Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“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. … Elsewhere in the news, George Credenza, wife of the candidate for state representative from Louis Credenza, Senior County, spoke long distance last night to her sister in Worcester, Massachusetts, Mrs. Lloyd Brossbar, the former Dorothy Kiddons of Rapid City, South Dakota. Mrs. Brossbar is said to have told Mrs. Credenza that the children are well and send their love to their aunt and uncle. KROP has also learned that they thanked them for the chemistry set … The 8 P.M. Worcester temperature was sixty-two degrees.’

“It was at KROP that I got to do my first remote, calling in my news over the telephone when I was sent to Lincoln to cover Charley Credenza’s maiden speech in the legislature. It was, I recall, a filibuster. No particular issue was at stake, no great principle; Charley just didn’t want to give up the floor. They finally had to vote cloture on him — the first time in Nebraska history. I was there. Marshall Maine was there.

“But do you know what the Credenzas liked best? Better even than self-reflexive history or on-the-spot coverage? Human interest. Folksy coda. I scoured the wire services and newspapers to feed their need for anecdote, their love of contretemps and feeling for that long line of the pratfallen — stick-up men who pulled their heists in front of police stations on plainclothesmen, double-parked judges who appeared before themselves on traffic raps, candidates for mayor out- polled by their wives. And when, as it sometimes happened, the news was all hard that day, I made up stories. ‘And that would be all the news if it weren’t for the fellow in the Pacific Northwest whose wife filed for divorce today; her first, his fifth. This time, however, Leonard Class of Seattle, Washington, may have some difficulty meeting his alimony payments, for Leonard lost his job as well as his wife. The city fathers are just a little upset with Leonard’s marital difficulties and have voted to remove him from his position as Director of Seattle’s Bureau of Matrimonial Counseling.’

“‘You have a nose for news,’ Poke Credenza himself told me after one of these stories. And so I had — a flair for all the trivial lessons of come-uppance, an intuition into the Credenza conscience itself. I fueled their condescension with an endless parade of housewives who won national bake-offs with ready-mixes and firechiefs whose homes burned down. The human comedy, the lofty laugh, a bit of patronage, and no harm done.”

Ultimately he went too far, betrayed by the dark side of his professionalism that came to light in northeast Nebraska.

These were heydays. There was Uncle Don and his “That ought to hold the little bastards.” Coast to coast, it seemed, in the primest time of that prime time, there were open keys, unthrown switches, bloopers, stoopnagelisms — but diffusing accident, there was form, order, a national sense of the institutional. There was Allen’s Alley, The National Barn Dance, Manhattan Merry-Go-Round, Lux Presents Hollywood, Town Meeting of the Air. And not even partisan, a wider community than mere fan —though these were the days of the signed glossy, of the fifty- cent “family album” of stars — something constituent almost, franchised. One knew that all America was tuned in. You can see the photographs in the encyclopedia. The family in its cozy parlor. (It is always wintertime in these photographs.) Father in his business clothes, Sis in wools, Mother with a bit of knitting in her lap, the floorlamp behind her right shoulder, the shade slanting the light forthrightly where her book would be if she were reading. The son is stretched out on the floor, belly to carpet, doing his homework. The gothic radio, like a wooden bell, on a table in the corner. They smile or are concerned or absorbed or wistful, as though they hear a song common to each — an anthem perhaps of some country where they had all once lived. The caption explains that this American family, like so many millions of others, is enjoying the jokes of a popular network comedian, or engrossed in the news that will be tomorrow’s headlines, or engaged by one of the many fine dramas that may be heard on the radio. And you know that it’s no fake, no mere posturing for the photographer, and indeed if you look close you can see that the dial in the radio glows.

There is another photograph above this one. A newscaster sits in his studio behind a big web microphone. In his dark, wide-lapelled suit he looks like a banker, the longitudes of his decency in the dimly perceived pinstripes. He holds his script. You glimpse a thin bracelet of shirtcuff. The “On the Air” sign is still inert, but there is a large-faced wall clock behind him, a thick second hand sweeping toward the landmark at the top of the clock where time begins. He looks toward the control booth at his director. He sits militantly, responsibly urgent — and this is no posture either but the careful, serious alertness of a man pacing himself, as attuned and concentrated as a child waiting to move in under the arc of a jump rope.

Alias Dick Gibson, alias Marshall Maine, alias Tex Ellery, alias a dozen others, knew, knew then, blessed by nostalgia as some are blessed with prescience, this steady hindsight that was contemporaneous to him and as involuntary as digestion, that all this was the truth, that those pictures had it right: Americans were in their living rooms, before their floorlamps, on their sofas, in their chairs, along their rugs, together in time, united, serené. And so he felt twinges, pins and needles of actual conscience; he needed to join his voice to that important chorus, that lovely a cappella.

He approached Lee, the reasonable Credenza, and spoke to him about it. He said KROP should be no different than other stations.

“I see what you mean. I’ll talk it over with the brothers and get back to you,” Lee told him.

And then, two weeks after he had first introduced the subject, he received a delegation of Credenzas in the transmitter shack. Surprised by their presence there and to a certain extent intimidated by seeing so many of them gathered at one time — only Charley and Bill, whose legislative duties kept them in Lincoln, did not come — he was at first alarmed, suspecting actual physical attack.

Louis III spoke. “You, Marshall Maine, Lee says you ain’t satisfied with the way we do things on our station.”