s office, I swear the men were standing a little taller. They wanted work, not handouts.

  Not long after that, Jack told several men he had found a week’s work for them. They responded to this news with a rustling of feet. Eventually, one broke the silence and said: “Jack, the last time you got me some work, the people at the relief office took my family off welfare; they said I had a job and even though it was temporary, I wasn’t eligible for relief anymore. I just can’t afford to take another job.”

  Later on, thanks again to his party connections, Jack was placed in charge of the Works Progress Administration office in Dixon. The WPA was one of the most productive elements of FDR’s alphabet soup of agencies because it put people to work building roads, bridges, and other projects. Like Jack’s informal program, it gave men and women a chance to make some money along with the satisfaction of knowing they earned it. But just as Jack got the program up and running, there was a decline in the number of people applying for work on the projects. Since he knew there hadn’t been a cure for unemployment in Dixon, he began asking questions and discovered the federal welfare workers were telling able-bodied men in Dixon that they shouldn’t take the WPA jobs because they were being taken care of and didn’t need help from the WPA.

  After a while, Jack couldn’t get any of his projects going; he couldn’t get enough men sprung from the welfare giveaway program. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize what I learned later: The first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy. If the people running the welfare program had let their clientele find other ways of making a living, that would have reduced their importance and their budget.

  The winter of 1932-1933 was very cold. Like a lot of other people in Dixon, I spent Christmas and New Year’s out of work and without prospects. The only job on the horizon was another summer of lifeguarding at Lowell Park. In February, however, I got a telephone call that changed everything: Pete MacArthur said one of WOC’s two staff announcers had quit and he offered me his job, starting at $100 a month.

  “I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said.

  Nelle had taught me to contribute ten percent of my income to the church and I’d always done so. As soon as I was certain I had the job, I visited our minister and posed a question to him: My brother has another year of college ahead of him, I said, but he is going to have to leave Eureka because he is running out of money; do you think the Lord would consider it a tithe if I sent him $10 a month instead of putting it in the collection plate? The minister, a kind and wise man, thought about the question a moment and said, “I think that would be fine with the Lord.”

  The day I arrived for work in Davenport, they put me on the air. I was a disc jockey before they invented the term: As staff announcer, I played phonograph records, read commercials, and served as a vocal bridge between our local programming and network broadcasts. I was not an immediate success as a radio announcer, to put it mildly.

  Nobody had bothered to give me any instructions on how to be an announcer and I quickly proved it on the air. I stumbled over my words and had a delivery as wooden as a prairie oak. I’d have hated to have to pay for some of those first commercials I read over the air. But what really got me in trouble was a commercial I didn’t read.

  One of my assignments was to present a half-hour program of organ music from a local mortuary; the mortuary provided the organist in exchange for a discreet plug identifying it as the source of the music.

  However, the nature of this quid pro quo was never explained to me, and one night I decided I didn’t like the idea of following a romantic song like “I Love You Truly” with a veiled commercial for an undertaker, so I omitted the plug.

  Understandably, the mortuary was unhappy and complained. After my previous weeks of on-the-air bumbling, the station management decided that it was time for me to find another career.

  Then one of those things happened that makes one wonder about God’s having a plan for all of us.

  My job was given to a young teacher, and the station asked me to help break him in. While I was doing it, I mentioned how I’d been hired and then fired. When he heard the story, he demanded a contract from WOC that would provide him with job security; he didn’t want to give up the relative security of teaching and then wind up in the same fix as I. But WOC didn’t give contracts to anyone and turned him down. He quit the next day and the station manager asked me to stay until they could find someone else.

  I agreed to stay on one condition: They had to assign someone to help me improve my on-the-air delivery.

  Pete and other friends went to work on me and gave me a crash course on radio announcing, and I began reading over the commercials before airtime and practicing my delivery to get the right rhythm and cadence and give my words more emotion. Whatever I did during those few days worked: After another we
ek or two, the talk at WOC about replacing me stopped.

  Then, enter another break for Dutch Reagan.

  I’d been in Davenport less than three months when Pete called me to his office and asked: “Do you know anything about track?”

  I said, “Hell, yes, I ran the quarter mile and was on a championship relay team.”

