This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Friday Kick off the Winter Olympics in style with the opening ceremony from Italy featuring a special performance by Mariah Carey. Celebrate the greatest athletes from around the globe as they come together to go for gold. Let's see our sensational!
The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics. William Maloney, redefining the sport. Friday at 8 Eastern 7 Central on NBC and Peacock. Hello, Malcolm Glaudwell here. We're here in New York City with T-Mobile for Business recording another episode of Revisionist History about how 5G network slicing strengthens trust and connections across worldwide industries.
Slicing can be used for so many different things. We're here with our friends from CNN, from Siemens Energy. The ways that it can be used, frankly, are limitless and are really, really built to think through how can T-Mobile understand the pain points that our customers have, smash those pain points, and help you deliver very specific options. Are you looking for entertainment that lifts you up? Then check out Upt Faith and Family, the leading streaming service for inspiring, hope-filled shows and movies.
This season streams soul-stirring favorites like Southern Gospel, plus four full seasons of Jesus Calling, and the uplifting new faith series These Stones. Or settle in with 19 seasons of the beloved family series Heartland, a family favorite ranch drama fans can't get enough of. It's commercial free. Stream anywhere. To get a free trial today, go to upfaithandfamily.com slash iHeart.
Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500.
Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing.
Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, the story of a truly iconic name in American broadcasting and a personal hero of mine. And we're talking about Paul Harvey. Here to tell the story is Stephen Mansfield, author of Paul Harvey's America.
Now let's get into it, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story. The breadth of the history that he interacted with is one of the pillars of greatness of Paul Harvey's life. He's born in 1918. That's the year World War I ended. He doesn't die until 2009 at the age of 90.
Think about the fact that he was on the air almost every day from 1945 until the end of his life. He would have talked about, and this was a major part of his Rise, would have talked about the returning GIs and their need to get jobs. He would have talked about the rise of communism and the Whitaker Chambers case. During the Vietnam era, he would have commented daily on the Milai massacre, on the Vietnam War, on every presidential campaign. He was on the air and gave beautiful monologues around the time of the Kennedy assassination, with riots, with the rise of the civil rights movement, and certainly with Watergate.
He was commenting every day, comforting the country, chastising the evildoers every single day for almost 70 years of American history and a time of great change in upheaval. Paul Harvey is commenting on everything from technology to politics to trends to religious themes. And again, think about this: every single day. This was just what people looked to Paul Harvey to do. And, you know, he was opinionated, just like the old man sitting in the town square giving his opinions and whittling and smoking.
his pipe. You know, he wasn't big on hippies. He was a conservative, so he used language like hippies and long hairs and beatniks and what have you. But people looked to him for that. He really was, many people said, the soul of America on the air.
But you have to understand his roots in order to understand the impact he was attempting to have upon the American people. Paul Harvey's upbringing is really a typical small-town America, even though he lived in Tulsa, which we now think of as a bigger, prosperous city, but at that time still had dirt streets. And Oklahoma had only been a state about a decade. He lived close to the earth. There were Native Americans walking the streets of Tulsa.
as Paul Harvey grew up. He lived in a rural farm, oil, petroleum world that was about grit and about your muscle and about your immediate life. And he listened to the older ones as they talked about the things of life. And it was love and marriage and what's being served for dinner and, you know, when mother died and all those kinds of good, rural, almost southern type stories. And he found all of them to be of significance.
They reflected character, they reflected values, they reflected nobility, they reflected the tragedies and the sadnesses of life. He didn't find meaning only in what the queen was doing that day. And Paul Harvey was a man deeply affected by the Christian faith, grew up in it, stayed in it all of his life. One of the things he was known for, which was very unusual in his time, is that he often quoted scripture.
Now, he didn't do it in a preachy way. He didn't do it heading towards an offering or after a hymn, but he did it in such a way as to apply Christian Truth and the Nobility of the King James Bible. to our society. And it didn't sound weird, it didn't sound hackneyed, it didn't sound like an overreach when he did it.
