Paul Harvey Aurandt (born September 4, 1918), better known as Paul Harvey, is an American radio broadcaster for the ABC Radio Networks. He broadcasts News and Comment on weekday mornings and mid-days, and at noon on Saturdays, as well as his famous The Rest of the Story segments. His listening audience is estimated at 22 million people a week. Harvey likes to say he was raised in radio newsrooms.
The most noticeable features of Harvey's idiosyncratic delivery are his dramatic pauses, quirky intonations and his folksiness. A large part of his success stems from the seamlessness with which he segues from his monologue into reading commercial messages. He explains his enthusiastic support of his sponsors as such: "I am fiercely loyal to those willing to put their money where my mouth is."
Harvey is the second-oldest syndicated radio personality in America; the oldest is George Putnam. Harvey and Putnam are among the very few remaining radio announcers who are older than the medium itself.
Paul Harvey, born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, made radio receivers as a boy. In 1933, at a high school teacher’s suggestion, he started working at KVOO in Tulsa, where he helped clean up and eventually was allowed to fill in on the air, reading commercials and news.
Later, while attending the University of Tulsa, he continued working at KVOO as an announcer, and later as a program director. Harvey spent three years as a station manager for a local station in Salina, Kansas. From there, he moved to a newscasting job at KOMA-AM in Oklahoma City, then moved on to KXOK, in St. Louis, where he was Director of Special Events and also worked as a roving reporter.
In 1940, Harvey moved to Hawaii to cover the United States Navy as it concentrated its fleet in the Pacific. He was returning to the mainland from assignment in Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Harvey served briefly as an enlisted man in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II from December 1943 until March 1944. He was given a Section 8 discharge for mental illness after admitting to stealing an airplane.
After leaving military service, Harvey moved to Chicago, where in June 1944, he began broadcasting from the ABC affiliate WENR. He quickly became the most popular newscaster in Chicago. In 1945, he began hosting the postwar employment program Jobs for G.I. Joe on WENR. Harvey added The Rest of the Story as a tagline to in-depth feature stories in 1946. The spots became their own series in 1976. On April 1, 1951 the ABC Radio Network debuted Paul Harvey News and Comment "Commentary and analysis of Paul Harvey each weekday at 12 Noon". Paul Harvey was also heard originally on Sundays. The first Sunday program, was Mr. Harvey's introduction on April 1st. Later the Sunday program would move to Saturdays. The program has continued ever since.
From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, there was a televised, five-minute editorial by Paul Harvey that local stations could insert into their local news programs, or show separately. On May 10, 1976, ABC Radio Networks premiered The Rest of the Story as a separate series which provided endless surprises as Harvey dug into stories behind the stories of famous events and people. Harvey's son, a concert pianist, created and produced the series. He remains the show's only writer.
In late 2000, Harvey signed a 10-year, $100 million contract with ABC Radio Networks. A few months later, he was off the air after damaging his vocal cords. He returned in late August 2001.
Harvey's News and Comment is streamed on the World Wide Web twice a day. Paul Harvey News has been called the "largest one-man network in the world," as it is carried on 1,200 radio stations, 400 Armed Forces Network stations around the world and 300 newspapers. His broadcasts and newspaper columns have been reprinted in the Congressional Record more than those of any other commentator.
Former Senator Fred Thompson, known for his work on NBC's Law and Order, substituted for Harvey regularly from 2006 to 2007, prior to his unsuccessful run for President. Thompson left the network to run and has not returned. Other substitutes for Harvey have included his son Paul Harvey Jr., Doug Limerick, Paul W. Smith, Gil Gross, Ron Chapman, Mitt Romney, Mike HuckabeeWPLJ New York Morning Host Scott Shannon, and Tony Snow. Harvey has been off the air since February due to pneumonia and returned to voicing commercials and new episodes of The Rest of the Story on April 28, 2008 (he took more time off after the death of his wife but returned May 19); a full-time return to News and Comment has not yet been announced. Harvey did the Saturday News and Comment for the first time since his break on July 19, 2008, and again on Monday, July 21, 2008.