  WHO, our sister station in Des Moines, he said, needed someone to broadcast the Drake Relays, one of the top track meets in the country. I got the assignment.

  A few weeks later, the Palmer Company received a permit for a 50,000-watt clear channel station in Des Moines. We were told WOC was closing and all of us were going to WHO.

  Until then, both stations had operated only low-power 1,000-watt transmitters with limited range. There were only fifteen 50,000-watt clear channel stations in America at the time and to work at one was the biggest thing in radio. Overnight, WHO became one of the most powerful NBC stations in the country, and because I’d gotten good marks for my reporting on the Drake Relays, I was offered the post of sports announcer.

  I spent four years at station WHO in Des Moines and they were among the most pleasant of my life. At twenty-two I’d achieved my dream: I was a sports announcer. If I had stopped there, I believe I would have been happy the rest of my life. I’d accomplished my goal and enjoyed every minute of it. Before long, during the depths of the Depression, I was earning seventy-five dollars a week and gaining the kind of fame in the Midwest that brought in invitations for speaking engagements that provided extra income I could use to help out my parents, whose financial circumstances had gone from bad to worse after Jack’s heart troubles left him unable to work.

  • • •

  After his graduation from Eureka, Moon visited me in Des Moines and he was in the studio one Friday night when I was predicting which football teams would win Saturday’s games. When I caught him shaking his head at some of my predictions, I told the audience about it and made him get on the air with me. Pete MacArthur heard us and liked the interplay and it led to a regular Friday night show in which we matched predictions. Later on, Moon became an announcer and program director, beginning a climb up the ladder of broadcasting that made him a director, producer, network executive, and finally vice-president of one of the country’s largest advertising agencies.

  During my years in Des Moines, I attended an endless number of football games, auto races, track tournaments, and swimming meets and, through the magic of radio, I “covered” hundreds of baseball games played by the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox without going to the stadium.

  In the press box at Wrigley Field or wherever the Cubs were playing, a telegrapher tapped out a report in Morse code after each pitch and each play of the game. In Des Moines, I sat at a microphone across from another telegraph operator with a pair of earphones wrapped around his head.

  After each play, he decoded a burst of dots and dashes from the stadium and typed out a few words that described the play and handed it to me through a slot in a sheet of glass separating the studio and the control room. I then described the play as if I’d been in the press box, even though the slip of paper might say only “Out 4 to 3”; four was second base and three was first, so it was a grounder to the second baseman who threw the batter out at first. It had to be done quickly because we weren’t the only ones covering the game. Six or seven other stations were also broadcasting Cubs games, most of them live from the press box. Sometimes, people would try to compare my broadcast to the live broadcast, and they told me that I was able to keep up within a half a pitch of the game.

  Between pitches and innings, there was usually a lot of dead time that I had to fill with anecdotes and descriptions of the players, the field, and the weather. I wish I could count the number of ways I managed to describe how the rays of the afternoon sun looked as they fell across the rim of Wrigley Field.

  One summer’s day—and this is a story that I’ve probably repeated more times in my life than any other—my imagination was tested to its maximum. The Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals were locked in a scoreless ninth-inning tie with Dizzy Dean on the mound and the Cubs’ Billy Jurges at bat.

  I described Dean winding up and releasing his pitch. Then Curly, our telegraph operator, shook his head and passed me a slip of paper, and I looked for a description of the pitch.

  Instead, his note read: “The wire’s gone dead.”

  Well, since I had the ball on the way to the plate I had to get it there. Although I could have told our listeners that the wire had gone dead, it would have sent them rushing toward their dials and a competitor. So, I decided to let Jurges foul off the pitch, figuring Western Union would soon fix the problem. To fill in some time, I described a couple of kids in the stands fighting over the foul ball.

  When Curly gestured that the wire was still dead, I had Jurges foul off another ball; I slowed Dean down, had him pick up the resin bag and take a sign, shake it off, get another sign, and let him pitch; I said he’d fouled off another one, but this time he’d just missed a home run by only a few inches.

  I searched Curly’s face for a look of encouragement, but he shook his head.

  I described Dean winding up and hurling another pitch; Jurges hit a foul ball, and then another . . . and another. A red-headed kid in the stands retrieved one of the fouls and held up the ball to show off his trophy.

