WLT (2 page)

So none of the announcers liked to use B, they would rather go in A, the big studio, even with the musicians lounging around and smirking and smoking, or sit in C, a room covered with green acoustic tile and known as the Gas Chamber because Leo LaValley did
Reflections
in there and left it full of sour green farts. Once he had to go in B to record a couple dozen Minnesota Dairy Council commercials and he ducked out to see a man about a dog and when he returned, the remaining scripts were for Murray's Meats in Minneapolis. “Oh well,” he thought, and recorded them, including a line that the copywriter swore wasn't his, “Yes, folks, nobody beats Murray's meat,” a line that almost got Leo fired. “How could you read that and not see what it says?” said his boss Ray Soderbjerg. Leo hadn't spotted it because he was busy trying not to laugh at an announcer named Phil Sax standing in the door with his finger poking out of his fly, waggling. A typical Studio B story.

A red and green neon WLT sign hung over the hotel marquee, flashing, “W ... L ... T ... WLT ... WLT ... The. . . . Friendly. . . . Neighbor. . . . Station. . . .” Then the “Friendly” turned bright red, and a cartoon man's face appeared, in blue, with a red derby hat, and his mouth line suddenly flashed a big toothsome grin and his eyes became sparkly white and the hat tipped, and when the eyes sparkled, the lights in Studio B dimmed. Only in B. Nowhere else. Gene the Chief Engineer checked the wiring. Nothing. It was a snakepit, that was all.

The curse of Studio B began in 1936, during a January blizzard, when a young disc jockey named Price Waterman, who emceed
Afternoon Ballroom
in Studio B, had to read school closings and road reports for two hours and ran out of water. His mouth got dry and his big meaty voice became a whisper and he couldn't get his breath. He talked without breathing for as long as possible and blacked out and when he came to, his voice was gone. He gargled and rinsed, he tried hot packs and cold, he rubbed his throat with goose grease, he dosed himself with hot gin and Moxie, with chili peppers, with birchbark tea, but his voice didn't come back. He could only hum or make a soft strangling sound like a pigeon. So he had to get a job. Through an uncle in the potato business, he found employment as a sorter in a warehouse in Minot, culling wounded spuds from a conveyor chute, and was killed in August, crushed in a massive potato slide when a truck gate opened and he was unable to cry out and warn the driver.

It was felt by his old colleagues that the ghost of Price stood behind the drapes of Studio B, restless, shifting from foot to foot, clearing its ghostly throat, waiting for The Last Sign-off. Shadows moved in the velvet folds when Price was stirring. Newscasts troubled him, so did drama shows, but he seemed calmer when musicians were around. On Saturday nights, the
Old WLT Barn Dance
broadcast from the Star of the North Ballroom one floor below, on a stage festooned with pine log posts and a big red barn backdrop anchored with hay bales, and the
Barn Dance
announcer, George Akers (Old Iron Pants), liked to slip up to B with a couple of the Buckle Busters and enjoy a bump of bourbon and a few hands of Between the Sheets during the gospel portion of the program.

He and the boys would play for ten minutes, jump up and leave the cards on the table and run down for a station break (“Thank you so much, Shepherd Boys! More Barn Dance coming up—this is WLT, your Friendly Neighbor Station, seven-seventy ay-em, studios at the Hotel Ogden, Minneapolis”) and then return to the game upstairs.

One Saturday night, George returned to find his handful of aces gone—disappeared!—and in its place a variety of less meaningful cards. “Boys,” he said, “the days of radio are numbered. Old Price is trying to tell us.”

The boys laughed. Radio? In decline? This was 1937. When you were in radio, you owned the world. Men moved aside for you, beautiful women smiled up at you, doors opened, and as you slipped through, you heard people whisper your name.

“We're on the way out,” said George. “We're going to go the way of the Ubangis. We're going to walk in the moccasins of the Sioux Indians. It's the last roundup, boys. We're sitting pretty now but it'll soon be over.”

The boys gathered up the cards and redealt. Old Iron Pants got a pair of twos, a jack, a six, and a three.

“Yes, the handwriting is on the wall, boys. Fate has us in its cross-hairs. The iceberg is dead ahead. It won't be long now. The little bastard has our name in his hand.”

“What's gonna take the place of radio, you figure?” asked Doc, the banjo player, playing his royal flush.

Old Iron Pants laid down his cards. “They will invent something,” he said. “It'll have the same effect as bourbon but it won't give you headaches or upset the stomach, so it'll be used even by the kiddos. It'll earn gazillions. And boys, they are not going to deal us in on that hand.”

Doc picked up the dimes. “Where'd you ever get such a load of B.S.?”

“Doc, I got it from old Price himself, and it's the level truth. Ain't that right, Price?” The boys looked up, and the drapes trembled.

In the salad days of the Ogden, before WLT moved in, B had been the Longue des Artistes, a ritzy little bar where, in 1910, the insurance playboy Howell Helmsdorf drank gin fizzes with his mistress Donna Donaldson. One night her husband strode in, a derringer in his trembling hand, and shot Howell in the ear and hauled the weeping woman home. She went on to found the Poets League of Minneapolis and the Well Baby Clinic and the Finding Society, and Howell, his ear shot off, went to Texas and was never seen again, except perhaps by people in Texas. The Longue featured luxurious frescoes of naked goddesses twined in misty wreaths of celestial bombazine—the walls later were covered over with green wallpaper, until one day an announcer peeled off a swipe of paper and revealed a woman's face, and other announcers in their spare time undressed her of wallpaper down to her waist and then to her golden thighs. They named her Donna LaDonna. She was serenely beautiful, on the west wall, behind the announcer chair. Turn around and there she lay, eyes averted, smiling faintly, inviting you to dip down into life's beautiful essence. It was considered good luck to pat her on the privates.