So he was a man of faith. He spoke about his faith. He spoke about praying for people openly and talked about churches like they were just part of life at a time when, especially when you hit the 60s, we're in a counterculture here. We're in a decline of Christian influence to some degree. The Christian faith is being attacked.
He didn't buy into it. But he was born on September 4th, 1918. Again, that was the year that World War I ended. In fact, Armistice Day was just another month or two after he was born that year. His father was a policeman.
His mother was a homemaker. good people, literate, deeply moral, committed to church.
So he would have lived in the home of a law enforcement officer. He would have lived in the home of people who talked about the world around the table. But there was a tragedy that occurred. Early in Paul's life, that really I think shaped everything he did afterwards. Exactly a week before Christmas in 1921, his father, a policeman, after finishing his day of service, went rabbit hunting with a friend.
Later in the evening, it was cold. as they were coming back from the hunt. They saw a car pulled off to the side of a country road. They assumed it was in trouble, that it had broken down, that somebody was in need on that cold Tulsa night. And so these two men pulled over to see what was needed.
As soon as they pulled up, even with the car, they saw that there were four men in it. The windows came down, and shotguns came out of the windows. These were criminals, these were men who had just been robbing people, and those shotguns fired into Officer Arat's. car. That was Paul Harvey's original last name, Arant.
And Paul Harvey's father was mortally wounded. He didn't die for another 48 hours, but he did die and of pretty ghastly wounds.
Well, Paul was only three, but he... Without question, was of course impacted by this death, the grief that filled the house. This was at a time when the community would have pulled together, not just because Paul's father was a policeman, but also because he was.
So respected in his part of Tulsa.
So, Paul Harvey grew up with this legendary father. Murdered by the side of the road a week before Christmas. And one of the reasons I think he was able to get in touch with the dark side, the pain, the tragedy of life is that he spent Christmases, and especially that first Christmas when he was three, with an empty house, so to speak, a father missing, a mother in tears. Everything in his youth was diminished by the tragic and needless, cruel murder of his father. And you're listening to Stephen Mansfield tell the story of Paul Harvey and what a story he's telling.
70 years. It's a kind of voice. and soul of America. One man, one typewriter. One microphone.
Speaking into just about every triumph and tragedy in our nation's history in the 20th century, or at least most of it. When we come back, more of this remarkable story filled with personal tragedy, as you just heard. Here. on our American stories. Lee Habib here, and I'm inviting you to help Our American Stories celebrate this country's 250th birthday coming soon.
If you want to help inspire countless others to love America like we do, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to ouramericanstories.com and click the donate button. Any amount helps. Go to ouramericanstories.com and give. Friday.
Kick off the Winter Olympics in style with the opening ceremony from Italy featuring a special performance by Mariah Carey. Celebrate the greatest athletes from around the globe as they come together to go for gold. Let's get on sensational! The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics. William Maloney, redefining the sport.
Friday at 8 Eastern 7 Central on NBC and Peacock. Are you a fraud-paying American? It's a fact that one in four honest, hardworking, tax-paying Americans has been a victim of identity theft. With LifeLock identity theft protection though, if your identity is stolen, they fix it, guaranteed, and get you your money back. Last year, the IRS flagged over $16 billion in refunds for identity fraud.
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Visit lifelock.com slash iHeart and save up to 40% your first year. That's 40% off at lifelock.com slash iHeart. Terms apply. Are you looking for entertainment that lifts you up? Then check out Upt Faith and Family, the leading streaming service for inspiring, hope-filled shows and movies.
This season streams soul-stirring favorites like Southern Gospel, plus four full seasons of Jesus Calling, and the uplifting new faith series These Stones. Or settle in with 19 seasons of the beloved family series Heartland, a family favorite ranch drama fans can't get enough of. It's commercial free. Stream anywhere. Get a free trial today, go to upfaithandfamily.com slash iHeart.
Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500.
Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing.
Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice.
Complete disclosures available at public.com slash. disclosures. And we continue with our American stories and the story of broadcast legend Paul Harvey. When we last left off, Paul Harvey's father, a police officer in Tulsa, had been shot and killed. A week before Christmas.
when Harvey was three years old. Let's continue with this story here again is Stephen Mansfield. I think that young boys who lose their fathers search the pages of history for father figures. Hycologists tell us this is true. This may have fed into why Paul Harvey was such a student of history, later did the rest of the story broadcasts talking about American heroes and telling tales of nobility that people did not know.
Um A fatherless boy found perhaps in the nation and its leaders and its fathers and its great heroes a bit of father figures that filled his soul. And so he would speak of a Lincoln or he would speak of a Thomas Alva Edison or he would speak of a George Washington almost as though he was a father figure to young Paul Harvey. And I think also it's what sent him to literature, it's what made him love words. It's what made him love communicating. He was building in his life community and fatherhood and connection that wasn't there as naturally as it might have been had his father lived and made him a man given to a bit of hero worship.
He respected those in uniform. He respected those who fought for the nation. Paul did become, through his career, really a voice for law enforcement. Yeah, I think. A policeman Is a composite of what all men are, I guess, a mingling of saint and sinner.
Dust and deity. Called statistics, wave the fan over stinkers. Underscore instances of dishonesty and brutality because they are news. What that really means is that they are exceptional, they are unusual, they are not commonplace. Buried under the froth is the fact.
Now it's interesting, he wasn't blind. He knew they were people of low character in uniform. He knew they were people who abused their office, their position, their power, the trust. And he spoke about that often. This is one of the myths about him.
He wasn't just blindly pro-military, blindly pro-police. He knew that people of low character could occupy those uniforms and those positions. And he castigated them in his broadcast. The fact is that less than one-half of 1% of policemen misfit that uniform, and that is a better average. Than you'd find among clergymen.
He was, while other news broadcasters were trying to be objective and maybe trying to build audiences by talking about the negatives, he didn't hesitate to advocate. He would describe the life of a policeman. He would describe the sacrifice. He would describe the low pay. He would describe the dangers.
And law enforcement revered him, not just because he was their advocate, but he brought understanding of their lives to the American people at a time when there were some calling policemen pigs and gunning for them, assassinating them. What is a policeman? He of all men is at once the most needed And the most wanted. A strangely nameless creature who is sir to his face and pig or worse behind his back. He must be such a diplomat that he can settle differences between individuals so that each will think he won, but.
If a policeman is neat, he's conceited. If he's careless, he's a bum. If he's pleasant, he's a flirt. If he's not, he's a grouch. He must make instant decisions which would require months for a lawyer, but.
If he hurries, he's careless. If he's deliberate, he's lazy. He must be first to an accident, infallible with the diagnosis. He must be able to start breathing, stop bleeding, tie splints, and above all, be sure the victim goes home without a limp. or expect to be sued.
The police officer must know every gun, draw on the run, and hit. where it doesn't hurt. He must be able to whip two men twice his size and half his age without damaging his uniform and without being brutal. If you hit him, he's a coward. If he hits you, he's a bully.
A policeman must know everything. and not tell. He must know where all of the sin is. and not partake. Uh He would describe the sacrifice.
He would describe the low pay. He would describe the dangers. And of course, he knew this because he had them recounted to him constantly by his mother, though he couldn't have known much about his father from first-hand contact. If I were the devil. If I were the devil.
If I were the Prince of Darkness, I'd want to engulf the whole world in darkness. and I'd have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I wouldn't be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree. The Fucking bad. The Tulsa race riot of 1921 is profound in Paul Harvey's thinking, and it shapes him in a couple of different ways. First of all, let's just remember that the Tulsa Race Riot was a horrible moment.
Black Wall Street was completely wiped out in Tulsa. This was one of the most successful black communities in the country. It had all begun because a girl on an elevator accused a black young man of molesting her. That's largely been proven untrue since. And so a riot broke out.
