The Dick Gibson Show Read Online Free PDF

for their clients, though almost no one but Credenzas could ever have been listening. One time, when I was really into something and neglected to do a commercial exactly when it was scheduled, I received an angry call from Louis III.
    “‘Hey you—Marshall Maine. What do you think you’re doing down there? The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Lincoln paid money to have that commercial done at 3:15. That don’t mean 3:14 or 3:16 or 3:18 or 3:20. Three-fifteen means 3:15. They picked that time because that’s when folks get thirsty and want something cool to swallow. They want their message said right then. You understand me? You think the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Lincoln wants its message jammed up against the Mutual of Omaha message at 3:23?’
    “When people are thinking of their deaths, I thought, when they’re thinking of loss of limb, their houses on fire, liability, personal injury. ‘No sir,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I was into something.’
    “‘Well, you look to your knitting, sonny, or you’ll be fast out on your ass of something else.’
    “‘Yes, sir,’ I said, for the truth is, I liked working there. The apprenticeship was on me, as I say, and I was getting valuable experience.
    “‘Call me Lou. You last long enough around here I might be your representative. I expect it’ll be me over old Poke in a landslide. In America it don’t do to say sir to the man that’s your representative.’
    “We followed FCC regulations to the letter, and functioned exactly as any station would, with all the ordinary station’s customary programming, though with the sense I had of the station and its listeners, the programs seemed experimental to me, as any public activity would seem strange performed in private. I had this notion of command performance and, because of this, a fear of my audience which was unfamiliar to me.
    “Yet even granting our ordinary format of music, news, and public service, there was something special about our programs. The Credenzas wanted their tastes catered to. ‘A station has to meet the needs of its audience,’ Felix Credenza often reminded me. So for Jim, the musical Credenza, we did ‘The John Philip Sousa Hour’ from eleven to midnight. For Felix and his wife, childless Credenzas who liked to pretend there were kids around the house, we did a children’s program with fairy tales and Frank Luther recordings. The most popular program, however, the one that pleased all the Credenzas, was a public service show called ‘Know Your County!’ It was about—I quote from the introduction—‘the living legend of Sylvia Credenza and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties.’ What it really was, was the history of the Credenza family done in fifteen-minute dramas, the Credenzas themselves putting together the scripts from their memory of family gossip. The program had been on since the station’s founding, and everything that had ever happened to the Credenzas had already been aired several times. When they came to the end of the cycle—each one, like the verses in ‘This is the house that Jack built,’ slightly longer than the last because of the additional increment of history—they simply started all over again. It was the way congregations read the Bible.
    “Most of the programs I was involved with dealt with the family’s founders—Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior—and related how they were sweethearts in the old country but couldn’t marry because Louis was scheduled to be called up for military service. There were shows about the plots and payoffs that got him smuggled to America, Louis Senior’s wanderings in the New World, the letters they exchanged once he was settled in Nebraska, Louis’s dreams, Sylvia’s misgivings about making the trip, the bad time she had in steerage, her missing her train in Chicago. This last was a milestone in the legend, a sort of Ems telegram approach to history, just that destiny-ridden. For Louis, it seems, had missed his train in