MY DAYDREAM OF LATE
I got the e-mail address last week of a guy who syndicates radio shows.
I didn’t go looking for it, it just plopped in my lap. He kind of came looking for me.
More accurately, he came looking for somebody like me.
Namely, somebody who was free for three hours on Saturday to fill in on a radio show. I was free and I filled in and it was a good experience and in our exchange of leave-taking e-mails I made my pitch.
Like everyone who has this man’s e-mail address, I said I’d like to do a syndicated show. He wrote back to me, as I guess he writes back to everyone, that it was something to think about it.
And I have been doing just that.
I have been thinking about it.
More specifically, I have been thinking about Ernie Pyle. Because it was Ernie Pyle whose idea I was ripping off for the syndicated radio show.
The few people who remember Ernie Pyle today remember him for his daily newspaper columns during World War II. He wrote the war. He slogged through the sands and the hedgerows and the horrors and he told the folks back home about their boys at the front.
In a way the imbedded pretenders of today could never approach, he told the American story, about the moral transformation of men in combat and the love and strength that give honor to the uniform of the United States.
Ernie Pyle has been my hero for 25 years.
For years I presumed that fate would eventually take me where he went, but as the war of my generation has raged in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have not written about its face, I have shamefully watched it on TV an ocean and a couple of continents away.
Ernie Pyle was killed almost 80 years to the day after Abraham Lincoln was killed.
Both were shot in the head.
But it’s not the wartime Ernie Pyle my imagination is stealing from.
In the handful of years before the war, Ernie Pyle wrote a daily column for Scripps-Howard. His assignment was simple: There’s America, go write about it.
And so, with a car and a typewriter and an ever-present cigarette, Ernie Pyle hit the road. From town to town he went, sometimes staying an hour or overnight, other times a whole week. And each day the topic was the place. Who did he meet, what did he see, how did he feel.
Sometimes it was the sandwich at the diner he stopped in, other times it was a farmer he saw working in his field, or the biggest factory or prettiest girl or whatever else it was that made that particular place on that particular day noteworthy and memorable. He lived, he wrote, America read. It was pretty straightforward.
Folks picked up their paper and learned where Ernie had been yesterday and what he had seen and what he had felt.
Some days the depression got him so bad that he stayed in an anonymous hotel or boarding house with a bottle and a sheaf of paper and that was the column. Some days he looked at the stunning goodness of the American heart or the awe-inspiring grandeur of the American landscape and wrote words that matched the greatness he saw.
There really aren’t any newspaper syndicates anymore, and people don’t read newspaper columnists, and I’m never going to get Ernie Pyle’s job.
But the other day with the radio man’s e-mail on my screen and the keyboard in front of me I borrowed the idea and changed the medium and pitched a radio show.
The one he’s going to think about and I’m going to daydream about.
You cobble together a string of affiliates, probably small towns and medium cities, places whose names you only barely recognize and where they grow crops and good people, and you go from one to the next. A week here, a couple of days there, taking the show to the place and the place to the show.
A visit to America and the American heart.
A series of new studios and towns, a voyage of discovery. A talk show with a window that looks out on something other than a skyscraper in New York or a strip-mall in Florida.
Syndicated radio works on the assumption that the host’s location is irrelevant and should be ignored. This would assume something different and offer something more.
At least in my mind.
Because that’s the only place it’s going to happen.
I’m no Ernie Pyle.
But sometimes I look at a map of this country of ours and I remember where I’ve been and wonder about where I haven’t. It’s odd to love something you don’t fully know, and it leaves you with a curiosity and a hunger.
I think Ernie felt that.
I do, too.
And I’m not the only one.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2010