Many, many were killed. It may have been as much as 3,000 African Americans were killed. We don't know for sure. And by the way, it's one of the few times that bombs were dropped from airplanes on American civilians. We now know that whites who own planes went up in those planes and dropped flaming tar balls onto the black community.
It was horrible.
Now, Paul Harvey was only three when this happened, but he grew up in the wake of it. And yet, it was woven into his understanding and his worldview at the same time as a love for America was being woven into his soul. This created one of his gifts, which was an ability to see the deformities and the warts on the American soul as being just that. A good country. A country well-intentioned, a country with high ideals, and yet one in which communities, people, sometimes people in uniform, certainly people in high office, could fall far below the high call, as he called it.
Could live beneath their values, could live beneath their founding principles. And this, I think, became a guide for Americans. You know, when the news is filled all with bad things, even just for an evening, Americans can conclude, you know, our country's falling apart. It's an experiment that didn't work. But Paul Harvey would say, wait a minute now, we've done these things, we've done these good things, let's remember who we are, let's remember our great stories, let's remember our high founding values.
And just because some racists do dastardly things in Tulsa in 1921 doesn't mean that America is abolished or America is a lie or that this ought to be, this is something that's going to pervade the country. And that perspective was unique at a time when you had the rise of American media, you had tightly competitive journalism, and reporters often went to the dark side. They often reported the bad news first. You know, if it bleeds, it leads kind of attitude. And as a result, there was a flood.
Of negative about America, about Americans, about what was going on in the world.
So all of this shaped him profoundly. And when you set all of that into a still rural Tulsas kind of context, you really start to come close to understanding Paul Harvey. Um If we're going to look at Paul Harvey as sort of a motivational story for the young, we need to know that he essentially was taken to his first job in radio by a school teacher. There was a school teacher who heard him speak, liked him, liked the timbre of his voice, liked his passion and his zeal. And so as an early teenager, Paul went and served at a radio station there in Tulsa, basically cleaning up, basically sweeping, working nights, working without pay, by the way.
But she had said to him, I think you may have a career in broadcasting. Get close to it, get in the culture, understand it, study it.
So he began working at KVOO first just as an unpaid 14-year-old janitor. And you've been listening to Stephen Mansfield tell one heck of a story. and periodically We hear from Harvey himself. In that combination of triumphalism and tragedy, deeply born out of his experience with tragedy and triumph. It infuses everything.
and he has that rare sensitivity to understand the wounds of life. The grief of life but that otherworldly part of him that rises above it. and finds the hope and the love. This internal paradox indeed is what made Harvey special. The story of Paul Harvey continues here.
on our American stories. Friday Kick off the Winter Olympics in style with the opening ceremony from Italy featuring a special performance by Mariah Carey. Celebrate the greatest athletes from around the globe as they come together to go for gold. Let's see what's sensational! The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.
Finding the Sport Merg at 8 Eastern 7 Central on NBC and Peacock. Are you looking for entertainment that lifts you up? Then check out Up Faith and Family, the leading streaming service for inspiring, hope-filled shows and movies. This season, stream soul-stirring favorites like Southern Gospel, plus four full seasons of Jesus Calling, and the uplifting new faith series These Stones. Or settle in with 19 seasons of the beloved family series Heartland, a family favorite ranch drama fans can't get enough of.
It's commercial free. Stream anywhere. Get a free trial today. Go to upfaithandfamily.com/slash iHeart. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously.
On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks.
Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc.
member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash.
Disclosures. This Sunday, iHeartRadio brings you live to Levi Stadium in Santa Clara for the Super Bowl 60 Tailgate Concert. Presented by NetApp, it's the ultimate pregame party, featuring an exclusive performance from Teddy Swims. Seven free. Your front row experience will be on iHeartRadio stations across the country.