On October 14, 1937, Vince Upton did his
Story Hour with Grandpa Sam
in B, when C was closed for repairs after somebody punched out part of the wall. He plopped down in the “old porch chair” and read off the names of the Happy Birthday club and picked the lucky winner of an all-day trip to Excelsior Amusement Park and said, “Well, you young whippersnappers, how about you gather round for a good old-fashioned yarn?” and picked up his script and began to read. It didn't take him ten seconds to realize that he was in trouble. He had glanced at the script minutes before, and it looked okay, but now, instead of riding away to the Pecos to locate Sally and Skipper, Cowboy Chuck poured himself a stiff drink of—Vince made it root beer—and spat on the barroom floor and muttered, “I come from St. Paul, Minnesota, a city full of angry maudlin Irishmen and flabby chinless men with limp moustaches waving their shrivelled dicks at the cruel blue sky—and as soon as I was lucky enough to get in trouble there, I left town and started to see what life was all about,” though of course Vince left off the part about penises. “Well, Cowboy Chuck is sure upset, isn't he,” Vince ad-libbed, waving to the empty control room. He pointed toward the turntable up beyond the big control room window, made circular motions, gave the
cut
sign, but nothing happened. Where was Gene?

He swallowed hard and plowed forward. From St. Paul, Cowboy Chuck had earned vast wealth in the whiskey trade in Chicago and moved in with a dark Paraguayan beauty named Pabletta, whose breasts were pale and small and shivered at the thrill of his touch. Slowly, his voice shaking with the effort, Vince picked his way through the story, glancing ahead as he read and skirting most of the worst parts, but some things he didn't catch until he already had said them—“I slipped my pistol into her hot throbbing love nest”—and suddenly there were naked bodies slipping around in the sheets moaning and pounding the mattress and he had to edit on the run, condense, mumble, beat his way out of the underbrush, and toss in an occasional “Of course, I knew I should not have done this,” or “Something told me that someday I would be punished for that.” Vince was a script man: the thought of speaking impromptu made him feel faint. Nonetheless, when Cowboy Chuck and Pabletta went swimming and Chuck stripped off the paper-thin white cotton shirt in which her taut nipples protruded like accusing fingers, Vince had to put down the script and improvise his way to shore. Cowboy Chuck ran out of the lake and put on his pants and rode to town and found a church. His mother was there, on her knees, scrubbing the floor. He knelt down and begged her forgiveness. He denounced the evil influence of modern novels. Word came, via a boy who rode up on his bicycle, that Pabletta had died beneath the wheels of a truck. Chuck called on all listeners, especially the kiddos, to obey their parents and attend church regularly, and then the big hand approached twelve, and the announcer said, “That's all for today. Be sure to join Grandpa Sam tomorrow at the same time for another exciting story.” And it was over. Vince turned and glared at Donna LaDonna. “You're supposed to be lucky,” he said, “and you're no different from all the others.”

R
ay Soderbjerg, President of WLT, offered $50 for information leading to the author of Cowboy Chuck, and though he had no solid leads, he first suspected his younger brother, Roy, because Roy was mad at him. But Roy had been in Moorhead, on his farm, cutting alfalfa that week. Besides, the Cowboy Chuck script used sophisticated terms like
quim
and
rooty
and
pearl dive
and
the man in the boat
and
flushing the quail
and
table grade
and
plush run
and
bazoongies
and
zazzle
, words that Ray didn't think Roy had ever heard. Roy was an engineer, a deep thinker, not a quail flusher; his greatest pleasure in life, he himself had said, was the invention of an icebox so efficient it ran on one block per month. He was long and gangly, with big red wrists and thin sandy hair and wingflap ears and a large google in his throat, and he walked with a noticeable boing-boing gait and his breath was enough to stun a monkey. He was no pearl diver.

Ray was the diver. He was a looker, handsome in a beefy way, smelling of
eau de lavande
and a heliotrope pomade, with a nice head of hair and dark, Charles Boyer eyes, a natty dresser who was made for the blue pinstripe suit and the red bow tie, and though built like a fireplug he had the nimble feet of a man who could find his way around a dance floor. Ray knew a number of friendly girls around town and in St. Paul and Duluth and a beauty named Mavis Feezer in Brainerd for when he went fishing and Sophie Sosnowski in Bemidji for deer-hunting season, also a Chippewa lady
outside
Bemidji named Bear Thighs. He didn't brag about his amours, being married to a fine woman, Vesta, but thanks to the mirrors in the Hotel Ogden coffee shop, which bounced entire conversations word for word to select spots, people at WLT were wise to him. Ray always came in at twelve-thirty for lunch and sat in the far corner, and the far corner could be heard perfectly by anyone sitting on one of the first six stools at the counter. That was where WLT people liked to sit and eat their sandwiches and hear him tell his nephew, Roy Jr., about women. Roy Jr. was the General Manager. He looked like his dad. He sat chewing, throat bobbing, not a word of moral admonition, just paying attention. “Holy cow, that Alma, she peeled me like a banana and threw me in the tub and we did it underwater and then in bed with her jumping around on me, dripping wet, barking like a golden retriever—holy cow, she was going to town like it was gym class. I still have marks on my chest,” Ray said in a low voice, and along the counter, Reed Seymour and Leo and Gene and Art Finn sat chewing quietly, listening.
Alma. Alma Melting of
The Excelsior Bakery Show.
She certainly didn't
look
like that kind of woman, the kind who would bark.