  By then I was in much too deep to admit the wire was dead, so I continued to let Jurges foul Dean’s pitches, and his string of foul balls went on for almost seven minutes. I don’t know how many foul balls there were, but I’m told someone reported the foul-slugging spree as a record to “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” column.

  Finally, Curly started typing again and I knew the wire had been restored. Relieved, I grabbed the slip of paper he handed me through the slot and read it: “Jurges popped out on the first ball pitched.”

  For days, people stopped me on the street and asked if Jurges had set a record for foul balls. I’d just say, “Yeah, he was there a long time.” I never admitted a thing.

  I only broadcast one football game in the same way via remote control and radio’s “theater of the mind.”

  At the time, many of the big universities were suspicious that radio broadcasts of their football games would cut down the sale of tickets at their box office. One, the University of Michigan, refused us permission to cover its game with the University of Iowa, so I was assigned to do it by telegraphic report. The most memorable thing about the game that day was the name of Michigan’s center—Gerald Ford.

  Not all my work in Des Moines was devoted to sports announcing. During the off season, I filled in as a regular announcer, which gave me an opportunity to interview visiting movie stars and other celebrities. One night our guest was evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who’d come to Des Moines for a revival meeting not long after she’d been accused of having an extracurricular romantic liaison with one of her followers, paid for with disciples’ contributions.

  I finished the interview and invited her to tell our listeners about the revival meeting. I took a seat and as I was thinking about the next commercial that I had to read, I heard her sign off and tell the listeners “Good night.”

  I looked at the clock and saw that there were four minutes to go before our next program. I jumped up to the microphone and twirled my index finger, signaling the engineer to play a phonograph record, and said: “We conclude this interview with the noted evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson, with a brief interlude of transcribed music. . . .”

  The engineer nodded and a song blasted over the studio’s loudspeaker. My guest looked at me with fire in her eyes and then turned around and left the studio with her coat standing out behind her in the wind.

  The engineer had played the first disk on his stack of records—the Mills Brothers singing “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day.”

  I gained one love, but lost another in Des Moines. It was there I first heard the words, “Nothing is so good for the inside of a
man as the outside of a horse.”

  I think I’d probably first discovered an affinity for horses when I was still lifeguarding at Lowell Park. There was a lodge at the park run by a Danish immigrant who owned a big gray horse and he occasionally rode it down to the bath house; a couple of times, when there weren’t any swimmers on the beach, he let me ride it. I didn’t know it then, but he was introducing me to one of the joys of my life. In Des Moines, I made some friends who liked to ride and they began inviting me, when we all had a free afternoon, to go to a local stable and rent horses for an hour or so and I enjoyed it very much.

  Then, another announcer at WHO, a reserve officer in the army cavalry, told me the Fourteenth Cavalry Regiment based at Fort Des Moines offered young men a chance to obtain a reserve commission through what the War Department called the Citizens Military Training Program. I didn’t have a burning desire to be an army officer—I still thought we’d fought the war to end all wars—but it was a deal too good to turn down: In exchange for enlisting in the reserve, the army offered training by some of the best cavalrymen in the country and unlimited use of army horses, all free. Ever since I’d become addicted to Saturday matinees, I’d had an affection for those scenes when a troop of cavalrymen in blue tunics and gold braid, flags raised and bugles blowing, raced across the prairie to rescue beleaguered pioneers.

  In Des Moines, I transformed some of the childhood fantasies into reality and discovered a lifelong love for horses and riding. I just fell in love with riding and I began to dream of owning a ranch. As the years passed, there was no place on earth I’d rather be than in a saddle, on the back of a horse.

  I had expected to marry Margaret Cleaver since my sophomore year at Dixon High. So had our families and all of our friends. She was the first girl I ever kissed. I had hung my fraternity pin on her and soon after our graduation, I’d given her an engagement ring and we’d agreed to marry as soon as we could afford it. But after Margaret took the teaching job in a remote part of Illinois and I’d moved to Iowa, it became harder and harder for us to see each other. We wrote often, but our get-togethers were few and far between. Then one day, about two years after I’d moved to Des Moines, I opened a letter from her and my fraternity pin and engagement ring tumbled out of it.