And the free iHeartRadio app is Sunday at 3:30 Eastern, 12:30 Pacific. Then, after the concert, tune in to the Super Bowl 60 pregame show on NBC. And we continue with our American stories and the story of Paul Harvey. When we last left off, Paul Harvey had started his career in broadcasting. on the advice of a teacher.
sweeping floors at a local radio station, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Let's continue with this story. Here again is Stephen Mansfield, author. of Paul Harvey's America.
So he began working at KVOO first just as an unpaid 14-year-old janitor. And in time, he began to learn the lore. They began to let him read commercials and do the news from time to time, just emulating what he'd already heard. But he was beginning to rise. He was beginning to use his gifts.
They even let him write a few stories about some things that he knew a bit more about than the other reporters. And so by being willing to serve, being willing to work hard, being willing to work after hours late into the night, he began to master the culture of radio and eventually master his craft. Americans preachers tell me that there is no sermon Which is looked forward to with less enthusiasm than a sermon about sin.
Well, that's probably true. If we're talking about a secular sermon on the subject of hard work, There is no gospel less popular than the gospel of hard work. The pregnant skyline of America was set in place one brick at a time.
Now that represents a lot of calluses. Americans are beautiful. Is not an accomplished fact guaranteed to remain intact. God shed his grace on thee, to be sure, but. This was wasteland when God had it to himself.
He handed man a hoe and said, You want another Eden? All right, earn it. I personally have always taken that as a great inspiration story because sometimes I know certainly in my life, I might not have been willing at the age of 14 or 15 just to simply serve in a business or around a culture that I would want to learn. But I think Paul Harvey had a sense that if he got in there, And he worked and he listened and he learned and he stayed alert that the predictions of his teacher Isabel Ronin, who had sent him to this job, actually taken him to this first radio job, would come true, that one day he could rise and do significant things in broadcasting. But I think we need to remember it was all because of a public school teacher and a boy who was willing to serve in an unpaid role.
Well, Paul Harvey graduates from high school, goes to the University of Tulsa for a short while, but he does not graduate from the University of Tulsa. Radio is just calling. He said often that he fell in love with words and ran off with the radio. That's very much the way it was in his life.
So he began to work at other radio stations. Hello there, this is Jane Whitman. KVOO was a station that was, of course, based in Tulsa, and it was one of Paul Harvey's first jobs. And what's fascinating about this particular station is that there was a valuing of their local context. There was a valuing of their local culture.
They would report local news, have local commentary. They didn't just bring the news from the East. They didn't just parody or repeat blindly what came out of New York. In fact, a story from Paul Harvey's life a little bit later will help in illustrating this. Later in Paul Harvey's broadcast life, he was clearly emulating the broadcasters from the East that he knew, Eastern reporters.
And a station manager came to him and said, Look, As long as you're emulating everybody else, you'll always be only second best. The only way you can be the best is by being yourself.
Well, that transformed Paul Harvey's broadcast, that transformed his style, and he had a sister-in-law who was a farm wife. And her name was Betty. And so during his career, he had decided to measure everything he broadcasted according to the Betty test. The question was, would this mean something to Betty? Would it impact her?
Would it be of interest to her? Would it ennoble her in some way? And so he constantly thought about his sister-in-law, Betty, who was a Missouri farm wife.
Well, I think that that helped him not only have respect for his audience, high and low, wherever they were in America and around the world, but also to frame his comments in a way they would appreciate. He would drain out technical language. He would drain out the political arcania of what was happening in Washington, D.C. And he would just speak in the way you would to a Missouri farm wife if you ran onto her at the local store. That appealed to people.
They were living in a complex world. They were living in an increasingly bureaucratic world. Knowledge was increasing rapidly. Media was bringing everything in the universe right to their door. But Paul Harvey spoke in simple, moral, accurate terms that also filtered out what wouldn't be interesting to Betty, he genuinely found interest in the common.
He thought that what was going on with Farmer Jones in Iowa was important. The moral decision that Farmer Jones had made, the barbershop quartet he had started, the way he tried new crops.
