Paul Harvey, who captivated millions of American listeners for nearly six decades with his homespun radio news reports and conservative commentaries, delivered nationally on weekdays in a stentorian staccato, died on Saturday at the Mayo Clinic Hospital near his winter home in Phoenix. He was 90.
Mr. Harvey, who lived in the Chicago suburb of River Forest, died with his family at his side, Louis Adams, an ABC Radio Networks spokesman, told The Associated Press. No cause was given.
Mr. Harvey, who joined ABC in 1951, was forced to suspend his broadcasts for several months in 2001 by a virus that weakened a vocal cord, but he returned to his Chicago studio and remained on the air until recently.
In his heyday, which lasted from the 1950s through the 1990s, Mr. Harvey’s twice-daily soapbox-on-the-air was one of the most popular programs on radio. Audiences of as many as 22 million people tuned in on 1,300 stations to a voice that had been an American institution for as long as most of them could remember.
Like Walter Winchell and Gabriel Heatter before him, he personalized the radio news with his right-wing opinions, but laced them with his own trademarks: a hypnotic timbre, extended pauses for effect, heart-warming tales of average Americans and folksy observations that evoked the heartland, family values and the old-fashioned plain talk one heard around the dinner table on Sunday.
“Hello, Americans,” he barked. “This is Paul Harvey! Stand byyy for Newwws!”
He railed against welfare cheats and defended the death penalty. He worried about the national debt, big government, bureaucrats who lacked common sense, permissive parents, leftist radicals and America succumbing to moral decay. He championed rugged individualism, love of God and country, and the fundamental decency of ordinary people.
“You can almost hear the amber waves of grain,” the comedian Danny Thomas told him.
Mr. Harvey was unapologetic. “I have never pretended to objectivity,” he once said. “I have a strong point of view, and I share it with my listeners. I have no illusions about changing the world, but to the extent that I can I’d like to shelter your and my little corner of it.”
He loved human-interest stories, and the one-liners he tacked on to them. “Nudists in Lakeland, Florida, are upset that outsiders are sneaking a peek through a hole in their fence,” he intoned. “The police promise to look into it.”
Or: “A man called the I.R.S. and asked if birth control pills could be deducted. The I.R.S. worker, not missing a beat, came back and said, ‘Only if they don’t work.’ ”
Or: “White House occupants come and go. They are just like diapers. They should be changed often, and for the same reasons.”
In a format virtually unchanged over the years, his style was stop-and-go, with superb pacing and silences that rivaled Jack Benny’s. He spoke directly to the listener, with punchy sentences, occasional exclamations of “Good heavens!” or “Oh, my goodness!” and pauses that squeezed out the last drop of suspense: the radio broadcaster’s equivalent of the raised eyebrow or the knowing grin.
He was a wordsmith, too, banging scripts out on a typewriter, and rightly or wrongly was credited with inventing the terms “Reaganomics,” “skyjackers,” and “guesstimate.” Listeners came to expect stock cues: “Stay tuned for the rest of the story,” and “May I have your undivided attention for just a moment.”
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