The Dick Gibson Show Read Online Free PDF Page B

Omaha. He had intended to surprise Sylvia by meeting her in Union Station and riding back to Nebraska with her, and if the two lovers hadn’t both missed their trains they would have missed each other, presumably forever. The mutual layover somehow permitted their reunion for all time.
    “And what a program that was—the reunion. KROP montages. Excerpts from Louis’s letters about his dreams. Solemn, forlorn blasts of exodus ship’s whistles become Chicago’s cheery choo-choo chugs. Then Louis’s ‘Hello, Sylvia.’ And Sylvia’s ‘It’s you, Lou.’ It was all down there. I tell you, I embraced myth then—all myth, everybody’s, anybody’s. To this day I’m a sucker for all primal episode: Bruce Wayne losing his parents and vowing vengeance; Tonto teaming up with the Lone Ranger; Clark Kent chipped out of Kryptonite—whatever.
    “Who played Sylvia? Who played Sylvia if there were only the two male announcers? Some Mrs. Credenza, you think? Not at all. Ego like the Credenzas’ wouldn’t have permitted it. They insisted on themselves being out of it, insisted on the high privilege of others doing it for them, their words in other people’s mouths, themselves cozy by their receivers, hearing their own legend. An Indian lady. A squaw did. A chief’s old wife. Squaws were brought in for all the female Credenza parts. Credenza legend was the single Dell Reservation industry. The counties had been theirs; the Credenzas had been their enemies, were still their enemies. They loved their grudge, I guess, and thrived—anyone in the studio could see it—on the Credenzas’ side of the story, bland with omission, the blandness and good will the givens of the Indians’ patient rage. At air time, the old squaw’s voice was waverless with Sylvia’s youth; it could have been under a spell. It was under one. How else could she, who had never heard it, get the precise mix of old country accent and young English? And how did I, who had never heard it either, know it was precise? Better, how did she manage the hyperbole? I mean the exact input of glory and meaning with which she iced those pale speeches and which the Credenzas licked up at face value? Why, she was an Indian. She had come up on the settlers’ wagons, infiltrated Fort Credenza, outwoodsed them, I tell you, crept up on their Credenza souls and last-laughed them to death in some red way the Credenzas never understood or even suspected.
    “But I’m getting ahead of myself. My major effort at KROP, what I thought at the time was the most valuable thing I did there experiencewise, grist-for-the-millwise (do you see what I was like back then? how ingenuous my concerns? I had an apprentice’s heart; I wanted to learn everything, do everything, conscientiously preparing myself with some self-made, from-the-ground-up vision of the world, assuming the quid pro quo and just dessert as if they were laws in nature) was the news programming. I had done news before only as a rip-and- reader, pulling the sheets off the teletype seconds before they were scheduled to be read, doing them cold. (And deriving thereby a certain false and snotty confidence, a sort of pride in what I took to be my professionalism. I didn’t see that this was the cynic’s way, the wiseguy’s way.)
    “At KROP I became a real newsman for the first time. I still had to depend heavily upon the wire services, but just as the Credenzas were interested in Credenza history, so were they interested in Credenza current events. When I saw a brother and asked ‘What’s new?’ it was as a reporter I asked, and I was required to make a good deal of his answer. ‘Flash: Louis Credenza III announced today that the new car he purchased three weeks ago has gone back to the dealer for its one-thousand-mile checkup. “The defective cigarette lighter that came with the car will be replaced for nothing,” Mr. Credenza said. This is in accordance with his 20,000-mile guarantee covering parts and labor. …