Sometimes he would go dark and say, Farmer Jones is a farmer no more. And he would describe what shut down the family farm in Iowa for the Jones family. In other words, he didn't just infuse the common with meaning. He recognized it and drew it out.
So it didn't sound strange that he was moving from a description of a boy raising a deer in Missouri and then switch over to a report about Watergate.
Somehow they seemed to be seemed significant to the human spirit. They seemed significant to America. It all seemed of a piece. And he did that masterfully.
So picture it now. You've got the Betties, his sister-in-law in Missouri, a farm wife, hearing about complex matters in London in very simple terms. But then you've also got the president of the United States hearing about the boy raising the deer on his farm. It fed a new culture, a new understanding of the world into people who didn't daily live in those contexts. and that's exactly how it impacted me.
I really honor Paul Harvey for that. He brought the world you weren't in to your world and brought something of your world to those who didn't know your world. And that was a masterstroke on his part. But I think that was a reflection of the culture of KVOO and some other stations owned by that same network and the group of affiliates because they. believed That they would have a greater impact, build a good audience if they were most authentic.
that their power came from being authentic. And according to their culture, and not just a repeater station for what came from the East. This distinguished them, and it shaped the career of Paul Harvey, a man with one of the most signature styles in American broadcasting, but it came about because of this.
sort of proud, fierce, Oklahoman, Midwest, rural. We are who we are. We're not living on Fifth Avenue in New York and we don't intend to. He often said that he couldn't stay in New York for more than 30 days because if he did, he would begin to believe that the sun set behind the UN building. In other words, that the sun rose and set on New York.
Um And you're listening to Stephen Mansfield tell one heck of a story. What frames Paul Harvey's life is that experience. At that station. that taught him that culture matters. and that it frames a point of view.
And yet Harvey never excluded big cities. He didn't see it as big city versus rural Midwestern America. But he put and never abandoned that framework forward in everything he did unapologetically. Not with a chip on his shoulder. but out of sheer straightforward pride.
The story of his Midwestern values. and where they sprang. And by the way, the values of this show They sprang from a station called WHO. One of our prime stations and one of our most important ones right in Des Moines. And I grew up my entire life.
in northern New Jersey near New York City, but had an attraction. to rural America that I think sprang from Paul Harvey.
Now that I'm listening to this, and from people like Bear Bryant.
So many of the people whose lives I emulated and admired came from this part of the country, these parts of the country. The story of Paul Harvey continues. A broadcasting legend. Here. on our American stories.
Friday Kick off the Winter Olympics in style with the opening ceremony from Italy, featuring a special performance by Mariah Carey. Celebrate the greatest athletes from around the globe as they come together to go for gold. Let's get on sensational! The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics. William Maloney redefining the sport.
Friday at 8 Eastern 7 Central on NBC and Peacock. Are you looking for entertainment that lifts you up? Then check out Upt Faith and Family, the leading streaming service for inspiring, hope-filled shows and movies. This season streams soul-stirring favorites like Southern Gospel, plus four full seasons of Jesus Calling, and the uplifting new faith series, These Stones. Or settle in with 19 seasons of the beloved family series Heartland, a family favorite ranch drama fans can't get enough of.
It's commercial free. Stream anywhere. Get a free trial today. Go to upfaithandfamily.com slash iHeart. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously.
On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks.
Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc.
member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash.
Yeah, yeah. This Sunday, iHeartRadio brings you live to Levi Stadium in Santa Clara for the Super Bowl 60 Tailgate Concert. Presented by NetApp, it's the ultimate pregame party, featuring an exclusive performance from Teddy Swims. Seven free. Your front row experience will be on iHeartRadio stations across the country and the free iHeartRadio app is Sunday at 3:30 Eastern, 12:30 Pacific.
Then, after the concert, tune in to the Super Bowl 60 pregame show on NBC. And we continue with our American stories and the final portion of our story on broadcast legend Paul Harvey. When we last left off, Harvey had developed what he called the Betty test. which distilled the news for those living in America's heartland, rather than the East. It was because of this that Paul Harvey started to rise.