Harvey's on-air persona mirrors that of sportscaster Bill Stern. During the 1940s, the famed Stern's The Colgate Sports Reel and newsreel programs used many of the techniques later used by Harvey, including the style of delivery and the use of phrases such as Reel Two and Reel Three to denote segments of the broadcast — much like Harvey's Page Two and Page Three. The discovery of many of Stern's old programs on transcription discs have led many to believe that much of Harvey's broadcasting style is based on Stern's work, including most notably the Rest of the Story feature, which is a direct parallel to a technique used weekly by Stern. Stern introduced his version of the feature with a caveat that the stories might not be true; Harvey, however, has asserted that his tales have been authenticated. However, a major urban legend debunking site blames Harvey for the creation of various rumors and urban legends.
Harvey is also known for catch phrases that he uses at the beginning of his programs, like "Hello Americans, I'm Paul Harvey. You know what the news is, in a minute, you'll hear the rest of the story." And "Paul Harvey News and Comment, and this is...(Day of the week)." At the end of the program, "Paul Harvey... Good day."
An episode of The Simpsons portrays Homer and Marge listening to a fictional tape of Harvey. He begins "Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Erotic American..."
He has been named Salesman of the Year, Commentator of the Year, Person of the Year, Father of the Year, and American of the Year. He has been elected to the National Association of Broadcasters Radio Hall of Fame and Oklahoma Hall of Fame and appeared on the Gallup poll list of America's most admired men. In addition he has received 11 Freedom Foundation Awards as well as the Horatio Alger Award. Paul Harvey was named to the DeMolay Hall of Fame, a Masonic institution, on June 25, 1993.
In 2005, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' most prestigious civilian award, by President George W. Bush.
On May 18, 2007 he received an honorary degree from Washington University in St. Louis.
In 1921, when Harvey was three years old, his father, Harry Harrison Aurandt, was murdered. Aurandt, born in Martinsburg, Pennsylvania in 1873, was 47 years old at the time and a civilian employee of the Tulsa Police Department. He and a friend – who was a Tulsa police detective – were rabbit hunting while off-duty when approached by four armed men who attempted to rob them. Aurandt was shot and died two days later of his wounds, leaving behind his wife, nee Anna Dagmar Christensen, a daughter aged 12, and his son.
The four robbers were identified by the surviving detective, and arrested the day after Aurandt died. A lynch mob of 1,500 people formed at the jail, but all four were smuggled out, tried, convicted, and received life terms.
In 1940, Harvey married Lynne Harvey (née Cooper) of St. Louis. Lynne Harvey was a member of Phi Beta Kappa at Washington University in St. Louis and was a former schoolteacher. Harvey himself was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha at Culver-Stockton College in Missouri. They met when Harvey was working at KXOK and Cooper came to the station for a school news program. Harvey invited her to dinner, proposed to her after a few minutes of conversation and from then on called her "Angel," even on his radio show. A year later she said yes. The couple moved to Chicago in 1945.
On May 17, 2007, Harvey told his radio audience that Angel had contracted leukemia. Her death, at the age of 92, was announced by ABC radio on May 3, 2008. When she died at their River Forest home, the Chicago Sun-Times described her as, "More than his astute business partner and producer, she also was a pioneer for women in radio and an influential figure in her own right for decades." According to the founder of the Museum of Broadcast Communications, Bruce DuMont, "She was to Paul Harvey what Colonel Parker was to Elvis Presley. She really put him on track to have the phenomenal career that his career has been."
Lynne Harvey was the first producer ever inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, and had developed some of her husband's best-known features, such as "The Rest of the Story." While working on her husband's radio show, she established 10 p.m. as the hour in which news is broadcast. She was the first woman to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Chicago chapter of American Women in Radio and Television. She worked in television also, and created a television show called Dilemma which is acknowledged as the prototype of the modern talk show genre. While working at CBS, she was among the first women to produce an entire newscast. In later years, she was best known as a philanthropist.
They had one son, Paul Aurandt, Jr., who goes by the name Paul Harvey, Jr., and assists his father at News and Comment and The Rest of the Story. Paul, Jr., whose voice announces the bumpers into and out of each News and Comment episode, has filled in for his father during broadcasts and is able to duplicate his father's speaking style to some extent. Paul Jr. has ended recent News and Comment broadcasts with the words, "Now THAT'S NEWS."