Let's continue with the story here again. is Stephen Mansfield. Those early days prior to World War II, his rise really certainly is God-given talent, but it's working hard, it's studying, it's not assuming that he should be given something. He's laboring, he's laboring in small stations, he's studying the craft and doing it on his own. He hardly ever went to any course that taught broadcasting, he hardly had any formal instruction, but he just learned on the job by paying close attention to what worked, what the station got cards and letters about, what resonated with people, and he built his career on that.
It's interesting that in his career, people sometimes forget, given that he was such a personality, of what an astute and gifted reporter he was. He could watch events, understand what was happening, anticipate what might be coming, describe it powerfully in a way that would make you lean into your radio set and stick with you long after. And he would stay with some stories as long as they lived. Think about how long he would have been reporting Watergate or Vietnam. And people often said that they understood more of what was going on in Vietnam than they did from the briefings of generals on the air, from the speeches of presidents, from the debates in Congress, and from print media.
So it was pretty stunning.
Now, he leaned conservative in his Broadcast and in his politics. He was very concerned about communist influence in America. He was very concerned, quite frankly, about left-leaning professors on American university campuses. One of the things he became concerned about was lack security at some of our nuclear and atomic facilities, at some of our military facilities. This really sent him over the edge because he felt like there might be some communist collusion and undermining.
He felt like people were being lax.
So, in one of the most unusual moments of his life, He decided to see if he could break into the Argonne National Laboratory. This was not far from his home. He had gotten information, as often happens with well-known broadcasters, people bring them information and leak things to them. And he had gotten information that. There was lack of security there, that people were carrying information out, things of that nature.
And as a result, he decided with a couple of friends to break in. It's hard to know in retrospect exactly what prompted this. Only Paul got over the fence. His friends did not. They didn't get over the fence before a jeep of security officials began to arrive.
He was taken into custody. The others ran away. And Paul claimed that. That he had been advised and was working in league with security forces and law enforcement forces. There were probably some truth to that.
He had probably been encouraged, perhaps, by some in Congress. There's no question that some other folks like this knew about what he was planning to do and were encouraging him. And the fact that he got off with no sentence at all, not even a serious hearing, means probably he had some people who were, well, maybe sponsors in Washington, D.C. But it says a lot about Paul Harvey that he so cared about the state of his nation and so cared about lax security at some of our secure facilities that he actually climbed a fence and tried to break into one of the most secure and high-level national research laboratories in the country. It's not something he talked about a great deal later.
I think he was grateful to get by unscathed, but he was trying to do what he considered to be investigative journalism and perhaps make a turn in American history and certainly raise the concern about the influence of communists in our security services. That's really where he was going.
So it's a fascinating episode. It's still a bit of a mystery. People still praise him and criticize him for it, but I think it shows the intensity and the devoted patriotism of Paul Harvey, however misguided this episode might be. But once his managers and producers began to realize that he was most powerful when he was commenting from a personal perspective, bringing his moral grid to the air, slapping the hands of some statesmen, encouraging others, celebrating the humor and the poetry and the glory of it all, that's when he was at his strength. Paul Harvey's numbers were stunning at the time, and you get different estimates for different seasons, but it's not wrong to say that Paul Harvey would average about 35 million listeners.
Uh, to his Paul Harvey news and comment.
Now, you got to realize that's in America during his heyday. That's north of 200 million people. We're in the 300 million now.
So that's 30 million, 35 million adults. in a nation of Arguably the low 200 million. And these are thinking people, these are working people, these are people in DC. This is unbelievably influential and far beyond some of the major evening newscasts and so on that we would still talk about. You know, Walter Cronkite, I don't know exactly what his audience was, but I remember him commenting that he was humorously in competition with Paul Harvey.
So the influence of those two men, Walter Cronkite and Paul Harvey, was huge. He was arguably the most powerful, most influential broadcaster of his age, a man who in his 80s signs a hundred million dollar contract, 10 million a year for 10 years. And he was a brilliant businessman and one of the great spokesmen and voices of commercials in American history. Part of the reason was people knew a couple of things about him. First of all, he used every product that he pitched.
He never spoke of a product that he didn't actually use. For example, I recall from my own listening years that he used a Schwinn Aerodyne bike. That was the stationary bike that had a big air wheel in the front of it. And he used it and he talked about his commercial was talking about losing weight and how he liked it and what he did while he wrote it and what time of day he wrote it and how angels sometimes his wife would use it.
Well, when you've got the most popular broadcaster in America, Speaking of things he's used, the refrigerator, a new way of doing ice cubes, what have you, that's very influential. The other thing is that he wove it into the broadcast almost as though it was part of the broadcast.
Now, people knew it was a commercial, but he would say, While you called your dad? Tell him to tune in. I'll have this for you. On page two. Page 2.
The such-and-such refrigerator is just a miracle of our time. Angel and I use it, and he would go right on. People knew it was a commercial, but it was done in the same Paul Harvey tones. It was personal, and he had a lot of respect for his sponsors. He used to say, I have great respect for those who put their money where my mouth is, meaning they fund my show.
He was known to be unbelievably influential. And of course, they would do studies to see how he would impact sales of a given product. And it was off the charts. And so his sponsorships were record-breaking. But the reason was he would move from the story of the moose in Montana and the funny thing that happened with the hunter and go right into talking about the Schwinn Aerodyne stationary bike.
And people were just as fascinated with the one as they were with the other. And by the way, it wasn't always certain that he would be so esteemed. Remember, again, he broke into a secure laboratory facility trying to poke his finger in the eye a little bit of the national government, which he considered to be lax. He broke from presidents. He said, President Nixon, I love you, but you're wrong.
And it was a huge moment in American broadcasting. He risked, he criticized. It wasn't guaranteed he would always be so beloved. It wasn't guaranteed that official Washington would come to revere him as it did. But Ultimately, he did receive the presidential Medal of Freedom, which is one of the highest honors a civilian can receive in our country.
And I think it was well deserved. I think he had been the voice of America, perhaps even more of a moral influence in America than, for example, Billy Graham. I can tell you quickly that I listened to Paul Harvey when I was a military brat living behind the Iron Curtain in Berlin, Germany. And I would sometimes listen to Paul Harvey with my German friends.
So, my German friends who spoke English, and they had never heard these things. They had no idea that all of their knowledge about America and American history was pretty much distilled through German media and the German education system. And even though Germans honored Americans, certainly for their sacrifices in World War II, etc., it wasn't the heartfelt thing that Paul Harvey brought. And I remember looking at those German young friends and being aware that they were falling in love with America, like I had, through the voice of Paul Harvey. And now you know.
The rest of the story. And a beautiful job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to author Stephen Mansfield, his book, Paul Harvey's America is available wherever you buy your books. And what a story. 70 years on the air every day since 1945, straight to 2009.
And you hurdle straight into the 21st century. There's modern and present a voice. as we've ever known. The Story of Paul Harvey The story of modern American broadcasting. He was the best there ever was.
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It's commercial free. Stream anywhere. To get a free trial today, go to upfaithandfamily.com slash iHeart. This Sunday, iHeartRadio brings you live to Levi Stadium in Santa Clara for the Super Bowl 60 Tailgate Concert presented by NetApp. It's the ultimate pregame party featuring an exclusive performance from Teddy Swims.
Set me free. Your front row experience will be on iHeartRadio stations across the country in the free iHeartRadio app is Sunday at 3:30 Eastern, 12:30 Pacific. Then, after the concert, tune in to the Super Bowl 60 pregame show on NBC. Hey Donald, we're really flying on that treadmill. I'm trying to run as fast as T-Mobile 5G home internet, Zach.
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